The Prayers of Curtis Wilkie

Civil rights, presidential politics, the Middle East. For 60 years, he covered it all. Writer Michael Oates Palmer talks violent history, ignorant Republicans, journalism on the brink, Mississippi falling backward, sandwich crackers - and a few choice nitwits - with the great reporter at 83.

Words by Michael Oates Palmer
Illustration by Jason Holley | Photos by Maude Schuyler Clay

June 5, 2024

the car parked outside a church in the Mississippi Delta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner took a bite of cold chicken. In a packed day of several stops, this was the best opportunity the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would find to sneak in a quick lunch. It was also the best opportunity for Curtis Wilkie, the 27-year-old reporter for The Clarksdale Press Register, to ask King a question: “Are you ever frightened?”

King was there to stir up support for his Poor People’s Campaign and its planned march on Washington for economic justice. Wilkie had followed him from stop to stop that day, including the tense situation they had just weathered in Marks, a tiny town surrounded by cotton fields.

King was about to take the pulpit of Silent Grove Baptist Church when a disheveled white farmer walked in through the front doors. The farmer reached into his pocket – Wilkie braced himself – only to pull out a $100 bill. He handed it to King. The Civil Rights leader thanked the farmer, who turned to the crowd of 200 and insisted that, contrary to what others told them, Ain’t nobody hungry in Mississippi. Some tense words were exchanged, but the farmer finally left, the standoff defused.

From the shotgun seat of the car, King answered Wilkie. “No, I’m not frightened,” he said. “I move without fear because I know I’m right. I’d be immobilized if I was afraid.”

Wilkie believed him. This was not bravado. King had shown no fear in the confrontation inside the church.

“Besides,” King said, “the climate of violence is gradually decreasing in the South.”

It was March 19, 1968. A little over two weeks later, King would pause his Poor People’s Campaign to make a detour to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. There, as Wilkie would write more than 50 years after that interview in the Delta, “the modern prophet had an appointment at his personal Golgotha.”

• • •

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and everything in Oxford, Mississippi, is closed.

That includes the expected public institutions: the post office, the schools, the Lafayette County Courthouse in the center of the square. But Ajax Diner, City Grocery, even the bibliophile’s Valhalla, Square Books – they’re dark today, too. A winter snowstorm had blanketed the town overnight, shutting everything down. With Ole Miss students still on winter break, everything would feel empty anyway. But now? It’s almost eerie.

Driving slowly south of the square, just a few blocks from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, I turn off Lamar, the main drag, and onto a block between streets named Lincoln and Grant. (To further complicate the terrain, Mississippi still pairs MLK Day with the state’s observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday.)

I pull into the driveway of a handsome single-story cottage, firewood stacked next to the unlocked front door. I let myself in.

I have been here many times. I’ve petted that old gray Persian cat giving me the evil eye from the kitchen counter. I’ve admired and studied the stacked and stocked bookshelves, filled with first editions of novels and biographies and history, most with broken bindings or torn dust jackets. I hear the words come on back, so I walk through the house to its main bedroom.

That’s where I find, in a leather armchair at the foot of a neatly made bed, my reason for coming to Oxford.

He looks much the same as he did when I last saw him, 10 months earlier. Maybe a little thinner. The full head of unruly white hair that resembles that of trial attorney Gerry Spence, or maybe Lyndon Johnson after he left the presidency and let his freak flag fly. The thick beard that, when paired with the scally cap he sometimes wears, makes him look like the featured guest at a Galway poets festival.

And then there’s that voice, one that makes every joke, story, insight, or profanity somehow sound gentle and authoritative at once: coming down from Mount Olympus, only whispered. He says the words that felt like a medal pinned to my chest the first time I heard them, years ago.

“Hey, buddy,” says Curtis Wilkie.

Curtis Wilkie. Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay, February, 2024

When we first met, I had the home field advantage.

We were at Dodger Stadium in 2005, not for a game, but a book party. Curtis’ friend Tom Oliphant had authored a memoir of the 1955 champion Brooklyn Dodgers. Though I gawked at attendees who made their name on the baseball diamond – Don Newcombe! Ron Cey! – I instead talked the whole time with the 60-something professor-author in shirtsleeves nursing a Diet Coke.

I didn’t yet know that I had spent an hour and a half chatting with one of the great journalists of the last 50 years; Curtis isn’t exactly a king of self-promotion. But there in Chavez Ravine, I had a taste of the man I would come to know: interesting and interested, deeply versed in politics, literature, history, food, and baseball; wry, witty, and warm. We shook hands as we left the ballpark. “Give me a call if you ever come through Mississippi,” he said.

Seven years later, I did. So began a friendship.

We chatted on the phone once or twice a year at first, then every few months. We sent each other books we liked. (Curtis mailed me his all-time favorite about politics, The Earl of Louisiana, A.J. Liebling’s 1961 biography of Louisiana Governor Earl Long.) And every year or so, I’d stop in Mississippi and get my fix – dinners, lunches, and conversations that covered the waterfront.

Last summer, a mutual friend in Oxford called me: “Have you talked to Curtis lately?”

I knew that was her way of saying, You really should call Curtis.

He had undergone spinal surgery in January that year,  to alleviate the sciatica causing brutal pain in his leg. When I saw him that March, he seemed to have bounced back: We had a couple of dinners and one day sat in his season-ticket seats for the coldest baseball game I’ve ever endured, watching his then-defending NCAA champion Ole Miss Rebels. Curtis moved more slowly, with the help of a cane. But he was moving. And his mind and wit were as sharp as ever.

But now, the mutual friend said, there’d been setbacks. The pain had returned. It was so bad he wasn’t leaving his bed.

There are ample upsides to making friends with people in their 70s and 80s: They’re often smarter than you, they have sage wisdom or advice to share, they tell better stories. The downside is the obvious one: There’s less road left on the runway. Odds are that someday you will be the one still there, mourning and missing them.

I called more frequently, checking in every couple of weeks. Curtis seemed to improve some; he was still in pain but no longer bedridden. Even so, I felt the pull. Missing a friend takes on an additional pang when the friend is 83 – “I’m astonished to have lived as long as I have,” he says – and lives 2,000 miles away. So I planned a visit. Only this time, there was a new purpose. 

Whether I talked to friends in politics, journalism, or Mississippi, I heard the same thing: “Curtis is a legend.”

That’s true, so much so that the adjectival form of the word seems to be appended to every role he played. Legendary reporter who launched his career in the cauldron of the Civil Rights Movement. Legendary political journalist of eight presidential elections. Legendary foreign correspondent. Legendary author or co-author of six acclaimed books. Legendary journalism professor, legendary raconteur, legendary (prodigal) son of Mississippi.

Our culture uses the word “legend” so often – we do the same with “hero” or “genius” –  that it’s lost some of its shine, its specificity. I knew that much-quoted line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But while I’d known Curtis for almost two decades, I realized I’d never heard the facts that became legend.

Sure, I’d read his lovely, moving book, Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the South (2001). He’s quick to say that Dixie was not a memoir so much as a reporting of what he observed in and about the South, and his relationship to it, over the course of his first 60 years. Large chunks of his life went untouched.

No one unfurls their entire life story unbidden. If they do, they’re a narcissist or a crashing bore. Curtis is neither: When I’ve talked with others about him over the years, his humility, unexpected and sweet, often comes up. But here was someone who had lived a wildly interesting life and, because he’s humble, he wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked.

I wanted to ask. Not just about what he saw looking back. But what he saw looking forward.

I take a seat in the armchair across from him, in front of the fireplace. As I fumble with the recorder on my phone, I realize what I’ve been foolish enough to ignore until go-time: I am about to spend hours – days – interviewing someone who interviewed others for a living for 60 years.

I look up. Curtis seems somewhat amused.

• • •

he first years of his life, he didn’t stop moving.

He was born in Greenville, Mississippi, but his family didn’t stay there long. Next came Memphis, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created as part of the Manhattan Project. Then his mother took him and moved to El Paso, ostensibly for young Curtis’ asthma but also to leave his father, an intermittently employed bookkeeper who drank. After a brief return to West Tennessee and a briefer reconciliation with Curtis’ dad, mother and son moved to Oxford, where his grandparents lived. Then to Sardis, just west of Oxford. Then back to Oxford. And finally to Summit, then a one-stoplight town just 20 miles north of the Louisiana line.

Ten moves. All before his seventh birthday. As Curtis wrote in Dixie, “The itinerary of my early childhood looks like a fugitive’s flight.”

His father, with whom he shared his name – Curtis Carter Wilkie – attempted one more rapprochement. It failed. The next time the son saw his father, it was at his wake. The 6-year-old remembered him as having dark hair, but when the boy peered into the open casket, he saw a man whose hair was red. Curtis Sr. had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. The fire had singed his hair. 

This sounds like the beginning to a brutal childhood, something out of Harry Crews. It wasn’t. Curtis is quick, in print and in person, to stress that his childhood was happy. The credit for that goes to Curtis’ mother, Lyda. She moved them to Summit to take a job as dean of women, registrar, and psychology teacher at Southwest Mississippi Junior College. Mother and son moved into a two-room furnished apartment in the girls’ dormitory.

They didn’t have much that first year – they took all their meals at the college cafeteria – but it didn’t feel like it. Then, when Curtis was 8, his mother married a Presbyterian minister new to Summit, John Leighton Stuart Jr. (Two of Curtis’ three children, his daughter, Leighton, and his younger son, Stuart, were named for him.) Stuart had been raised in China, the son of an educator and university president whom Harry Truman had tapped to be the U.S. ambassador there. Curtis’ stepfather hadn’t married before, and they would have no other children. Curtis, like me, grew up an only child.

Stuart was a gentle, good man. “He was the antithesis of fire and brimstone,” Curtis says. “The last sermon I remember him delivering was when I took my children sometime in the ’70s, and it was all about love.” Curtis eventually stopped calling him Mr. Stuart and started calling him Paw.

His parents were moderates for Mississippi in the 1950s; they taught him to treat everyone with respect. When his mother heard him use a racial epithet, she set her 13-year-old straight: Such terms were used by hateful people, she said, and were not to be heard in her house. In 1964, his parents pushed to integrate the church his stepfather headed in Summit. When an opponent to the integration asked where the Black members would sit, Curtis remembers hearing his mother loudly announce to the congregation: “They can come sit with me.”         

Summit introduced Curtis to not just the poverty of his “country people” classmates, but of those who weren’t allowed to attend the same school. He described it in Dixie:

Clusters of black children, all ages and sizes, waved tentatively at the passing bus with dirty yards studded with broken glass and cast-off tires. Their shacks were usually set on the perimeter of cotton fields. To brighten the surroundings, the families decorated their front porches and tree branches with blue-glass milk of magnesia bottles. In the backyards, heavy cast-iron pots, heated by wood fires, bubbled with laundry. Water was drawn from wells or scooped out of ditches.… In early autumn, when the landscape looked as though it had been littered with popcorn, entire Negro families would take to the cotton fields.

The only child read a lot; he made friends by playing football, basketball, and baseball. Like many children of the South in the year before the Braves moved to Atlanta, the St. Louis Cardinals were his team. But Curtis, precocious, found a pastime he loved even more: He started his own newspaper when he was in the third grade. He had caught the journalism bug, and it didn’t go away. In sixth grade, he began writing for a local Summit weekly, continuing all through high school. And when he arrived at the University of Mississippi, in the fall of ’58, he knew he would major in journalism.

What he did not know was that Ole Miss would soon be watched by seemingly every journalist in the country.

He loved college. He had a good time, maybe too good; his grades were not strong. He didn’t like Oxford then, with good reason: It was a dry town. “We had to go 40 miles to find a legal beer.”

He didn’t have to go that far to find a genuine literary titan. He’d see Mississippi’s own Nobel laureate walking around the square. Though Curtis never talked to William Faulkner, he remembers that he was tiny, maybe 5-foot-5, if that. “Also, he was very dapper. Also, he drove a Jeep.”

Curtis knew he wanted to go beyond the world that Faulkner had turned into Yoknapatawpha County. His wanderlust was real, stoked by excursions outside of the South. Those included a couple of summers working in Yellowstone. But it was the summer of 1961, spent at a YMCA resort in upstate New York, that changed how he saw his home – and how urgently it needed to change.

There at Lake George, for the first time in his life, he sat at the same table as Black students and got to know them. He was practically the lone Southerner among 200 other college student employees, and his fellow workers questioned him about what his state was doing. “They asked good questions,” he says. “I recognized how fucking wrong we were. I was reluctant to say we’re all a bunch of jerks, but I was at a loss to come up with a good defense.”

He took a semester off and, with some friends, drove out to California. “I was just ready to get the fuck out of Mississippi,” he says. “I was also very much in the thrall of On the Road,” the Jack Kerouac novel of the Beat movement that launched a million road trips. He quickly ran out of money and came home to Summit and a job in a quilt factory, his first and last experience of manual labor.

In 1962, he returned to an Ole Miss that was about to go through the great fire of change. The year before, a Black Air Force veteran named James Meredith applied for admission to the university, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had finally ordered the school to comply. On September 20, Meredith arrived on campus to enroll, only for Gov. Ross Barnett to rebuff him. This led to an escalating series of events, with Curtis watching as Barnett came onto the field at halftime at an Ole Miss football game to rally opposition to integration.

In his 1965 book about the crisis at Ole Miss, The Past That Would Not Die, historian Walter Lord – he was a Stephen Ambrose or David McCullough of his day – quoted a student describing the scene: “It was like a big Nazi rally… It was just the way Nuremberg must have been.” Lord didn’t identify the student, but more than 50 years later, while researching a book at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Curtis found Lord’s notes affirming what Curtis already knew: The quoted student was Curtis himself.

By Sunday afternoon, September 30, hundreds of U.S. marshals in battle helmets and bulletproof vests had arrived on campus. Students heckled the marshals, then pelted them with debris. Before long, Curtis was in the midst of his first riot – and the first campus riot of the 1960s. Marshals fired tear gas into the crowd. His lungs burning, Curtis fled into the lobby of a girls’ dormitory where on a TV set President John F. Kennedy assured the country that James Meredith was safely on campus. The president apparently had no idea that violence had already erupted. By the time the riots ended, gunshots had been fired, two men were dead, and the Confederate battle flag had been hoisted up the flagpole in front of the administration building. To this day, you can still see the bullet holes in its facade.

When Curtis graduated in 1963, he landed a job as a rookie reporter at The Clarksdale Press Register, a paper with a circulation of only 7,000 but offering a front-row seat to the slow, stuttered implementation of Brown v. Board and, soon, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During the next six years, he would cover Freedom Summer, interview Dr. King and Medgar Evers, and follow Bobby Kennedy as he toured the Delta in 1967 as part of a Senate subcommittee investigation into hunger and poverty. 

In a house in Cleveland, Mississippi, Curtis would write in Dixie, “I witnessed a scene stored, like treasure, in my mind for more than thirty years.” There, Kennedy watched a child in soiled diapers crawl across a dirty room, eating crumbs of cornbread from the floor. In his article the next day, Curtis wrote:

Flies were swarming. Kennedy knelt by the child and gently stroked his face for about two minutes without saying a word. The boy just looked at him with wide eyes.

“It was a very moving experience in retrospect,” Curtis says. “It was a defining moment in his pilgrimage from working for Joe McCarthy to marching with Cesar Chavez.”

But a job at a small-town paper also meant that Curtis covered small-town news. The Press Register became his graduate school, where he honed his skills. “You get good answers with good questions,” he says. “I learned early, don’t ask adversarial questions at the beginning of the interview, because if you don’t know the subject, that might be the end of your interview.”

He had married his college girlfriend, Jane Pelegrin, and soon he was a young father of two. He liked living in the Delta. You can tell, when he describes it more than 30 years later in Dixie:

Myths grew up there as quickly as weeds. Everything seemed exaggerated, from the extremes in wealth and poverty to the lush accents that placed a broad pronunciation on the letter A. A cosmopolitan population, including many Catholics and not a few heathens, the people of the Delta enjoyed a hedonistic society beyond the Baptist pale. Parties lasted late, and mornings often included eye-openers for breakfast.… Cat on a Hot Tin Roof best caught the Delta’s strange ethos: the eccentric manners, the flow of bourbon and braggadocio, the stylized way of speaking, the sense of doom that kept springing out of the closet despite every attempt to keep it contained.

The more he covered the struggle for change, the more he felt drawn to joining that struggle. Vietnam only amplified those feelings, the draft sending a disproportionate number of poor Americans, especially Black and brown, to a faraway war. Curtis wasn’t in danger of joining them – he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma. But even 50 years later, his disgust for that war is palpable. “That was just so wrong. Mindless,” he says, tensing up even now. “What the fuck did we think we were doing there?”

In the ’68 presidential primaries, he supported Senator Eugene McCarthy, whose insurgent anti-war campaign convinced President Johnson to not run for reelection. When Aaron Henry, head of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, asked Curtis if he would join a diverse state delegation challenging the all-white group at that year’s Democratic Convention in Chicago, Curtis signed on: “I was very committed to any kind of movement that would affect change in the state and shatter Jim Crow.”

He knew it was not a shrewd professional choice. “I’ve often said that if I had been my editor, I would have fired me for doing that. But as an individual living in Mississippi, I felt that was more important.” 

What happened at that ’68 convention in Chicago – and how it sowed a sense of chaos around the Democrats that would help Richard Nixon win the presidency – has been well chronicled. After police beat up peaceful young protesters, Curtis joined a march down Michigan Avenue, holding a McCarthy poster with a drawing of a dove. When the cops fired tear gas into the crowd, Curtis scampered into Grant Park to escape.

He had now lived through multiple riots, and he wasn’t even 30. He was tired of conflict. He was tired of Mississippi.

In 1969, he applied for and received a Congressional fellowship, and as he and his wife crossed the state line on their way to Washington, he said the words out loud:

Free at last.

Curtis Wilkie and his dog, Willie, named for Willie Morris. Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay, 2001

• • •

fter a morning spent talking about his time at that small paper in Clarksdale, I ask how he feels about the South today. “When I wrote Dixie 20 years ago, it was an optimistic book,” he says. “If I had to write the damn thing today, it would be very pessimistic.” That’s even ignoring, if we can ignore, Donald Trump.

Curtis’ grievances aren’t so much with traditional conservatives as with what has taken over conservatism and what that’s wrought. “If I didn’t have any Republican friends, I’d be pretty lonely in Mississippi,” he says. He’s even occasionally liked some Republican politicians in the state. He has kind words for the late Senator Thad Cochran, a good friend he first met as a kid; their families lived in the same dorm when his mother was getting her master’s degree. He respects former Governor Haley Barbour. “I like Haley. I would never vote for him, as he knows. But I’ve begun to yearn for him after the last 16 years of fucking nitwits.”

Former Governor Phil Bryant and current Governor Tate Reeves shouldn’t hold out hope for holiday cards. But more urgently, Curtis worries that Mississippi is reverting to Jim Crow days. As evidence, he cites the state Republicans blocking Medicaid expansion that would bring millions of dollars to keep rural hospitals afloat – essentially denying life support, especially to the predominantly Black, predominantly Democratic Delta.

Then there’s the continued encroachment on voting rights: the requirement of a photo ID, the lack of early voting options, the strict restrictions on absentee voting, the highest level of felony disenfranchisement in the country. And then there’s the recent welfare scandal, where millions earmarked for the have-nots of the state instead went to volleyball stadiums, dubious nonprofits, and wealthy individuals, including Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre.

“We – if I may use that possessive plural – we lost the fucking Civil War. And yet we continue to celebrate it,” Curtis says. “When I lived in Washington, Wilmington, or Boston, I never saw any kind of commemoration for the war outside of here.” It’s a point I never heard anyone make during the monument debates of a few years ago.

Curtis says the state’s biggest problem is the brain drain – standout students leaving Mississippi for college and never looking back. “There’s no reason for them to stay here,” he says. “It’s not a partisan issue. It’s a Mississippi issue.”

He shifts in his chair, and I can tell that his sciatica is acting up. I feel guilty. My plan was to talk to Curtis for a few hours each day, breaking it up by taking him to a lunch on the square. It’s two days after the storm, though, and everything’s still closed. He says he ate a big breakfast, so he’s fine. Then he says I should feel free to grab a soda from the kitchen. “Do you want some Nabs?” he adds.

How Curtis talks – his accent, his vocal register, his delivery – has earned a lot of colorful descriptions over the years. Some writers rise to the challenge. Others succumb to condescending, cornpone cliches. The worst offenders deploy words like hickory, molasses, whiskey.

Marshall Ramsey, the cartoonist for Mississippi Today, said Curtis has one of the best voices “this side of Morgan Freeman.” And I like how Hendrik Hertzberg described Curtis in a 2010 New Yorker piece about an Oxford literary conference. He said Curtis “looks like Robert E. Lee, talks like Mose Allison sings, and thinks like a hybrid of Lincoln Steffens, William Lloyd Garrison, and A.J. Liebling.”

Curtis pokes fun at his voice, too. He tells a story about a press conference in Beirut, soon after the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight. After Curtis posed a question, the government official at the podium asked if someone could give him “a translation in English.”

I love Curtis’ voice. It’s an egregiously missed opportunity that his publishers never had him record the audio versions of his books. And this many years into knowing him, I rarely have to ask him to repeat anything. That said, I’m not sure what word he just used. Did he mean Nibs? Knobs or Naps? What are Nabs? 

“The little peanut butter sandwich crackers.”

He hands me the familiar package I’ve seen in vending machines all my life, featuring six decidedly not organic peanut butter sandwich crackers wrapped in cellophane. Nabisco was one of the first producers of the crackers, back in the 1920s. So parts of the South nicknamed them Nabs.

I open mine. Curtis opens his. On a day when Oxford continues to be shut down, this is our lunch. The two of us quietly eat for a minute.

I’ve been calling these “sandwich crackers” all my life, I think. What a boring description. Nabs is much better.

• • •

n the photograph, he’s in shirtsleeves, a mop of longish brown hair and a mustache, a can of Coors in front of him on the table on a campaign bus. He looks less like a political journalist and more like a roadie for the Allman Brothers.

There he is, not even 32 in 1972, a reporter for the News-Journal papers of Wilmington, Delaware, immortalized in a classic book in a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Well, maybe not so immortalized: The most recent edition no longer features the Leibovitz photos. But Curtis is still there in the prose.

“For political journalists of my generation, there are a handful of books that we’ll point to invariably, and the two that most come to mind are The Boys on the Bus and What It Takes,” says Jonathan Martin, who spent a decade as a national correspondent for The New York Times before joining Politico as a columnist in 2022.

Richard Ben Cramer’s mammoth What It Takes, published in 1992, examined in thousand-page-plus detail six candidates in the 1988 presidential campaign. But it was Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, a bestseller published in 1973, that first pulled back the curtain to reveal the people who covered presidential campaigns.

Crouse, then a young writer for Rolling Stone, criticized the “pack journalism” mentality that dominated the press corps in 1972. He took aim at some of journalism’s most sacred cows, including R.W. Apple of The New York Times and David Broder of The Washington Post. Among the few journalists that Crouse seemed to respect: Curtis Wilkie.

After two years in Washington working on the Hill, Curtis had returned to newspapers, moving his family to Delaware for papers owned by the arch-conservative Du Pont family. He first covered local stories, including a young New Castle County councilman taking on an incumbent Republican senator.

Curtis has always liked Joe Biden. He impishly smiles as he describes running into the then-senator on the floor of the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. As those who know him will tell you, the 46th president doesn’t reserve his coarsest language for the passing of healthcare legislation. “Wilkie, I went to the best fucking party I’ve ever been to in my life at your alma mater,” Curtis remembers Biden saying. “The Grove, man. The fucking Grove!” Biden had visited the legendary tailgate before an Ole Miss game, and liked what he saw.

Soon Curtis was assigned to the 1972 campaign trail, where he often filed two stories a day, one for the Morning News, one for the afternoon’s Evening Journal. There he would watch as George McGovern unexpectedly won the nomination, only to go down in landslide defeat to Richard Nixon, even as the Watergate cover-up continued to unravel – or rather, unspool.

The next year, Crouse’s book came out, and Curtis’ career was never the same. He only appeared in a few pages. Crouse described sitting down “next to a thirtyish dark-haired reporter wearing a Palm Beach suit and a drooping mustache, who looked too hungover to object to my presence.” But he praised Curtis as an excellent reporter.

“I was stunned. Nobody had ever said anything that nice about anything I’d ever done professionally,” says Curtis, who describes himself as then being “lower echelon” in the caste system of campaign journalism. “I was working for the Wilmington paper. Nobody gave a shit about anyone who worked for the Wilmington paper. They wouldn’t return my phone calls.”

Besides Curtis, only a handful of the journalists Crouse wrote about still walk among us. Jules Witcover is 96. Carl Leubsdorf still writes a column for The Dallas Morning News. There’s Connie Chung. And there’s Tom Oliphant, who would write for The Boston Globe for almost 40 years. He and Curtis met on that campaign. It was the beginning of a lifelong, ride-or-die friendship.

“Why did Timmy put us there?” asks Oliphant, described at 26 as “The Kid” in Crouse’s book, but now in his late 70s. He answers his own question: A seismic shift had begun. “He was indicating that something was trying to get born here.” That something was a new political journalism that was “just as diligent as the old generation that was about to be replaced,” Oliphant says. “What was different was, it was more openly interpretive and irreverent.”

Oliphant says that he, Curtis, and Crouse were younger people who had direct experience with Civil Rights and Vietnam: “The idea that there’s a great deal of bullshit was not something we had a lot of trouble accepting.”

Curtis was named a deputy editor at the News-Journal papers in 1974. It was a notably short tenure: 20 days, if that. The Du Ponts had exerted more and more control over the editorial content. When they informed the editors that all “sensitive stories” would first have to be cleared by the board they controlled, Curtis and his colleagues quit in protest.

It could have been career hara-kiri. (Also, his wife was nine months pregnant with their third child.) But the Crouse book had transformed Curtis’ profile. Newspapers pursued him, and within three weeks, he had accepted a job offer: “There were only three papers I was interested in working for: The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. And the Globe called first.”

Curtis discovered a Boston fraying at the seams over busing and desegregation; he soon brought a unique perspective to the Globe’s coverage. “The biggest question is not how the South shaped Curtis,” says Oliphant, “but rather what Curtis, because of what he’d been through, could tell us about the North. When he wrote a great story about a race riot on the beach in South Boston, that’s the redneck explaining to the Yankees, ‘The beast is up here, guys.’”

Boston was not what Curtis expected. “I was coming to the only state that voted against Nixon. I thought I was coming to political nirvana,” he says. “And I found that wasn’t the case at all. I saw more raw racism that year in Boston than I ever saw in the South.”

In the Globe, though, he found a welcoming home for his writing. Under the editor Tom Winship, “a great guy who became a father figure for me,” the paper pushed boundaries in how its reporters covered stories. “Winship wanted to tear down all of these dry, two-dimensional barriers to insight,” says Oliphant. “The pieces were longer-form and not built just around what somebody did yesterday.” They were often irreverent, too, reflecting the personality and flavor of the New Journalism that had exploded across magazines for a decade.

As a reporter for the Globe, Michael Rezendes shared a 2003 Pulitzer for coverage of the Catholic Church scandals. (Mark Ruffalo received an Oscar nod for playing him in Spotlight.)  Now an investigative reporter for The Associated Press, Rezendes became a fan of the Globe long before he wrote for it: “When I was in college, the Globe was just a really cool paper to read. The writing was freer, looser, and more literary.”

In November 1975, with a presidential election on the horizon, Curtis received an assignment that did not seem so plum. His buddy Oliphant still laughs at the editors’ miscalculation. “They thought they’d give him the most obscure, least-likely-to-succeed candidate. Whoops! They thought it was Siberia. It turned out to be Jimmy Carter.”

That assignment may have had something to do with Curtis’ roots. He wasn’t the only Southern-born journalist assigned to cover the Southern candidate. “What these papers did was, they sort of plucked the Southerners out and said, ‘You can translate for this guy, you go down and cover him,’” remembers Eleanor Randolph, a Pensacola native whom the Chicago Tribune tapped to cover the Carter campaign. 

Curtis’ marriage had fallen apart – that’s all on him, he says – so his mailing address became a Best Western motel in Americus, Georgia, eight miles from Carter’s home base in Plains. The roving-correspondent life is not easy on spouses and children, says Oliphant. “We took to this vagabond existence.”

Jimmy Carter has been so deified for his good works since leaving office, it’s easy to forget his decidedly mixed record as both candidate and president. (He’s helped by outliving most of his detractors.) Curtis developed a reputation for being especially harsh on the peanut farmer-turned-governor. “His campaign was based on the theme ‘I will never lie to you,’” says Curtis. “But we all started adding up all the lies, every day, and a lot of them were silly.”

Curtis found Carter to be cold, weird, and a little mean; he preferred the company of Carter’s infamous brother, Billy. While other reporters attended Jimmy’s Sunday school classes, Curtis hung around at Billy’s service station and drank beer. Billy would just give it away, as at the time you couldn’t sell beer in Georgia on Sundays.

Curtis concedes that early on he was unfairly skeptical about Jimmy Carter’s faith. When he finally did attend Carter’s Sunday school class, Carter asked if anyone needed a Bible. Curtis raised his hand. “Well, of course, you need a Bible,” Carter said. Then he handed him a Bible: his own.

As he followed the lesson, Curtis flipped through the book’s pages. It was dog-eared, annotated, clearly reflecting a man of deep faith. “I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to make fun of this guy’s religion again.’ And I never did.”

Eleanor Randolph remembers Curtis as a superstar of that campaign and a leader within the press corps – someone other reporters flocked to. “Curtis would tell a story in a way that would just have you under the table, you were laughing so hard,” she says. “He lifted the spirits of all who were around him.” Sometimes those spirits needed lifting, such was the grind. “There’s a picture of Curtis and me one morning at 5 o’clock, and we both look like baby birds. We were both either so hungover or tired,” says Randolph, Curtis’ seatmate on the bus for most of the Carter campaign. 

Randolph describes Curtis as invaluable, kind, and professional toward women colleagues in a way that not all of his male contemporaries were. “There were scoundrels on that campaign, just as there were everywhere,” she says. “It was one of the hazards of being a woman on the campaign trail. You just had to avoid them. But Curtis was a Southern gentleman.” He always treated her like a fellow journalist. “And if he didn’t like my lede” – what journalists call the opening paragraph of a story – “he’d let me know and say that it was weak, or terrible, or shitty.” 

“If you’re on a campaign trail, it’s very competitive,” says Randolph, who would later write for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and, for 20 years, The New York Times. But “Curtis would just help people. If you asked him a question, he’d tell you the answer. Once you met him and could figure out what he was saying, he became the encyclopedia: He knew everything about national politics in the South.” 

Curtis covered Carter on that victorious ’76 campaign, then in Washington as the Globe’s White House correspondent, and then the ill-fated ’80 reelection campaign. Compare the openings of those two Election Day stories. On November 4, 1976:

At last it was over, the campaign that was entering its third winter, and Jimmy Carter had come home the victor.

Now the other lede describing the unhappier 1980 result:

After a final, punishing campaign journey of more than 3,000 miles, President Jimmy Carter made a melancholy return to his hometown yesterday. He struggled to keep from crying as he told his followers of the ‘difficult’ and ‘politically costly’ decisions that he felt were costing him his presidency. Even though the polls had just opened, he appeared exhausted and disheartened by the grim word from his staff – based on their own polling data – that the election appeared to be irretrievably lost.

“I’m drawn to underdogs, and not necessarily an underdog who’s going to ultimately win,” Curtis says. “I’ve found there’s more poignance, and a better story, to the loser at the end. It was a much better story when Carter lost, I think. Nobody was expecting him to get hammered the way he did.”

Carter and Mondale with members of the White House traveling press corps softball team, dubbed the News Twisters, at the Plains High School baseball field.  Left to right are Justin Friedland of ABC News, Charles Mohr of The New York Times, Carter, James Walker of ABC News, Mondale, Rick Kaplan of CBS News, Billy Carter, Curtis Wilkie of the Boston Globe, and Phil Smith of Newhouse News Service. Photo by Ken Hawkins

Twelve years later, he covered an underdog on the ropes who did triumph. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton faced allegations that he’d had a 12-year extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers. Writing months later, after Clinton had already secured the nomination, Curtis described the moment when the Arkansas governor almost lost it all:

Bill Clinton’s time was expiring in New Hampshire. Worn down by illness, his voice frayed by fatigue, his jogger’s body swollen from the consumption of junk food, he seemed to be fighting a losing battle.… Still, Clinton was encouraged when he arrived at the event and saw that an overflow crowd had come to hear him on the Saturday night before the primary. It was a good sign, he told his wife.

Hillary Clinton was not so sanguine. “How do we know,” she said, “that they’re not just coming to see the freak show?”

Curtis remembers walking down a hallway with Clinton in New Hampshire that winter. The veteran reporter told Clinton that he “must have known he was gonna get hit by all this shit. You had to have war-gamed to know how to deal with it.” Clinton, who had denied the affair, put his arm on Curtis’ shoulder, looked him in the eye, and said, “We have, and I decided I would have to tell the truth.” Curtis knew in that moment: “He’s been lying like hell. He’s just lied again. At that point, I felt, well, he’s beginning to live up to the Slick Willy reputation he had in Arkansas.”   

Curtis identified as a liberal in his personal politics, but he was careful not to let those politics interfere with his journalism. The story was everything. “We are the classic refutation of this canard about liberal bias. Because we literally didn’t care,” says Oliphant. “If somebody screwed up, Curtis didn’t care whether it was Richard Nixon or Ted Kennedy. It’s not nihilism, but it is the ethic.”

In the early 1980s, after a couple of years covering Ronald Reagan’s White House, Curtis felt restless. When an American-born Jew walked into a Jerusalem mosque with an M16, killing two Arab guards, the Globe sent him to Israel for a month. “I didn’t know a kibbutz from a settlement,” he says.

When the Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed in 1983, the Globe dispatched him to the Middle East again. This time, it was a more permanent assignment. He fell in love with Israel, though not necessarily its government. In his coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he sometimes saw echoes of what he had seen in Mississippi and drew sharp criticism from readers back home. Here is how he began a 1986 piece:

Welcome. The characters in Arabic, English, and obligatory Hebrew crawl in falsely bright colors, as sad as toys in a children’s cancer ward, across an arch over the gateway to the city: “Welcome to Gaza.”

Curtis came back to the States  to cover the ’88 presidential campaign. “The only time I’ve ever been homesick in my life was when I moved back to Boston. I got terribly homesick for Jerusalem,” he says.

The Globe would continue to deploy him to hotspots around the world. He developed a reputation as a reporter who could be dropped in anywhere, quickly get the lay of the land, and deliver. Those skills would take him from Yugoslavia to Cameroon. But after covering the civil war in Somalia in 1993, he drew a line. He had covered foreign wars for more than a decade. He was done.

He was also over Boston and its never-ending winters. So he pitched a crazy idea to his editor. He was traveling so much, what did it matter where he lived? What if he continued doing what he was doing, but with New Orleans as his home base? His editor liked the idea. He told Curtis to go cover the South as if it were a foreign country.

Later that year, a few days before Christmas, he found himself in Little Rock, sniffing out a would-be scandal: A handful of Arkansas state troopers had leveled some ugly accusations about their former boss, now-President Clinton. On Christmas Eve, Curtis drove to Memphis. There, alone in a hotel and unattached, he realized he’d been on the road seven of the last 10 Christmases: “I once again realized how punishing the job was for any kind of normal life.”

“Normal life” isn’t the first phrase that jumps to mind in describing New Orleans, but Curtis relished the time there when he wasn’t on the road. He found a house in the French Quarter with a nice sunny balcony. He even started going back up to Oxford again for football games. In 1998, Curtis co-wrote his first book, Arkansas Mischief, a memoir by Jim McDougal, a central figure in the Whitewater scandals. But there was another, more personal one he wanted to write.

When the Globe offered a buyout in 1999, he took it, agreeing to come back to cover the 2000 presidential campaign, his eighth. Then, after more than 25 years at the Globe, he retired from daily newspapers, admired by peers and adored by colleagues. “I don’t think there was another reporter with the Globe who had that kind of national reputation,” says Michael Rezendes. “He could have played the prima donna, and he didn’t. Everybody loved him.”

Dixie had the bad luck to be published on September 11, 2001. Still in print, it’s a beautiful, moving book, with both harrowing and gorgeous passages, though in reading it you can sometimes sense Curtis’ unease in writing in the first person. He had shied away from the pronoun “I” for most of his career, often mocking fellow war correspondents he knew, inevitably British, who hyped things up in what he calls the “‘there I was when the bullet passed over my head’ school of writing.”

And while Dixie ends with Curtis describing his move to New Orleans as a homecoming, it feels somewhat premature. As if he had not yet truly come home.

He knew what he wanted to do with the years that would follow: “I wasn’t going to sit around the porch and tell old stories. I wanted to continue to write books.”

He just didn’t know that he would go home to Mississippi to do it.

• • •

n our third day together, his neighbor next door, a mother in her 40s, brings over some muffins. It’s clear she’s a fan. She’s not alone: In the three days I have spent with him, Curtis has received more than a few phone calls from friends all over the country, checking in. Curtis has a lot of buddies.

You can meet people, especially in the political world, who drop bold-faced names into conversation like fish food to let you know they’re kind of a big deal. That’s not Curtis Wilkie. Yet a conversation with him can sometimes connect the dots of a who’s-who constellation of friends that extends from politics to literature to sports.

That’s not just because Curtis has led a life intersecting so many different communities. It’s because he has been such a likable, decent guy while he led it. Most movers and shakers, I find, don’t engender such affection. (If Curtis had a valet, to counter the old saw, I think he’d be a hero to him.) When he does mention someone, he usually sounds tickled that they’re friends, awed by their talents or skills.

These aren’t superficial relationships, either. The novelist Richard Ford was the best man for one of Curtis’ weddings. Curtis gave a eulogy at a memorial service for  congressman Mo Udall’s wife, Ella. The late journalist David Halberstam and Curtis chatted almost every week. And Hunter S. Thompson? He was crazy, but a pal.

A few years ago, at a casual Fourth of July barbecue outside Livingston, Montana, I somehow found myself seated across from Tom Brokaw and his wife. (Now, there’s some name-dropping.)

Brokaw, at that point retired from NBC News, was suffering neither fools nor small talk. I made a couple attempts: He wasn’t having any of it. I was about to take my cheeseburger and retreat to another picnic table, when I tried one last volley. “We also have a good friend in common.”

“Oh, really? Who?” said Brokaw.

“Curtis Wilkie.”

Brokaw, for the first time in our interaction, looked me in the eye as his face broke into the widest grin: “My MAN!”

Curtis likes that story.

Whether in college or covering Civil Rights, the campaign press corps or the Middle East, New Orleans and, eventually, Oxford, Curtis both nurtured and drew breath from camaraderie and community. The only child found his brothers and sisters out in the world.

But if friendship came easy for him, marriage did not. By the time he left the Globe, Curtis had been married four times.

“The one thing my wives all had in common,” he says, “was that they were all smarter than me.” He describes only one of the marriages as “combustible.” And after the failure of his first marriage, he was a serial monogamist, he says, not a cheater. The others just went, pfft, kaput. He has a sense of humor about it, though: “My old professor read Dixie and said, ‘Didn’t you leave out a couple of wives?’”

 Like Elizabeth Taylor with her eight marriages to seven men, Curtis didn’t give up on the institution, no matter his success rate. Besides, the number of previous contestants never seemed to discourage future contenders. As Oliphant says, women always liked Curtis. “He wore it well. He was not a prowler. He was more laid back than anything else.” Eleanor Randolph agrees: “Curtis is very comfortable with women. He’s a serial husband, not a serial seducer.” But the vagabond life didn’t lend itself so well to a lasting relationship.

Neither did the drinking. Curtis was never an angry drunk, but he had become the guy who had a few glasses of wine at lunch, pulled a bottle out from the fridge at 5 p.m., put away a Bloody Mary or two on weekend mornings, and faded off halfway through dinner. He operated under a constant buzz, and at 60, it wasn’t a great look. New Orleans had many things to offer, but clean living was not among them.

Everything began to shift when he took a job teaching journalism at Ole Miss. He kept the house in the French Quarter for a while, but he soon discovered Oxford wasn’t the same Oxford that he remembered. It was more interesting, more bohemian, with a fantastic bookstore, nice restaurants, and intellectual people – and where a job on the faculty put him directly at the heart of a vibrant community. It was a good fit: “It was almost like I was a loose piece of iron, being attracted by this magnet all my life.”

Teaching came easily to him: His evaluations were through the roof. It helped that he liked the young people. “I empathized with them,” he says. “And I knew that it was a stressful time in their lives. They’ve been protected by their parents, and suddenly they’re thrown into school. They’re facing going to work. They’re having romantic connections for the first time. And they’re questioning the religion they were raised on.”

After 45 years – stretching back to high school – he stopped drinking. He’s quick to credit the family and friends who had the sit-down conversations with him to stop. He didn’t join AA; by his own telling, Curtis is not a meetings kind of guy. But he never had another drop. It’s been more than 20 years.

Soon after he stopped, he met Nancy Roberson at a Clarksdale wedding. She’d grown up there, but raised her family in Memphis; when they married in 2007, she joined Curtis in Oxford.

His children all seemed to be doing well, too. His son Carter, a campaign staffer in Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, then a presidential speechwriter, has headed communications strategies for banks and tech companies out of Boston. His daughter Leighton met her husband working in advertising in Atlanta; they bought a house in Oxford as a getaway, then moved there full time and started a real estate development in Taylor, just outside Oxford. And his youngest, Stuart, lived and worked as an elementary school teacher in Wilmington, Delaware, while also pursuing art.

And Curtis? He taught. And he wrote.

Which meant he reported.

• • •

eporting is a mysterious art. It reminds me of how I once heard film editing described: If it’s great, you don’t notice it at all. If it’s not great, you know it immediately.

“The sources and methods that go into reporting are lost on the average reader,” says Jonathan Martin. “I don’t think that they know the alchemy involved. They see the people named in the story, and they assume that’s all you talk to. But you’re talking to a lot of kinds of people who aren’t quoted in the story.”

Part of the magic of Curtis’ books is that they read so smoothly, like good fiction; all the shoe leather required to deduce and dimensionalize the story is seamlessly hidden. “Curtis was one of the most chronic reporters I ever ran into,” says Oliphant. “Don’t let him fool you: He was a reporter first. It was inspiring and maddening. He would talk to three extra voters, when one would’ve been more than sufficient.”

He had a formidable work ethic, but he also didn’t go into stories already knowing what he wanted to discover. “You sometimes hear people at story meetings say ridiculous things like, ‘I think we should have a story that says …’ You would never catch Curtis talking like that,” says Oliphant. “He’s the definition of inductive reasoning. Let’s fill a couple of notebooks, collect everything in a vacuum, and sit down and ask this simple question: What have I got?”

The University of Mississippi Press published an anthology of Curtis’ journalism in 2014, Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest: Fifty Pieces From the Road. Still, when Curtis started writing books, you could feel him break free of the last boundaries he’d faced at newspapers. As Oliphant says, “When you rarely type the word ‘yesterday,’ Jesus, you think a lot.”

Curtis had already employed a “voice of God” style in magazine pieces, writing as if he were present for every conversation related in every event, not bogging the pieces down with attributions. It was a style he admired in his favorite nonfiction, especially Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But he had not yet brought that style to a book of his own.

Then, in 2007, he opened the newspaper to find a story that cried out for a deeper dive. Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, a Mississippi native, Ole Miss graduate, and one of America’s most successful trial lawyers, had been indicted, accused of trying to bribe a judge. Scruggs, who had made a fortune suing the tobacco and asbestos industries, had been a major supporter of the Democratic Party in the state; however, his wife’s sister happened to be married to former Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott. In fact, Lott had abruptly resigned from the Senate the very day before his brother-in-law was indicted.

Curtis read the stories in the local papers and the national press. He had all kinds of questions, starting with: How did Dickie Scruggs – whom Curtis considered a friend – get involved in something criminal? “And I just said to myself, goddamn it, Wilkie, why don’t you write a book on the case?”

He sold a proposal, and spent the next two years researching the story. What he found was more than even he expected. Scruggs had made mistakes, even broken the law. But he had also been ensnared in a plot made up of various enemies in the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the state’s Republican Party. “I just led from one breakthrough to another to another to another,” Curtis says. “It’s one of the joys of being a reporter. You keep talking and finally you find a good source and a connection that leads to other people.”

Or, in this case, to what Curtis would describe as the “mother lode” – the “whole goddamn set” of FBI tapes. They made clear the extensive plot to take Scruggs out. “Dick was guilty, he admitted it in court, and he admitted to me he was guilty,” Curtis says. “But I felt the whole thing was big-time setting him up for it.” Why did all these forces so want to take Scruggs down? “He was a trial lawyer, not the most popular members of the bar association. He’s suddenly very wealthy. And he was a huge Democrat.”

The resulting book, The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Lawyer (2010), is a Trojan horse: You may think you’re reading a legal thriller. What it’s really about is politics and power in the Magnolia State. The book excavates how the levers get pulled in Mississippi in the same deft way that Robert A. Caro’s LBJ biographies explain power mechanics in Texas. (It also features cameos that stand out now more than when published: At one point, Mississippi attorneys approach Sara Jones Biden, Joe’s sister-in-law, about heading the D.C. outpost of a new lobbying firm, with Hunter and Jim Biden, Joe’s son and brother, to be involved, too.) The story, as Curtis tells it, is riveting, surprising, sometimes darkly funny, and, in the end, tragic. Not only does Scruggs plead guilty to avoid a worse jail term, ending his law career, so does his son and law partner, who likely didn’t know a whit about the scheme. Curtis wrote it all in that omniscient “voice of God” style, with 30 pages of notes on his sources in the back.

Throughout the book, Curtis’ superb eye for detail is in full force, like here, when he describes the hapless lawyer who pulls Scruggs into a bribery scheme – only to then drop a dime on Scruggs to the FBI:

In many ways, Balducci was a quintessential good ole boy, a regional description for those who might choose hunting and fishing over books. A law degree did not rule anyone out of the good ole boys club. There is nothing inherently anti-intellectual about a good ole boy. Plenty of lawyers readily accept the designation. But good ole boys prefer telling jokes and outlandish tales over having serious discussions. Good ole boys dare to be uncouth and poke fun at high manners. They favor informality: Caterpillar caps, blue jeans, and boots.… Despite his Italian surname, Balducci fit right in with the Bubbas.

The book was a hit, especially within the state. It’s still Curtis’ most successful book in sales and recognition: “It made a reputation for me in Mississippi because I think every fucking person in the state who was literate read the thing.”

His next book would mark a professional reunion with one of his closest friends. He and Tom Oliphant, now also retired from the Globe, co-wrote The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign (2017), examining John F. Kennedy’s journey from a failed bid for the vice presidential slot at the 1956 Democratic Convention, up through his razor-thin victory over Nixon in 1960. It was the first modern presidential campaign, relying on grass-roots organizing to bypass the traditional political bosses, while introducing the polling and 30-second campaign ads that became the norm.

The book wrests Kennedy away from post-Dallas deification, bringing him down to earth as a talented flesh-and-blood pol. In a field of better-known Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy was a long shot – made more so by his Catholicism – a backbencher with a thin legislative record. His ascension to the presidency was neither preordained nor inevitable.

It was as if Curtis and Oliphant were reminding readers – and maybe themselves – that even glamorous, gifted JFK was once an underdog, too.

• • •

urtis’ house is warm and bright, full of colors reflecting Nancy’s fine aesthetic. It doesn’t feel like a museum. That said, some photographs and memorabilia hang from the walls of the foyer and the guest rooms.

As his Persian cat, Pepper Wilkie, stands sentry, Curtis uses his walker to give me the tour and point out a few choice pieces. There’s Curtis playing softball with Jimmy Carter in ’76 – the future president in knee-high tube socks and denim shorts. Curtis, without a beard at the time, just the mustache, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Oakland A’s great Catfish Hunter. (When I mention this to Curtis, he tells me that the late Boston crime fiction author George V. Higgins said the same thing, even inscribing “To Catfish” in every book he signed to him. Well, all right!)

There’s a framed blowup of the 1980 comic strip in which Garry Trudeau depicted Mike Doonesbury, in the  “John Anderson for President” offices, taking a call from Curtis Wilkie at the Globe.

There’s even the handwritten postcard a college-age Curtis received in response to the fan letter he wrote to John Updike, shortly after Faulkner died.

A framed poster from the Mississippi Tourism Bureau features 18 Mississippi writers, some dead, some living: Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Richard Ford, John Grisham, and Natasha Trethewey. Curtis’ headshot – for a very funny, very warm person, he almost never smiles in photos – sits right between Barry Hannah and Greg Iles. In large letters, at the top of the poster: “Yes, we can read. A few of us can even write.”

And then there’s a colorful painting of a saxophone player on Bourbon Street. “Stuart did that,” Curtis says. He looks around the room. “I don’t have many photos of Nancy or Stuart out,” he says.

 “It would just make me sad.”

• • •

is marriage to Nancy was a happy one. They both enjoyed reading, travel, restaurants, and each other. But in 2015, as Curtis was well into work on the Kennedy book, Nancy’s health began to fall apart. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer and began treatment. Then her colon ruptured on Christmas Eve. And then, while in the hospital for that, she suffered a stroke.

There were multiple procedures. Three visits to the Mayo Clinic. Curtis says this with matter-of-fact conviction: “Being there for Nancy during that year was the most important thing I will ever do.”

When she was diagnosed with pneumonia, in August 2016, her body had had all that it could take. On September 1, two weeks after Curtis and Oliphant turned in their manuscript, she slipped away in the hospital.

Curtis would write her obituary. “Nancy Roberson Wilkie of Oxford, 72, a vibrant personality who spoke with the soft accent of her native Mississippi Delta, died early Thursday morning, September 1, 2016, in Oxford.”

Then, within just a few months of that loss, more unthinkable news: Curtis’ youngest son, Stuart, was diagnosed with colon cancer. Stuart had married only three months before, moving from Wilmington to nearby Tupelo to be with his new wife.

Eighteen months later, he was gone, too. He was 43.

What do you do when faced with such enormous tragedies? Some would raise the white flag. Maybe withdraw or shut down. What Curtis did was take refuge and comfort in his life’s work.

Which meant writing and teaching. And friendship.

• • •

n election night 2016, Curtis went over to a friend’s home to watch returns, expecting to celebrate the election of the nation’s first female president. When it became clear the night was going in a different direction, Curtis couldn’t stand to watch. He left early, telling his friends, “There goes the Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime.”

Donald Trump in office was even worse than Curtis expected. “He’s a narcissist, he’s obnoxious, he’s a liar,” Curtis says. “He’s the kind of person where I’d be appalled if he lived next door to me.”

It wasn’t just that Trump was pushing conservative policies. Suddenly, democracy itself faced an existential threat, with a president hell-bent on undermining one of the greatest stopgaps against that threat: the press to which Curtis devoted much of his career.

“Throughout my life, I never lost a great deal of sleep when a Democrat lost. I’ll disagree with what Ford’s going to do, or even Nixon, but in the end, they’re not going to do anything crazy,” Curtis says. “Trump’s just totally out of control. This guy will do anything.”

Curtis reasons that part of Trump’s appeal to many is precisely what so shocks the rest: “He’s like seeing the snake at the zoo. You recoil from it, at least I do, but you always want to go see him.”

When Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020, Curtis felt relief. Then the country suffered a wound from which it would not soon recover.

Curtis knew mob psychology: He had seen it at the riot at Ole Miss, the race riot in Boston, even in events in the Middle East. But January 6 was worse than anything he’d seen before. He lay in bed and watched the whole thing: “When they began climbing the walls of the Capitol, it was like movies of the fucking Crusades where they’re climbing battlements.”

During that election year, he was writing a book that grappled head-on with the extremist history within his own state. When Evil Lived in Laurel (2021) explored the 1966 murder of Mississippi NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer at the hands of a Ku Klux Klan sect called the White Knights. It also told the story of a brave young father, Tom Landrum, who became an FBI informant and joined the Klan, helping to take down the White Knights and bring justice to Dahmer’s killers.

When I read the book, it reminded me of the fiction I’ve loved by older writers still at the top of their game, like William Maxwell or Jane Gardam, writing books with a maturity and insight that a younger writer couldn’t possess. Curtis explains how the KKK actually operated – or, in many instances, bumbled. But Laurel transcends history when it describes how extremists shifted their strategy for achieving racist goals by eschewing groups like the KKK and instead working within the system. Electoral politics was a far more effective means than domestic terrorism to achieve their aims.

Curtis masterfully draws a direct through line from ’60s hate groups, to political demagoguery and the dog whistles of the Republican “Southern strategy,” to, as he writes, “a Twitter-obsessed leader whose remarks and frenzied rallies often resembled the language and political fire of George Wallace.”

“This is a very violent country. It’s always been violent,” he says. “When you read history, it’s full of political violence, duels, and dead presidents.”

• • •

nd what about journalism in 2024? Does Curtis feel discouraged or despondent about its chances in the face of Trump and his political heirs, or a changing media landscape that threatens its very existence?

He is more optimistic than I expect him to be. First, he thinks that the major newspapers are doing a stronger job of covering Trump, reserving special approval for The New York Times. “They will quote him and basically then say, it’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s another lie. That’s the only way to fairly cover him. You’re obligated to report what he’s saying, but you’re then obligated to refute what he’s saying in the same breath.” 

He is in awe of today’s reporters, given the pressure they’re under: “I marvel at how good stories are when I know their desk is calling them to update it on the hour.” As Jonathan Martin says to me, “Everybody’s a wire service reporter now. When there’s breaking news or a big moment, you’re typically writing it in real time.”

The more dire threat to news may be an unsustainable business model. In the month since we talked, the Los Angeles Times laid off more than 100 journalists, and The Baltimore Sun’s new owners made clear they will impose a conservative slant on news coverage. Curtis points to several newspapers doing good work, but also to nonprofit news websites like Mississippi Today, which broke the state welfare scandal. These give him hope for more robust local news coverage, filling in the gaps where local newspapers have fallen.

His former Globe colleague Michael Rezendes is less optimistic. He points to a report last November from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University that said that more than half of the counties in the entire country now have no or limited access to local news. The United States is on pace to have lost nearly a third of its newspapers by the end of this year. And since 2005, the country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists.

“This is a true crisis, and it has a direct effect on democracy,” says Rezendes. “It’s why we have lies that get normalized because there’s no countervoice saying, hey, wait a minute. Or they’re very faint in comparison to the megaphone that’s held so effectively by the purveyors of fake news and alternative facts.”

Says Jonathan Martin: “I don’t know, to borrow the cliché, that we’ll see Curtis’ like again.” He says it with affection for Curtis’ one-of-a-kind personality and how it defies the forces of homogeneity.

But the Medill report that Rezendes cites seems to pose a greater existential question: What if the reason we may not see Curtis’ like again is because someday there may not be a place where we can see it? 

What if we, as a culture, as a nation, fail to support robust, independent news media at all levels – local, national, global – and instead allow it to collapse?

What if the next Curtis Wilkie won’t exist because he can’t exist?

• • •

ix years ago, Curtis reconnected with a woman he’d briefly dated in college. Mimi lives in Memphis and spends the winters in Delray Beach. Curtis can’t drive these days, but he hires someone to take him to see her in Memphis. He likes to visit her in Florida, too, and not just because when they drive past Mar-a-Lago, he can give Trump the finger.

Mimi’s a great pal, a lot of fun. As Curtis sees it, she has only one flaw. “She’s a right-wing Republican.”

This means Curtis watches more Fox News these days. “She sits there and listens to this shit. And I do, too, simply just to see for myself what they’re doing. They are giving out daily doses of poison to the public.

“I love her. I don’t want to exacerbate any kind of argument that would be destructive to the relationship,” he says. “But every now and then she will say something that’s so fucking outrageous that I’ll speak up. I’ll say, Mimi, that’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. And she’ll get frosty. For a little bit.”

On the topic of the next election, Curtis is philosophical. “It’s ultimately going to be decided, as they always are, by the independents, the center,” he says. “There probably has never been an election in this country where the center didn’t make the difference.”

We have burned through a lot of firewood in three days. I bring more in from the porch. Curtis continues: “I’ve become something of a shut-in. I can’t drive, I don’t walk well, I can’t lift things, and if I go out, I’m lugging a rolling walker with me.” He hated teaching via Zoom during the pandemic. At the end of 2020, he retired from the journalism school. The Honors College lured him back to teach one more course, but he was done for good by 2022.

He’s hopeful that he can travel to Florida later this winter to visit Mimi. If that goes well, he will fly out to Rhode Island in the summer to see his son Carter and his family. He still reads a ton – he loved Alice McDermott’s Absolution, but he’s been on a contemporary Irish fiction kick. And he watches a lot of sports. Which when we meet means football. “I don’t really have a team,” he says. “I have a couple teams I hate. The Dallas Cowboys got annihilated yesterday, so I was a happy camper.”

I only now spot that on the end table next to his bed, almost out of view, are his six books standing in a row, as if for no one’s benefit other than his own. Is he done writing books? It makes me happy to hear that he’s noncommittal, even a little coy. “It’s hard for me to imagine, given my health condition, but I never said that was the end of it. I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“I’ve always felt like a character from Peter Pan. But I began to feel like I was getting old when my legs began to give me problems. I had to give up tennis in my mid-70s.” Even here he takes a philosophical tone. “I lived 78 years free of any real handicaps, other than the asthma I had as a child.”

We’re not talking about politics or journalism now.

He tells me that every morning, when he’s still in bed, he says his prayers. He can see that this surprises me. He says they take the form of gratitude, expressed to something he doesn’t pretend to understand. There’s a force out there, Curtis says, and it’s a hell of a lot more powerful than he is.

He says thanks for his mother and his stepfather who believed in him. For his children and his grandchildren. For Nancy. For Mimi. For his cat, Pepper Wilkie. For his friends. For his health, such as it is. For home.

Curtis spent so much of his life on the road, so much time going from place to place – the Christmases he spent on stories, the year when his mailing address was that Best Western in Americus, Georgia. There’s an irony that after such a peripatetic existence, he is now somewhat housebound. But I’m happy that home is in a place where he has family and friends who love him.

One day, his ashes will be buried in the Oxford cemetery where his mother’s family lies. They will be placed next to Nancy’s, with his son Stuart’s ashes just a few feet away. His daughter and son-in-law have plots nearby. “We’re all right there together,” he says. “And Faulkner ain’t that far away.”

He’ll leave it to his kids to decide his epitaph, he says. 

What about his legacy?

“I’m retired. I expect to be forgotten, too. I don’t think my books are going to live forever. I just hope that I’ve lived a good life, have been a good friend, and have had good friends, and been honest, and had integrity.”

I ask what integrity means to him.

“It means everything. To be a man of my word. To stand up if a situation calls for it, on behalf of my beliefs. I always told my students that your most important possession is your credibility.”

I drive over to a restaurant that’s open, and bring him back a pepperoni pizza for dinner. I tell him I hope to get back in the fall and would love to see him then. I don’t know if he notices that my voice catches when I say this.

As I slowly ease my rental car from his driveway, careful of the ice under the powder, I think about the words Curtis told me he would choose for his epitaph.

He came home to be with his people.

I smile. One more good lede.  ◊

Michael Oates Palmer is a writer in Los Angeles. A former two-term member of the board of the Writers Guild of America, West, he has written for television for over 20 years. His writing has appeared in Food and Wine, Gravy, Vox, and other publications.

Maude Schuyler Clay was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and assisted photographer William Eggleston. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, among others. In 1999 University Press of Mississippi published Delta Land, which received the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award and the Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. She is also author of Delta Dogs. Clay was the photography editor of the Oxford American from 1998 to 2002. She continues to reside in the Mississippi Delta.

Jason Holley is a Texas-born illustrator, educator, and exhibiting artist living in Los Angeles. His illustration career spans 25 years and he is widely recognized for his influence and contribution to the field. Since 1997, he has been a member of the faculty at Art Center College of Design, where he is an associate professor.