William Whitworth’s Legacy

William Alvin Whitworth was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1937. He grew up in Little Rock, attended Central High School, received a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma, and then returned to Little Rock as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette. Among the stories he covered was the fight over desegregation, centered on his old high school. At the Gazette, Bill met two people who became lifelong friends—Ernest Dumas and Charles Portis, later a novelist (Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South). In 1963, Bill followed Portis to Manhattan to take a job at the New York Herald Tribune, where his newsroom colleagues included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and the photographer Jill Krementz. On his second day at the Trib, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. During the years that followed, Bill covered John Lindsay’s New York City mayoral race, Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate race, the first Harlem riots, the free-speech movement at Berkeley, the Vietnam anti-war protests—he got tear-gassed a lot—and the Beatles’ first trip to the United States. He was in the Ed Sullivan Theater for their American-television debut.