in the search for the truth. In my book, he always got it right. If it had not been for reporters like John I do not know what would have happened to us as we fought for civil rights. He was not afraid to get in the way, often risking his life to uncover the truth. He made a lasting contribution to the movement and to America." In covering national politics, Tom Wicker, Washington bureau chief and columnist for The New York Times, explained in Jean Stein's 1970 book American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy why he assigned Herbers to cover Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign for the presidency. The Kennedys, he explained, had a way of making partisan supporters out of reporters who covered them and thus used them to advance their political goals. Wicker said, “When Robert Kennedy became a presidential candidate, I assigned for full-time coverage a very distinguished reporter in our Washington bureau named John Herbers. Herbers had been for years before he came to the Times UPI’s correspondent in Mississippi, where he came under all imaginable sorts of pressure…. He withstood it all to a do a magnificent and honest job….I thought this was a good assignment, and I felt justified by it as the year went along because although I know that John Herbers came to be personally fond of and impressed by Robert Kennedy, his coverage throughout the year remained very dispassionate and objective…which is what we wanted." In his bestseller Megatrends, John Naisbitt applauds Herbers’ grasp of American demographics: "No one has understood and interpreted the small-town boom with more clarity than New York Times reporter John Herbers, who, in my view, is one of only three or four great American journalists. Herbers has the ability to place his individual news stories within the context of changing social, economic, and political realities, thereby offering the reader not just the facts but an interpretation of the way those facts relate to the rest of what is going on." Awards 1960–1961. Nieman Fellowship, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts. 1974. The Silver Em Award. University of Mississippi. School of Journalism. 2000. John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. Columbia Journalism School. Books The Lost Priority: What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in America? Funk & Wagnalls. 1970. . [on the decline of the civil rights movement] The Black Dilemma. The John Day Company. 1973.