Poll guru Carroll dies

MAURICE (Mickey) Carroll, a longtime journalist who was at the scene in Dallas when assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was killed, died Wednesday after a battle with colon cancer. He was 86.

The jovial Carroll (photo inset) spent the past two decades as the spokesman for the Quinnipiac University poll, often providing insights into the results to mainly New York and New Jersey reporters.

He is also the father of New Jersey Assemblyman Michael Carroll.

“Saddened by the passing of Mickey Carroll,” Gov. Cuomo said in a tweet. “He was a gentleman who cared deeply about the truth and about New York. He will be missed.”

Carroll spent more than 40 years as a journalist, working for such publications as The New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and New York Newsday.

He also spent time at a number of New Jersey papers, including the state’s largest one, The Star-Ledger.

While working for the Herald Tribune, Carroll was dispatched to Dallas in 1963 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was at the Dallas police headquarters on Nov. 24, 1963, when local strip club owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald, who was charged with the President’s murder. He is seen in the background of the iconic picture of Oswald’s slaying.

“I may have shouted the last words he was ever to hear,” Carroll wrote in 2013. “How about it, Lee?”

A believer that Oswald acted alone, Carroll wrote books about Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and the 1979-80 Iran hostage situation.

In 2015, he wrote a piece for the Daily News about being in Selma, Ala., to cover the Rev. Martin Luther King’s protest marches. The timing was tied to the release of a movie on the subject.

Carroll also taught journalism at Quinnipiac, Columbia University, New York University and Montclair State University.

“Mickey Carroll was a reporter in the finest tradition of American journalism, a dedicated educator and a knowledgeable commentator on the American political scene,” said Quinnipiac University President John Lahey. “He educated thousands in the classroom and millions through his reporting and his work with the poll.”

Carroll, the son of Maurice Carroll, a businessman, and Dorothy Carroll, a bookkeeper, was raised in Rutherford, N.J. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and served in the Army.

Carroll was predeceased by his second wife of 30 years, Beth Fallon, a newspaper columnist, in 2007, and a son, Patrick, who died in 2005. He is survived by his first wife, Peggy, with whom he remained close; his son; two daughters; 10 grandchildren, and a sister

A memorial Mass will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 14 in St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church in Morristown, N.J.