The Breslin Era

What's been lost

A version of this review essay first appeared in The Point.

When I was twenty-three, and tasked with covering a mayoral race in New York, the dazzling dungeon of a city in which I was raised, I read and reread a long magazine article written by Jimmy Breslin. The first-person feature, published in a July 1969 issue of New York Magazine, does not truly belong to the J.B. canon. It has nothing to do with Kennedy’s gravedigger or a migrant worker drowned in concrete. It did not, unfortunately, make the cut in the new Library of America edition of his work, edited by the columnist Dan Barry. “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” is Breslin at his most acidic and rollicking, and it’s what made me, ultimately, want to write about politics—and indulge, briefly, in practicing it. Breslin, like a number of writer-intellects of his era, was cajoled into running for office, and teamed up with Norman Mailer, then at the zenith of his acclaim and infamy, to run for New York City Council president while the Armies of the Night author sought the mayoralty. Breslin, then in an interlude between tabloid sinecures, was free to ramble for Clay Felker’s New York, and did so—reflecting on the failure of his own campaign and, more importantly, the crumbling of his city. “I saw a sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay,” Breslin writes. “Rage which, with heat and humidity and crowding and misery and misunderstanding and misused or misunderstood authority, could turn the city into a horror on any night soon.” I had never, in the context of journalism, known language like this before.

New York City, at the time of Breslin’s writing, was six years away from its brush with bankruptcy. Whatever fulminating Fox types do against the alleged urban crisis today, 2020s New York is in many respects a utopia compared to what came then: waves of violent crime, tax flight and the immolation of entire neighborhoods for insurance cash. The manufacturing sector that bolstered the middle class for so many decades was collapsing. The suburbs were swallowing up taxpayers. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, municipal government was gutted—teachers, sanitation workers, police officers and firefighters laid off en masse—and the neoliberal era commenced. The federal government, long a patron for New York, allowing mayor after mayor to dramatically expand the city’s social safety net, retreated less out of necessity than spite. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were equally suspect of New York, den of machine liberalism and genuine socialism and booming multiracialism and Lower East Side yentas and barrio Puerto Ricans and the Italian and Irish Catholics, insisting they had every right to the WASP American Dream. The New Deal was going to be buried. New York could bleed itself to prosperity and become, over time, an attractive investment vehicle for the rich. There was a young builder of the outer boroughs, the son of a powerful developer every Democrat knew, who very much wanted to make it in Manhattan; an exceedingly generous tax abatement to remodel the old Commodore Hotel, at Grand Central Station, sent him on his way. Out of the ashes of the old New York, social-democratic New York, came Donald J. Trump.

Breslin was there for all of it. Born in 1928, he died in early 2017, just long enough to see Trump, one of his many bêtes noires, inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. As hyperreal as that day was for a large swath of America, it must have been especially absurd for Breslin, who grew up several miles south of the Trumps. Whereas young Donald was reared in Jamaica Estates, perhaps the toniest slice of Queens, Breslin spent his youth in working-class Richmond Hill, in the maw of the Depression. He overcame these odds to become one of the most important newspapermen of the last century.

There is really no such thing as a big-city newspaper columnist anymore, but Breslin was big—he would literally call reporters on the phone to tell them, “I’m big.” He did beer commercials. He hosted a television show. His books, novels and nonfiction hit bestseller lists, and he was more famous than many of the politicians he chronicled. He was assaulted by the mafia. When the Son of Sam was terrorizing New York in the summer of 1977, he addressed a cryptic and sadistic letter to Breslin, then a columnist for the Daily News. It is difficult to underscore to anyone under 45—I fall into this category—how influential newspapers could be, and the mystique a top columnist possessed. Once, every city had one—Mike Royko of Chicago, Herb Caen of San Francisco, Carl Hiaasen of Miami, Steve Lopez of Philadelphia and later Los Angeles—and they were regularly read by many thousands, if not millions.

Before you excavate the Breslin oeuvre, you must reckon with the economic forces that made it all possible. When there was no internet, the car dealership and the department store and the credit union had no choice but to advertise in the newspaper; the landlords and employers had no choice either, and the classifieds section made the army of probing reporters and jabbering columnists possible. The Village Voice was once such a cash cow that Rupert Murdoch could own it for nearly a decade and never dislodge any of its radical feminist and Marxist staffers. Local advertising meant local readers, local politics. New Yorkers, Breslin’s New Yorkers—the working-class stiffs—read him and sometimes only him. Cable television did not exist until deep into Breslin’s career. The nationalization and rabid polarization of American politics was over the horizon line. This is readily apparent in Breslin’s account of Watergate, How the Good Guys Finally Won, which the Library of America helpfully includes. As Breslin observes, it is the ranchers in Wyoming who turn on the Republican Richard Nixon, and that’s when Breslin realizes, at a dinner hall in Cheyenne, that the president who won 49 states in 1972 was absolutely finished. The local and regional newspapers, flush with cash and holding relative monopolies on attention, could change people’s minds.

“J.B. Number One,” as he affectionately called himself, never graduated college. Why bother with classrooms when the barrooms, pool halls, police precincts and political clubhouses had far more to teach? His father had abandoned the family and his mother was distant, rarely hugging young Jimmy. Once, he caught her holding a pistol to her head. Around age ten, he was publishing his own neighborhood newspaper, The Flash, and he had a headline ready: “Mother Tried Suicide.”

Breslin’s beginnings were in sports writing, at newspapers that no longer exist like the Long Island Press and New York Journal-American. In the first half of the twentieth century, sports writing largely consisted of purplish hagiography, the contests likened to Greco-Roman myth and the journalists largely subservient to the athletes they covered. Breslin’s early sports writing wasn’t adversarial, but it offered the games on the scale of flesh, blood, tedium and misery. He is at his best, arguably, in the sorts of pieces that have not been cemented in media lore. For Life, he tailed Early Wynn, the 43-year-old pitcher desperate to win his three hundredth game. Wynn was a fading legend, beset with gout and dental plates, who once threw a ball at the head of his fifteen-year-old son in batting practice. Breslin’s most famed contribution to sports writing is his chronicle of the 1962 Mets, the worst and most lovably buffoonish team in baseball history, but it’s in Wynn, who “runs like an old cop,” where Breslin finds his canvas. One time, the creaky pitcher noticed a car following him. He drove up a dead-end street, pulled into a driveway, and then reached under the seat for his Magnum .357. “This is listed as a pistol,” Breslin almost deadpans, “but they could fight the next war with it and get a lot done.”

Forever identified with New York, Breslin still roamed plenty, thanks to staff jobs that, in a far flusher era for newspapers, permitted generous expense accounts. He filed from Vietnam, England and Selma. Plucked for the New York Herald Tribune, a writer’s paper known for also employing a young Southerner named Tom Wolfe, Breslin had his column. His career, in retrospect, is the stuff of kismet. He covered John F. Kennedy’s trip to Dallas in 1963 and was later present for the deaths of Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy. His column on Clifton Pollard, Kennedy’s gravedigger, eventually landed on most J-school curricula and became the most famous piece he ever wrote. As every journalist in town obsessed over the slain Kennedy, his assassin and the prestigious officials in tow, Breslin spoke to the man digging the president’s grave for $3.01 an hour, a black World War II veteran who doesn’t even attend the funeral—he’s digging another grave as JFK is laid to rest.

But the column, while indelible, is inferior to another piece filed from Dallas that the Library of America saves for posterity. Breslin interviews Malcolm Perry, a young surgeon who cannot save Kennedy’s life. Jackie is there, praying out loud with the priest, unable to cry. Perry’s “long fingers” run over the chest of Kennedy’s corpse as he tries “to get a heartbeat, and even the suggestion of breathing, and there was nothing. There was only the still body, pale white in the light, and it kept bleeding, and now Malcolm Perry started to call for things and move his hands quickly because it all was running out.” It’s hard to tell if Breslin was in the operating room or reconstructed the events through interviews later on. Either way, the kicker guts: “I never saw a President before,” Perry tells Breslin.

Certain writers curdle with time, while others manage to keep adequate pace with the accolades they amassed when alive. Breslin lacked the pretensions of his contemporaries. Although he was associated with the New Journalism that brought literary techniques to conventional journalism, he eschewed Wolfe’s pyrotechnics and Mailer’s existential swaggering; he had no signature outfit, never stabbed anyone and didn’t, like his sometimes-colleague and rival Pete Hamill, date Shirley MacLaine. He did not grasp at Hemingway’s shadow. His masculinity was not performed, nor was it tortured. He was more bookish than he let on—Dostoevsky was a favorite—and he wasn’t, unlike Hamill, prone to fits of reactionary nostalgia. Breslin’s columns, though crafted on deadline and yoked to long-faded news cycles, are wry and crackling enough—and tangle with more universal fare, like the nature of political power and the strictures of class—to appeal to those who never lived through his various heydays.

A product of the white working class, Breslin would always be somewhat sympathetic to their plight, but he spent much of his career as something of an apostate. Many of his columns lashed the NYPD for their brutality and corruption, which was far more brazen in the twentieth century. He was a biting critic of the Irish cops of his old neighborhood. When a young Hispanic officer, Cibella Borges, was fired for posing nude before joining the NYPD, he quipped, in a column defending her, that the police “should have been proud of the pictures, as they prove that at least one member of the force is in marvelous physical condition; most officers are in such deplorable shape that if called upon to pose for pictures, they would first put on overcoats.”

Breslin was a prominent voice of dissent when Bernhard Goetz, a white 37-year-old, shot four black teens who attempted to rob him on the subway. Goetz, in the high-crime Eighties, was briefly a folk hero, the “Subway Vigilante” who attempted, like a gun-toting Batman, to restore order in the underground. Breslin saw a sociopath, a man who shot and paralyzed a teen who had been cowering on the ground after the first bullets went flying. Breslin would visit the nineteen-year-old, Darrell Cabey, in the hospital, and capture his suffering. He won his lone Pulitzer for these columns and his profiles of AIDS victims. In an era of rampant homophobia, he was unafraid of spending time with them, detailing the horror that came with living with such an unknowable, insidious disease. These columns are sparer, heavy with dialogue, J.B. Number One receding to offer the stage to the sick. David Comacho, terminally ill at twenty-seven, tells Breslin he got off the phone with his doctor, who told him that the cancer, fueled by AIDS, had spread to his lungs.

“I said nothing,” Breslin writes.

“I’m trying to keep myself together by washing the windows,” Comacho tells him, and the column ends.

And then there’s Trump, fraudulently ascendant at the end of the Eighties. Breslin was never impressed, and he is unsparing as well as prescient, excoriating the media for handing the fame-hungry developer headline after headline simply because he’s unavoidable for comment. Outright bribery, Breslin figures, is better, since at least friendly reporters could pocket some cash. But these reporters, he fumes (tongue somewhat in cheek), are “doing it for nothing!”

“The scandal in journalism in our time,” Breslin writes, “is that ethics have disintegrated to the point where Donald Trump took over news reporters in this city with the art of the return phone call.” In 2015, when Trump descended the golden escalator, he would pull a similar trick, this time with reporters everywhere.

Despite Breslin’s moral compass, he could have his uglier moods. While at Newsday, he clashed with a female colleague, Ji-Yeon Mary Yuh, who called Breslin sexist for penning a column in which he jokingly claimed his wife’s election to the City Council was ruining his home life. Breslin, usually manageably cantankerous, exploded, calling the reporter a “yellow cur” and “slant-eyed.” Asian journalists and Newsday staffers called for his ouster. Breslin apologized, but then phoned into Howard Stern and made light of it. Newsday went on to suspend him. Breslin, by then, was 61. It would be easy to dismiss him as a racist or, at the very minimum, someone who had contempt for Asian people. His work, his defenders could credibly argue, was absent such hatreds. But the episode marred, for a period at least, what seemed to be a much less knotty legacy: a reporter and columnist who sweated, every day, what the powerful inflicted on the weak.

Tragedy shaded his brilliant career. The Library of America anthology includes eulogies for Breslin’s first wife, who died of cancer at fifty, and a daughter who died of a rare blood disease at forty-seven. Another daughter—Breslin had six children with his first wife—collapsed and died at forty-four. Breslin’s personal health travails were grist for a memoir, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me, which tracks his recovery from a brain aneurysm. He kept working, only giving up his regular columns in 2004, and still publishing books well into his eighties. Newer generations found him, only slightly subdued, on Jonathan Alter’s Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, the HBO documentary tracing his own life and that of Hamill’s. The two newspaper giants were joined together on screen one last time before death. It was an elegy, as all of these projects inevitably are. He was not going to be replaced.

The Breslin era is long gone. News is now nationalized, and most reporting muscle is aimed at stories that can garner the most eyeballs. Local nonprofit newsrooms have started to dutifully fill the void of the collapsed newspapers, but they notably lack columnists. Nonprofit donors and foundations will underwrite nonpartisan investigative and beat reporters, which is all well and good, but ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and the CITY (in New York) aren’t cultivating the next Breslins. The reporters there are capable, not colorful. The style that made Breslin famous—sardonic, rat-a-tat, low-literary—isn’t found on those websites. Prose, for Breslin, mattered a good deal, and the prose of most of the new online outlets dully bleeds together, in service of merely conveying information and not enlivening the language. The few media organizations with formidable resources, like the New York Times, have a waning interest in local columnists. Once the Times killed its standalone Metro print section, it almost entirely ended the tradition of the weekly reported column, save for Ginia Bellafante’s “Big City,” which appears on Sunday. Even in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Times was trotting out several city-focused columnists, including Michael Powell, Clyde Haberman and the late Jim Dwyer. That era is gone—and it’s gone, in part, by choice.

Reported opinion is a vanishing genre. Pundits are everywhere, on television and online, and social media has made many reporters more opinionated. Breslin never confounded his audience because he was both a designated columnist—a spouter of spiky opinions—and someone willing to ask tough questions of his own tribes, whether it was the outer-borough white ethnics he lived among or the liberal politicians he supported without ever dipping into hagiography. Many of his celebrated contemporaries—Jack Newfield, Wayne Barrett and the aforementioned Hamill—fell prey to white knight syndrome, temporarily elevating men like Robert F. Kennedy, Mario Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani to sainthood.

Breslin rarely locked himself into a side or a faction, and his example is instructive for today’s journalists who too often make their craft Manichean. Breslin married punditry with reporting muscle. He had opinions and he shared them; he also showed up and interviewed human beings. He wasn’t bound to his desk, his house or the office. For those charged explicitly with pumping out takes, Breslin is a reminder that the genuine thinker isn’t espousing views that are indistinguishable from whatever the RNC or DNC press offices are pumping out on a particular day. If news organizations will not finance a new generation of Breslins, journalists themselves can at least look to J.B. Number One and remember what was, and what should be again.