The president had been shot, according to an ABC Radio bulletin at 12:36 central standard time. At 12:38, CBS became the first national TV network to report the news.
Breslin, according to Dick Wald and Jim Bellows in their book The World of Jimmy Breslin, knew from the start this was his story. “When President Kennedy was killed, Breslin was on the first jet from New York to Dallas.”
The assassination occurred at 12:30 central time. By 12:33 the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had walked out of the Texas School Book Depository, apparently less than a minute before the area around the building was locked down. By 1:00 CST the president was declared dead. By 2:00 the vice president had left Parkland Hospital. When the body of the man who had been president of the United States joined him aboard Air Force One, along with the woman who had been First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, LBJ was sworn in as president. It was 2:38. Jacqueline Kennedy was still wearing the bloodied pink suit she had on when the convertible presidential limousine sped away from the book depository, and she was heard by others in the car to say: “I have his brains in my hands.”
The media confusion of the first hours—dead, reported dead, unofficially reported dead, priests tell a 32-year-old Dan Rather of CBS he is dead, Walter Cronkite considers what language to use, reports of Oswald’s arrest, reports on the murder of Officer Tippit at 1:15 P.M. CST by Oswald—all of this confusion had subsided by the time Breslin arrived at Love Field in Dallas. By the next day, at a press conference, he was able to “pepper,” gently, the doctors who worked on Kennedy with questions that would only make sense when his account “A Death in Emergency Room One” appeared in the Trib in the Sunday, November 24, editions.
“Essentially he was a storyteller,” Richard Kluger wrote in his magisterial work, The Paper, which chronicled the life of the Trib and its important impact on democracy from the era of Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, and James Gordon Bennett, founder of the Herald, to the era of Breslin and Tom Wolfe.
His usefulness to the paper was well illustrated by the work he did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While other reporters were concentrating on the fallen President’s assassin, theories about his involvement in a plot . . . Breslin busied himself interviewing the surgeon who had tried to save Kennedy’s life, the priest who had administered last rites, and the funeral director who provided the best bronze casket in his stock.
Breslin “gently but thoroughly” questioned the doctor, 34-year-old Malcolm Perry, and used his answers in reconstructing the loss of hope, the stoicism of the First Lady, and the final efforts to save what was left of a man under the harsh surgical lights.
The long piece Breslin filed is held up as one of the great examples of modern journalistic storytelling.
DALLAS—The call bothered Malcolm Perry. “Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,” the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctor’s cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The “STAT” meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.
“This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires’ page,” he said.
“President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,” the operator said. “They are bringing him into the emergency room now.”
Perry hung up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria and down a flight of stairs and pushed through a brown door and a nurse pointed to Emergency Room One, and Dr. Perry walked into it . . .
Perry called for a scalpel. He was going to start a tracheotomy . . . The incision had to be made below the bullet wound . . .
[H]e started the tracheotomy. There was no anesthesia. John Kennedy could feel nothing now. The wound in the back of the head told Dr. Perry that the president never knew a thing about it when he was shot, either . . .
Just as he finished the tracheotomy, Malcolm Perry looked up and Dr. Kemp Clark, chief neurosurgeon in residency at Parkland, came in through the door. Clark was looking at the president of the United States. Then he looked at Malcolm Perry and the look told Malcolm Perry something he already knew. There was no way to save the patient.
“Would you like to leave, ma’am?” Kemp Clark said to Jacqueline Kennedy. “We can make you more comfortable outside.”
Just the lips moved. “No,” Jacqueline Kennedy said . . .
The IBM clock on the wall said it was 1 P.M. The date was November 22, 1963.
Three policemen were moving down the hall outside Emergency Room One now, and they were calling to everybody to get out of the way. But this was not needed, because everybody stepped out of the way automatically when they saw the priest who was behind the police. His name was the Reverend Oscar Huber, a small 70-year-old man who was walking quickly.
Malcolm Perry turned to leave the room as Father Huber came in . . .
Everything that was inside that room now belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy and Father Oscar Huber and the things in which they believe.
Father Huber pulled the white sheet down so he could anoint the forehead of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy was standing beside the priest. Now this old priest held up his right hand and he began the chant that Roman Catholic priests have said over their dead for centuries.
“Si vivis, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen.”
The prayer said, “If you are living, I absolve you from your sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, amen.” . . .
“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” Father Huber said.
“And let perpetual light shine upon him,” Jacqueline Kennedy answered. She did not cry . . .
When he was finished praying, Father Huber turned and took her hand. “I am shocked,” he said.
“Thank you for taking care of the president,” Jacqueline Kennedy said.
“I am convinced that his soul had not left his body,” Father Huber said. “This was a valid last sacrament.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Then he left. He had been eating lunch at his rectory at Holy Trinity Church when he heard the news.
Breslin was still in New York City, perhaps on his way out of the 41st Street offices of the paper. Perhaps not quite yet. Only minutes had passed since the first news had reached him.
He was not there. But if you read the short story he wrote—and really that is what it is—then you were. You were there and you knew more about the death of John F. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital than you would have learned from reams of reporting by the wire services and newspapers, and hours and hours of radio and television commentary. It was, in fact, the only thing you needed to read sixty years later. Your heart aches. You understood the crime. You understood the victim’s condition and that you were in the victim’s family: America was wounded, critically if not mortally. The criminal, in this and all of Breslin’s reports from Dallas, is hardly worth a mention.
“A Death in Emerrgency Room One” has been criticized, Kluger writes, for getting certain facts wrong even as Breslin strove for “an attempt at clinical accuracy.”
The story contained errors, he points out. The correct names of surgical procedures, the title of the chairman of the department of surgery (Breslin had characterized him as the chief resident) and the operator’s words were among them. Yet, rereading the story, Kluger said Dr. Perry thought “the major focus is correct” and the mistakes “to be expected in such circumstances.”
Complainants about Breslin’s work have a number of times asserted that he sacrificed, as Kluger also says, accuracy for emotional impact. But when the dart hits the bullseye, as it does here, both accuracy and emotion are served equally in the creation of a story that brought you truth, which is not a hard and fast thing to be conveyed simply in a collection of well-organized facts. His is an honest form of storytelling, not one of deceit or sloppiness. At the time Breslin wrote it, how he wrote it also was seen as something new, something revolutionary, a form of reconstruction designed to put the reader there, with the author, in the scene of the tragedy.
Praise for his work often includes the critical judgment that his prose resembles that of Hemingway in its short, seemingly simple sentences that build through their very compression a compelling story.
If you were to read Hemingway’s journalism for the Toronto Star you would see that is often the case in these pieces, which like Breslin’s are far shorter than all but the shortest Hemingway story:
During the late friction with Germany a certain number of Torontonians of military age showed their desire to assist in the conduct of the war by emigrating to the States to give their all to laboring in munition plants . . . they now desire to return to Canada and gain fifteen percent on their United States money.
Through a desire to aid these morally courageous souls who supplied the sinews of war we have prepared a few hints on “How to Be Popular Although a Slacker.” . . .
The first difficulty to be surmounted will be the C.E.F. [Canadian Expeditionary Force] overseas badge. This is easily handled, however. If anyone asks you why you do not wear your button, reply haughtily: “I do not care to advertise my military service.”
In another piece of his journalism on valor, “War Medals for Sale,” the author would walk from medal and coin shop to pawn shop to secondhand shop to capture “the market price” of valor by asking how much a medal could be sold for. No grand statements necessary. From the Toronto Star, December 8, 1923:
The reporter got, in succession, a price on his coat, another offer of seventy cents on his watch, and a handsome offer of 40 cents for his cigarette case. But no one wanted to buy or sell medals . . . You could sell your old military puttees. But you couldn’t find a buyer for a 1914 Star. So the market price of valor remained undetermined.
The reporter-to-reporter comparison might be a better comparison than one that puts Breslin’s journalism beside Hemingway’s later novels or nonfiction.
But if there is a book by Breslin that could be compared in simple elegance and precise detail to Hemingway’s work of nonfiction—say, Death in the Afternoon—it might be that first book, Sunny Jim. The account of the life of this legendary horse trainer, Jim Fitzsimmons, is simple in its prose and emotionally complex in its grasp of a man and his stables and jockeys and his work, which could be summed up for Fitzsimmons in the way Breslin would later sum up his own work: you won a big race on Saturday, you went to work the next day not looking backward for one minute at that fame which could not beat tomorrow’s horse.
“Breslin deals in emotions the way some columnists deal in issues,” said Jim Bellows, the last editor of the Trib, and Dick Wald, its last managing editor, in the book of Breslin’s columns they composed together. “They are the stuff of his writing and his articles gain or lose an audience by how well the public can identify with his private responses to the world . . . He has a particular aptitude, though, for dealing in tragedy, pathos, and sorrow . . . he does his work with an odd mixture of restraint and emotionalism that manages to capture the mood of sorrow in its varying shades . . . He became so wrapped up in it that, after filing ‘A Death in Emergency Room One,’ he went out, re-did all the research that he had gathered in the first place, and tried to file the story again. When he finished covering the Kennedy funeral in Washington he was unable to talk to anyone for several hours.”
They composed that book in a graveyard of a city room. It was all that was left to compose that day in 1966, after the reporters and editors were gone, their fifth-floor desks empty, the presses on two and three silent, the trucks no longer belching out of the first-floor loading bays. They sat in the newsroom to compose this book on the very last day of the paper’s life. They had to do so, because Breslin had taken a publisher’s money and failed to deliver a book. In this case the publisher agreed to accept a compilation in exchange for the money advanced.
The book organized by Bellows and Wald compiles a very good sampling of the work of this talent that Bellows and his editors nurtured.
If “Emergency Room One,” published November 24, 1963, is a textbook example of The New Journalism and all the truth its personalized storytelling could enable through careful reporting and a reconstruction of events—not by ignoring the facts or creating the facts, but by breaking through the strictures of the past—“The Gravedigger,” published November 26, 1963, the day after JFK was buried, is the iconic example of what set a great reporter apart from what Breslin derisively and a bit unfairly called “the scribblers,” or even the best reporters for the then most assuredly astringent New York Times.
It is the example of Breslin’s brilliance taught in schools. It is a story most often taught in encouraging the young to look for that which is difficult. If the teacher is too vigorous, there is the risk of failing to teach that the first job is to satisfy the reader or viewer’s simple interests: Who won the game? What was the score? Or in the case of the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, what did the larger picture look like?
“The Gravedigger” only works if it is set against those factual accounts. The loser’s locker room is only poignant if the account butts up against a story that begins with the score. The true power of the column as journalism is not in its simple and poignant beauty, which is fine, but in the way it served as a counterpoint to the reporting of the main events that were unfolding as the United States prepared to bury a president. The column, seen in this light, is not so much what made Breslin special as it is what made the newspaper he worked for special. That is easy to lose sight of today, when we are talking about artifacts.
It is a little unfair to the reader to give these short excerpts of this particular column. So if you haven’t read it twice, look it up.
IT’S AN HONOR
Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 A.M., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
It ends like this:
Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards. “They’ll be used,” he said. “We just don’t know when. I tried to go over to see the grave,” he said. “But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn’t get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I’ll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it’s an honor.”
And on the way to the ending, Breslin makes a few more points, which would tell you what he considered most important about the events at the side of the grave Clifton Pollard had dug:
Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave. . . .
Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history . . . Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked. . . .
Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House. “What time is it?” a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes past three,” he said.
Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill.
There is one other piece to this trilogy of reports Breslin sent back to his reader in New York from this, the funeral for a hatless, Roman Catholic, Irish president. It is a piece published on November 25, 1963, the day JFK was buried in the grave Clifton Pollard had dug, and a day before “The Gravedigger” appeared, that consciously or not in its concluding paragraphs can be felt as a harbinger.
But now you noticed the soldiers. You saw the ones standing so stiffly around the coffin, and the others moving slowly and clicking their heels while the bayonets sparkled. And then everything came over you, and you stood in the rotunda of the Capitol Building of the United States of America and looked at a coffin that held the body of a President whose head had been blown off by a gun fired by one of his own people and now you fell apart inside and there was this terrible sense of confusion and inability to understand what was going on. And there were tears; of course there were tears, there have been tears for three days now; and then you started talking out loud.
“Oh, Christ, what are we doing here?” It was a prayer, not a blasphemy.
At this point the newspaper found it necessary to guide the reader by inserting a cross headline, “Art of Hating,” before the column continued:
Dallas. You started to think about Dallas. In Dallas they sat and told you that a Communist shot the President of the United States. They sat and told you that, while everybody in the town with any brains knew that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was shot because this is a country that has let the art of hating grow so strong that now we kill our Presidents because of it.
And Dallas does not own hate. Dallas is a collective word and it means Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and, yes, Scarsdale and Bay Ridge and the Bronx, too. Dallas means everyplace where people in this nation stand off with their smugness and their paychecks and their cute little remarks, and run their lives on the basis of hate. Everybody has a piece of this murder. Everybody who ever stood off and said, “that Jew bastard,” and everybody who ever said, “I don’t want niggers near me” is part of this murder.
These three pieces, taken together, certainly give you three elements of Breslin’s powerful sense of craft: the immediate “STAT” of “Emergency Room One,” the poignant sound of the backhoe in “It’s an Honor” and the harsh and sweeping indictment that closes “Everybody’s Crime.”
A fourth element of these final pages of Camelot, and one that under pressure or in haste, or under the presumption of good taste, could have been ignored, is in the minutiae that take place away from the black bunting, the crepe, the horse-drawn caisson. It is the final act of noticing you can often see in his work. He stays to observe when everyone has in one way or another moved on. This fourth piece was published on November 27, 1963. It is the best kind of closed-room crime reporting.
Within five minutes after the assassination was confirmed Friday afternoon, the public information officer for a Senate subcommittee sat dazed in his office and when the phone on his desk rang he picked it up automatically.
The caller was a lobbyist for an important industry.
“It’s terrible,” the one with the Senate subcommittee said.
“Yes it is,” the lobbyist said. “Now tell me something. We would like to know what effect Kennedy’s death is going to have on this investigation of our industry that you’ve been planning. What are the implications.”
This column, “The Smooth Transfer of Power,” is shining and hard as a pure white diamond.
Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s private secretary, knew enough to get into her office Saturday night and clean out her desks and files . . . She was getting out of the way before the first of the hungry people started piling into her office.
This is what you found here after you finally looked around at what had happened after the longest weekend you had ever spent: a weekend you want to forget. . . .
There was a transition here. A swift one, too.
This does not mean the transition of power from a dead president to his successor. . . . and the other important people who run this country . . . these things that went on were far beneath them and were unnoticed.
But some of the little people, the ones who use politics as a way to make a living, were brutal.
Breslin, when his work on “Emergency Room One” was over, could not speak for several hours, according to Bellows.
When he finished all his work in Washington, Breslin went home to Queens, walked into a bar named Pep McGuire’s, and did not come out for two or three days, according to Breslin. Pep McGuire’s was at the center of Breslin’s mythical universe, and there he now found solace. Alcohol, which would continue to fuel him for years into the future, had already lost the warm golden glow of a sunny morning in a mug and an elbow and an ashtray not on a desk in the Long Island Press newsroom but on a warm wooden corner of a bar, polished by rags, spilled drinks and elbows.
Now its mystical properties deadened pain, creating a darkness inside him as bleak as the city and the nation outside the bar.
“I went into Pep’s bar and I never came out. You just drank the sickness right out of your system; the bleary day.” He told the interviewer this on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
As for the work itself, he said, like Sunny Jim, he had not looked back on it. He did not read it again. Not “The Gravedigger,” not the other columns from the simultaneously grieving and scheming Capitol. “What for,” he told me, to whom he more expansively once said, “Let’s reminisce about tomorrow.”
He had to earn a living.