By now the presses of the Herald Tribune had long been silenced. Labor strife had killed it and with it the camaraderie of Bleeck’s barroom.
“We were all ambitious and we were too young to have the jobs we had. You know, I was the managing editor when I was 37,” Dick Wald said. “Jimmy was writing a column that had a fixed spot. . . . [Dave] Laventhol wouldn’t wind up being the City Editor of a major metropolitan paper for another ten years, anywhere else.
“When [Whitney] bought it, he decided that it was a great newspaper and it was what he wanted, but he needed a different kind of paper,” Wald said. “He made the management decision to make it an essential read because of what it was, not because of the news that it brought in.” And this was the foundation on which what became known as The New Journalism was laid.
“They gave us power . . . and Whitney put the stamp of approval on it. The other thing was we just enjoyed what we did. Everybody there would sit around after the paper was up. Uh, we’d probably go to Bleeck’s for a drink except Tom Wolfe. He didn’t drink much.”
But the romance of journalism isn’t always so great when you are unemployed, or the child of an unemployed news reporter.
“I remember my mother saying, ‘Your father’s out of a job,’ ” Kevin Breslin recalled. “I somehow remember in the back of my mind thinking, ‘This is bad.’
“You start thinking of what my grandma used to say, you know, ‘you’re going to the poor house.’
“I think we just assumed everything would be OK and not have to lose our house or something.
“I wasn’t shell-shocked because when I was nine, J.B. was going through a little bit of a tough time and I had my trumpet repossessed and I was asked to leave the school music band, which ruined my career in music.” Kevin has a funny half smile as he says this. “This was just before the Mets book.
“But when the next one closed down [the World Journal Tribune] I remember thinking ‘this is a strange business.’ But the Herald Tribune all I remember is that it seemed like the place my father worked. I loved the cafeteria . . . I remember the unique smell . . . I think it was the cafeteria smell that wafted through the entire newspaper, that inside the smell of ink, oh yeah, and cigarettes.”
Before the presses made their final run and it was a final last call for the Trib at Bleeck’s bar, there were many columns and many nights. In the amber light refracted off the damp bar, Breslin sat with Walt Kelly, who was supposed to make Pogo cartoons and not drink according to doctors, and with Wald and Jim Bellows, Dick Schaap and others. Through a glass of gold and a wreath of smoke, Wald recalled, Breslin would mutter “what a crappy column” he had written even as he was thinking about the next one and dreaming about the novel he was already plotting out. Rent receipts, utility bills, the milkman; these things mattered little. He usually did not think of them at all.
His agent of many years, Sterling Lord, recalled the one time he did. Rosemary Breslin had called him:
“‘Look, Sterling.’ I guess I’ve been working for a year or so with Jimmy. ‘We got a problem here because Jimmy has run up bills at five or six different companies here. And I need help in eliminating the problem.’
“So I had a suggestion and she took it. And I was able to eliminate the debt problem in about a year. So he’s all clean now. And the next day he came in the office and he said, ‘Sterling, is there any way you can reinstate one of those bills?’ He said it was always interesting fighting with those guys over the phone. See that’s what he missed, the fighting. But I couldn’t do it. There’s no way I could start it again.”
Between the day John F. Kennedy was buried and “The Gravedigger” appeared in the papers and the day Bobby Kennedy was killed and Breslin was there—in his memory, sitting on the assassin’s legs as he was wrestled down (though in other accounts memory may have played its tricks)—he had written well over 750 features and columns for the New York newspapers he called home. In one year, the number was greater than 174 pieces.
He had interviewed the mobster Dutch Schultz’s killer, who called him on his first day out of jail and asked Breslin to meet him at the Port Authority to talk. He had flown to London as Churchill lay dying: “he dies in an attached house on a very common street, with only a detective walking up and down in front of his door.” He had gone to Dover to the Park Inn pub to seek a man who took soldiers off the beaches at Dunkirk. “You know, it wasn’t exactly simple,” said the man, who couldn’t remember the date of “something that children will be memorizing in school a 100 years from now.” But the man offered an idea: “Well, why don’t you come inside and chat a bit. I hope I can remember enough for you.” Breslin captured the pageantry of the Knight of the Garter’s funeral, his coffin on a gun carriage from 1880 pulled along by sailors hauling white ropes. And then he found the people to whom Churchill mattered most, those who were under the bombs.
“And ’e was around that mornin’,” one woman said, recalling when Peggy Anderson’s 15 year old was killed by one. . . . “ ’e come up to Peggy Anderson and ’e says ‘Where’s your husband’ and she says ‘Trainin’ in the army . . . and ’e says ‘You ’ave to stand fast down ’ere. And then ’e shook ’is fist and said ’e was going to fix these goddam Nazis . . . and then ’e left and ’e was crying like a little kid in school when ’e walked away. ’E was crying for Peggy Anderson’s daughter and if ’e could do that for ’er then we can go out and cry for ’im today.”
Breslin had captured the ugliness of Sen. Joe McCarthy when he wrote about the righteousness of a man’s restoration to his job eight years after he was flayed in Washington hearings. Firemen, bookies, horse betters, racketeers, Teamsters, Mob bosses and widows and riots; the dead and the dying. Day in, day out he smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, he typed, he drank, he made notes, he smoked, he typed and the papers and the public were better for it. If you did the rough math, Breslin at times appeared in daily papers and Sunday supplements more than three times a week. Whether in his home precincts of New York, or the highlands of Da Nang, or the damp serenity of Hyde Park he brought something, almost all the time, to you: he put you there. You were with Frank Sinatra’s son walking out to the press after his kidnapping, shouldering union laborers finishing up at the World’s Fair, gazing at Tony Provenzano standing alone before the bench, counting time already, imagining Little Tommy blessing himself “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” as machine guns and bombs and dynamite are discussed with the “Men Of the IRA” and the boy stands on a chair to peer down into a British prison yard.
As the senator’s personal bodyguard, ex-FBI agent Bill Barry, leapt into the fray—brave, but too late for Kennedy—Breslin captured the scrum that included Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Rosey Grier, retired now after a tendon torn in his last season, who wrested the gun from Sirhan Sirhan’s hand as it appeared pointed at the writer George Plimpton. He captured the shouts of “We want him alive. We want him alive,” from the powerhouse California politician Jesse Unruh who jumped on a table as the crowd shouted, “Kill him, kill him,” and writer Pete Hamill, who would go home and weep, threw a punch.
The chaos of the scrum, the solidarity of good soldiers in Vietnam with rioters in the US, the sadness and the steady absorption of the pain of the world, no wonder it was chaos at home where bills were unpaid, milkmen were threatened, children walked on eggshells, his wife conferred with his agent to find the money, and the ghosts of the house his father walked out of permeated the soul of this writer—whose smile could be cherubic when the face wasn’t twisted into a bellowing rage—even as his family lived in a much finer house, with, so far as is known, only one possible alcoholic—the writer himself.
The chaos and antics and the love also at home were described best by Kevin Breslin:
“He was boisterous. ‘Fuck this and fuck that and I’m going to sleep in a funking hotel. [but] He had a whole different side to him and in the kitchen, [he would say] and watch this little boy . . . ‘Dad loves Mommy,’ thank God you know, because joint was wild. She was him; he was her. It’s like, it didn’t matter that the world’s caving in. They were like a team.”
And the Breslins, in 1965, were another family in Queens sending a man to Vietnam.
“It must have been dangerous because when he shipped out, every night, we would have to pray. My mother would have my brother James, my sister Rosemary and me on the floor praying on our knees to make sure he was okay. He was there for four or five months,” Kevin Breslin said. And in Forest Hills, as in so many homes, prayers flew East.
But first, the impresario dressed for war. “We had to go to the army navy store,” Kevin said. “He was buying like a flak jacket with all the pockets. A military belt with the canteen green shirts, green pants. I remember he’s trying it on. He paraded around the bedroom. And he had a canteen and the old buckle military belt with a hidden back where he could put money. You’d think it’s a comedy. He’s getting dressed to go to Vietnam. We didn’t know what Vietnam was except it was a war.” Breslin found out soon enough what that meant.
“Yeah, it was July, it was some fucking place. Mostly the dirt. When I found you could put your face in the dirt and still breathe it was a good spot. I don’t know what they teach in basic training camp, when I’m fucked bad, I know what to do. ‘How deep in the dirt can you put your filthy head?’ ” In 1965, a good many of the other faces in the dirt were Black.
By Jimmy Breslin
Herald Tribune News service SAIGON, Aug. 16—The radios sit on bunks and on boxes in the mess halls and out in the field they are on top of the sandbags.Every hour the music stops and the News begins: “rioting in a section of Los Angeles.”
And the Negro soldiers stand and listen. And they talk. They talk with uniforms over their Black skins.
The column continued. It simply captured the debate and discussion of what was on the mind of these American soldiers in the summer of Watts, where the riots had started as so many things seem to with a police car stop, then of course came the rumor—the cops had kicked a pregnant woman—and then from August 11 and for another five days, rioting of a kind that claimed thirty-four lives, according to published reports, of a kind that had the government send in 14,000 National Guard soldiers.
“They ask you why you’re here when you can’t be straight at home,” a tall one, smoking a cigar said. “Why shouldn’t they!” the other one said. “How can you come over here and say to the people, ‘We going to liberate you,’ when you got go out in the streets and riot to liberate yourself at home.”
His face was in the dirt. But his head was not in the sand. There were many good war correspondents in Vietnam by that year, some so good that it would have been hard to show up in July and with all the talent in the world catch up by August with Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press, David Halberstam of The Times, Peter Arnett, and Neil Sheehan with their depth of knowledge of the war, the soldiering, the politics and the nuances of policy. Breslin did something simple and clear. He told the story of what events in life at home meant to the soldiers here. One soldier reminded his colleagues of Lemuel Penn, the Lieutenant Colonel home from camp in Georgia and shot by the Ku Klux Klan. “They got us over here defendin’ Georgia. Next thing you know they’ll have us fighting for South Africa.” The Vietnamese, who were our allies themselves, did not get a pass on racism. Breslin closes this trenchant column by capturing something that remained true well after the war was over—the Vietnamese too wanted little to do with Black Americans.
But Breslin’s best war reporting came when he got home. From Travis Air Force Base, he captured the cost of war in a country thousands of miles away. The headline summarized the topic nicely: “Wounded, Dead in War Arrive Nightly at Travis.” The subhead captured the rest: “Unloading of Vietnam Casualties From Big Jets Becoming Routine.” Breslin takes you inside the big, windowless transport, first noting the squadron of nuclear armed B-52s parked nearby. Inside, where the nurses are getting twenty-seven casualties—twelve ambulatory and one psychiatric, the rest on litters, ready to come home.
It is warm, the broken bodies are covered only in sheets, but now, with the Northern California air very cool at dusk, “They came out, one after another, with casts and with bloodstains on their sheets, and the nurse’s tanned hands pulled olive drab blankets over their broken bodies and she talked quietly and looked into the face of each of them. Then he would be gone and the medics would place another piece of the war in Vietnam at her feet. And she would bend over and reach for the blankets.” It’s graphic, it’s detailed with blood seeping from casts, colostomy bags, legs that can’t bear the touch of the blanket. It’s not the defeat of Gallipoli, but is the same scene as when the troop ships returned to the piers in Australia.
“‘I have a colostomy. I’m 25 and I have a colostomy. I was going to marry a girl. She’s in Pennsylvania. If I ever heal up I can marry her.’ ”
The next night’s plane, someone whispers as the column closes, will only be carrying coffins.
And in 1967, when the war is at its height, he captures another fact of this war: “Friendly Napalm Changes Return Address on a Soldier’s Letter.” The soldier had been there two months. Breslin is shown the letter. The soldier’s father allows: “The letter. You can keep the letter if you do one thing for us.” “Yes?” “Put in the paper that he was a very good son for us.”
What was most important about going to war, for Jimmy Breslin, was that it opened his eyes to the cost of war, and opened his heart to the question of whether this war was our country’s to fight. But he didn’t opine, he just continued to write simple war stories. The kind you can find at certain Air Force bases during any American War. The kind that Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times on October 27, 1947:
“The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly.”
Breslin went home to Queens, New York. Despondent, he could not write.
The journalist Lawrence O’Donnell, writing about the White House following the assassination of another Kennedy, Bobby’s brother, JFK, in his book Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, best states what Breslin must have been feeling:
“There was a moment in the White House late that day that captured what everyone in the Kennedy circle was feeling. Mary McGrory, a columnist close to the Kennedys, said through her tears, ‘We’ll never laugh again.’ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, said, ‘Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.’ ”
Vietnam was in the past. So was Bobby, whose views had evolved from those of a young man once actively involved in the architecture of his brother’s Southeast Asia plans, to one now dovish and vocally opposed to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s plans. Bobby was dead. The Bobby America needed—created in a large part by sympathetic reporters, who knew and chose to downplay or ignore the ruthless determination that Bobby had exhibited in the past and had exhibited in his calculated bid for the party nomination—would not sit in the West Wing. The funeral train had arrived in Washington. The solemnity had begun. Breslin was there. As it was with the war dead, who Berger heard a sailor murmur “came home too late,” and point out to another sailor that the signs welcoming the troops home or congratulating on a job well done were painted over or faded, now it was with the hope for peace and unity and a future that Bobby seemed to promise to the young woman who scooted over to grab the telephone on the first ring. It had faded away.