He had thrown himself across the long couch and he looked like a homicide detective, worn out but still smiling with his tie undone and still wearing his raincoat.
He alternated slapping through the pages of his reporter’s notebook and tearing pieces of a fresh loaf of Italian bread and dunking the buttered heel and all that followed into a cardboard container of coffee, letting the crumbs fall onto his shirt. He kept smiling.
His head was back against one arm of the couch, his feet in black, thick shoes, were dangling off the side.
He had already been at work for several hours.
Sitting as straight in his chair in the corner as an American Gothic was Murray Kempton. His suit was neat, his tie was narrow, and he punctuated what he said with his cold pipe. An Episcopalian minister on a Monday morning, the Baltimore-born columnist was not yet too troubled by the writing of his next sermon.
In his thick suspenders, his dark colored shirt and too-wide-for-the-decade tie, behind the editor’s desk sat Don Forst, Editor of New York Newsday. On the desk were a pair of glasses, a concession; they rested on their rims with the arms already out so they were easy to pick up and put on. There was also a conceit, his copy of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli by way of the Opinion Page editor, Tom Plate, who thought it never hurt to have a reminder at hand that it was better to be feared than loved.
Forst had been at work since 4:00 A.M. when he had pulled his first perfect cup of espresso from the gleaming wonder of the commercial grade espresso machine that held a place of pride in his Tribeca loft in the old Thread Building.
He knew full well how to manipulate love and fear and how to imagine, create, build and drive a newspaper. These were the things he knew how to do well. There were many other things he could not do well at all.
Each of these three men was complicated. One lived in chaos. One could be cold and distant. Forst, he was an editor. He had a dark spot on his soul that even those who admired him could not ignore. And he was single minded. Monomaniacal. Gael Greene, the restaurant critic who defined a genre and met him while at the New York Post said, with a great deal of affection, that she knew their marriage was over when he dropped her breast to pick up the phone for a call from Breslin.
And here was Breslin. He left a paper with close to a million and a half readers, where he had won a Pulitzer, to join one with a circulation that at around 130,000 was still growing from 25,000 to a peak of around 225,000. Forst had played a significant part in getting him to come. Why?
“Truth,” Forst said. It was his mantra. “Truth is the ultimate con.”
The three men had known each other since they were much younger, and each had played an important part even then in changing the way news and newspapers and city columns were reported and written. They were now going to do it again. That certainly may have been part of it.
“Let’s reminisce about tomorrow,” the man on the couch said. He finished ruining the pages of the notebook as he shoved it in his pocket and stood up.
The tall thin man in the corner picked up his coffee mug and carried it in front of him like a censer as he drifted archangelically toward the door. He turned as he stepped outside before vanishing into the quiet of his own small office with its archive of meticulously kept notebooks.
“Ha Ha Ha.” Forst was alone again. Thinking about putting a bullseye on the reader’s heart. In front of him he had two versions of it: his freehand sketches of the next day’s front page. One of these would be the concept that had to be beaten to win the lottery and get on the cover.
Forst went for the heart. Not the head. One word, VICTORY, was better than two—WE WIN—which could be better than three—IRAQ WAR ENDS—but even when he used four to illustrate the knife a subway criminal had used (THAT’S NO BUTTER KNIFE), he still went for the heart. To do it, in Forst’s bullseye school of page design, the words and the picture had to be united and in great tension with each other. Then you could sell a paper.
He would walk from the office looking at newsstands to see if they were selling papers sports side up or news side up. The vendors, he knew, knew their customers.
After winning his Pulitzer, Breslin lasted at the News for two more years. And why did he leave it for a startup? A paper hived off the immensely successful suburban Long Island Newsday, which had a virtual lock on that 118-mile island’s lucrative two-car, some college, two-income demographic, New York Newsday intended to bring to New York vibrant, aggressive, in-depth reporting that would compete for the hearts of its readers.
If that sounds a little like the Herald Tribune of 1963, it is no small coincidence. That paper, knowing it could not compete with The Times in terms of completeness in its coverage, chose to compete with its writers’ voices and its ability to bring its subjects to life. So did this one.
This one chose to dominate metro New York coverage. It hired an entire generation of the best and brightest young reporters—90 or so of them to do it, and a total staff of just over 230.
The paper was helmed by Trib alumni who staffed it with this vision of vibrancy, experimentation, humor and responsibility that Jim Bellows and Jock Whitney first had brought to the Trib. Forst, who became a Bellows protégé, had been an assistant City Editor there before going on to helm his own underdog papers and a long stint, for him, on the culture pages of The Times. Dave Laventhol, the soft spoken City Editor of the Trib, took his sniffles and went on to create with Ben Bradlee the Style section of the Washington Post, which was the first of its kind, then became editor of Newsday under publisher Bill Moyers, where he reprised his Washington success by redesigning Part II of that paper. He led the paper to four Pulitzers and he soon became its publisher. He launched New York Newsday in 1985 with a vision of bringing excitement back into news. He then became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of the parent company of both papers, the Times Mirror Company.
From that station he could coddle and protect his brainchild and Forst at the helm. Dennis Duggan, who was also a Trib alumnus, would become the paper’s subway columnist, covering the travels and travails of more than five million commuters in a way that had not been done. Serve the reader. Serve the city. Kempton was there. And now Breslin. Kempton, Breslin and Pete Hamill were for a while in the company of Denis Hamill, Pete’s much younger brother, bringing the voice of Brooklyn. By 1995, just before the paper closed, it took an eight-page press release to list the stellar staff and its accomplishments. The company Breslin kept would include that of the great gossip doyenne, Liz Smith; of Bill Reel, a delightful, gentle, general interest columnist; Mickey Carroll, Gail Collins, Sheryl McCarthy writing on politics, Jim Dwyer, Ellis Henican; Sydney Schanberg, who had left the soul-killing fields of The Times; cartoonist Doug Marlette, Les Payne, George Will, Art Buchwald (who also long ago wrote for the Trib). Sometimes it felt the paper had more writers than readers.
Breslin was not immune to flattery with a grounding in the truth. Nor to excitement. So Forst certainly played some part: he was promising Jimmy a better home.
But for Breslin there were several things that drove his writing: Fame, Money, Rage, as well as the need for a home. In this case, it was the money.
Paul O’Dwyer, the County Mayo–born civil rights lawyer and Democratic party activist, had cut him a deal too good to pass up: essentially a lifetime, no-cut contract for top dollars. With that, Breslin joined New York Newsday, a paper with a color front page, in a sea of newsprint that was still mostly gray, with deep and aggressive coverage of government and the neighborhoods, and the kind of thoughtfulness that branded it as a “tabloid in a tutu.”
In a 1988 interview in the Boston Globe, Breslin told Karen Polk why he went to NY Newsday:
“Because they are giving me the most money paid in American newspapers. . . . Anybody who says they don’t write for money is either a blockhead or an amateur.”
The statement, echoing one memorialized in the 1960s at The Trib, certainly demonstrated consistency. Breslin to Jock Whitney, 1965—“When Our Circulation Began to Rise”:
When I started here, I thought I was just going to be writing for 300,000 people or so every day. And I approached my job with that attitude. But now I awake each day to find myself in an immense publication. The responsibility for going directly to over one million people each day is becoming awesome. It is clear to me that I need something to calm my nerves. . . . I need a raise.
Seen through another lens, Breslin’s move resembled that of a perpetual journeyman rather than a star with a byline that could be associated with one organization for decades. His had been a career marked by one move after another, one disappointment after another, one gap after another, one home after another, one angry ending after another. He always, it seemed, was seeking the right home for his voice, always struggling with balancing his desire to create novelistic art with accepting the constraints of daily journalism that fulfilled two things: paying the mortgage and the household bills and feeding an adolescent need for instant recognition, instant gratification.
As Bill Graham, the impresario who famously founded the rock palace the Fillmore East, is reported to have said, repudiated or crushed when Mick Jagger dropped him as a tour manager for another representative who offered a better deal: “It’s not the money, it’s the money.”
On May 22, 1988, Breslin’s final column appeared in the Daily News. The city Housing Authority had moved to evict a woman convicted of killing her abusive husband, according to witnesses, before she had even been released from prison. Breslin took the trouble to point out that in the Jefferson Houses near 115th Street and Second Avenue in East Harlem, this would hardly have been the introduction of a notorious Mob hitman into an Upper West Side senior assisted living home, but rather that of a slightly built woman into a complex with a significant number of formerly incarcerated residents, not so many of whom had committed only one crime. And her crime? The appropriate headline seemed to be the detective squad room saying: “He needed killing.”
Following Breslin’s arrival at New York Newsday, the Boston Globe took the trouble to write an insightful piece.
But questions about his move or comparisons to his colleagues don’t really interest Breslin. . . . He says that what he writes about and who he writes about are the same as when he was at The News, and at the New York Post before that, the New York World Journal Tribune before that and the Herald Tribune among others, before that.
Breslin compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who never left anyone who bought a ticket feeling they had been robbed.
“He got the best effort I know how to give,” he remembered DiMaggio said. “If you start cheating on this, then you feel robbed yourself and you’ve robbed the readers. The reader knows he’s been had.
“As long as I tried the utmost to walk that last block or make that last phone call then I know I didn’t rob them of their quarter.”
So what had changed for him in 41 years in the newspaper business? The world. And not for the better. The writer Karen Polk asked him and his answer in the Boston Globe captured this ache with brilliant concision: “In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was president, Hubert Humphrey was vice president. The New York State Senators were Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits. The mayor of New York was John Lindsay. There was some hope and with it some vocabulary in New York City and the nation where derogatory remarks about somebody’s color was out of vogue, in poor taste. It was wicked.
“In 1988, what’ve you got? Reagan and Bush. [Sen.] Moynihan should know better and doesn’t. [Sen.] D’Amato is a clerk and you’ve got Koch as mayor, who’s an outright racist, and a governor [Cuomo] who has the ability to do everything and doesn’t. And he’s a friend.” Balance? Fairness? Of no importance he tells Polk:
“I don’t know what objectivity is. The truth is what’s important.”
And the truth, he tells her, is that since 1964, “It’s been all pain.’’
The sadness shows in the eyes of the gray-haired man whose picture graces the Sunday, September 11, 1988, Page Two announcement “Breslin Column Begins Today.” And the Page Nine column is filled with sadness at the senselessness that gave us crack pipe–sucking mothers and blind babies, babies born addicted, or with a sexually transmitted disease. It’s all pain for which compassion is no match.
In his time at the News it wasn’t all serial killers, unsurpassed scandals, and a police descent into the manners of an occupying army. Breslin elevated the stunt and the political caricature. There was one story in which he married the two into a gesture worthy of a true deadline artist. It appeared under the headline “Ed Koch, Home-Breaker” on Page Four of the Sunday, August 22, 1982, editions of the News. And it recounted the travails of Joseph Cruz, 55, and a World War II veteran, who was now homeless.
Two years ago, he was thrown out of a single-room-occupancy hotel because his Veterans Administration check had arrived late. Cruz inspected the disgraceful chambers the city runs as shelters for the homeless and decided they were beneath his dignity. He became one of our street people, but a highly imaginative one.
Cruz moved to a traffic island underneath the FDR Drive at 61st Street and arranged his life.
In this spot, with the roof over his head provided by the southbound lanes of the highway, Cruz set up full housekeeping, with bed, stove and chair. He washed body and clothes in a Parks Department building that is on the other side of the exit lane.
. . . When Cruz’ home was discovered by the brilliant Bella English of this newspaper, motorists stopped and handed Mr. Cruz money, beer and encouragement. In return they got a wave and a smile, giving the motorists perhaps their only cheer of the day. Sitting in his home, drinking his beer, reading a book, smiling as motorists yelled to him, Mr. Cruz never thought of himself as an aggressor.
Oh, but he was. Mr. Cruz was an embarrassment to Mayor Koch, who runs for governor and whose car went past Mr. Cruz on the way to Gracie Mansion each night.
The city bureaucracy kicked into high gear. Calls from City Hall landed on desks.
“Why are they bothering me now?” Mr. Cruz said when he was told he might be moved. “I’ve been living on the streets for over two years and nobody cared.”
But that was before he became part of an election.
A psychiatrist was sent to see Mr. Cruz, who fled into traffic and this was enough to take Cruz, who had fought for his country, and have him committed to a psychiatric institution. He was a danger to himself and others.
Mr. Cruz had been living on the island for months and there is no record of him ever endangering anything except an official reputation or so. But now the claim could be made that he was a nut who played in heavy traffic. So on Friday, a day in which several murders were committed in the city, on a day when there were many armed robberies, here were six policemen pulling up to the traffic island to grab Mr. Cruz, dismantle his living quarters and take him to Bellevue and lithium.
Koch’s office said that the mayor felt the action was “appropriate” but that Koch most certainly had not personally ordered the action. Which is another reason why Koch will soon be known everywhere as Copout Koch.
Breslin then turns the mayor’s action on its head. He goes to the newly vacant traffic island, where there are now twenty large yellow barrels each filled with 100 gallons of sand set up to prevent any new occupant.
So yesterday I arrived at the traffic island with my friend Desmond Crofton . . . We turned over about a half dozen of the barrels, smoothed the sand and made a fine beach, a lovely beach, a cleaner beach than any beach in the East, and it was right in the middle of Manhattan.
I went to Crofton’s apartment on 50th St., changed into smashing beachwear and returned to my private beach with an umbrella, beach chair, radio and book. . . .
I found my beach so thoroughly delightful that I remained for quite some time . . . and I intend to be there until Joseph Cruz is freed from Bellevue and returned to his home.
But it never should be forgotten that the temper, whim and nastiness of the city government, certainly reflecting on the desires of one man, Copout Koch resulted in citizen Joseph Cruz being taken by force of police and thrown into a mental ward on a summer weekend simply because he tried to live decently in New York.
Days later, city officials, lacking any rational answer or intelligent solution, were pulling out their hair. Breslin told the Washington Post why:
“The question of the homeless is going to become a major topic and a test of us as a people. What kind of a people are we if we have this? The answer is, we’ve lost the ability to assist, we’ve replaced it with a new standard, and the standard is greed.
“It’s above and beyond this one guy,” he said. “The traditional answer of the rich when they see vagrants is, the man must be mad, and they look to psycho them. They always say the man on the street corner is mad.
“The rich are uncomfortable at the sight of anyone homeless. The mayor has to pass there every night on his way to Gracie Mansion. They had the greatest show of bureaucracy trying to move one f— guy because he was an embarrassment. They drove the man nuts.”
The writer Michael Kernan captured an essence of Breslin in his characterization: “Jimmy Breslin, you recall, is a larger-than-life figure who makes New York the setting for his life movie and its inhabitants the bit players. When Norman Mailer ran for mayor, Jimmy Breslin ran for the No. 2 spot, president of the city council. When Son of Sam wanted to talk, who would he talk to but Jimmy Breslin? As for his latest campaign, Breslin cautioned, ‘Don’t call it a crusade. Someone always gets killed in a crusade.’ ”
As a result of Bella English, and Breslin, homelessness, rather than his run for governor, was now sitting right in the center of the desk that Koch, like Fiorello La Guardia, used when ceremonially governing. It was right there in the Daily News in the picture of Breslin, in his cabana set, glasses set down on his Irish nose, cigar in one hand, book in another and towel around his neck and of course, a smile. Good on you, James Earle Breslin.
The theme of Breslin and his relationships with politics and politicians runs like a lead line through his column, where he measures their depth and the depths to which they are willing to sink to gain political advantage. He understood from the likes of Tip O’Neill that politics is about survival, and sometimes, sometimes more often than not, the public good is sacrificed on the altar of the ballot box. Votes brought Richard Nixon to impeachment. Votes put O’Neill in a place to collect those votes in the legislature.
There was Hugh Carey, a congressman when he elbowed up to the bar with Breslin and O’Neill in the days when Tip O’Neill was still collecting the votes for the impeachment of Nixon. Soon he would be a governor of New York and a confidant of Breslin. Until one day, he seemed more interested in dancing across the New York stage with his paramour, Evangeline Gouletas, a real estate mogul with a closet full of marital skeletons whom he wooed, squired, and married within three months of meeting her. He had slashed his way through New York’s fiscal mess, uniting labor and management to help get the city back on its feet. He passed legislation to end the hospitalization of the disabled and mentally ill. Famously he united with the other Irish Americans—Edward Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to attempt to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Now he had dyed his hair red and, smitten, was using the state helicopter, according to Breslin, as a throbbing love seat. Breslin dubbed him “Society Carey.”
Back in the art department of the Daily News, the gray spew from the airbrush was put to good use. Gone were the stripes from Carey’s blue pinstriped suits, gone was the long tie, replaced with a bow tie that seemed crudely done until it appeared in the halftone cuts in the paper. And most important, now the lapels were those of a tuxedo. You watched in this way the transformation of a solid politician into a cartoon, whose last year in office was misery thanks to Breslin and the paper. And whose marriage to Gouletas he later dubbed perhaps his worst miscalculation.
Carey, Koch, and soon Giuliani and Trump would all be scorched by Breslin’s pen. Of Mario Cuomo, who he called a friend, he simply said he did nothing when he could have done all. Of Breslin, Cuomo’s son Andrew, himself a governor of New York, simply said, “Breslin was always a journalist first and a friend second.” In this way they were two men who put their jobs first, almost obsessively. And they needed each other. Andrew, his father’s campaign manager at age 18, had seen Breslin up close, in the chaos of the Breslin home, and in his own family’s Queens kitchen where the columnist could put down a good portion of a bottle of scotch before Rosemary—“a saint, that woman”—showed up with the family car to carry him home.
A difference between Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch was that Cuomo did understand the difference in the job descriptions of an elected leader and a columnist: Breslin’s, as he told Koch, was to inform and entertain. Koch’s was supposed to be the running of New York City.
In the waning months of the third Koch term, after the PVB scandal had come to a head in January 1986, the city seemed a hellscape of disfunction. In June of 1986, Marla Hanson, an aspiring model, was slashed across her face by a jealous landlord. The disfiguring and career-ending wound required 150 stitches. On July 12, 1986, Police Officer Steven McDonald, patrolling Central Park, was shot in the head, throat, and spine by a 15-year-old and left a quadriplegic who lived, heroically and as a role model in forgiveness, until January 2017. In August, Robert Chambers, the Preppy Killer, choked Jennifer Levin to death, and tried and failed to escape punishment for the Central Park murder by using a “rough sex” defense. In December, there was Howard Beach. On December 20, Michael Griffith, 23, and two other Black youths were attacked outside a pizza parlor in the predominantly white Queens enclave. Severely beaten, Griffith ran out onto a highway, was struck by a car, and was killed.
Crime in Central Park, cops shot, race hate—this was Koch’s final term. Times Square, the crossroads of the world, felt like Beirut, crime was approaching a thirty-year high and the political machine that had elected Koch and fostered corruption while holding the reins of power was on the verge of being dismantled.
And as it grew to a close, there was Yusef Hawkins. This time we are in Bensonhurst, predominantly Italian and therefore, unfortunately, the domicile of mobsters who like to hide among the hardworking. It is August 23, 1989, and Yusef Hawkins and his friends have arrived to take a look at a 1982 Pontiac with an eye toward buying it. A group of 20 to 30 youths, who a mobster much later said were there to guard his home against racial unrest, attack Hawkins and his two friends. At least seven have bats. At least one has a gun. The reason given for their presence is that they were waiting in ambush for Blacks to show up to a party a neighborhood girl had invited them to.
Protest after protest followed. During one of them the Rev. Al Sharpton, an activist and quite a showman himself, was stabbed by a neighborhood youth.
But of all the racially charged cases, all the ugly police misconduct, all the vile racial undertones of Ed Koch’s appeal to the working classes, the one that tore at the city’s heart, the one with notoriety that raced around the globe as evidence of New York’s depravity, the one that brought to light the blinders of the most liberal of reporters was the case of the Central Park Jogger. That was the name the victim of a sexual assault so violent that she lost consciousness for days was given by the media. In this case, Breslin’s paper had one reporter whose source told him that he knew five youths arrested were guilty because they fell asleep in the holding cell. In that same paper, another reporter had a source who told him the youths were singing the “Wilding” song in their cell. Today few believe that characterization to be anything but shameful. Both the reporter and the source are dead.
The narrative at the time painted the youths as part of a gang or more than one gang who were rampaging in the park, coming down from Harlem and across the stone walls of the park like the hordes of Khan through the Great Wall of China to steal bikes, severely beat at least one person and push others around to which the youths added rape. The youths admitted involvement either as actors or witnesses in the other crimes. But the admission of the sexual assault was forced and tainted. There also was much prejudice, much implicit bias too, in news organizations comprised of mostly white reporters led by mostly white editors. Mostly.
The first narrative was filled with hate, fear, and the old story of Black men preying on defenseless white women. These young men had nothing to do with the rape. Their confessions appeared forced and were later recanted. A serial rapist came forward and said he had committed the crime—alone—this after years in jail for the wrongfully convicted youths. And that rapist’s DNA was the only DNA found on the victim.
The new facts resulted in a senior Sex Crimes district attorney being let go by her publisher, a lead prosecutor resigning her post at a college in upper Manhattan, and a legal settlement by the city that paid $45 million to the no longer so young men.