What if there had been no gravedigger?
On November 26, 1963, Jimmy Breslin published a column in the New York Herald Tribune that cemented his reputation as the “voice of the common man.” The piece was still being taught when I was in journalism school in the 1980s. Four days after the assassination of JFK, every reporter in the country was chasing the who, what, when, where, and why of that national tragedy. Breslin tracked down the man tasked with digging the president’s grave and interviewed him for a column headlined “It’s an Honor.” His journalistic instincts were good; everyone’s looking one way, you look the other. Tell the same story from an angle no one else thought of.
But.
Factual errors had been called out in a column Breslin wrote two days earlier, “A Death in Emergency Room One,” in which he interviewed the doctor who operated on Kennedy. So it’s not crazy to wonder if the gravedigger really did say “It’s an honor” when asked about his task that day. Did Breslin massage, or “pipe” (invent), that quote? And others in the piece? No one else was there, so we’ll never know. But as Breslin himself says on the first page of the prologue to Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth, a new hagiography of New York’s most famous/notorious street columnist:
“Do. Not. Confuse me. With. The Facts. I tell the truth.”
And that was that. For the duration of his six-decade-long career. For my professors at Columbia Journalism School. For the committee that handed him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. But reading Richard Esposito’s book in 2024, at a time when “facts” are bracketed in suspect rabbit ears as the province of “lived experience,” you can see in Breslin’s career arc how what was once considered “the news” first began to be sacrificed in the name of someone’s conception of “the truth.”
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James Earle Breslin was born in Queens, New York, in 1929—according to Esposito, who was one of his late-career editors and a lifelong fanboy. But Wikipedia says 1928. So right away, you go, What’s the truth here? His father, an “itinerant piano player,” walked out early on and left Breslin’s alcoholic, suicidal mother to fend off the Depression on her own. One of young Jimmy’s first scoops, in a self-published bulletin he called The Flash, was “Mother Tried to Kill Herself.” He dropped out of high school to work as a copy boy at the Long Island Press, and his first published article covered the introduction of television to a local bar. It was a template for the kind of pieces he’d write the rest of his career. Especially the bar part.
He started out as a sportswriter, doing unconventional though not unheard-of things like going to the loser’s locker room. In 1962, he published a well-received book about a horse trainer, Sunny Jim, followed a year later by a chronicle of the Mets’ disastrous debut year, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
The team’s owner, Joan Whitney Payson, far from being offended, told her Social Registered sibling John Hay “Jock” Whitney to hire Breslin for his newspaper, the Herald Tribune. Whitney was making over the stodgy establishment broadsheet, which still published shipping news and timetables, into the birthplace of New Journalism.
Tom Wolfe, another of Whitney’s hires, attested to Breslin’s abilities in a 1972 article for New York magazine (which had started as the Trib’s Sunday supplement): “Breslin made a revolutionary discovery…that it was feasible for a columnist to leave the building.” He went on: “Breslin worked like a Turk. He would be out all day covering a story, come back at 4 p.m. or so and sit down at a desk in the middle of the city room. It was quite a show. He was a good-looking Irishman with a lot of black hair and a great wrestler’s gut. When he sat down at his typewriter he hunched himself over into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until vapor started drifting off his body. He looked like a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man who could write so well against a daily deadline.”
I’m quoting at length for two reasons: I trust Wolfe when he says Breslin had legit skills, and because this paragraph is so much better than any of Esposito’s. He’s such an acolyte that he attempts to write the book in the style of Jimmy Breslin. Bad enough that Breslin himself often sounded like a bad Hemingway parody (“But now you noticed the soldiers”), but Esposito sounds like bad Breslin:
“I gaped like a batboy seeing Babe Ruth step out of the Yankee Stadium dugout. A cigar cloud steamed above his black Irish curls as the words came right out of Breslin’s big mouth the same way they came out of his typewriter and that was cleaner and better than anyone else who tried to tell the truth in a 1,000–1,100 word newspaper column.”
According to Esposito, Breslin’s “palette was richer than that of a courtroom artist.” Calling him “a reporter and poet equally,” he likens “J.B. No. 1” to Auden and Yeats.
Breslin did know how to capture an image at times. His column after the second Son of Sam murder describes how the detectives on a street corner “split up, like groups of door-to-door salesman, and started for the houses on the block.” That’s pretty good. Esposito gives the Son of Sam case considerable real estate because Breslin and David Berkowitz famously corresponded. Their back-and-forth became an exercise in sociopathic self-promotion. And not just for Berkowitz.
“Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C, which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C, and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed off the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.”
Until I read the next sentence— “J.B., I’m just dropping you a line…”—I thought Breslin had suddenly become a better writer. Then I realized this was actually Berkowitz’s first letter to him at the Daily News. Some considered it unseemly to promote the ravings of a serial killer in the bestselling newspaper in the country, but as even Esposito admits, Breslin had a “cyclonic greed for attention that began in childhood and was unrelenting.” And “like Sam, he needed to be a big shot.” The column and Breslin’s ego were two gaping maws in need of daily replenishment.
The “Damon Runyon of Queens Boulevard” was best known for the cast of colorful characters with whom he peopled his storied watering hole, Pep McGuire’s. An arsonist known as “Marvin the Torch.” A 400-pound bookie called “Fat Thomas.” The self-explanatory “Klein the Lawyer.” Were they real? Each had “the spine of a real person,” Esposito assures us. But their identities were not “cloaked in hyperrealism.”
They may not have been real, but these fictions did make Breslin rich, thanks to his outsize salary demands and a bestselling comic novel about the mob, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, published in 1969. His success spawned imitators in every major newspaper town: lefty Archie Bunkers like Mike Barnicle in Boston and Chicago’s Mike Royko, fellow New York shamrocks Pete Hamill and Michael Daly. All self-righteous pamphleteers of liberal-elite causes like attacking the police and “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” All “men of the people,” despite Daly’s art-history degree from Yale and Hamill’s squiring Jackie Onassis, Linda Ronstadt, and Shirley MacLaine to the Hamptons while writing liner notes to Bob Dylan albums.
Breslin, too, clambered up the social ladder. He and his wife, Rosemary, raised their children in Queens’ toniest enclave, Forest Hills. A year after her death, he married into Upper West Side liberal royalty in the person of Ronnie Eldridge—Democratic Party operative, city councilwoman, PBS host, and in Esposito’s measured estimation, “saint.”
By the time he was suspended from New York Newsday (reluctantly, by Esposito himself) for calling an Asian reporter a “yellow cur,” he was making $500,000 a year—about $1.3 million in 2024 dollars. So here was a rich socialite posing as a regular Joe (or Jimmy) and making stuff up. Write left, live right. His readers didn’t need to know.
In HBO’s 2018 documentary Deadline Artists, the journalist Richard Cohen says, “On the street, when I worked for UPI, it was a saying that when a guy jumps out a 33rd-story window, Breslin’s the only one who’ll tell you what he was thinking on the way down.”
It’s weird. Esposito is by all accounts a respected investigative journalist, and yet he holds his hero to none of the standards he presumably abides by: “The facts? The truth? Breslin would always use the former, heavily and well, but use regularly the prerogative that came with a black-lined box that separated him from the news coverage to allow him to get to the latter.”
Meaning he was a columnist, not a reporter, so… whatever?
Another one of Breslin’s editors, the old-school cynic Don Forst, just throws up his hands: “The truth is the ultimate con.”
Maybe they should have called the book Fanfare for the Common Con Man or, in Breslin’s parlance, Jimmy the Fraud.
Photo: AP Photo
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