The gorgeous 1960s! I remember those sweet and fascinating years. Growing up in Dhaka, then the capital city of East Pakistan......which was far, far away from my imagination and the suburb of Bronx, located in New York City. I could not possibly be an avid reader then, to have relished the powerful columns of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the New York newspapers. I stumbled into their work, much, much later, by sheer accident.
Both these guys were extraordinary wordsmiths. They would grab you by the collar and drag you into the places and faces of those they wrote about. Passion infused their reports. They were never boring. They made you laugh and cry as they transported you into the lives of real people. The readers felt that they had actually gone out into the streets of the city and talked to people......all kinds of people: poor, rich, black, white, Puerto Rican, Indians, high-rollers, low-lifes, politicians, athletes, mobsters -- they ran the gamut.
You could sense, that they loved their work.....meaning that it enlivened them as it enlivened the reader. Their words sung and crackled and breathed across the pages. They left readers always craving for more, wondering sometimes how true it all was.....so captivating, was their storytelling abilities.
Both were blessed with an uncanny ability. They cut through abstractions to connect individuals to major events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Central Park jogger case, Aids, among others. They were spokesmen for the underdogs, the abused, the confused, and the bereft, and relentlessly attacked the abuses and hypocrisies of the powerful.
They became celebrities as a result of their writing. Breslin ran for New York City Council President along with Norman Mailer for Mayor with the slogan 'No More Bullshit,' and went on to perform beer and cereal commercials. And, Pete Hamill dated Jacqueline Kennedy and Shirley McLaine. Coming out of poor and struggling Irish-Catholic families in Queens and Brooklyn respectively, they became acclaimed in NYC and the country, as celebrity 'reporters'!
As a result, they were befriended by the rich and powerful, with whom they had mingled.
Media institution, the HBO had recently released a fascinating documentary about the pair: Breslin and Hamill. It brought them back in all their gritty glory to the days when New York was another city, a city of newspapers and typewriters and young passion, still hopeful that despite the problems and national tragedies, there were still fighters who would bang out a message of hope and defiance in the mainstream press.
It was a time before money and propaganda devoured journalism and a gloomy pall had descended on the United States.......as the economic elites expanded their obscene control over peoples' lives and the media.
And so, in all its fitness, this documentary felt like an Irish wake, with two old wheelchair-bound men musing on the past, and all that had been lost and really, what approaching death had in store for them, and all that they loved......
While not a word was spoken about the Catholic faith of their childhoods with its death-defying consolation, it sat between them like a skeleton. We had watched and listened to the two men, once big in all ways, talking about the old days as they had continued to shrink, before our eyes.
I was reminded of the title of a novel Breslin had written long ago: World Without End. Amen! This was a title taken directly from a well-known Catholic prayer. Endings, the past receding, a lost world, aching hearts, and the unspoken yearning for more life that lay beyond.
Hamill, particularly, wrote columns that were beautifully 'elegiac', and his words in this documentary also sounded that sense, despite his efforts to remain hopeful.
The film was a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Breslin, who has since died, tried hard to express the bravado that was his hallmark in his halcyon days, but a deep sadness and bewilderment seeped through his face, the mask of indomitability, that once served him well, to have disappeared in the end.
So while young people today, need to know about these two old-school reporters and their great work in this age of insipidity and pseudo-objectivity, this film was probably not a very good introduction. Their writings would serve this purpose better.
This documentary was allowed to 'appear' at an interesting time when a large group of prominent Americans, including Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, were calling for new investigations into the assassinations of the 1960s, murders that Breslin and Hamill had covered and wrote about. Both men were in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. They were friends of the senator, and it was really, Hamill who wrote to RFK and helped convince him to run.
By a strange coincidence, Breslin was in the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. He wrote an iconic and highly original article about the JFK assassination. Hamill wrote a hard-impact ing piece about RFK's murder, describing Sirhan Sirhan quite harshly, while 'presuming' his guilt. They had covered and written about all the assassinations of that era. Breslin also had penned a famous piece about John Lennon's murder. They wrote these articles quickly, in the heat of the moment, on the deadline.
But they did not question the official versions of these assassinations. Not then, nor in the fifty plus years since. Nor in the documentary, I mentioned earlier, above. In the film Hamill talked about five shots being fired at RFK from the front, by Sirhan Sirhan who was standing there. Breslin uttered not a word. Yet it was well known that RFK was shot from the rear at point blank range and that no bullets had hit him from the front.
The official autopsy had confirmed this. Robert Kennedy, Jr. asserted that his father was not shot by Sirhan but by a second gunmen. It was as though Hamill was stuck in time and his personal memories of the event; as though he were too close to things and never had stepped back and studied the evidence that had emerged before curious eyes.
Perhaps both men were too close to the events and the people they covered. Yes, their words always took readers to the scene and made them feel the passion of it all, the shock, the drama, and the tragedy.....the pain, the confusion, and all that was irretrievably lost in murders that changed this country forever.
These killings have haunted the present in incalculable ways. Jimmy and Pete made us feel the deep pain and shock of being overwhelmed with grief. They were masters of this art.
But the view from the street was not that of history. Deadlines are one thing; analysis and research another. Breslin and Hamill wrote for the moment, but they lived a half century after those moments, decades during which the evidence for these crimes had accumulated to indict powerful forces in the U.S. government. No doubt this evidence came to their attention, but they had chosen to ignore it, whatever their reasons. Why these champions of the afflicted have disregarded this evidence is perplexing.
Street journalism has always enjoyed its limitations. It now needs to be placed in a larger context. Our world is indeed without end and the heat of the moment also needs the coolness of time. The bird that dives to the ground, to seize a crumb of bread returns to the treetop to survey the larger scene. Breslin and Hamill had stuck to the ground, where that bread lay.
At one point in Breslin and Hamill, the two good friends had also talk about how well they were taught to write by the nuns in their Catholic grammar schools. 'Subject, verb, object, that was the story of the whole thing', said Breslin. And Hamill has replied, 'Concrete nouns, active verbs'.
'It was pretty good teaching', Breslin has added. And although neither went to college, they had learned those lessons well and gifted us with so much gritty and beautiful writing and reporting.
Yet like the nuns who taught them, they had their limitations, and what was written once was not revisited and updated. In a strange, very old-school (my alma mater St. Gregory's High). Catholic sense, it was the eternal truth, rock solid, and not to be questioned. Unspeakable and anathema: the real killers of the Kennedys and the others. And, the globe-changing attacks of September 11, 2001 as well.
Many, many years later, in the city of Karachi that hosted us after 1971, my mother was very old, she published her only piece of writing. It was a crisp account of her life she had abandoned in Dhaka. She wrote how, when she was a young and newly wedded lady......and the streets of Kolkata were filled with horse drawn 'ghora-garis', and hand pulled rickshaws......the nuns in the nearby convent school requested her to go to a neighbouring bakery to buy rolls for their lunch. It was considered a big honour and she was happy to get out of the convent school for the walk to the bakery, which she chose, was located only few streets away. She got the rolls and was walking back with them when some boys jostled her and all the rolls fell into the street, rolling through the 'cow dung! filth and drain. She panicked, but picked up the rolls and cleaned them off.
Shaking with fear, she had then brought them to the convent and handed them to a nun. That day, was called to the front of the room by the nun who had chosen her to buy them. She felt like she would faint with fear. The nun sternly looked at her. "Where did buy those rolls?" she asked. In a halting voice she told her the name of the bakery. The sister said, 'They were delicious. You must always shop in that bakery.'
Of course the magazine wouldn't publish the words 'cow-dung'. The editor found a nice way to avoid the truth and eliminate the 'four letter word 'dung'. And, the nuns were happy to read this piece.
In our current life context, the word 'bullshit' seems much harder to erase, despite slogans and careful editors, or perhaps because of them. Sometimes silence is the real bullshit......and then, how do you eliminate that!
The author is a former educator based in Chicago, USA
