On a quiet Sunday morning in December, 1999, Jimmy Breslin, a stocky man then in his early seventies, his hair a shock of white, stepped out of a car that had dropped him at a street corner in the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He walked briskly up to one of several buildings in the neighborhood under construction. When he spotted a man looking at the building permits stapled to the entrance and taking notes, he started waving and calling.
“Hey,” he cried excitedly, “are you the inspector?”
When Breslin recognized me—a fellow-reporter—his face fell. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, glumly. “What’s going on?”
Breslin was there pursuing what was to him the biggest and most important kind of New York story, the sort he had chased his entire career, championing the powerless against the powerful. A construction worker, a Mexican immigrant, had tumbled several stories after floor joists collapsed beneath him, and drowned in freshly poured concrete. The building’s developer had used City Hall political connections to ward off city building inspectors who had wanted to shut his construction sites down. Now the hunt was on to find out how many other buildings going up in the neighborhood had similar problems, and Breslin—whose nickname for himself was “J.B. One and Only”—firmly intended to be the first to find them. (Breslin would go on to write a book about the dead worker, "The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez.")
Breslin, who died Sunday, at the age of eighty-eight, after a legendary career as arguably New York City’s greatest tabloid columnist, the inheritor of a mantle once worn by the likes of Damon Runyon, would often say that his first rule of reporting was always to be on his own. “Don’t go where the crowd is,” he counselled a class of journalism students I taught at Hunter College a few years ago.
“Jesus, that’s death. If I had anything that helped me make a living in this business,” he added, “it is a great aversion to being with somebody else. If I go there and there are reporters, I may as well go home.”
Going his own way led him to Arlington National Cemetery on the day of John F. Kennedy’s funeral, in November, 1963. “I go to the White House and there are three thousand reporters,” he told my students. “I can’t work with that. I decide I am going to get the guy who is going to dig the grave.”
He was working for the New York Herald Tribune at the time, and he bounced his idea off his friend Art Buchwald, a Tribune political columnist. “He said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ ” Breslin recalled. “That’s all I needed, the voice of one guy who is smart and gets it.”
Breslin’s column about the grave digger, a man named Clifton Pollard, who told the lone reporter who approached him how honored he was to be digging the grave for the fallen President, became part of journalism history.
Breslin credited his go-it-alone approach to his days starting out as a young sports reporter for the old Long Island Press and the Journal-American, in the nineteen-fifties. “You always went to the losers’ dressing room,” he said. “That’s where the story was.”
And yet those of us who worked alongside him as he did his tours of duty over the years at the New York Post, the Daily News, and New York Newsday knew that his daily routine started with interviewing the pack. The phone would ring, and you'd answer to an unmistakable rasping voice demanding that you deliver the goods on whatever was in your notebook: “Yeah, what’s doing?” he would bark. And, because this was J.B. One and Only, you told him. It wasn’t just because the Breslin brand often loomed larger than the newspapers where we worked, although he was often only too glad to make that point. And it wasn’t just because he had several fabulous books to his name, including “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight," a novel that burrowed so deeply into the national consciousness that it became a universal motto for hapless ineptitude. And it wasn’t just because he had once strutted his way, cigar clamped in his teeth, through a zany campaign for citywide office, in 1969, alongside Norman Mailer on their “Vote the Rascals In” ticket.
It was because, at the end of the day, you knew James Earle Breslin, bluster and prickliness aside, was capable of doing something magical with the story, something that no one else could. And you knew that, beneath his sheen of faux cynicism, this Irish-American son of Richmond Hill, Queens, had a built-in sense of rage at injustice, one that he could translate into prose that would produce both lacerations and laughter.
On the day in November, 2004, that he decided to stop writing his three columns a week for Newsday, I was in Cleveland in a drenching downpour watching voters line up outside polling places to cast ballots for John Kerry or George W. Bush. Breslin called to ask how things looked. Not good if you were a Democrat, I said. When he casually mentioned that he was finally done with newspapers—he returned, in 2011, for a short stint at the Daily News—the dank, dismal day grew darker. What will you do? I asked. “Write!” he screamed through the phone. “I still have to make a living, don’t I?”