One final nod to a dying breed: the great newspaper columnist



Jimmy Breslin as I knew him

I first met Jimmy Breslin when I was a tragically underpaid and underappreciated war correspondent in Vietnam and he was a New York columnist of great renown on a two-week material gathering mission. Over drinks one night at some long forgotten Saigon dive he told me to look him up if I ever got back to New York City. He even gave me his card.

Now I have no idea how many struggling newspapermen he gave cards to on his many excursions into the taverns of this world, but this one decided to take him up on his offer when I made back to New York two years later. By then he was a columnist for the World Journal Tribune, perhaps the world’s greatest all-time writer’s newspaper. Red Smith was on the paper’s sports staff. Art Buchwald was one of its Washington columnists. But Breslin was the man and he got me a job at the paper. Admittedly, it was not much of a job — I was covering sports played by Hofstra College — but I was working among the giants.

I quickly learned that whenever any major story broke in New York City, Breslin knew exactly the right New York City bar where he could get the complete story.

One day we all went to work and the paper was padlocked. There we were, all of us out of a job with little warning (OK, there were clear signs of an imminent collapse, but we ignored them). I remember sitting around table with Breslin and about seven other Trib writers at one of Breslin’s favorite taverns discussing what we were going to do with our lives. I made the mistake of saying out loud what I was actually thinking — that I might return to school to get my journalism degree. Breslin was apoplectic. He told me he education corrupts great writers, that he had ended his formal education at the sixth grade and he was doing OK. (He would go on to more than just "doing OK." He wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and he teamed up with Norman Mailer in an unsuccessful attempt to relocate his residence to Gracie Mansion.

I really liked and admired Breslin. So it was nice to see his name today when I ran across this list of the 10 best all time newspaper columns. (Hey! Molly Ivins is No. 4 on the list) It was a piece about the day President Kennedy was buried. It was written two years before I met Breslin in Vietnam, but it illustrates why newspapers are dying today. Not only do we not have columnists like Breslin writing columns like this anymore, we don’t have newspaper readers with the intellect and the patience to read them.