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Breslin never pontificated about anything, but his attitude was rarely in doubt. His reporting from Viet Nam ignored military strategy, focused instead on the human tragedies on both sides, because Breslin has to write about people, not issues. He came away hating it all. "This thing," he says now, "it's like getting killed in an industrial accident."
It was Breslin who produced one of the first surgeon's-eye views of Emergency Room One in Parkland Memorial Hospital when Jack Kennedy died in Dallas. He detailed the final minutes of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. "Here he was, trying to get dressed for dinner, and he had no tie." Breslin was only 20 ft. away from Bobby Kennedy when the Senator was shot in Los Angeles. "Robert Kennedy is on his back," Breslin wrote. "His lips are open in pain. He has a sad look on his face. You see, he knows so much about this thing." Bobby and Breslin were friends, and Jimmy confides that "if that kid had lived, they couldn't have gotten me out of newspapers with a bulldozer. But with him gone, who needs it?"
Nobody ever accused Breslin of running scared, but now that he is turning to writing books, he does fret about his own lack of discipline. Not about his background, though. "I'm not smart, but then you tell me who is. I shoulda gone to an Ivy League college, then I coulda lied like the rest of them jerks wearing the striped ties." He seems overly proud of his limited tastes in literature. "Portnoy's Complaint! I don't read nothin' that ain't written in English."
Breslin is equally proud of his capacity for bars, beer and booze. "I used to drink until it was lights out and you'd wake up in the morning with large holes in the night before." He could justify that in a column: "You've got to understand the drink. In a world where there is a law against people ever showing emotions, or ever releasing themselves from the greyness of their days, a drink is not a social tool. It is a thing you need in order to live." But a doctor has told Breslin otherwise—that he's a sitting duck for a heart attack—and he's cut back.
Worth a Shot. Breslin is a New York boy who once lived in a suburb, but hated it and moved to Queens. His long-suffering wife, renowned in his columns as "the former Rosemary Dat-tolico" and their six kids put up with him, which takes some doing.
Looking back, Jimmy Breslin spits at the business that made him. Excepting Millionaire Jock Whitney, who gave him a big play in the now departed New York Herald Tribune, Breslin has only scorn for publishers. "I worked for Newhouse, Scripps-Howard and Hearst—the Sing Sing, Leavenworth and Folsom of American journalism," he says. "People who are working for Newhouse shouldn't have the Guild as their bargaining agent. They should have the Mafia. And they should get a Pulitzer prize for malnutrition."