Hamill dated Jacqueline Kennedy and the actress Shirley MacLaine. Breslin ran for New York City Council president along with Norman Mailer for mayor with the slogan “No More Bullshit.” Breslin appeared in beer and cereal commercials. They became celebrities as a result of their writing. They relentlessly attacked the abuses and hypocrisies of the powerful. They were spokesmen for the underdogs, the abused, the confused and the bereft. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Central Park jogger case, AIDS.
They cut through abstractions to connect individuals to major events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President John F. They left you always wanting more, wondering sometimes how true it all was, so captivating were their storytelling abilities.
Their words sung and crackled and breathed across the page. All kinds of people: poor, rich, black, white, high-rollers, lowlifes, politicians, athletes, mobsters - they ran the gamut. You could sense they loved their work, that it enlivened them as it enlivened you the reader. You knew they had actually gone out into the streets of the city and talked to people. They made you laugh and cry as they transported you into the lives of real people. They would grab you by the collar and drag you into the places and faces of those they wrote about. These guys were extraordinary wordsmiths. Growing up Irish-Catholic in the Bronx in the 1960s, I was an avid reader of the powerful columns of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the New York newspapers. In a strangely old-school, Catholic, sense, they chose not to look back or question the assassinations of the 1960s, writes Edward Curtin.
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