A gripping new documentary on HBO about the sadly bygone era of great street-reporting newspaper columnists in New York City forced me to recall a time when I blew the story.
On the morning of July 21, 1993, The Washington Post carried an eerily sketchy report. Obviously, the news had broken late, near deadline.
I was unable to fathom it.
The story was about Vince Foster, the stately, thoroughly competent and utterly decent Rose Law firm lawyer from Little Rock who'd come to work in the White House with his good friend and law partner, Hillary Clinton.
It was that he had shot and killed himself the previous afternoon in a place called Fort Marcy Park in Virginia.
The phone rang. The caller was Jimmy Breslin, the famous New York columnist and author of Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? and The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, among other books.
I'd been thrilled to make his acquaintance the year before. He was outraged--which is redundant--over Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton's leaving the campaign trail to be in Arkansas for the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector.
Somebody told Breslin I could fill him in. From that and ensuing phone conversations, I wound up his houseguest during the New York primary.
That was when he made an appointment for me with a literary agent that led to the book about Clinton's first presidential year that I was in Washington trying to report and write.
With confident loudness--again, redundant--Breslin ordered me to go forthwith to Fort Marcy Park. He told me to make the same drive Foster would have made. He told me to park where Foster might have parked. He told me to walk Foster's final path, committing to memory what he had seen and smelled those last seconds the day before.
He said that was my book.
But my book contract said I'd write about Bill Clinton's first presidential year, not a spectacularly bizarre suicide. When you're insecure, when you feel inadequate and intimidated, you cling to the rules, to strict structure. You assume that authorities would let you nowhere near that suicide site.
So I ignored Breslin and produced an utterly inconsequential chronicle of known policy and known politics in which the most readable chapter was about Foster and the suicide.
I should have adapted to the real news. I should have sent the publisher a fuller story of Foster spanning cover to cover, one I was in a position to write, having come from Little Rock, having known him.
Five investigations, including partisan-laced ones, found Foster's death a matter of Washington-worsened depression and self-infliction. I don't imply I would have written otherwise. I imply I might have written his tragic personal story more fully as an element of the Clinton story, the Washington story and the American story that others were telling.
I'm saying I should have heeded the legend. I'm saying I should have gone that day to Fort Marcy Park.
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This month HBO has an admiringly honest and enlightening new documentary called Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, about Breslin and his pal Pete Hamill.
They were the leading celebrity columnists of the golden tabloid era in New York from the early '60s into the late '80s. The nation read The New York Times. The locals read the tabloids.
The film captures the gritty, lyrical, vivid, flawed and triumphant glory of the big-city street reporting and opinionating by these friends. They swam in the bloodstream of their city, connected to its downtrodden, preached a profane and hard-drinking virtue and provided the distinctive if not always attractive face of their vibrant newspapers.
The documentary appropriately spends more time on the irascibly complex and pioneering Breslin, who blended obnoxious and endearing in a seamless way I've not otherwise seen.
He wrote lean columns in a fiction-like narrative. And, yes, he always knew to go the other way when the reporting herd went that way.
In Washington for John F. Kennedy's funeral, Breslin looked at scores of cameras pointed at the same scene--the carriage-led funeral procession--and realized "I can't make a living here." So he veered alone to Arlington National Cemetery, to see, to smell. He found and interviewed the black man digging the president's grave for $3.01 an hour.
People remember that column. The dispatches of the reporters packed on the bleachers holding their notebooks and peering at the same scene ... not so much.
I should have dared, of course, to embark that day on the lone adventure of New York swagger and bombast that Breslin recommended. Instead I cowered in the paralysis of Arkansas insecurity.
I should have better imitated Breslin and thus better captured Foster.
Breslin died in 2017. I am left only to try to do better, to be better, in what's left of my time and of his industry and craft.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Web only on 02/06/2019