So back in the day there were star reporters. One was Pete Hamill. Others of legend included Jimmy Breslin, and Mike McAlary (who died young) the subject of Nora Ephron's play Lucky Guy. They were guys who didn't like liars. And they exposed a lot of them in high places and low.
Pete Hamill was, variously a reporter, columnist, editor of the Daily News, novelist, and hard drinking Irish American newsman. He died yesterday at 84.
In the '70s I bought the evening NY Post for columnists like Pete and Murray Kempton, progressive voices.
One of my favorites was his furious column when Henry Kissinger and le Duc Tho of Vietnam were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Kissinger? The Christmas Bomber of Hanoi? Why not ask Ann Frank and Joseph Goebbels to share it?
And the novels - two of which I read. Snow in August - the tale of a Brooklyn Irish kid who became a sabbath goy - helping out an elderly rabbi at a time when the thugs were Irish, like the boy. And the Irish doc of North River [that's the Hudson] whose daughter takes off with a Spanish Communist during the Civil War, and loses his wife who walks out the door and is never seen again. But finds love in an unexpected way.
Pete Hamill Moved Back to Brooklyn to Work on His Last Book - The New York Times
By
After 9,000 or so bylines, Pete Hamill has probably earned the opportunity to write the lead of his own profile.
Quintessential New York journalist Pete Hamill dies at 85.
“Oh, I thought about it,” Mr. Hamill said on a recent Friday morning, hunched over a walker in the kitchen of his brownstone apartment in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“‘Pete Hamill is 84,’” he said. “‘He’s got stents in his heart’— I do, I have four. ‘He’s got two broken hips. He has to go to dialysis three times a week. He’s even got a pacemaker.’”
“‘But,’” he added, “‘he ain’t done yet.’”
Mr. Hamill was a star city columnist when such a thing was still possible. His gritty yet soaring dispatches about cops, immigrants and crooked City Hall cronies earned him a reputation as a tabloid poet, long before the word “tabloid” was synonymous with celebrity fluff.
Even so, he never let the tabloids contain him. Mr. Hamill wrote acclaimed novels and mingled with movie stars. He interviewed legends of the 20th century like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Che Guevara, and palled around with Robert F. Kennedy.
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