Jimmy Breslin began as a sportswriter, telling personal stories of triumph and failure.
Breslin progressed from writing about jockeys, baseball players and fighters to using the same focus on character and personality in his acclaimed later work.
The new Library of America collection of Breslin's "Essential Writings" reveals how Breslin quickly advnced from his profiles of dyspeptic jockey Bill Hartack, aging pitcher Early Wynn and embattled New York Mets manager Casey Stengel to his famous columns about the emergency room doctor who treated the fatally wounded John F. Kennedy and the worker who dug the slain president's grave.
Although Breslin arrived in Dallas on the night of Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, his column on surgeon Malcolm Perry's efforts to revive the president gives the impression that Breslin was present in the Parkland Memorial Hospital emergency room on the afternoon of the slaying.
The young New York Herald Tribune columnist gathered details from a second day news conference by Perry and by talking to the doctor.
He also interviewed the priest who gave Kennedy his last rites, and the Dallas funeral home director who chose the bronze coffin in which Kennedy's body was placed for the trip back to Washington, D.C.
Breslin's "A Death in Emergency Room One" describes Perry's performing a tracheotomy on a wound in Kennedy's throat and the president's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, observing from a corner in her blood-stained pink suit.
The column, written on deadline, expresses the view that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating the president from the Texas Book Depository Building. Yet the detail about Perry calling the throat wound an entrance wound strikes a chord through the years.
Breslin also brings the personal touch he learned as a sportswriter to his famous piece on Clifton Pollard, the $3.01 an hour Arlington National Cemetery gravedigger who dug the president's grave.
The column "It's an Honor," written for the New York Herald Tribune, gives an account of Pollard's workday from the time he was called at home to come to the cemetery. Working on nearby graves into the afternoon, Pollard tried to attend the Kennedy service but was kept away by heavy security.
The title comes from Pollard's telling Breslin about his sense of pride in carrying out his grim duty.
Breslin's column brings back that horrible day with the immediacy of 60 years ago.
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