Obituaries of Pete Hamill today provided echoes of the good writing the Irish-American enfant terrible, champion of the underdog, and darling of the New York glitterati who died this week at 85.
Robert D. McFadden’s in the New York Times contained this by Hamill, about his first stepping into the New York Post’s city room, which was, he wrote, “an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copy boys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor.”
He was hooked
Hamill may have been hooked before that day in 1960–perhaps while in the Navy—because as Edward Curtin pointed out, HERE, like his pal Jimmy Breslin, another legendary storyteller in the tabloids, Hamill wasn’t into challenging official narratives.
Another paragraph from McFadden’s obit:
”His presence at crises was uncanny. In 1968 he was steps away from his friend Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on the night Kennedy was assassinated and helped subdue the killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was blocks away when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, killing thousands, then described it in the Daily News.”
Note that in the obituary Sirhan is “the killer.” Whereas Sirhan was at best a patsy, certainly not alone. Ballistics evidence established that from where the Jordanian citizen (occupation: stable boy) was in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom the bullet that mortally wounded RFK could not have come from his gun.
Note that although Hamill lived nearly 19 years after the WTC attacks he was not moved to chronicle the absurdity of the official line as it has unraveled during that time. It’s not colorful enough, and apparently that’s not the function of newspapers anyway.
— Mark Channing Miller