When I was 23, and tasked with covering a mayoral race in New York, the dazzling dungeon of a city in which I was raised, I read and reread a long magazine article written by Jimmy Breslin. The first-person feature, published in a July 1969 issue of New York magazine, does not truly belong to the J.B. canon. It has nothing to do with Kennedy’s gravedigger or a migrant worker drowned in concrete. It did not, unfortunately, make the cut in the new Library of America edition of his work, edited by the columnist Dan Barry. “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” is Breslin at his most acidic and rollicking, and it’s what made me, ultimately, want to write about politics—and indulge, briefly, in practicing it. Breslin, like a number of writer-intellects of his era, was cajoled into running for office, and teamed up with Norman Mailer, then at the zenith of his acclaim and infamy, to run for New York City Council president while the Armies of the Night author sought the mayoralty. Breslin, then in an interlude between tabloid sinecures, was free to ramble for Clay Felker’s New York, and did so—reflecting on the failure of his own campaign and, more importantly, the crumbling of his city. “I saw a sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay,” Breslin writes. “Rage which, with heat and humidity and crowding and misery and misunderstanding and misused or misunderstood authority, could turn the city into a horror on any night soon.” I had never, in the context of journalism, known language like this before.
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