Pete Hamill piece on the last hours of RFK

That's funny stuff.

 

What Hondo said.
I thought the same thing.

And I think Pete Hamill wanted us to see it that way.

 

I feel the same way about Pat Jordan, Frank. What you think about him?

Love his writing. Love it better when he doesn't insert himself into anything and everything. And his wife. And his dog. And the Meg Ryan thing.

 

For the record, this isn't an excerpt from a Hamill book, it's almost the entire essay that's featured in a pictorial book about the RFK campaign done by Bill Eppridge, a famed Life magazine photographer who took many of the photos from that time that are burned into our memory today, specifically the one of a dying RFK being cradled by the busboy. As an avowed Kennedy groupie, I have to say this is already a dog-eared book, and I've only had it for a week or so.

I am also eagerly awaiting arrival of "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America," by Thurston Clarke, which is released this week and was excerped in Vanity Fair this month (as were some pictures from the Eppridge book).

Also, as an admitted Hamill groupie, I have to say I have little problem with his first-person dabblings. Like it or not, he has led a fascinating life (as has Breslin, another for whom I don't mind his first-person tales), and to me it is not just a writer's privilege but also his responsibility to share such experiences with his readers. Maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea, and that's fine. But to me, "A Drinking Life" is the best memoir I've ever read (better by far than Breslin's, even) because of its honesty, the brutal way he evaluates his own behavior while drinking, and, of course, the fact that in my view he puts sentences together better than just about any other American-born writer, ever.

 

what he said. 8) 8) 8)

 

Hamill's merits aside, how the hell else would you write this? ... he was there in the hallway when RFK was shot. It scares me that somebody could read this evocative piece and all they could think of was to lament that it was written in the first person.

I'm also wondering how much Aeschylus George W. has read, and who his favorite poet might be ...

 

That about sums it up. Awesome.

You have to say, though, it doesn't descend into so much of the exasperating self-pity you see in these "drinking memoirs."

Pete Hamill has written more about his life than Benjamin Franklin his.

 

In Katherine Graham's autobiography, she tells the story of a cartoon Herblock submitted after the RFK shooting. He listed the names of all the US Congressmen who voted against gun control with the caption "Killers" beneath it. Bradlee and The Post didn't run it as it turned out.

 

Good.

Ol' Herb, overshooting the runway, on that one . . .