Esper, Breslin two of a kind
On George Esper’s tombstone at Sylvan Heights Cemetery are these words, carved for all time into granite: “Anything can be done with love. Anything at all.”
I’ve been thinking about Esper and other great newspaper reporters ever since the death of Jimmy Breslin was flashed across the world wide web several days ago.
Esper, you might know, hailed from Uniontown and worked for the Associated Press. He was revered for his skills and tenacity and daring, all of which were on display in Vietnam during the war there. George was the last American reporter in Vietnam, the only one to stay past the bitter end. On the day South Vietnam fell to the communists, he played host to several North Vietnamese soldiers, serving them Coke and leftover cake in his office above Saigon’s Central Square.
That was George: there for story and he got it.
Jimmy Breslin was the renowned New York City columnist famous for many things, including for being Jimmy Breslin. To friends, on the phone, he was apt to announce himself as “J.B., the one and only.” Really, it was the only introduction he needed. Breslin was the Babe Ruth of newspapermen. Across the decades, no one wrote as well, no one was a better reporter. He narrated. He explained. He made you laugh, think, cry, and get angry and sad, sometimes in the same column. You could not ask for more.
If there was a newspaper reporter Hall of Fame, Breslin would have been on the stand with the first class of inductees. Right there with the likes of David Halberstam, Richard Harding Davis, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann, Mary McGrory and Bob Woodward.
Esper would be enshrined, too, only probably not with the first class, but still on the first ballot.
As far as I can tell, Esper and Breslin could not have more different. Breslin was brash. Esper, as his tombstone implies, was humble. Maybe it’s the difference between New York City and Uniontown.
Despite their differences, I bet they had a whole lot in common, including a reporter’s con. More than once, Esper once explained, he managed to worm his way into a story by means devious and otherwise. He was not the Boy Scout earnest young reporters think they should be.
Breslin could, I bet, be just as deceptive, though he covered his tracks well. He once said. “There have been many Jimmy Breslins. Because of all the people I identified with … turning me into them, or them into me, I can’t explain one Jimmy Breslin.”
Maybe he was so famous and such a celebrity that people opened themselves to him in ways that are not available to ordinary mortals. Really, I don’t know how the man worked, he was so famous. It was like Elvis coming to the fire station.
Both Breslin and Esper kept their distance from stories swarming with reporters. I suspect it’s one of the reasons George Esper chose to stay in Vietnam as the enemy closed in. With other reporters out of the way, the story was his, danger be damned.
Breslin famously disdained crowds of reporters. It’s what propelled him to flee the White House in late November 1963 to seek out the gravedigger Clifton Pollard preparing John Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
Pollard, from Pittsburgh and a family man, earned $3.01 an hour working for the government.
Breslin wrote: “Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.
“‘That’s nice soil,’ Metzler said. ‘I’d like to save a little of it,’ Pollard said. ‘The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.’
“James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it. ‘He was a good man,’ Pollard said. ‘Yes, he was,’ Metzler said. ‘Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,’ Pollard said. “You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this.'”
This column and the one Breslin wrote the night John Lennon was shot on a Manhattan sidewalk are his most famous. The Lennon column is a wonder: He reported and wrote the thing from a dead sleep in a matter of hours.
Like Breslin, Esper reported from around the country and world, though he is best known for the 10 years he spent in Vietnam.
He wrote this as the curtain rang down in 1975: “Saigon, South Vietnam, April 30 — Communist troops of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam poured into Saigon today as a century of Western influences came to an end.
“Scores of North Vietnamese tanks, armored vehicles and camouflaged Chinese-built trucks rolled to the presidential palace.”
The words are subdued, understated, matter-of-fact as befitted a proper AP-man. George Esper wouldn’t have done it any other way.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.