It’s been said the legendary newspaperman, essayist and author Pete Hamill, who died Wednesday at the age of 85, was the voice of New York.
And that line is true enough. His writing for the big city dailies, the New York Post and the New York Daily News, and his magazine work for New York, Esquire and the Village Voice offered a canvas where he painted portraits of the daily life of the city, sketching story after story over more than a half-century, about murders and boxing, strikes and city hall, about mobsters and jazz. He pounded out these pieces in the newsrooms of a different era, one crackling with energy, rattling with typewriters, billowing with cigarette smoke and clamoring with the shouts of editors on deadline demanding, “Copy!” So, yes, it’s true enough that Hamill amplified his stories through the big circulation of these dailies and, yes, that did indeed make him the voice of New York.
But what is more true is that Hamill gave voice to New Yorkers, especially those who lived in corners of the city that were not being heard. He sought out those voices in the housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the neighborhoods of Queens where one million immigrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America and beyond struggled to find an American dream; at the construction sites where middle-class union welders built Manhattan skyscrapers atop the foundation of their Irish and Italian immigrant parents’ dreams, or in public school classrooms in the Bronx where teachers did their best to inspire the future of the city.
And what’s important to remember is that Hamill did not just give voice to New Yorkers, he traveled to the farthest corners of the world finding the stories of people who were not being heard and gave voice to them, too. In his long, storied career, Hamill produced datelines from Vietnam, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland and Lebanon. He served as the editor of the Mexico Daily News in the 1980s and some of his best writing was his coverage of the 1989 fall of the wall in Berlin and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet empire. In so many under-covered corners of the world, from rural hamlets in Vietnam to those emerging from the shadows of the dystopia that was East Berlin, Hamill dedicated himself to the work of giving voice to the voiceless. His international coverage is perhaps less well-known and less celebrated than his New York newspaper columns, but those who knew Pete knew he was a citizen of the world as well as a son of his beloved Brooklyn.
He lived in Dublin, Barcelona, Mexico City, Saigon, San Juan, Rome and Tokyo, where he met his wife of 30 years and the love of his life, Fukiko Aoki Hamill, who is a celebrated journalist and novelist. Pete loved to tell the story of how he met her in Tokyo when he was there for the publication of a translation of one of his novels into Japanese, and Fukiko was assigned to interview him. They met in a hotel lobby for the interview and just as they sat down, an earthquake shook the building and they had to go into shelter. Or, as Pete often put it, “When I met her, the earth moved.”
In recent years, Pete and Fukiko had left their TriBeCa apartment and moved back to Pete’s native Brooklyn, into a brownstone near Grand Army Plaza, very close to where Pete was born and baptized as William Peter Hamill on June 24, 1935. He came of age as the eldest of seven children to parents who were Irish immigrants. He often told the story of how his mother, Anne (Devlin) Hamill of Belfast, who worked as a midwife at a local hospital, came home one day with a library card for him and changed his life, opening him up to reading and art and a world of ideas.
As he wrote in the Daily News, “Yes, we were poor. Like almost everybody else we knew. But we were absolutely not impoverished. The reason? We live
d three blocks from a magical stone building that was bulging with treasures. A branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.”
Hamill loved to talk about writing as much as he loved the work of writing. So he convened a reading group for a small tribe of reporters in New York in the 1990s, which I was lucky enough to be part of. We would meet at his apartment on Horatio Street in lower Manhattan, a place filled with books and Pete’s artwork which at the time was focused on paintings of Mexican wrestlers. A high school dropout, at age 16 Pete went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard until he joined the Navy and finally got his high school diploma. When he returned from service, he went to Mexico, where he studied art and fell in love with the murals of Diego Rivera. Then he returned to New York and took classes in art and design at Pratt Institute. Art was a big part of Pete’s life, and he was always sketching.
Amid his own paintings and the beautiful collection of books and photography that lined the walls of his apartment were portraits of Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan, all of whom Pete counted as friends. An open letter he wrote to Bobby Kennedy was considered a factor in the U.S. Senator announcing his run for president in 1968. Pete was there at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Bobby was shot, and he was among those who wrestled the gun away from his assassin.
Pete was a street-smart, self-taught, larger-than-life celebrity back then, a tabloid newspaper columnist who was often in the society pages and who looked as good in a tuxedo at a theater opening as he did with his sleeves rolled up and his tie undone in a newsroom pulling hard on a cigarette. He befriended Bob Dylan and wrote the liner notes to the album Blood on the Tracks, which won Pete his only Grammy. He first met Sinatra in Las Vegas when he was covering a fight, they became friends and he eventually wrote a biography titled “Why Sinatra Matters.” Pete wrote clearly and poetically about boxing and documented the rise of Ali, but he also finally and controversially came out against boxing in 1996 after watching Ali physically and mentally decline, writing, “boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don’t love it anymore.”
We were all just daily news reporters at that reading group, but Pete wanted us to be thinking beyond the headlines and the daily coverage, to dare to think about the craft of writing. The rival and late, great New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary enjoyed teasing us about this reading group, calling it “detention.” Pete always shrugged off those who might see pretension in these gatherings. He was just inviting us to takeout and soda and one night in the week after deadline to skip past the bar and head to his apartment to talk about literature and about the construction of dialogue in the great short stories of Hemingway, Faulkner, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Amy Tan and many more. The reading group was formed in part because Hamill missed the camaraderie of the tavern in Greenwich Village called The Lion’s Head, which was frequented by journalists, and he wanted to reestablish a different kind of place to talk about journalism and about writing, just without the drinking. Hamill struggled with alcohol in the early part of his career, and then began a journey to sobriety that he chronicled in his bestselling memoir, “A Drinking Life.”
This generosity of spirit as a colleague — this drive to guide a new generation of journalists — was one of Hamill’s most unique and enduring qualities. And he set himself apart by his willingness to acknowledge mistakes when he got something wrong as he did about boxing and about booze and as he did about the Central Park jogger case — a story that every reporter in the city at the time, including this one, got dead wrong by reporting the lies of the police and prosecutors which implicated five teenagers who were cleared only after years of wrongful imprisonment. In a business of big egos, Hamill was different. He was a giver. He was always offering quiet advice and sharing appreciation for good writing and good reporting and helping us push ourselves. He would never call this collegiality ‘mentoring,’ but that is exactly what it was. And I felt incredibly lucky to be counted among those he mentored.
In the spring of 1993, one night when we were finishing up the reading group, I lingered with Pete and Fukiko and their enormous black Labrador named “Gabo.” Pete wanted to talk about the work I had been doing on the first World Trade Center bombing, a botched plot to topple the twin towers by placing a truck bomb in the parking garage. I was a street reporter then and got on to the story of the bombing by being the first reporter on the scene that day, in February, 1993. I arrived just as Pete’s younger brother, Denis Hamill, was pulling up as well. Denis is also a gifted writer and columnist, and that day we snuck past the police lines together to see the explosion up close, even before it had been confirmed as a terrorist attack. Six people were killed, a thousand injured. It was the first time Middle East terrorism had struck New York. It was a big story.
So we took Gabo for a walk through lower Manhattan to talk about how I should be thinking about the coverage. I spent most of the previous few months writing about the suspects in the case and was uncovering stories that showed their connection to Islamic militancy and the world of Middle East immigrants who gathered around mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City. Pete told me to stay on the story by knowing everything about their lives in the neighborhoods where they lived as immigrants, and he pushed my editors to send me out to follow the trail of the suspects from Brooklyn and Jersey City all the way back to where they came from in Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan and the West Bank. He wanted to see me go all the way with the story, to give the narrative the sweep it deserved. Even as the headlines faded and New York and federal investigators began to shrug off this first World Trade Center attack, which ultimately failed in its audacious intent to take down the towers. The suspects were dismissed as rank amateurs. Indeed, the first big break in the case came when one of them returned to the Ryder rental agency seeking the deposit on the truck that carried the bomb. But even as investigators and editors lost interest, Pete told me to stay with it. That advice started me on a career as an international correspondent, and eventually led to a job at The Boston Globe, where I was named the Middle East bureau chief. While I moved overseas to chronicle the rising tensions that were yielding a growing movement of Islamic militancy, Pete was being thrust into two exciting but ill-fated stints as the editor-in-chief at both the New York Post and then, briefly, at the New York Daily News.
Back on that walk in 1993, Pete and I had no idea that the suspects arrested in this first bombing of the World Trade Center were in fact part of nascent Al Qaeda. We could see it was part of a movement to declare war on America, they publicly stated it as such, but we had no idea they would work on the plot for another eight years. We never would have imagined that, ultimately, this idea would be put into action on September 11, 2001. Pete wrote a powerful essay about that day and about his odyssey through the chaos, the ash and the fear, about trying to get home to Fukiko. We certainly had no idea that the United States and its allies would still be fighting against this enemy, a war that is now the longest in American history, to the day Pete died.
Pete was not prescient about the threat nor was I, he just wanted to be sure I saw the 1993 bombing as a powerful story, and most of all as a way to reveal the violence and the failures of American foreign policy, the corruption and tyranny of Middle East dictators that so often lured young men into militancy. He encouraged me to make my way into the slums of Cairo, the lawless fringes of Pakistan and to hear what the voices rising up against America were really saying. He wanted me to give voice to the people in the Middle East and try to understand where the rage and the calls to violence were coming from. I have dedicated a large part of my life to doing just that.
Through ten years of being based in the Middle East and London for the Globe and then moving back to Boston where I would become an entrepreneur in new media and start GlobalPost and then The GroundTruth Project, I would stop in to see Pete and Fukiko. It was one of the proudest moments of my life as an editor and founder of new media initiatives when Pete Hamill wrote for us at GlobalPost, taking an assignment to write about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, which featured his daughter Deirdre’s photography.
In more recent years, Pete’s health was failing, and he required regular dialysis. He would use the time to sketch, and Fukiko was always there by his side caring for him. They had an epic love affair and as Pete became more frail, it was like watching a spectacular sunset. Pete fell last week and could not recover from the surgery. It was ultimately heart and kidney failure that took his life on the morning of August 5th, according to Fukiko. I liked the way the New York Press Club put it in a statement the day he died, “Pete Hamill was an inspiration to generations of reporters who reveled in his unique style of storytelling and his gifts as a writer and reporter who spoke truth to power.”
Death in the time of pandemic means there will not be the kind of big funeral that is befitting a man who touched so many lives. There will be no raucous wake at an Irish funeral home and nearby Brooklyn bar where his stories should be told and re-told. Instead, there will be a quiet funeral attended by immediate family. But for all of us who knew him and admired him, we were truly blessed, another word Pete would never use, to stand up and honor him at a gathering in December of 2018 at New York University’s Ireland House, where Pete was a charter member. Four hundred people gathered that night for an event titled, “A Tribute to Pete Hamill.” That night, Dan Barry, the New York Times writer who helped to organize the honoring, presented the line of the night: “If the pavement of New York city could talk, it would sound like Pete Hamill.” On the sidelines of that evening, Pete offered a macabre joke that it was like being at his own wake without having to look on silently from a wooden box. Instead, he was right there with us and able to hear the admiration and the stories we all wanted to share for a life that deserved all the praise and honor we could muster.
Six weeks ago, a group of us gathered on June 24 to celebrate Pete’s 85th birthday on Zoom. As the video conferencing flickered to life, there was Pete smiling and wearing a “Report for America” t-shirt. He puffed his chest out a bit to show off the red-white-and-blue against black logo for Report for America, our national service program that now has 225 reporters in 160 newsrooms. Pete was always proudly supportive of the work we do at GroundTruth globally and locally. I loved that he chose to wear that pride on his chest. Pete especially loved our mission: to inspire and support emerging journalists to report on under-covered corners of America and the world, to tell the story of the people who live in the places we are not hearing from, to serve their communities by being a watchdog and, most of all, to give them voice.
Charles Sennott is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The GroundTruth Project, which launched the national service program called Report for America in the fall of 2017.
