Back When the Pulitzer Meant Something

“Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. ‘Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” So begins one of the most famous pieces in American journalistic history. While other reporters stumbled over each other after Kennedy’s assassination, trying to get to the vice president, the First Lady, or anyone else in power, the author of this piece, Jimmy Breslin, spent his day with Pollard, a man paid $3.01 an hour to dig graves. Pollard, it turned out, could do more than most pundits to capture the nation’s profound grief. Breslin was someone who understood that history couldn’t be written exclusively from the halls of power or the seats of scholarship. It had to be reported, observed through the eyes of the men and women who bore its consequences. This was an insight that propelled the legendary columnist throughout his decades-long career, and won him the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986. After this year’s Pulitzers were awarded on Monday, I found myself reflecting on the kind of work that led Breslin to win the award all those years ago.