Pete Hamill
New York news giant wrote eyewitness account of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy, writes
PETE Hamill, who died on Wednesday aged 85 years, had a stellar career as a journalist, covering major news stories and becoming one of the leading columnists in the Big Apple along with the late Jimmy Breslin.
He also led an active social life, including relationships with film star Shirley MacLaine and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
He was very friendly with such diverse figures as Robert F Kennedy and Frank Sinatra and wrote a book about the latter, entitled Why Sinatra Matters, published in 1998.
Hamill also wrote a celebrated Irish-American memoir, published in 1994, entitled A Drinking Life. His engagement with alcohol began in the early 1940s when, as a youngster, he followed his father into bars and became part of a culture where drinking and masculinity were considered inseparable.
He continued in this vein for about 30 years and the book is a fascinating account of how his successful career was combined with constant heavy drinking. But in 1972 he noticed his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette, so he switched over to being a teetotaller.
One of his favourite retreats was PJ Clarke’s, a saloon and restaurant at Third Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan where he would meet up with Sinatra. Asked for his opinion of Ol’ Blue Eyes, he told me in an interview: “I liked him a lot, because among the things that are not generally associated with him was that he was very intelligent. He wasn’t well-educated, but what the hell? Neither was I in any formal way.”
Sinatra wanted to have his autobiography written by Hamill, and the journalist said he would have to ask the singer a range of questions about topics such as his music, women and “the wise guys”, a euphemism for the mafia.
The Chairman of the Board replied: “Music, I can talk from now till dawn. The women, I loved them all. But if I talk about some of those other guys, someone might come knocking at my f ***ing door.”
One of the reasons they got on so well was that they both came from immigrant stock. William Peter Hamill Jr was born in Brooklyn on June 24, 1935, the eldest of seven children. Although their father, Billy, was born on the Lower Falls in Belfast and their mother, Anne (née Devlin), came from the Short Strand in the same city, they met for the first time at an Irish immigrant dance in New York.
Young Pete attended Regis High School in Manhattan, but dropped out in his second year and went on to serve four years in the US Navy.
He started his media career as a designer on a magazine but switched to reporting for the New York Post in 1960.
In 1962 he married Ramona Negron. They had two daughters, Adrienne and Deirdre, and became divorced in 1970. Seventeen years later he married a Japanese journalist, Fukiko Aoki, who survives him, as does his brother Denis, also a journalist, and three other siblings, Kathleen, Brian and John, as well as Pete’s daughters and grandson.
He cast his net wider than the US: reporting from Northern Ireland, Lebanon and Vietnam, for example. When a lengthy newspaper strike broke out in New York, he crossed the Atlantic and carried out magazine interviews for the Saturday Evening Post
with Brigitte Bardot, Sean Connery, Sophia Loren and Michael Caine.
Returning later to the US, he was given a column four days every week in the New York Post.
“I was young, I was full of energy, loving the work,” he said later. Subsequently, in 1977, he began writing for the rival New York Daily News.
At different times, he became editor of both papers, the first for five weeks and the second for eight months.
A supporter of Robert F Kennedy’s presidential bid, he was in the room when the aspiring Democratic Party candidate was assassinated. In his eye-witness account for the Village Voice, Hamill described the powerful urge he had to seize and crush the attacker.
Much later, he dated Robert’s sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and he said of her: “I have never seen a person whose public image and private reality were so different. The one thing you never get in these endless combinations of books and docudramas and all that is her sense of humour, her wit, her sense of irony about the world.”
Hamill took a sympathetic approach to the Long Kesh hunger strikes led by Bobby Sands in 1981, although he did not approve of the IRA campaign of violence.
He regularly visited this country, where his friends included veteran journalist and Sunday Independent
contributor Joe Kennedy, who was introduced to Pete Hamill by Tom Clancy of the Clancy Brothers at the Lion’s Head Tavern in Greenwich Village.
In a fitting tribute, New York Times journalist Dan Barry tweeted: “I once wrote that if the pavement of New York City could talk, it would sound like Pete Hamill. Now that city weeps.”