While I was working on "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life," I was also co-directing and co-producing an HBO documentary, "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists," about the lives of the legendary NYC columnist, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill. On Tuesday, our film won the Emmy for Best Historical Documentary.
As I prepared my little speech (delivered virtually, of course), I started thinking what the two Jimmys I've devoted the last five years to studying may have had in common.
At first glance, nothing. Jimmy Breslin was a loud, swashbuckling newspaperman from Queens--Jimmy Carter a soft-spoken peanut farmer from Georgia. Breslin never much liked Carter, and ripped him often in his column.
But each was an enormously complicated man and, in his own way, passionately committed to truth-telling. Carter, in office and out, often spoke truth to power, as Breslin and Hamill did so well. They would have loved Carter's Law Day speech at the Univ. of Georgia Law School in 1974. That's where Carter, quoting Bob Dylan lyrics in a tough, extemporaneous speech, ripped into the Georgia criminal justice system. The gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson happened to be there. He had been bored by Teddy Kennedy and other speakers and kept going to his car for Wild Turkey. But when Carter started, he went to his car for his tape recorder. He became a strong supporter of Carter in his Rolling Stone pieces and in my book you'll learn how Thompson helped make
Carter president.
The two Jimmys were also both devoted family men--in businesses (journalism and politics) where that's fairly rare, or was in the old days.