A Portrait of Bravery and Baseball

Jimmy Breslin

Despite a long spell of winter weather that seems more appropriate for skiing, baseball season opens up across America next week. 

It is shaping up to be another barnburner of a year, certainly in the American League East, where Irish American fans in Boston and New York will yell and scream at each other, as the powerhouse Yankees and stacked Red Sox duke it out.

It is fitting, then, at this time of year, to look back at the so-called American national pastime. To look back to an era when the greatest concerns were not who was going to get the largest slice of baseball’s billion-dollar pie. 

To look back at a time when the game’s all-time home run king was a boozer and womanizer (Babe Ruth), but not an accused steroid junky and possible perjurer (Barry Bonds, who is on trial right now).

Thankfully, we have legendary Irish American newspaperman Jimmy Breslin to lend us some perspective.  Breslin’s latest book is a biography of former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. 

Rickey, of course, is the executive who convinced Jackie Robinson that the time was right to racially integrate Major League Baseball.  The year was 1947, and the game of baseball was as white as snow. 

Integration in general American life was barely up for discussion, and the game of baseball was not much more interested.

As Breslin makes clear in Branch Rickey (Lipper/Viking), the brainy general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers thought the time was right -- but only if the right kind of player was up to this extraordinary challenge. In the end, Robinson paved the way for a cultural revolution. 

Of course, back then, there was no way to tell if this experiment was going to work.  Opposition was fierce, and there was no guarantee Robinson himself would be able to survive the ugly racism that was surely going to come his way.

After all, Robinson famously faced a court martial in 1945 when, as an Army lieutenant in World War II, he refused to back down when a white bus driver spewed racist words at him while telling him to get to the back of the bus.

Indeed, as Breslin also makes clear, while this is a noble story with heroic behavior, that is not all there is to the story of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson.

Rickey, after all, may have been a visionary.  But he was also a businessman. 

He knew that getting Robinson onto the diamond at Ebbets Field would change America.  But he also knew it would simply make them a better baseball team.

Breslin uses his trademark razor-sharp wit to, at the same time, credit Rickey with changing the game, even if his models or motivations were not always pure.

Rickey, for example, is credited with creating the minor league farm, system, which allowed teams to draft very young players and mold them, then use them when they were ready for the big leagues -- or trade them.
As Breslin puts it, players were grown “like crops.” He adds that the minor league system “was modeled somewhat after the Southern system of slavery.”

Then again, Breslin admits that for all of his New York credentials, he himself had some reservations about taking on this project.

“The rule I followed from my first day as a copy boy in the sports department was that you couldn’t write about a gamer unless you went to see it.  These people who tried reporting by watching television were killing readers with lifeless stories.  It still is like this, except there are many fewer readers to murder,” he says.
Breslin proceeds to tell the fascinating story of his single encounter with Rickey, way back when Breslin was in high school. 

Despite this singular meeting, Rickey is a classic Breslin subject --an underdog, no angel, and just a little bit crazy. 

Breslin might have made him up in one of his novels, as a political operative on Queens Boulevard, perhaps, if Rickey wasn’t such a colorful real-life character.

The effects of the changes wrought by Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson would be felt from Mississippi to Northern Ireland in the decades that followed.  We should never take that for granted, even if we look around and shake our heads at the current state of the baseball game. 

Not that it was so much better back then.  Rickey and the Dodgers parted ways before the Dodgers won their only World Series in 1955, and the Dodgers left Brooklyn a few years later.
Ah, the good old days.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The failed plot to kill President John F. Kennedy

On April 3, the long-awaited mini-series The Kennedys will air on cable TV. 

Starring the likes of Greg Kinnear and Mrs. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, the mini-series was famously dropped from another cable channel a few months back.  Rumors swirled that members of the Kennedy clam were displeased by its depiction of Jack and Bobby and the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Well, the mini-series will finally air beginning April 3 on something called Reelz.  This may turn out to be much ado about…well, not very much.  Most of us, like it or not, already know much more about the Kennedys than we want to know.

But this is an opportunity to recall a more or less forgotten episode in the history of the Kennedy clan.  Not many people know that the mythic era of early 1960s Camelot might have been over just one month before it began thanks to an anti-Catholic nut with a violent streak named Richard Pavlick.

So much attention is paid to the Kennedy assassination of November 1963 that it is easy to forget that in December of 1960 -- just weeks after JFK won his historic election over Richard Nixon -- Pavlick tried to kill Kennedy in Florida.

The failed JFK assassination attempt has been given fresh attention by veteran TV journalist Jeff Greenfield, who has just written a fascinating little book called Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (Putnam). 

Greenfield plays the “What if?” game with history, imagining how America would have been different if various scenarios had played out among the most powerful men in the nation’s history.

One of the scenarios Greenfield looks at is the failed attempt to kill JFK in December of 1960.  As he described it in a recent article, “On Sunday, December 11, 1960, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick, age 73, driven by bigotry against Catholics and contempt for the Kennedys’ wealth and influence, parked outside Kennedy’s Palm Beach home, holding a switch connected to seven sticks of dynamite -- enough, in the words of the Secret Service, to ‘level a small mountain.’”

Greenfield continues, “Only Jacqueline Kennedy’s appearance, to see her husband off to church, kept Pavlick from ramming Kennedy’s car and detonating the explosives. (He was captured four days later by authorities who had been tipped off.)

“The closeness of the call was appalling,” Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman wrote in his memoirs.

This even though an Irish American postal worker from Pavlick’s New Hampshire town had done a great job tipping off authorities to Pavlick’s suspicious behavior. 

Thomas Murphy was a postmaster in Belmont, New Hampshire, who started to receive messages from Pavlick after the well-known local kook had left the town.  The ominous letters implied that the world would soon know all about Richard Pavlick. 

Murphy contacted the authorities, who soon discovered that Pavlick had recently purchased dynamite.
And yet, only fate intervened and prevented the assassination.

It is fascinating to wonder what would have happened to civil rights, Cuba and even Vietnam had the anti-Catholic Pavlick succeeded. 

But it is also worthwhile to stop and imagine the hatreds that drove him.  It is far too easy to forget these days just how deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism was in American history. 

The election of JFK, as many have noted, may very well have been the final obstacle which helped Americans accept members of the Catholic church as full and equal citizens. 

Imagine, though, if Kennedy had been killed by a nut driven by those very same hatreds.

At the very least, Catholic Americans -- especially the Irish -- would have taken this hard.  They would have felt that they had finally made it to the top of the mountain, only to abruptly be thrown off.

History has more or less forgotten Pavlick.  He lived until 1975 in a New Hampshire hospital, where he died at the age of 88. 

It is possible that amidst all the sex stories about Marilyn and Bobby and Jack, the Kennedys mini-series will look at this dark, forgotten episode of anti-Catholic history.

It is possible.  But not likely. 

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Enough already with the Irish mob

A friend of mine came up to me the other day and mentioned that a new movie called Kill the Irishman, was about to open.

“How many of these Boston Irish mob movies are they going to make?” he added.
I pointed out that Kill the Irishman, which opened this week and stars Val Kilmer and Christopher Walken, is actually set in Cleveland.

But his point was well taken.

Now comes word that the legends behind Goodfellas – Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese – are going to team up once again for a movie based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The book tells the life story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a hired killer who supposedly whacked notorious union leader Jimmy Hoffa.

For the record, to “paint houses” is mob speak for someone who is willing to kill for money.

The working title of the Frank Sheeran movie? The Irishman.

Which means, the same week Kill the Irishman opened up, we have the announcement that another movie called The Irishman is about to be made.

Oh, and you might also be reading these days about a gritty little Brooklyn movie playing in theaters called White Irish Drinkers.

This, of course, comes on top of films such as The Town, which came on top of films such as Gangs of New York and State of Grace and even the aforementioned Goodfellas, which makes much of DeNiro’s character, Jimmy Conway, being Irish.

I think we can safely say there might now be more Irish crime films than actual Irish criminals out there.

This must be what Italian Americans feel like every time yet another B-level mafia caper comes rolling out of some film studio.

Look, there is no more fascinating story than the history of the Irish American gangster, as author T.J. English has made clear in his authoritative history of this criminal specimen.

The Irish were never quite the top dogs of the underworld in any given city, yet they were always right there fighting for their unseemly slice of the pie.

In addition, they managed to blur the lines between crime and politics impressively, not to mention bloodily.

But what is this current fascination with the Irish American underworld? It is true, as the guys in The Westies liked to say, that because they were Irish they needed to prove they were crazier. That never gets tired on screen.

Danny Greene, the Cleveland legend who is the subject of Kill the Irishman, was many things. But he was most definitely crazy.

Still, it seems there is something deeper going on here, and it seems particularly relevant right around St. Patrick’s Day.

This is the time of year when everyone has their green-tinted glasses on, and we see the Irish as charming folk who wear Aran sweaters and strum harps and whistle Irish Spring tunes.

But there also seems to be an understanding that there is more to the Irish American story than Aran sweaters and Guinness. There seems to be an endless craving for the dark side of these supposedly charming people.

And it comes at a time when the Irish in America are as successful as they’ve ever been – perhaps even to the point of feeling as if they are beginning to blend into the more bland American landscape, as newer ethnic groups command attention.

Let’s face it, a lot of Irish folk love these crime films as much as anybody. Is this some way for Irish Americans to maintain their ethnicity?

Maybe that’s reading too much into it. It is interesting, though, that just as Frank McCourt tapped into a deep well of Irish sadness in the 1990s -- when Irish
Americans were prosperous and there was peace in Northern Ireland -- so it seems these armies of old-school Irish criminals have come along at a time when there is anxiety about it means to be an Irish American in 21st century America.

One thing it means? Watching movies about Irish criminals. Kill the Irishman?
It seems tempting, at least in the movie version of the typical Irish criminal. It would be nice to tell some quieter Irish American stories.

But don’t hold your breath. I think some of us still need to prove how crazy we really are.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The real problem with Congressman Peter King’s hearings

 Read more: Why not have Muslim congressman investigate Catholic Church scandals, ala Peter King?

Read more: IrishCentral founder on 'Hardball' with Chris Matthews

There is a group in America. They are a minority, but they are quite a high-profile group, especially in and around large cities.

Sadly, in the past, they have been linked to certain crimes, including acts of terrorism.

And, perhaps worst of all, some members of this group have clammed up when it comes to sharing information with the authorities about these crimes.

I am speaking, of course, about high-ranking members of the Catholic Church.

As Long Island Congressman Peter King gets ready to convene hearings on homegrown radicals this week, some disturbing questions are being raised.

Are these hearings necessary? Are they a reflection of a lingering anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment in the land?

And does King’s past experience with the peace process in Northern Ireland -- in which, critics charge, he was more than a little sympathetic to the Republican cause -- taint his efforts to unearth terrorists here in America?
Finally, the ghost of old red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy has been dusted off and propped up. Some of King’s critics say he is nothing more than a McCarthy for the 21st century, looking to score political points by creating a scapegoat.

Many of these questions were asked by regular as well as famous folk over the weekend, during a rally in Times Square. The theme of the rally was “I am a Muslim, too,” and hoped to convey the message that when you infringe upon the rights of one group in the U.S., you infringe upon the rights of all Americans.

However, I think King has, at least adequately, defended the looming hearings.

That’s one reason why the McCarthy comparisons are off base. McCarthy was an increasingly unstable, paranoid demagogue who eventually drank himself into an early grave.

He was also, it must be added, lending voice to insecure Irish Catholics in America who still felt somewhat marginalized by elites, and, thus, wanted to prove their 100% American-ness by flexing their anti-Communist credentials.

That’s not what’s going on in Washington right now. King is a complex political thinker, not afraid to veer from his own party’s conventional wisdom, even if it costs him support.

He surely knew these hearings would provoke a backlash. We happen to live in an age of global terror.
I, for one, take him at his word that he thinks homegrown Islamist terrorism is a problem that needs further investigation.

Some of King’s critics, in the past, have probably argued that Congress should investigate radical anti-abortion groups, or other far right causes.

Now, suddenly, they don’t think we should at least have a debate on this topic.

The real problem, as Richard Cohen pointed out in a column on Tuesday, is whether or not these hearings are hypocritical. That’s where the Catholic Church comparison comes in.

“The government has no business examining any peaceful religious group because a handful of adherents have broken the law. If it did, it would be past time to look into the Catholic Church, which clearly was -- or maybe still is -- engaged in concealing the sex crimes of priests and others,” Cohen wrote.

This, of course, is a very touchy area. Which does not change the fact that this is a valid point.

Looking into the sources of radical terrorists -- whatever their cause -- is, of course, a legitimate endeavor. King has to make sure this does not become some kind of witch hunt or blame game.

But the folks who are condemning King do need to ease up on the McCarthy references.

On the other hand, those who believe there are so many nefarious Muslim terror plots out there need to look around and see that there are very real problems unfolding out in the open.

Just this week, there were disturbing new reports out of Philadelphia and Los Angeles related to sex scandals and the priesthood.

Are investigations called for? Hauling religious officials before Congress would certainly look unseemly.

That, of course, is how certain Muslim Americans will be feeling this week.


(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

 Read more: Why not have Muslim congressman investigate Catholic Church scandals, ala Peter King?

Read more: IrishCentral founder on 'Hardball' with Chris Matthews

'The Fighter's' 'Irish' Micky Ward - a working class hero - SEE VIDEO

Read more: Irish Micky Ward: "The Fighter" speaks out

This Sunday, when Hollywood big wigs gather for the 83rd annual Academy Awards, The Fighter will be looking to have the biggest night for a heavily-Irish movie in five years, since The Departed was up for a bunch of awards, including a Best Supporting Actor nod for “the fighter” himself, Mark Wahlberg.

Given what is going on in the world, given the angry, messy state of the union here at home, it’s tempting to dismiss the Oscars as little more than a gathering of pretentious, pretty folk.

But can we actually find deeper meaning in the Oscar-nominated films? In The Fighter? Is there a deeper message for our time in this inspirational flick?

Joyce Carol Oates thinks there might be. The only trouble is that the message may be a frightening one.
Oates is a best-selling author, as well as long-time chronicler of the boxing world.

According to an essay in this week’s New York Review of Books, Oates likes The Fighter, even if she has some questionable things to say about Irish culture along the way.

For example, the characters in the movie, Micky Ward and his half-brother Dicky Ecklund, have “crude-rhyming nicknames,” and thus are “quintessentially working-class Irish, suggesting the playful camaraderie of a pub society in which men remain adolescent and “unattached” through their lives, so long as they don’t “return to their homes where wives and mothers exert authority.”

You need more than one hand to count the stereotypes in that statement.

But in the end, Oates sees a connection between The Fighter and another recent movie about an Irish American boxer.

“Like Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) … The Fighter is, if not a champion film for all time, a very good, poignant, and commendable expression of its era—postindustrial working-class urban America, bereft of history as it is bereft of jobs, strong unions, pride in one’s work.”

Talk about a back-handed compliment. Trouble is, I think Oates is on to something.

The Fighter, after all, is about an old mill town which lost its decent union jobs a long time ago. Micky Ward rises above that, but what about everyone else in the town?

It’s no wonder the governors of New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere are picking on public-sector unions. There are no other unions left to pick on!

I love that today’s anti-union forces want teachers, cops and firefighters to behave more like private sector workers. Because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the private sector never screws up, right?

But okay, fine, go ahead, treat government workers like the private sector. I’ll sit back and wait for my cut of a billion dollar bailout.

Full disclosure here -- as regular readers of this column know, I am a member of the New York City teacher’s union.

Which, first and foremost, means I understand how unions can at times become lazy and complacent.
But this effort to transform public sector union members into public enemy number one is as frustrating as it is bizarre.

Are you trying to tell me that after the events of the last several years -- the trillion dollar wars abroad and the billion dollar bailouts at home -- that men and women who educate millions of inner city kids every day, and who run towards danger when the rest of us run away, are solely responsible for the poor financial health of states across the nation?

C’mon! Interestingly, Irish Americans -- once the backbone of organized labor -- seem to be evenly split on this fight, just as they have become more or less evenly split between the Republicans and Democrats in the last 40 years.

For me, though, there comes a time to draw a line. Yes, unions need to sacrifice during tough times.

But simply because the private sector has been pillaged is no reason to do the same to the public sector.
To bring this back to The Fighter, it’s great that Ward emerges as a champion in his Hollywood movie.

But these times seem to call for a leader who can rally not just himself and his family but the working and middle classes, who are being unfairly attacked these days.

That great Irish Liverpudlian John Lennon once wrote that “a working class hero is something to be.”
It is, indeed. So, who will answer the bell?

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Read more: Irish Micky Ward: "The Fighter" speaks out

How the CIA got ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan

Given what New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg apparently thinks about the Irish, he almost certainly would have had some trouble back in January of 1940.  That was when “Wild” Bill Donovan was out and about talking up a new movie starring fellow Irish Americans Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. 

The movie was The Fighting 69th, about the famously Irish National Guard brigade which leads the St. Patrick’s Day parade down Fifth Avenue every year. 

Given the stars and subject matter of the movie, you can imagine our mayor envisioning the brigade kicking off the march, while dozens of “inebriated Irishmen” hang out of their Fifth Avenue windows.

That moment back in 1940, however, was actually pivotal for one of the most important, lesser-known figures in 20th Century American history – “Wild” Bill Donovan, who earned the Medal of Honor as a member of the Fighting 69th back in World War I.

Donovan, who died exactly 52 years ago, in February of 1959, is back in the spotlight these days.  Just last week, Martin S. Quigley, who was America’s chief spy in Ireland during World War II, died at the age of 93.  Quigley worked directly under Wild Bill Donovan during the war.

This comes just as a brand new biography of Wild Bill hits bookstores.  Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage (Free Press) by Douglas Waller outlines Donovan’s humble Irish roots, his service with the Fighting 69th and his relationship with Cagney and O’Brien, not to mention Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy.

Most importantly, Waller argues, we are still living in the cloak-and-dagger world of diplomacy more or less created by Donovan.  The OSS, after all, was the forerunner of the CIA. 

So, any time you here about intelligence gathering or paranoid “spooks” working for “the agency,” you can thank this humble Irish Catholic from Buffalo.

Donovan was born on New Year’s Day, 1883, the son of Timothy and Letitia Donovan, from Ulster and Cork, respectively. 

Though dubbed “a poor Irish Catholic boy from Buffalo” this week in a New York Times review of Waller’s book, Donovan went on to earn a stellar education. 

It was at Columbia, while playing football, that he earned the nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life.
A 1905 Columbia graduate, Donovan worked as a lawyer before leading a cavalry troop of the New York State militia, during the build-up to World War I.  In the Great War, Donovan served as major, then colonel, ultimately earning the Medal of Honor for his service in France.

Donovan is still the only American to receive four of the nation’s highest military distinctions -- the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal and the National Security Medal.

After World War I he was a U.S. attorney (who vigorously prosecuted bootleggers), and entered politics – as a Republican, of all things!

Donovan ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor (against the sainted Al Smith) in 1922 and governor in 1932.

Donovan was a vocal critic of Franklin Roosevelt, though unlike some Irish American isolationists Donovan seemed to grasp the threat raised by Nazi Germany and the looming European war.

In fact, on the eve of World War II, Roosevelt tapped Donovan to visit Britain, where Joseph Kennedy was serving as ambassador and had raised a stink by declaring that Britain was not ready to fight in World War II, and adding that the U.S. should remain isolated from the tensions. 

Donovan disagreed, arguing Britain could serve as a bulwark against Nazi imperialism – especially with U.S. aid.

This came in handy when Roosevelt had to decide who might be the best person to centralize all U.S. intelligence during and after the war. Donovan was selected as the head of the Office of Strategic Services -- the OSS. 

Donovan fell out of favor with Washington big-wigs, in part because he picked a fight with J. Edgar Hoover.  But when the Cold War rose and the CIA was formed, though Donovan was not its leader, he had set up the infrastructure which remains deeply flawed but utterly fascinating to this day.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The enemy is...multiculturalism - foiling home-grown terrorist plots

In his new book The Matchmaker of Kenmare, Irish novelist Frank Delaney sends his characters on a tour of World War II-era Ireland.

Soon, they become sucked into the era’s foggy diplomacy, visiting the war-town landscapes of both England and Germany. These characters are able to move around without raising too much suspicion, in part, because they are from Ireland, and Ireland, of course, was neutral during World War II.

We can argue some other time about Irish neutrality in the face of Nazi barbarism. What this does remind us of is that people – and nations – have had to make tough choices in the past.

During World War II, the Irish weighed their unique history with British imperialism against the realities of 1940s politics and made their choice.

This is interesting to think about as British and American politicians are now saying some provocative things about religion, immigration and terrorism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over in Great Britain, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron blasted the very concept of multiculturalism.

As The New York Times put it, Cameron criticized “the country’s decades-old policy of ‘multiculturalism,’ saying it has encouraged ‘segregated communities’ where Islamic extremism can thrive.”

Cameron criticized what he referred to as the “hands-off tolerance” of Britain and other European countries, adding that they had encouraged Muslims and other immigrants “to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, Congressman Peter King, new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, prepared to hold hearings next month which will focus on the role Muslim Americans have played -- or not played -- in foiling home-grown terrorist plots.

King, for years a well-known presence in Irish American circles, is no knee-jerk immigrant-phobe.

Indeed, there is understandable concern on both sides of the Atlantic about terror, and about whether or not immigrants are assimilating, or are instead participating in plots to destroy the very nations they once chose to adopt as their homelands.

Which brings me back to World War II. Let me call upon another expert, though not a novelist or congressman or prime minister.

My mother grew up in 1940s Brooklyn, when another global war was raging. In talking to her over the years I’ve gotten a fairly strong sense of what her block in East Flatbush was like, in part because there were many other blocks just like it.

It was -- though no one used this word back then -- a “multicultural” block. Mostly white ethnic, with plenty of working class Irish, German and Italian Americans.

That bears repeating because, as any regular viewer of the History Channel knows, among our enemies during World War II were … the Germans and the Italians!

The Irish, of course, were no enemy. They were simply neutral.

Which is kind of how some Fox News devotees view the French these days. It’s not that they’re against the global war of terror. They are just kind of neutral.

The point is not that everyone on my mother’s block got along. From what I can tell my grandmother showed no prejudice, mainly because she hated everybody.

But here, living side by side, were the children of immigrants from nations the U.S. was fighting a bloody war against. Yes, of course, there were spasms of anti-German sentiment, and some Italian-Americans were indeed sent to camps, and a handful of rough Irish kids teamed up with members of the German American Bund and dreamt up terrible anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

But in their day-to-day lives that multicultural Brooklyn block endured. And did so under circumstances that seem more disturbing than our current concerns over terror and multiculturalism.

Yes, we should be vigilant, and we should demand that immigrants grasp what is great about America. But there is a fine line between vigilance and fear-mongering.

We want our immigrants to know what is great about America. But it seems as if the native-born also need to be reminded from time to time.

(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)