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.
Take, for example, what he did the night of December 8, 1980. Breslin was getting ready for bed in his home in Queens when a call from the newsroom sent him rushing across the river to Manhattan. He showed up on 72nd Street and Central Park West and talked to a police officer named Jim Moran. That evening, Moran told Breslin, he was assisting a man in a red shirt and jeans who had just been shot—“Blood,” Moran told Breslin, “was coming out of the mouth and covering the face.” Moran put the man in the back seat of his patrol car and rushed toward the hospital.
“Moran,” Breslin wrote in his column, published the very next morning, “looked in the back seat and said, ‘Are you John Lennon?’ The guy in the back nodded and groaned.”
Such masterworks, thick with emotions and rich with insights into the lives and yearnings of everyday Americans, earned Breslin his profession’s highest honor while at the New York Daily News for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.”
Oh, how far we’ve fallen. Starting this year, for the first time since 1970, the Pulitzer Prize Board scrapped the Commentary category entirely, alongside Editorial Writing, and replaced both with a brand-new category called Opinion Writing. And opinions, as that pithy wordsmith “Dirty” Harry Callahan famously put it, are like buttholes: We all have them, yet very few are lovely enough to present in public.
What, then, merits a Pulitzer for opining? Let us check in with this year’s winner, M. Gessen, whose grapheme of a first name and preferred plural pronouns are both themselves microaggressions against the English language. Gessen, explained the prize’s official website, received a Pulitzer for “an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes.”
Sounds worthwhile! Would they be writing about Iran, perchance, where the murderous mullahs have reportedly slaughtered as many as 30,000 dissenters this year alone? Or Azerbaijan, which rocked a score of 6 out of 100 in Freedom House’s 2026 Freedom in the World survey and is growing more airless by the year? Maybe Cuba, where the Communist government pilfers billions while cheerfully torturing dissidents?
No such luck. Instead, here are a few of the columns for which journalism’s holiest grail was handed to M. Gessen:
“The Chilling Consequences of Going Along with Trump”
“The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed To”
“Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era”
You get the gist.
That Gessen was chosen should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has paid any attention to the Pulitzers in recent years. In 2020, the award for Commentary went to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times. The fiction prize would’ve been more apt, considering the fact that Hannah-Jones’ masterwork, The 1619 Project, was basically fan fiction reimagining American history as a dystopian hellscape exclusively obsessed with abducting and abusing Africans. The same can be said for last year’s recipient, the New Yorker’s Mosab Abu Toha, who, “reporting” from Gaza, continued to peddle the widely debunked claim that the strip’s al-Ahli’s hospital was deliberately bombed by Israel (it was hit by a failed Hamas rocket launch instead) and argued that none of the Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, were tortured. (They absolutely were, as both their testimonies and their medical records grimly confirm.)
You may, if you wish, lament the fact that we went from celebrating men and women like Breslin, who roamed the streets and told people’s stories with uncommon compassion and warmth, to feting mediocrities who’ve done little more than master the tribal ululations of the left. You may also take a magnifying glass to the Pulitzer Prize Board itself, and argue that the award’s skid into farce was all but guaranteed once the panel of judges was stacked with leftist activists rather than dispassionate writers and editors.
But neither rage nor lament offer much to keep us keeping on. Go back for a moment and reread those nuggets from Breslin at the top of this piece. Even from a distance of many decades, they still throb with an unmistakably American spirit, great and true and timeless.
It’s a spirit that was forged in small, local newsrooms—Breslin started out as a copy boy for the Long Island Press—stacked with blue-collar reporters who were no better educated, compensated, or regarded than the police officers, firemen, small-business owners, and elected officials they covered.
It’s a spirit attuned to the thoughts and feelings of gravediggers and beat cops just as it is to the exhortations of officials, intellectuals, and other grandees.
And it’s a spirit that gives even the most distasteful people and the most troubling ideas a fair shake, because it understands that whatever quarrels we Americans may have, we ought to quarrel, as the Talmud teaches us, for the sake of heaven, hoping not to destroy each other but to keep each other honest.
Breslin, bless him, embodied this spirit well. But look elsewhere, and you’ll find it everywhere among the Pulitzers’ storied alums. The Pulitzer for music, for example, which was recently awarded to Kendrick Lamar, every NPR listener’s favorite rapper, once honored works like Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a musical love note to ordinary Americans that remains a beloved classic. Or the Pulitzer for fiction, now a referendum on fashionable political opinions, was not too long ago the domain of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Fixer, and The Old Man and the Sea.
We return to these great works, we keep reading Breslin and the rest of the Pulitzer gang, for the same reason we cringe when we read the mirthless ministrations of M. Gessen: because the Pulitzer winners of old help us make sense of this complicated and nuanced and vast and maddening and inspiring and incomparable nation, rather than reduce it to some dreary and grotesque cartoon of political uniformity.
Whenever you have a few hours to kill, go on the Pulitzer site, scroll to 1986, click on Breslin’s name, and read a few of his celebrated pieces. The warmth and the passion you’ll feel permeating through the page aren’t just nostalgia; they’re a promise that American curiosity is too resilient to be crushed by pedigreed bureaucrats. And even if their work wouldn’t win them the prize anymore, the spirit of the Pulitzers continues to inspire reporters and poets and composers and editors and novelists dedicated to telling American stories. And that’s more meaningful than any award could ever be.