I Run to Win
Jimmy Breslin's first-person, comic account of how he came to run for President of the City Council on Norman Mailer's 1969 mayoral ticket, ending in a portrait of a wounded city that either gets an imagination or dies.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Jimmy Breslin, “I Run to Win.” New York, 5 May 1969, 40–44; cover photograph of Mailer and Breslin. Lennon calls it “the most humorous of the accounts” of how the Mailer–Breslin ticket was created (69.24).
Breslin tells it as a man who had arranged his life to avoid unpleasant vibrations. A seven o’clock call about his voter registration for petitions he had barely heard of leads back through Jack Newfield’s radio endorsement, a lunch at Limerick’s with Newfield, Gloria Steinem, and Peter Maas, and a call to Mailer from a pay phone, during which Breslin reasons that Mailer gets the top of the ticket only because he went to Harvard. Two evenings at Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights house win him over: Mailer’s talk of black self-government, of a monthly “Sweet Sunday,” and of statehood for the city. A drink with Hugh Carey, who waits on Robert Wagner’s plans, and an afternoon at Toots Shor’s with Paul Screvane, who waits on the same, settle the matter. The essay’s center is a boxing figure (Marcel Cerdan breaking Tony Zale with body punches while his face stayed unmarked), set against a glittering Manhattan and the dying neighborhoods. It ends with the press calling, his wife warning that she’ll ask him to leave if the phone rings once more about it, and Breslin introducing himself, candidate at last, to a newsstand dealer who thinks she has seen his picture somewhere.
The piece is reprinted in Running Against the Machine (69.80, p. 21) and in New York’s own anthologies New York Stories (2010, p. 241) and Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable (2017, p. 46). Victor Peppard’s “Jimmy Breslin’s Run to Win” (The Mailer Review 13, 2019) was written to introduce it, but the article was not printed with it.
The whole issue can be read in Google Books (New York, 5 May 1969). The transcription is held, rights pending, at full text (rights pending).
Related pages
- The Mailer–Breslin Mayoral Campaign (1969) | Running against the Machine: A Grass Roots Race for the New York Mayoralty | 1969
- Jimmy Breslin | Gloria Steinem | Peter Maas
- I Run to Win (69.24)
Criticism 1
Essays, chapters, and books
- Peppard, Victor. “Jimmy Breslin's Run to Win.” The Mailer Review, 2019. register