MURRAY KEMPTON PUTS WIT AT OUR SERVICE : REBELLIONS, PERVERSITIES AND MAIN EVENTS, <i> By Murray Kempton (Times Books: $27.50; 570 pp.)</i>

With the elite media wallowing in shamelessness, their packs of so-called journalists hounding after that which is most salacious and frivolous, it is refreshing to visit a retrospective of this bard of the tabloids. For six decades in the pages of the New York Post, New York Newsday and whatever magazines would have him, Kempton has plied the craft that the First Amendment was designed to protect.

The fact that he appeared in the tabloids is a comment less on him and them than it is on the New York Times, which should have been the natural venue for the finest writer ever to cover New York and, through it, the world. But good writers, like other artists of integrity, can never be hobbled by the tastes of gallery owners who might or might not choose to hang their works. They will, the great ones, insist on getting it right even if only to hang it on a subway wall.

I’m gushing, I know. But I have loved Murray Kempton’s work ever since I began reading him as a kid in the 1950s, in the New York Post. It was required reading in my part of the Bronx. “You saw Kempton?” my garment-worker mother would ask by way of opening a free-ranging dinner conversation on subjects as varied as nuclear war, the Mafia or Marilyn Monroe.

I mention my mother’s occupation only to challenge the snobbism that might suggest that less-educated readers of the tabloids are unable or unwilling to parse what are arguably the most pungent--and complex--sentences written by anyone this side of Shakespeare, let alone a journalist.

Which may explain the mutual admiration felt by the liberal Kempton and the conservative William Buckley to whom this book is dedicated. Enjoying Kempton’s prose is an acquired and addictive habit, like doing a crossword puzzle, or reading the classics. And while that may be why Kempton is not syndicated widely, this wonderful selection of three decades of Kempton columns confirms that the slight effort involved is well worth it.

The messages, about who and what we are, prove timeless, making this an essential book for study. But it is also a delight to dip into for a quick three-page random read. Making this especially easy is a detailed index wherein one can look up Malcolm X, Dwight Eisenhower, Karl Marx, or say, Richard Nixon, now sadly in the news.

Back in 1966, Kempton wrote in the Post about encountering Nixon at the Overseas Press Club:

“His smile across the room at the intruder is almost and unexpectedly beseeching. The first thought is that he is faintly crying mercy; but he must long ago have ceased to expect mercy anywhere; a man who has so doggedly followed his star without ever asking quarter from history is certainly above asking mercy from journalists . . . this is a man who, say what you choose of him, came to run the course. He will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation. . . . We will end surprised to discover that we love him. . . .”

On the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed: “He died asserting the dignity of garbage collectors. And he died at a moment when his ideas had never seemed quite so unfashionable. We have been very sick; a country is sick when the second thought in everyone’s mind with the news that a Nobel Peace laureate has been murdered can be the fear that his death is the signal for violence and arson and that his first memorial must be children fleeing from a burning tenement.”

On an auction of the address book of Marilyn Monroe: “There is a note to ‘call Jack at 11 o’clock’ that has set the gossips to imagining the beat of great wings overhead; but since the year was 1957, the odds are that this Jack was only her hairdresser.”

Kempton is ever the contrarian--as in his acceptance of the guilt of accused atom-spy Alger Hiss, heresy in left-liberal circles--and yet he is rarely unforgiving. Noting that Hiss, as a federal prisoner, conducted himself with dignity even to the point of winning the respect of fellow cons, Kempton wrote: “Think though I always have that his jury was correct, I shall never dismiss Alger Hiss as no better than a traitor so long as I know that he never finked at Lewisburg.”

Kempton’s greatest achievement is as a debunker of conspiracies, especially those concerning the Mafia, reminding us that ordinary life is naturally so filled with inexplicable contradiction and mystery as to mock all attempts to define an overarching plan imposed by mortals.

Like I. F. Stone, his only peer, Kempton bases his journalism as much as possible on what is known of the actual record. Perusing the transcripts of FBI wiretaps of reputed Cosa Nostra boss Simone Rizzo (Sam) DeCavalcante, Kempton discovers what those who make a living alarming us about the Mafia pointedly ignore--that they are by and large penny-ante losers. DeCavalcante, operating from the “power center” of the Elizabeth, N.J., hod carriers union, was constantly the recipient of complaints from his “soldiers” about not being able to pay the rent.

According to the FBI tape, one such soldier, Frank Cocchiaro, “told DeCavalcante that he has money problems as he gives his wife $50 a week, pays $125 a month rent in N.J. and $115 rent per month for his wife.” Chump change you might say. As Kempton notes, being in that Mafia world “is clearly not an environment productive of millionaires.”

In a long 1969 essay in the New York Review of Books, Kempton reminds the authors of two major works, one a journalist and the other a professor, that when it comes to the mob their sense of proportion is all wrong. Conceding that they are tops in their field he notes:

“Yet read alongside the real life of Sam DeCavalcante, the reports of these two authorities seem astoundingly credulous, the journalist and the academic being our chief sources of social misinformation. One of the few knowledgeable persons I can imagine believing them is Sam DeCavalcante himself; the faith of witches and of the hunters of witches survives the failure of witchcraft.”

With Kempton it is not a matter of being arrogant but rather of being precise. He takes as his task the fine tuning of our consciousness so that we can hold ourselves and others accountable--the highest calling of a free press in a democracy. Often this entails revisiting precincts no longer in the news.

Do you remember Charlotte Street in the Bronx? No? Well Murray Kempton does. Charlotte Street was once the favorite backdrop for journalists who journeyed with then-President Jimmy Carter to the burned-out borough to promise its revitalization. It didn’t happen, instead becoming an opportunity for the Reagan Administration to once again “prove” that social programs don’t work by using the power of the presidency to subvert them. The Wedtech Co. scandal is merely one example.

Kempton revisited this shame on the occasion of the arraignment of Wedtech President Fred Neuberger, whose Bronx-based company had ripped off millions of Defense Department dollars intended to create jobs for the poor. Kempton offered this as proof positive that organized society does indeed care about what happens to poor people. “If organized society had not cared about Charlotte Street, Fred Neuberger would not have been able to move to Sutton Place in Manhattan and still be man of substance enough to afford a $1-million bail bond after pleading guilty to grand larceny.”

Kempton goes on to co-opt the language of law and order for the cause of class justice. “Neuberger and his friends are gougers; they stole in the name of the poor, and they have cheated the poor of one of their scanty few hopes. They belong in jail until they rot like Charlotte Street.”

Thank God Murray Kempton has great memory and genes that permit him at age 76--and as good as ever--to put his wit at our service. Who else is there to remind today’s trendy journalists that history extends beyond last week’s lunch, that books are meant to be read, and that a writer’s prose should be expected to inform as well as sell? When they gave him the Pulitzer in 1985, when he was nearly 70, they should have been deeply ashamed that it took so long.