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A Man of His Words : With a civil tone and a principled eye, Murray Kempton searches for New York’s moral centers.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Before work one recent morning, Murray Kempton sat in the fake living room where they tape “Good Morning America,” holding his tongue as Charles Gibson, the host, bungled the name of this new book.

It is “Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events,” a selection of Kempton’s journalism from 1963 through 1992 (Times Books/Random House, 1994).

Gibson said “Perversions,” not “Perversities,” fumbling just the kind of nuance that has distinguished Kempton’s writing for half a century. Murray Kempton deals in the criminal, the ethically murky and the unforgivable, but rarely in the sexually extreme.

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He did admit, in a 1966 column reprinted in the new collection, that “if the pornographic impulse is an obsession with the contemplation of a debased object, then I have a dirty mind about Time”--the news magazine. But sex wasn’t on his mind. He went on to call Time “a slaughterhouse of moral integrity.”

Moral integrity matters to Murray Kempton. So do the faith of the radical, the debasement of democracy, and the smallness of great men and women. In “Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events,” he tracks these themes over a wide swath of Western culture.

He considers Richard Nixon’s fight to buy a co-op apartment, the tactics of Machiavelli and the blues of Bessie Smith.

He witnesses the rise of Cassius Clay and the fall of Michael Milken with a penetrating, principled eye and reports back in prose one might describe as American baroque. Kempton won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1985 and the next year shared a Grammy award for liner notes. His subject was Frank Sinatra.

These days, Kempton writes for New York Newsday. At 76, he knocks out four columns a week on deadline, each one timely enough to read on the morning subway, elegant enough for reprint in the intellectually upscale New York Review of Books.

He is a New York City institution, known for rectitude both physical and philosophical and for the civility that seemed to prevent him from correcting a host, Gibson, in his simulated home. On “Good Morning America,” Kempton played elder sage in calm, resonant tones. Then he set off to a real day’s work.

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*

By noon, Murray Kempton was wet. His $5 umbrella wasn’t responding. The sky was low, gray and windy. Rain fell like heavy tinsel on the sidewalks connecting the granite courthouses of lower Manhattan. Deadline was nine hours away, and Kempton still needed a topic for his column.

Leaving “Good Morning America,” he had stopped at a friend’s apartment for coffee and a call to Newsday to find out what was scheduled around the city that day. The former police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was giving a talk.

“Oh, I love Kelly,” Kempton said. “What time?”

Luncheon. Perhaps Kelly would criticize his successor, William Bratton, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, men Kempton finds mean-spirited.

“I hate people attacking people who are only doing their job,” he rumbled, referring to Bratton’s grousing about the local director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But cover the speech? “I have doubts about that,” he said. “I’ve done Ray so often.”

He looked out the window, relit his pipe, tried a call to inquire about court dockets. Maybe Tupac Shakur, the rap star charged with sexual assault, would be in for a hearing.

“Poor Tupac,” Kempton said. “He’s been fairly decent.” He is a middle-class kid who’s hung out with a bad element, Kempton continued. “I was hoping to touch base with his mama.”

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Shakur was not scheduled to appear this day. Nothing of interest leaped out.

“I guess I’ll go down to criminal court and dig around,” he announced, draping a bead-chain of press tags over his dark blue suit.

Kempton is famous for riding a bicycle around New York, but the weather was rotten and he hadn’t been on the bike all winter. Dodging puddles and construction barriers, striding toward the subway, he explained how he arrives at each day’s topic: “You make a bad choice in the morning. Then you get back to the office at 4, and you hope you don’t have to stick with the morning’s bad choice.” This morning’s choices were as bleak as the weather. He didn’t want to write about Bill Clinton or Bosnia or Haiti.

In the press room at police headquarters downtown, he greeted Newsday’s beat reporter. “What have you got for me, Willie? Murder? Death?” Willie had nothing but a luncheon speech--Ray Kelly. Maybe he’d say something about Commissioner Bratton.

Kempton picked up his earlier theme: “Bratton slams people who are just doing their job. Isn’t the head of the Citizens’ Budget Commission supposed to criticize the city budget? Isn’t the ACLU supposed to do what they do? I don’t understand America.” But he still didn’t see Kelly as a column.

Sloshing through the alleys of the court district, Kempton headed for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He dropped in on Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes unit. She confirmed that Tupac wouldn’t be in and offered up sentencing for a Mitsubishi executive who violently raped a colleague, then sought to apologize over lunch. The victim went to the restaurant wired. The cops taped the pitiful confession. The whole thing was sordid.

“I think,” Kempton told Fairstein, “he should be disposed of without being held up to the hue and cry of the public.” Then he mused: “Why are things so stagnant? Is it me?” It was 11:15.

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In the elevator, a chatty lawyer tried to interest Kempton in the case of a client on trial for setting fire to the testicles of a brothel owner. Downstairs, Newsday’s court correspondent proposed a column on the way lawyers had deceived the former P.R. adviser to Marla Maples, convicted of burglarizing the Maples shoe closet.

“Everyone says I’m friendly to reporters,” said Kempton, back on the street, his pipe upside down to keep the rain out. “Now you see why. I need them.”

Five decades of published writing to the contrary, Kempton disavows praise for his reporting. He calls himself “a master of all trades and a jack of none,” referring wryly to his “legend,” his “air of authority” and his “affectations.”

He works without special sources, he says, but a few hours with him on the hunt demonstrate his confident handle on the undramatic, essential tools of reporting: genial acquaintance with both secretaries and brass, graceful curiosity, a rich historical memory, the wisdom to draw connections, the sense to tell right from wrong. Plus the tenacity of a teen-ager.

From one courthouse to another, past metal detectors and back-door guards, up one well-worn grand staircase, down another overburdened elevator, Kempton clipped along.

“Thank you,” he told secretaries, leaving their domains empty-handed. “It was a joy as always.”

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He bemoaned his goose chase with an accustomed despair. Around noon, he ducked into a dry courtroom for the Mitsubishi-rapist sentencing, just in case.

“Well,” he observed as it ended, “I have nothing to say about that. Poor girl.” His body sat bolt upright. His spirit seemed to slump. The clock was pushing 1, eight hours to deadline. “I’m going back to the office and brood. I’ve wasted my day.”

A young member of the district attorney’s staff piped up, “No, you haven’t. You were wonderful on ‘Good Morning America’ this morning.”

He wouldn’t know, Kempton said. He’d stopped looking at himself on TV 31 years ago--a year before the D.A.’s aide was born.

*

Kempton began reporting in 1942. He grew up in Baltimore, descendant of distinguished Southerners he gets tired of talking about, particularly the namesake who wrote the federal law forcing runaway slaves back south.

“There’s a statute of limitations,” he impresses upon an interviewer, “on writing the Fugitive Slave Act.”

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It was in the South, at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, that Kempton produced some of his most memorable work. Through the ‘50s and early ‘60s, he covered the hearings on the witch hunts of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the enmeshment of labor leaders and mob bosses, the rise of world leaders from Billy Graham to Nikita Khrushchev, all for the New York Post. The rough, loose-lipped tabloid gave him room to stretch.

A volume called “America Comes of Middle Age,” now out of print, collected Kempton’s columns from those years. Around the time it appeared, in 1963, he left newspapering. He worked for a while at the New Republic, then wrote an award-winning book about the trial of a group of Black Panthers. But by 1977, he was back to the daily deadline. Even a week’s time to write, he says, was too much. You over-report. You fret. And you come up with nothing better than you’d have teased out against the clock in a noisy newsroom.

As the hours ticked by at Newsday that afternoon, another reporter turned in a four-paragraph brief on the sentencing of the Mitsubishi manager. The editors decided that Ray Kelly’s lunchtime critique of his police department successors merited not only a full report, but a transcript on the Op-Ed pages.

Kempton would be in the Op-Ed package too, with a reprint of his foreword to “Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events.” There he wrote, in a flourish worthy of Walt Whitman, “I write every day for the next and walk wide of the cosmic and settle most happily for the local.”

But having forgone Kelly and the corporate rapist, what would Kempton settle for that day?

About 740,000 readers found the answer on page A13 the next morning: Murray Kempton on Mayor Giuliani, Police Commissioner Bratton and civility. It was the thorn that had needled him over coffee--Bratton’s sniping at his critics. It was the stew that had simmered inside him as he wound his way through the courts and the rain. He wrote of the budget and civil liberties watchdogs as he’d spoken: “They are doing what they are paid to do, and their utterances would be proper cause for such offense only if they weren’t.”

Then he wrote something more, praising the critics over the thin-skinned officials: “No man serves us better than the one who accepts his faith, labors in its vocation, and takes his pay and works to earn it by devotion to his task.”

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A commuter scanning those lines on the subway would be hard-pressed to devise a more accurate tribute to Murray Kempton, reporter, himself.

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