With Malice Toward None

By the time he died on May 5, 1997, Murray Kempton had written more than 11,000 newspaper columns, mainly for the New York Post and Newsday, as well as hundreds of freelance essays on everything from his experience as a hapless mugging victim (for Playboy) to an abbot-close reading of the Newark federal prosecutor’s collected wiretaps of Simon Rizzo DeCavalcante (for The New York Review of Books). He was the one reporter in New York capable of covering a housing court trial on an August Tuesday in the Bronx through the dramatic prism of Aeschylus. Reliably, but without pretension or evident strain, he could summon a passage in Henry Adams’ “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres” as a way of explaining the wayward faith of John Gotti, late of Leavenworth maximum security. Kempton did not think much of secret sources, but over the years his subjects and acquaintances ranged from William F. Buckley Jr. to Carmine (the Snake) Persico; he was equally at home at the Morgan Library and the Ravenite Social Club. He got around. His targets were the men of arrogance, the ones who believed in nothing and risked less; he went to his grave disdaining Bill Clinton. His sympathy, which far outstripped his disdain, went to the weak, the mistreated, the lost and the fallen. One of Murray’s conceits was that, despite his own politics, it often seeme1679818752his affection and pity for Richard Nixon only increased as Nixon fell deeper into the abyss. When Mario Cuomo once asked Sydney Schanberg at Newsday how he could get Murray Kempton to love him, Schanberg replied, “Try getting indicted, Governor.”

Both as a man and as a reporter (Murray hated the grasping professionalism of “journalist”), Kempton was admired more widely and more deeply than anyone else in the trade. Younger reporters (and they were all younger after a while) loved him. He was, in so many ways, our ideal: a man of erudition and experience, of wit and character, of unbelievable energy and even greater generosity. His judgments only seemed surprising; as you came to know Kempton’s codes of forgiveness, chivalry and grace, you could begin to anticipate him and understand why he would shed tears for a soul such as Jean Harris--though fewer tears, perhaps, after he learned that she’d fired her gun a second and third time at the diet doctor who’d broken her heart.

Kempton was not unaware of the reverence directed toward him, nor was he unaware that he had become in some quarters a kind of New York character, an urban legend: the city’s last gentleman740294658the besuited reporter bicycling off to a Bellvue press conference while smoking a pipe and listening to the Diabelli Variations on his portable CD player. He enjoyed the admiration but was more than a little embarrassed by all the fuss. I never knew quite how embarrassed he really was until he was gone. The funerals and memorial services of reporters and even editors are, almost invariably, occasions for storytelling, myth-making and self-celebration. The last great gesture544171552Murray’s character was the funeral he designed for himself: On a fine spring morning, hundreds came to a grand Episcopal church on the Upper West Side expecting to hear the name Kempton uttered many times in affection, but Murray made sure we heard, again and again, the name of God. There was no storytelling at all, no charming speeches; rather we heard the elevated language of prayer, of Murray’s favorite hymns, we heard the music he loved and, finally, the sound of a bell tolling off his years. I can hear that bell now. Afterward, Murray’s daughter and sons, their families, his friends, his colleagues--even the mayor of New York City--came down the steps and into the sunligh1950031872we’d been made a little better, once more, by the craft and spirit of Murray Kempton. Once more he had proven himself an artist. As I say, the man knew how to write, even when he was quoting.

But while his friends and acolytes will tell Murray stories and quote his columns and remember him for many years to come, there is no getting around the fact that as the author of books Kempton was, in his lifetime, treated disgracefully. Only the publication in 1994 of “Perversities, Rebellions, and Main Events”--an omnibus collection of columns and essays--made a rotten situation a little less so. When Murray died, his other books--”Part of Our Time,” “The Briar Patch” and “America Comes of Middle Age”--had been out of print for years. For a reader of nonfiction, of journalism at its best and most ambitious, this was rather like being unable to find copies of “Homage to Catalonia” or “Patriotic Gore,” “The American Scene” or “The Fire Next Time.” It was intolerable.

“Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties” was the most sorely missed of all of Kempton’s books, his masterpiece. It was published in 1955, when Kempton was 38. His hair was still red. His sentences were a good deal simpler than the more baroque ones that would come to be his later (and inimitable) voice. He was, in years, still young, and yet “Part of Our Time” is a book of almost autumnal reflection on the radicals of his childhood and youth.

In form, “Part of Our Time” is a series of profiles or, as Kempton put it, “a series of novellas which happen to be about real persons”: Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, Elizabeth Bentley, Paul Robeson, Joe Curran, the Reuther brothers. Kempton takes on both the familiar and forgotten figures of the era and tries not merely to account for what they did but to ink about why. It is only secondtharily important to him, for instance, that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged; what matters most is what led this sorry man to his sins and, not least, how much the sins--and others like them--mattered at all. He surveys the literary figures of the era and tries to determine for himself the difference between the complicated commitments of the first-rate and the zealotry of the second-rate, the differences of mind and political passions between the authors of “To the Finland Station” and “Marching! Marching!”

But, more, “Part of Our Time” is a book about idealism, myth, engagement, commitment, foolishness, pride, delusion and, finally (and above all else) forgiveness. “Part of Our Time” is the book of a profoundly experienced man, one who came out of the world of shabby gentility in Baltimore (the world, Kempton tells us, of Hiss); one whose reaction to national collapse was a short stint first with the Young Communist League and then with the Socialist Party. After finishing Johns Hopkins, Kempton fought in the Pacific with the Fifth Air Force and then came home to be a newspaperman at the New York Post. I am just about the same age now that Kempton was when he wrote “Part of Our Time,” and when I reread that book I find in itence with the gods and the fools of his time, that is beyond me or any of my similarly coddled peers. It seems that Kempton had lived so much by the time he began writing “Part of Our Time” he was beyond the cynicism and the unforgiving impulses of the young. Writing on a subject that is almost always given to accusation or defense, Kempton adopts both a prose and a moral stance that speaks less of his understanding of Lenin and Marx than of Matthew and Mark.

“The thirties were a part of my life like any other,” Kempton writes in his author’s note, “I am aware that there are things in it for which I must apologize; I am also aware that in the whole of my life there will be many things for which I must apologize, under what have to be compulsions stronger than a Congressional subpoena.”

It is worth noting that no one was more delighted by the tragicomical end to Soviet communism than Kempton. And yet it is also worth noting the courage it took him, in 1955, in the America of Joseph McCarthy, to write with sympathy about those radicals of the ‘30s who believed in the myths of their decade. After living four years in Moscow and witnessing the downfall of Soviet communism, I came home at the end of 1991 to read article after article of triumphalism, of vitriol dumped in retrospect on the heads of men and women who, 50 and 60 years before, had made the mistake of showing sympathy to the foreign radical left. For so many of those writers I was reading then, figures such as Robeson, Walter Reuther and Clifford Odets were but mere punching bags set in a row for a good time. “Part of Our Time” goes a long way toward re-creating not merely the privations of the ‘30s, the economic and political conditions that led imperfect men toward foolish and violent ideologies, but also a moral landscape that was “blighted more than anything else by the absence of pity and mercy.” Because Murray Kempton had more pity and mercy within him than any writer of his time, he is the best writer to read on his time, of which he was so much a part.