[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 60 (Friday, May 9, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4287-S4289]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MURRAY KEMPTON
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on Monday of last week, Murray
Kempton died. With his passing, we mark the end of a legend in New
York, and in American journalism. Kempton was the kindest man and
toughest reporter we have known in our time. A certain incandescent
sweetness now departs. Yet his memory and, yes, his legacy remain.
The Daily News' columnist Sidney Zion captured Kempton's unique
ability and thus legacy when Zion wrote: ``Kempton used his power to
condemn, but loved his right to absolve. And when he absolved the
sinner, he owned the territory.''
This was Kempton's singular power. With characteristic flair, Kempton
would challenge corruption with voracity. Then instead of reveling in
victory, would show compassion for the humans beneath the deeds and
absolve the sins of some of the greatest losers in New York's history.
Carmine DeSapio, Alger Hiss, Carmine Persico, Roy Cohn. Such was the
power of the words which Kempton wielded.
When the reformers in the City had finally overcome DeSapio, one of
the great Tammany bosses, Kempton wrote, as only he could: ``The age of
Pericles had begun because we were rid of Carmine DeSapio. One had to
walk carefully to avoid being stabbed by the lilies bursting in the
pavements. I wish the reformers luck--with less Christian sincerity
than Carmine DeSapio does. I will be a long time forgiving them on this
one.'' Kempton felt sympathy and respect even for the rogue. He stood
up for the loser whether it was Carmine DeSapio, a deposed dictator, or
a shunned local New Yorker.
J. Edgar Hoover once called Mr. Kempton a snake and a rat. From one
who was once referred to by Mr. Hoover as a skunk, I take pride in
knowing that my work was seen in the same light as Kempton's. But I
fear no one else has what the Washington Post called, ``[Kempton's]
skeptical sympathy'' required to continue his work.
The Age of Kempton is over. Budding writers would do well to re-read
and emulate his work; public figures continue to thank and rue the day
Kempton chose them to be subject of his column; and for we who knew
him, only sorrow bursts through the cracks in our hearts today.
I ask that the following articles about Murray Kempton be printed in
the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
[From the New York Post, May 9, 1997]
Kempton's Funeral Is a Lesson in Simplicity
(By Christopher Francescani)
Even in death, Murray Kempton's disarming humility ruled
the day.
There were no eulogies at the legendary columnist's simple
Upper West Side funeral yesterday, although hundreds of the
city's greatest literary, political and newspaper voices were
on hand.
There were no limousines, although Kempton was considered
royalty among the city's press corps.
And there were no gaudy floral tributes, only small bursts
of potted cherry blossoms, Casablanca lilies and white
azaleas perched unassumingly on the altar.
But the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, who sounded off
for decades on every aspect of the city he loved, was
remembered--and remembered well.
``The funeral was pure Murray,'' Post columnist Jack
Newfield said. ``His manner, his grace, his kindliness, his
humility beyond self-effacement. He was the benchmark.''
Kempton, 79, whose gentle elegance and amusing
eccentricities won him the respect of virtually all of his
``fellow workers,'' died Monday at a Manhattan nursing home.
In a note written in 1989, entitled, ``My Funeral,'' he'd
requested a brief ceremony with no eulogies. His body was
cremated earlier this week.
``He chose a simple ceremony in the classic Anglican
manner, which focuses on God's love and the equality of all
persons in the face of death,'' said the Rev. Gaylord
Hitchcock of the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch.
``His [funeral] runs against the grain of most American
funerals, where the Mass turns into a celebration of the
person.''
Kempton, known among his colleagues as much for his
intricate sentence structure as for riding his three-speed
bicycle to news events--jazz humming through his headphones--
spent most of his 55-year career at the New York Post and
Newsday.
The Baltimore-born scribe, who once ran copy for H.L.
Mencken, won a Pulitzer for commentary in 1985.
The pews of the tiny Gothic-style church where Kempton
worshiped for decades were filled to capacity 30 minutes
before the ceremony began.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Mayor Giuliani pressed their way
through the crowd. Writer Nora Ephron sat pensively in a rear
pew as the church bell rang out 79 times, once for each year
of Kempton's life.
Columnist Jimmy Breslin, Post editor Ken Chandler, Daily
News editor Pete Hamill, writers Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip Roth
and Calvin Trillin, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer were there--
as were former Mayor David Dinkins, Manhattan Borough
President Ruth Messinger and hosts of other dignitaries.
Off to the side of the altar, a choir clad in black sung
hymns softly in Latin.
Some of Kempton's favorite passages from the Bible took the
place of speeches.
Instead, eulogies were whispered between pews and among the
crowd of mourners outside the chapel.
[[Page S4288]]
``He was the last great gentleman poet,'' said Post
columinist Liz Smith.
Writer David Halberstam said,
``I'll miss meeting him on the street, and having the
choice of talking about the Knicks, the mayor, the Clintons,
anything. He was great fun on every subject.''
``He was the soul of kindness,'' said WCBS Radio reporter
Irene Cornell.
New York Post managing editor Marc Kalech edited Kempton's
copy in the late 1970s, when the columnist worked at The
Post.
``Editing Kempton was like editing Shakespeare,'' Kalech
said. ``You'd read it, you'd struggle to understand it, and
then you wouldn't touch it.''
But perhaps the greatest tribute to one of New York's
greatest columnists came from someone who never met Kempton.
``I'm just a reader,'' explained Ray Belsky, a retired
health-care consultant who sat alone in the back of the
church.
``He touched me with his integrity. There was a courtliness
about everything he wrote. Even when he wrote about common
men, and common problems, he gave them the dignity they
deserved.
``I never met him. I just admired him and I read him . . .
every day.''
____
[From the Daily News, May 8, 1997]
Murray Kempton Was No Paper Saint
(By Sidney Zion)
I left the courtroom for the newsroom 35 years ago by
parodying Murray Kempton, and if I were true to his newly
minted ghost, I'd slip this fact into a fog bank somewhere
around midstream in this piece.
But every journalist who got a nod from Kempton became his
memorialist before I could get a word in edgewise, given the
tyranny of column calendars. He died Monday, and here it is
Thursday, so I play my credentials on top.
In December 1962 the New York newspapers were in the throes
of their longest strike. Victor Navasky, today the publisher
of The Nation, decided to put out a parody of the New York
Post, and he asked me to do Kempton. I was an assistant U.S.
attorney in New Jersey, but Navasky knew I was a Kempton
buff.
I wrote the column, and the next thing I knew I was being
pursued by the Post. I took a leave of absence from the
Justice Department and never got back to court.
Murray was bemused. He thought I was more than a little
crazy for this move, but I insist that it establishes me as
his true short biographer. Who else changed his profession,
his life, because of Kempton?
And I say that he wouldn't like the canonization that
greeted his death. Nothing bothered him more than good
intentions, so I feel free to patronize those who
sentimentalized him as the patron saint of the losers of the
world.
The losers' dressing room was indeed his locker, but only
because there were winners. He used his power to condemn, but
loved his right to absolve. And when he absolved the sinner,
he owned the territory.
Carmine DeSapio, Alger Hiss, Carmine Persico, Roy Cohn--all
cases in point.
Every phone call I received upon Kempton's death from old
pals mentioned first his great column on DeSapio the day the
Village reformers destroyed the Tammany boss.
Kempton had been in the forefront on the reform movement,
but when DeSapio was beaten, he wrote: ``The Age of Pericles
had begun because we were rid of Carmine DeSapio. One had to
walk carefully to avoid being stabbed by the lilies bursting
in the pavements. I wish the reformers luck--with less
Christian sincerity than Carmine DeSapio does. I will be a
long time forgiving them this one.''
This column drove the Village reformers crazy. But it was
classic, and Kempton repeated the theme until his death. Let
anyone else praise DeSapio, and Murray would have at him. He
knew why DeSapio was a dignified loser, but if you said so,
watch out.
The same with Hiss, and then some. Murray knew Hiss was
guilty because like Hiss, Kempton was a shabby-genteel
Gentile out of Baltimore--and a former Communist. (Everybody
I knew, Jew or Gentile, assumed Murray was a Jew--who knew
his first name was James?--and he wrote for the then-liberal-
Jewish New York Post.)
But Kempton had no time for the right-wing attackers of
Hiss. Hiss was his, and the rest were know-nothings.
None of this came to me until the day Murray ran into me on
Broadway and said he had attacked my book on Cohn. Always the
gentleman, Kempton said: ``Don't worry, I put it in a paper
that nobody will read.''
I said, ``But you were at every party for Roy, and with a
better table than I had.''
Murray cringed, and in that cringe I recognized that only
he could absolve the sinner. I had crossed over the line and
had to be punished.
He was the best there was in his time, don't get me wrong.
But he was the best because he was sly, he knew everything
about everybody, and only when he didn't want you to know it
he ran into fog banks, each one chartered by Kempton out of
Henry James.
And he was always ``cosmic,'' despite his denials. Murray
Kempton knew the cosmos and played it every time, whether
with Adlai Stevenson or John Gotti. They bury him today. He
smiles at the Maker, and vice versa.
____
[From Newsday, May 6, 1997]
``One of a Kind''--Murray Kempton Dies; ``Kindest Man, Toughest
Reporter''
(By Fred Bruning)
Murray Kempton, the erudite, pipe-smoking scribe whose
penetrating intellect made complicated issues seem simple and
whose audacious sentences made the English language more
joyously complex, died yesterday at the Kateri Residence, a
skilled nursing facility in Manhattan. Kempton was 79.
A son, Arthur Kempton, 48, said his father died at 4:40
a.m., apparently of heart failure.
In January, Kempton, a columnist at Newsday since 1981, was
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his son said. Kempton
recently underwent surgery and was being treated by
physicians at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
Manhattan.
Kempton's death prompted expressions of sympathy from a
multitude of admirers--President Bill Clinton among them.
``Hillary and I were deeply saddened today to learn of the
death of Murray Kempton,'' Clinton said in a statement.
``Murray's reporting during his illustrious 45 years in
journalism was marked by courage, honesty and compassion. He
represented the very finest of his profession and we will all
miss him.''
Kempton covered the campaign of Republican challenger
Robert Dole last year. Yesterday, Dole mourned Kempton.
``Murray is a longtime friend,'' Dole said. ``I enjoyed his
presence on the campaign plane. He will be greatly missed by
friends and family and his objective voice will be missed in
the world of journalism.''
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said of Kempton: ``He
was the kindest man and toughest reporter we have known in
our time. A certain incandescent sweetness now departs.''
Newsday publisher Raymond Jansen said Kempton's absence
from the paper represented a major loss. ``We certainly are
going to be poorer for his not appearing in our pages any
longer,'' Jansen said. ``He was unique. That term so many
times applies to people who really aren't, but in this case
he was truly one of a kind.''
Jansen said Times Mirror of Los Angeles, Newsday's parent
company, was to have presented Kempton with its Special
Distinction Award tomorrow in recognition of achievements
``epitomizing the very top of his field.''
For colleagues at Newsday, and for thousands of devoted
readers in New York and elsewhere, it will be difficult to
imagine a world without the wry, unyielding Murray Kempton to
help sort out the daunting issues of the day.
His last columns, published in January, were typically
eclectic--the pieces dealt with Presidential politics, bad
cops and corporate greed--and resonated with trumpet blasts
of the brash but sophisticated voice that Kempton had
cultivated over a half-century.
Writing about a woman who was suing the manufacturer of
artificial breast implants, Kempton said: ``Her case, whether
won or lost, will likely pass unremarked, because we are
already satiated with reminders that American corporations
are fixedly future-blind in engagements with the welfare of
their customers and for that matter of themselves.''
The paragraph was vintage Kempton--insightful, challenging,
artfully obtuse. In characteristic fashion, Kempton was
gleefully standing newspaper convention on its head by taking
the longest, not the shortest, path between two points. Aware
that his prose was viewed by some as unorthodox and
difficult, Kempton joked that he likely never would be
successfully sued for libel because no judge or jury would be
able to untangle his sentences.
Kempton could afford to be self-effacing. He knew that many
considered him a master of contemporary letters, a reporter
who took the journalistic form about as far as it could go, a
rare breed who found a way to survive as much on his powers
of analysis and abstraction as the assorted facts scribbled
in his notebook.
``He was like one of those comets hurtling past,'' said Les
Payne, a News Day assistant managing editor and a long-time
friend of Kempton.'' We will not likely see his kind again.''
In addition to the admiration of fans and co-workers,
Kempton earned the esteem of the publishing establishment. He
won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1985 and twice took
the respected George Polk Award. His book ``The Briar Patch''
won the National Book Award for contemporary affairs in 1974,
as well as a number of other honors. Among his most cherished
was a 1987 Grammy from the National Academy of Recording Arts
for liner notes accompanying the album, ``Sinatra--
Standards.''
Though he wrote regularly for News Day, Kempton contributed
to a wide range of publications. Over the years, his work
appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Commonweal, Life, Harper's, and
Atlantic Monthly.
He published four books. The last ``Rebellions,
Perversities, and Main Events,'' released in 1994, was
dedicated to his old pal, William F. Buckley Jr. The
conservative stance of Buckley, editor of the National
Review, did nothing to discourage Kempton, whose politics
strayed in another direction.
Kempton enjoyed persons who held contrary views and, in
turn, was revered by Americans of many persuasions. ``Murray
set a high journalistic standard,'' Sen. Alfonse
[[Page S4289]]
D'Amato (R-N.Y.) said, ``He was tough, but fair.''
Since a young man, James Murray Kempton prepared himself to
move easily among the American throng--as attentive to the
struggles of the ordinary citizen as the maneuverings of the
rich and powerful.
He was born in Baltimore on Dec. 16, 1917, and, as a young
man, became a devoted reader of the Baltimore Evening Sun--
and particularly of the Sun's iconoclastic essayist H.L.
Mencken. Drawn to newspaper work, Kempton found a job at the
Sun, attending his first national convention as a copy boy
for Mencken, his hero.
After graduation from Johns Hopkins University, Kempton
followed his leftist political instincts. He worked as a
labor organizer, wrote for the Young People's Socialist
League and the American Labor Party. Even in later years as a
reporter, Kempton played off his lefty background by greeting
colleagues as ``fellow workers.''
In 1942, Kempton joined the New York Post as a reporter but
with World War II intensifying, soon enlisted in the Air
Force.
During a three year hitch, Kempton served in New Guinea and
the Philippines. He once noted that he was assigned to a unit
called the Cyclone Division. ``They call it the Cyclone
Division because all its tents got blown down on maneuvers,''
said Kempton. ``That's how it is with my team every time.''
After the war, Kempton returned to New York and began his
writing career in earnest. He worked again for the Post and
then a succession of other publications--New Republic
magazine, New York World Telegram, New York Review of Books.
He taught journalism at Hunter College and ``political
journalism'' at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University.
While covering the civil rights movement for the Post in
1961, Kempton showed his wily instincts. Freedom Riders were
traveling by bus through the South to illustrate how blacks
were denied access to public accommodations. There had been
violence along the way, and likely, there would be more. In
Montgomery, Ala., journalists were told a busload of Freedom
Riders were heading out at 7 a.m. Other reporters piled into
cars to follow the bus. Kempton went them one better--he
bought himself a ticket that allowed him on the bus.
``He wrote a helluva story,'' said Michael Dorman, who
covered the Freedom Rides. ``It was a master stroke to buy
that ticket--and just the sort of thing Murray would do.''
At Newsday, Kempton's reputation preceded him but the new
man--a star by any measure--proved affable and without the
aura of celebrity.
Working out of the now defunct New York Newsday, Kempton
looked like an aging Ivy Leaguer--shirt and tie, natty suit
well-pressed--but had a gift for gab and generous nature that
neatly undercut his formal bearing. He loved jazz and the
blues and, as if that weren't enough to cement his man-of-
the-people reputation, Kempton traveled to the office by
bicycle. Murray Kempton couldn't drive.
On his 75th birthday, Kempton got a plant from a fan--the
wife of alleged mobster Carmine Persico, about whom Kempton
had written. Kempton said he had no talent for horticulture
and gave the plant, an amaryllis, to staff member Anthony
Destefano. The amaryllis thrived, but never flowered until
this spring, Destefano said, when it bloomed red, and bright.
By then, Kempton was seriously ill and his own brilliant
season almost through. But even feeling poorly, Kempton kept
his edge. Spencer Rumsey, a Newsday editor who checked
Kempton's columns, said that Kempton told him he likely got
sick because New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani kicked the Mafia
out of the Fulton Fish Market. ``When the mob was in charge,
you could always count on safe fish,'' Kempton said.
It was Kempton as Kempton would want to be remembered--
sassy, sardonic and unexpected. ``He represented the very
best that there is in this business,'' said Newsday Editor
Tony Marro. ``It was our great good fortune to have him as a
colleague and mentor, and we'll miss him terribly.''
Kempton is survived by three sons, Arthur, of
Massachusetts; David, of Fallsburg, N.Y. and Christopher, of
New York; and a daughter, Durgananda, also of Fallsburg. His
first wife, Mina, lives in Princeton, M.J. His second wife,
Beverly, died last year. A son, Murray Jr., died in an auto
accident in 1971. Kempton also leaves a companion, Barbara
Epstein.
A funeral is set for 11 a.m. Thursday at St. Ignatius
Episcopal Church, 552 West End Avenue, New York.
____
[From the New York Post, Tuesday, May 6, 1997]
Murray Kempton (1917-1997)
Murray Kempton, who died yesterday at 79, was one of the
mainstays of New York journalism. For more than half a
century--most of that time here at The Post--he brought to
his craft a unique perspective that made him a legend.
Though his famously wordy style could be dizzying, Kempton
had a reputation as a master phrasemaker. A congressman once
said that ``Sometimes I can't understand what he's saying,
but the end effect is enormous.''
Kemption never thought of himself as an oracle, but rather
as an observer. He was attracted to society's rogues and
underdogs and made an art form out of covering criminal
trials.
He described himself as a Normal Thomas Socialist--but he
avoided political orthodoxies of any stripe and believed
journalists should not wear labels.
``The trouble with thinking of yourself as a liberal or a
conservative,'' Kempton once wrote, ``is the danger that you
might unwittingly die to preserve an unconscious image. It's
not the reporter's responsibility to lie for a political
party, no matter what it is.''
Such attitudes might explain the esteem in which Kempton
was held by ideological friends and foes alike. When Kempton
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985, George Will proclaimed him
``the class of our class.'' William F. Buckley, Jr., even
while chiding his good friend's political naivete added: ``As
a columnist, Murray Kempton is the noblest of us all.''
____
[From the Daily News, May 6, 1997]
One of a Kind
The death of columnist Murray Kempton will provide over the
coming days an outpouring of praise and affection from the
journalistic community. And not a few anecdotes aiming to
capture Kempton's huge talent and equal heart.
What is remarkable is that all the best eulogies will have
the distinct advantage of being true. Kempton was a giant, a
man whose contributions to his craft, his city and his
country were unique to his generation. To say he will be
missed doesn't begin to capture the void he leaves.
____________________