The real founder of the New Journalism.

4

The first time I saw Murray Kempton was 39 years ago, in the summer of 1955, when he was covering the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi for the New York Post. I was 21 that summer, working as a reporter in a small town in the northeast part of the state, and I had decided to do a magazine piece for the old Reporter on the way different reporters covered the trial. I had subscribed to about a dozen different papers and clipped them every day, and although I was never able to pull the piece off, there was never any doubt about who was the most brilliant and lyrical writer covering the trial.

Every day it seemed there was one more of his columns in the Post, and they were the work of a master craftsman writing at his best. They were more like small, almost perfect short stories, catching the rage and the fear as well as the curious humanity of Mississippi in that terrifying summer. If there was an inventor of something called the New Journalism, I always thought it was not Tom Wolfe and his colleagues working for a dying Herald Tribune a decade later. Rather it was Murray Kempton, writing those marvelous nonfiction short stories from Sumner, Mississippi, in 1955. Twice on my day off I ventured over to Sumner to watch the national reporters in action, those mighty figures from the great metropolitan dailies whose ranks I one day wanted to join, and though we did not meet that year (I did not have the courage to approach him), I watched Murray carefully from afar. He was a slender figure even then, perfectly dressed in the summer uniform of the national reporter in that pre-air conditioning age: cord jacket, button-down shirt, striped tie, khaki pants.

He had about him a dignity that everyone else covering the trial, save Johnny Popham, the wonderful New York Times reporter, lacked, and he seemed a man at once at the center of the reporters covering the trial, a peer figure of great renown--as the best writer in any group of reporters is always at the top of the pecking order-and yet somehow a man apart, working to his own rhythms and cadence, a man who looked and saw things that others did not see, and listened and heard things that others did not hear.

Jay Milner, who was covering the trial for Hodding Carter's Greenville Delta Democrat, knew the territory, became a kind of bodyguard for Murray in those days, and later became a friend of mine. Jay told me what great fun it was to pal around with Murray, often drinking with him into the very late night, and that Murray had arrived with the perfect reporter's kit: not just the right summer clothes for a blazing Mississippi summer, but far more importantly, his own portable record player and his own collection of 33 1/3 LPs. almost all blues, which he played while he wrote through the night in his motel room in Clarksdale. Jay thought Murray had decided to bring with him to Sumner a portable record player in order to capture the mood of the region, which he suspected, quite properly, would be excluded from the record of the trial at Sumner.

I met Murray for the first time some seven years later at a ceremony where we were both picking up awards. I was then reporting from the Congo, and we spoke for a brief time, not about American politics, and God knows not about the Congo, but about which American jazz figure was at that moment our musical export with the broadest popular base. As I recall, he suggested Thelonious Monk, while I thought it was the pre-Diet Pepsi Ray Charles. With that our friendship could begin. Over the years we have remained friends, and because we have remained friends, and because he has a friend who lives on the street where I live, I see him often now, a slender elegant figure defying the traffic of New York on his bicycle, wearing those old-fashioned metal cuffs on his pants so that his trousers won't get caught in his bike.

He always wears a Walkman and he has, I suspect, Mozart or Schubert or Monk playing so that he can drown out the modern song of New York. I am usually walking my dog when we meet, and we linger and our conversations are wonderful and eccentric, for conversation with Murray is like listening to the flight of a great modern jazzman; it is as much rift as it is conversation, it takes off in flight, goes off in one direction, footnotes itself, changes direction, one subject constantly slipping into another, each reference bringing up yet another, as ever esoteric and ubiquitous: the decline of whatever New York mayor currently is in office, the unfortunate duplicity of whoever is president, the melancholia of being a sports fan in New York, the beauty of Michael Jordan. The conversations are always enriching, for he is usually trying out his columns on his friends, talking them out to see how they sound. The latest volume of his work, the first collection of Kempton since 1963, is Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, which brings together writings from the Post, Newsday, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.

Though it is almost 40 years later, and the cast of characters has changed, and Homer Bigart and Johnny Popham have been replaced by men and women who were not even born at the time of that Mississippi summer, Murray remains in many ways the same figure he was then: elegant, graceful, admired by his peers (even though they are 40 years younger than the peers who once admired him) not just for the craftsmanship of his work, the high literary and reportorial quality of it, but also for his conduct as a professional, his unfailing courtesy and generosity to those around him, particularly those who are younger. He is loved and respected as very few people in this profession are. He is imitated almost as much as he is loved, but the imitators almost always fall short, for in the unlikely event that they can write nearly as well, they almost surely lack the intellect that also guides and distinguishes his work. And if by chance they have some of the intellect as well, they almost surely do little of his marvelous daily legwork. He is still very much the reporter, and his best columns are those where he gets out and does street reporting--"gets around," to use his own phrase.

He is a man driven by irony and self-deprecation, the great skeptic of the American Century. He has an unfailing instinct for the truth not just of a situation but of a person, and a profound sense of life's irony. He vastly prefers both people and ideas which are out of fashion, has a fond spot for the newly convicted, as opposed to those newly elected, and by instinct gravitates to the loser's locker room rather than that of the winner. It is said that Governor Cuomo, puzzled because Murray writes quite unsympathetically of him, once asked Sydney Schanberg of Newsday what he could do to have Murray write more favorably of him. "Get indicted," Schanberg told Cuomo. It is true that Murray is wary of positions that are fashionable, and of one young columnist whose work he does not admire, he told me rather coldly, "He has very safe opinions."

For much of the last six years I was working on a book on the fifties, and as such I went back over Murray's old columns and articles of that period. No one wrote better of that time, and rarely does any body of work stand up as well as his collections of pieces on that era, Part of Our Time. Occasionally I would call him to check up on something, and he would answer, and then I would reread what he had written in an old column, and I was stunned not just by the completeness of the contemporary answer but the fidelity of his memory of events, often 40 years after covering them. He managed to survive those years at the Post where he wrote five times a week, for peon's wages, the reward clearly, as that great Calvinist Dorothy Schiff thought, being in the doing.

Murray has been writing a column for some 50 years, and he is still very good; he still has the capacity to write beautifully; and he has the capacity to surprise the reader with his ideas. In addition, he remains a man of civility and decency and courage in a profession where each quality is almost always in short supply, now regrettably more so than ever.

David Halberstam's book on the 1964 World Series between the Yankees and the Cardinals, October 1964, will be published this summer.