02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Going Around' Review: A Midcentury Witness
In November 1989 El Salvador's Marxist guerrillas launched an offensive against that country's U.S.-backed government. Foreign journalists not assigned to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall flocked to San Salvador. Among them was a thin, white-haired American, dressed in a suit and tie and riding a bicycle around the tropical streets: 71-year-old Murray Kempton. At one point, Kempton joined two correspondents, from the U.S. and Japan, to check out the fighting. Caught in a crossfire, the three scrambled for cover in a concrete stairwell.
'I haven't had this much excitement since the Philippines fighting the Japs,' Kempton cried. Then, remembering the colleague from Tokyo huddling nearby, Kempton quickly added: 'No offense intended, of course.'
Intrepid, cerebral, equal parts old-fashioned manners and revolution-curious politics—Kempton produced 11,000 newspaper columns, as well as books, essays and pamphlets, in the six decades bracketed by the presidential second terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. Before his death in 1997 at age 79, Kempton wrote for just about everybody, but most famously for Newsday, the New York Review of Books and the New York Post (mostly in its liberal incarnation before Rupert Murdoch bought it).
Kempton was to New York City roughly what Walter Lippmann was to Washington. His stock in trade, though, was not Lippmann's—high-level access. It was 'going around,' observing events, often on his bicycle. Hence the title of this collection of his writing.
