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Wall Street Journal
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
What Motivated Murray Kempton's Pacifism?
I'm grateful to Charles Lane for reviewing 'Going Around,' the collection of Murray Kempton's journalism that I edited (Bookshelf, June 3). I think it would please Kempton to be remembered so fondly in the Journal, 'whose editorials shine the shoes and press the trousers of American enterprise,' he once wrote, 'and whose news staff undresses American business down to the follies and frauds blotching its naked skin.' That was a compliment. He was a loyal reader. Yet I have to risk discourtesy to Mr. Lane, who praised my 'intellectual honesty,' by hazarding a word in defense of Kempton's youthful noninterventionism. As Mr. Lane points out, Kempton's pacifism in the 1930s and early '40s reflected a dreadful misapprehension—genuine myopia—of what it would take to stop Hitler. But the left-wing version of noninterventionism that he and his radical cohort espoused was rooted in what was essentially a humane drive to avoid the calamity of another world war and the permanent elision of the New Deal's welfare state into a national-security 'warfare state.'
Wall Street Journal
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.
