14 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.'
