What The Hell America!

Going Around
Selected Journalism
by Murray Kempton
Seven Stories, 460 pp, $29.95

FROM THE MIDDLE TO THE END of the twentieth century, the streets of New York City were source, subject, and muse to the writer Murray Kempton. He was a true working journalist, by which I mean that he spent many of his days biking around the city looking for his next story. Some knew him as an author with one or two well-regarded books under his belt, sure—but if we want to get at Kempton’s essence, we will find him to be a perfect representative of a type that has all but disappeared: the old-school newspaper columnist.

Unlike many of today’s columnists, Kempton didn’t limit himself to trafficking in political commentary or offering second-day reactions to the news. He saw himself as a reporter to the end, when he was pushing 80. “All my life,” he wrote in 1995, “when called upon to identify myself to the Internal Revenue Service . . . I have preferred to enter not journalist, not columnist, not commentator, certainly not author, but simply . . . ‘newspaper reporter.’”

Born in Philadelphia in 1917, he was raised by his mother and his aunt in Baltimore, where he spent his formative years listening to jazz (he was particularly into Count Basie and Bessie Smith) and reading articles by a local newspaperman named H.L. Mencken. Kempton briefly joined the then-liberal New York Post before World War II and rejoined the paper after the war. He’d spent most of the rest of his life working for daily papers like the New York Sun and Newsday, with a stint editing the New Republic in the mid-1960s. But he also freelanced for the weeklies and monthlies: This collection includes pieces written for Playboy, Grand Street, and the New York Review of Books. He never stopped working, filing columns up until shortly before he died in 1997.

And indeed, throughout Going Around, one can read him reporting on anything and everything. He reflects on the lives of Emmett Till and Tupac Shakur, examines Donald Trump and Karl Marx, chastises Ed Koch and Roy Cohn Jr., and looks for meaning in the downfall of Robert Oppenheimer. He even writes with humor about getting mugged and having his bike stolen. This is not the niche work of a specialist, and nor is it the smoothly faux-sophisticated work of someone with Wikipedia (or, God forbid, ChatGPT) at their fingertips. Instead, Kempton’s writing is that of an observant person in conversation with the world around him—and of someone hungry for the next story. In a December 1987 column occasioned by his 70th birthday, Kempton offered this reflection on his career:

I have seen Robert Kennedy with his children and John Kennedy with the nuns whose fidelity to their eternal wedlock to Christ he strained as no other mortal man could. I have been lied to by Joe McCarthy and heard Roy Cohn lie to himself and watched a narcotics hit man weep when the jury pronounced Nicky Barnes guilty. Dwight D. Eisenhower once bawled me out by the numbers, and Richard Nixon once did the unmerited kindness of thanking me for being so old and valued an adviser. . . .

Most of life’s epiphanies arise from its accidents, and it is never so much fun as when it conscripts us as prisoners to the luck of the day.

IN ADDITION TO KEMPTON’S OWN WRITING, little snippets of others’ writing about him have been dropped in throughout the book. One excerpt comes from his FBI file; others have been clipped from profiles written about him. One that this collection’s editor, Andrew Holter, passed over, but which gets at the matter directly, comes from Garry Wills 1994 review of Kempton’s book Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events: “I go away from most Kempton pieces feeling that no one has better caught his subject.” Reading through this collection, I felt I understood just what Wills meant. Kempton’s skill as a journalist was, in a way, self-effacing. In his best and most mature work, he doesn’t make much of his vocabulary or regale his readers with complex, long-winded sentences. His real gift comes out in the way he is able to penetrate and see into his subjects.

Among the pieces collected in Going Around, the one that offers the best example of this talent in action is Kempton’s 1967 profile of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, written for Esquire. He explains how Eisenhower hid a formidable intelligence behind a mask of innocence and charm, one that he refined through years of practice. “It was the purpose of his existence,” writes Kempton, “never to be seen in what he did. When he fired Sherman Adams, his chief of staff, as a political liability in 1958, Adams thought it was Nixon’s doing. While he was coldly measuring the gain or loss from dropping Nixon as his 1952 vice-presidential candidate, Nixon thought it was Thomas E. Dewey’s doing.” A few pages later he gets to how and why Eisenhower got this way: “He learned to play bridge well because his pay did not cover losing money to civilians. He is equipped to respond to any challenge which seems to him sensible.” By the end of the piece, Kempton has used Eisenhower’s skill at cards to throw light from new angles on the man’s political repertoire: The president was a knack for clever bluffs, the ability to say one thing while meaning another, and a strong awareness of when to show emotion for maximum advantage (and just how much to show, too). In only a few pages, Kempton offers you as good a picture of the president’s mind as you might get from a much longer biography.

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Kempton’s skills extend beyond his ability to get an inside view of his subjects. He writing is alive with witty asides and clever one-offs. About Nixon’s attempts to secure an apartment at the fancy 61 East 72nd Street building, Kempton wrote: “He dared to bargain with Brezhnev and Mao, but he knew better than to try to bargain with an East Side co-op.” On Trump: “We are assured that God does not make trash, which thought disposes of the impression that Donald Trump is not altogether a self-made man.” And my favorite Kempton mot, on former New York City mayor Ed Koch: “New York is a city of beggars, separated into the two classes of those who are capable of shame and those who aren’t; the Koch who scorns abject beggars smears his mouth with the shoe polish in his dealings with arrogant ones.”

Going Around covers a very long period. The selection includes pieces ranging across six decades, from an early item originally published in 1936 to an article Kempton wrote shortly before he died in 1997. As a result, this is a long book that also feels incomplete. For every column and feature story that Holter chose to include, you feel the ghostly presence of another that is missing. The sort of ephemera beloved by completionists—a piece on the New York Mets’ first season at the Polo Grounds, scripts from his stint at CBS Radio in the 1970s, excerpts from an unfinished memoir—are here, but some heftier items, including his essay on Machiavelli, his coverage of the 1976 Republican National Convention, and a long profile of Paul Robeson, aren’t. Neither are any excerpts from those well-regarded books: Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties and The Briar Patch. It’s a shame to miss them here, sure, but that’s simply to be expected with any collection that presumes to gather a representative body of work from a writing career as long and varied as his. (Thankfully, too, those three essays, at least, are available in an earlier Kempton anthology.)

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Ultimately, though, the collection left me with a rueful impression. That’s because it prompted me to wonder: Whatever happened to this kind of reporter? When I was growing up in the Toronto area, we had newspaper columnists of our own who’d been cast in the Kempton mold: Joey Slinger and Joe Fiorito are two such figures who wrote about the city with verve while covering anything and everything. But the conditions that allowed for their careers—and those of others like them, like legendary New Yorker reporter Joe Mitchell—have disappeared. With the consolidation of print media ownership and the collapse of print advertising revenue, newspapers have repeatedly slashed budgets and, as a result, their coverage. There is no Murray Kempton–style reporter working at the Toronto Star or the New York Times anymore, although we do have writers like Luke O’Neil and Rosie DiManno who cover similar ground.

And that makes Going Around all the more important for readers. We used to have journalists whose beat was the life of their community, who took their bikes around the city to report on what was happening and wore out the soles of their shoes chasing stories. And if we had that once, we can have it again, even if it must come back to us in some new form. Let Kempton show us how it was once done.