Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (Murray Kempton)
Brookhiser, Richard
E arly on in this collection of pieces written over the last thirty years, Murray Kempton praises the late columnist Westbrook Pegler, a lifelong hero, for his "fierce and unreasonable vanity about...
...When the world presents him with material his prejudices happen to match, his hands dance...
...He can't forgive Alpert for giving herself to such louts, and ends up sounding like John Crowe Ransom's old man in a dust coat trying...
...The one time his chivalry seems to fail here is in a review of the memoirs of Jane Alpert, a veteran of the Weather Underground: one of Kempton's more insightful pieces, but also his only acrid one...
...Every now and then, in the course of great events, the elements of tradition and innovation ally themselves and each one's weakness supplements the other and together they achieve the perfect debacle...
...Pegler would be proud to have made them...
...One wonders how Kempton, subbing for Burke, would have written up some dashing young priest-drowner in the Vendee...
...Murray Kempton's toolkit is a small set of prejudices...
...Although there are long tracts of this book which have to be traversed with weary foot and bleary eye—the piece on the 1968 Democratic convention is New Journalism at its most self-indulgent...
...That's simple enough, isn't it...
...but if not .. . probably not...
...The matter is not entirely simple...
...But when Kempton has a subject that is truly paradoxical, he, and we, are in Heaven...
...Alger Hiss always made his debut escorted by the gods: He came to Washington with a reference from Felix Frankfurter and he went to Lewisburg [penitentiary] with a reference from Frank Costello...
...This principle allows Kempton full enjoyment of his eclectic circle of acquaintances...
...Kempton always gives a woman a break, even Lillian Hellman, and the thought of men who do not gives him real pain...
...Kempton's ill-temper arises from being forced to contemplate the love life of radicals, c. 1969...
...when it doesn't, the effect is like watching a piano tuner fuss with a carburetor...
...And then, two-thirds of the way through the book, five home runs in a row, on the subjects of Marilyn Monroe, an S&M murder, an attempted murderfor-hire, an ancient Sicilian city, and Soviet architecture...
...If chance had sent a drowned priest's mother Kempton's way, he would of course be severe...
...The desire to nail down every last calibration produces those sentences that the magazine Seven Days once lampooned by diagramming...
...Because the man who liberated western Europe could not make faculty club conversation as well as Adlai Stevenson, he had been judged a dunce by those with the authority to make such judgments, including Kempton...
...The logical conclusion is almost always wrong...
...but as a writer...
...Terrorism had been this lovely word and now it was this horrid deed . . . whose reeking flower is the death of two policemen, either of whom, if he had seen Kathy Boudin at a loss on the street, would have come up to her and, with great respect, inquired, "Is there anything I can do for you, Miss...
...Some revolutionaries might he brutes from the word go, but Kempton is powerless to say so, until they have won...
...There aren't all that many human creatures more attractive than some revolutionaries can be, at least until they win...
...The trouble is, sometimes the matter is simple...
...E arly on in this collection of pieces written over the last thirty years, Murray Kempton praises the late columnist Westbrook Pegler, a lifelong hero, for his "fierce and unreasonable vanity about [his] craft...
...0 REBELLIONS, PERVERSITIES, AND MAIN EVENTS Murray Kempton Times Books /570 pages /$27.50 reviewed by RICHARD BROOKHISER 76 The American Spectator October 1994...
...But Kempton's piece was the word that had to be said before any other words could be...
...How odd, then, that he should be so often tempted by logic, not as a thinker Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...The classic instance is his 1967 essay in Esquire on Dwight D. Eisenhower, which changed the course of historians, if not of history...
...Sentences like this: "If our eyes were keen enough, the image of Stepin Fetchit might show them not a little about the protracted term beneath the notice of the general public that the craftsman can use for scouring the murk where hide the subtleties that even coarse performers require if they are to stick in our memories...
...Here are some of the main prejudices on exhibit: • The virtue of women...
...Lillian Hellman, for instance, was a Communist harpie with (a little) talent...
...Does this book bear him out...
...Hellman, could be the epigraph for the book...
...This phrase, from an essay on the aforementioned Ms...
...It is not the last word on Eisenhower: the question remains whether Eisenhower's guile served the country as well as it served him...
...Kempton clearly believes that the qualifying coda of this sentence, which is from a piece on El Salvador, brings it into line with his visceral hatred of revolutionary brutality (he cites Edmund Burke approvingly several times in this book...
...But Kempton, in Esquire, took a second look, and broke the news of Ike's cunning...
...If he likes someone, it does not matter whether they are Communists, or mobsters, or even anti-Communists: Kempton will never deny them what he imagines to be their due...
...if you want Kempton on the civil rights movement, go to his other collection of columns, America Comes of Middle Age (1963)—even in the badlands, keep a look-out for freshets like these: Harry Truman's Plain Speaking is as powerful an argument for measured and restrained discourse as Deep Throat must be for long underwear...
...This is also, of course, a projection of qualities Kempton hopes he has...
...But does it...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
