The real founder of the New Journalism - Murray Kempton; includes related article

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by David Halberstam

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The first time I saw Murray Kempton was 39 years ago, in the summer of 1955, when he was covering the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi for the New York Post. I was 21 that summer, working as a reporter in a small town in the northeast part of the state, and I had decided to do a magazine piece for the old Reporter on the way different reporters covered the trial. I had subscribed to about a dozen different papers and clipped them every day, and although I was never able to pull the piece off, there was never any doubt about who was the most brilliant and lyrical writer covering the trial.

Every day it seemed there was one more of his columns in the Post, and they were the work of a master craftsman writing at his best. They were more like small, almost perfect short stories, catching the rage and the fear as well as the curious humanity of Mississippi in that terrifying summer. If there was an inventor of something called the New Journalism, I always thought it was not Tom Wolfe and his colleagues working for a dying Herald Tribune a decade later. Rather it was Murray Kempton, writing those marvelous nonfiction short stories from Sumner, Mississippi, in 1955. Twice on my day off I ventured over to Sumner to watch the national reporters in action, those mighty figures from the great metropolitan dailies whose ranks I one day wanted to join, and though we did not meet that year (I did not have the courage to approach him), I watched Murray carefully from afar. He was a slender figure even then, perfectly dressed in the summer uniform of the national reporter in that pre-air conditioning age: cord jacket, button-down shirt, striped tie, khaki pants.

He had about him a dignity that everyone else covering the trial, save Johnny Popham, the wonderful New York Times reporter, lacked, and he seemed a man at once at the center of the reporters covering the trial, a peer figure of great renown--as the best writer in any group of reporters is always at the top of the pecking order-and yet somehow a man apart, working to his own rhythms and cadence, a man who looked and saw things that others did not see, and listened and heard things that others did not hear.

Jay Milner, who was covering the trial for Hodding Carter's Greenville Delta Democrat, knew the territory, became a kind of bodyguard for Murray in those days, and later became a friend of mine. Jay told me what great fun it was to pal around with Murray, often drinking with him into the very late night, and that Murray had arrived with the perfect reporter's kit: not just the right summer clothes for a blazing Mississippi summer, but far more importantly, his own portable record player and his own collection of 33 1/3 LPs. almost all blues, which he played while he wrote through the night in his motel room in Clarksdale. Jay thought Murray had decided to bring with him to Sumner a portable record player in order to capture the mood of the region, which he suspected, quite properly, would be excluded from the record of the trial at Sumner.

I met Murray for the first time some seven years later at a ceremony where we were both picking up awards. I was then reporting from the Congo, and we spoke for a brief time, not about American politics, and God knows not about the Congo, but about which American jazz figure was at that moment our musical export with the broadest popular base. As I recall, he suggested Thelonious Monk, while I thought it was the pre-Diet Pepsi Ray Charles. With that our friendship could begin. Over the years we have remained friends, and because we have remained friends, and because he has a friend who lives on the street where I live, I see him often now, a slender elegant figure defying the traffic of New York on his bicycle, wearing those old-fashioned metal cuffs on his pants so that his trousers won't get caught in his bike.

He always wears a Walkman and he has, I suspect, Mozart or Schubert or Monk playing so that he can drown out the modern song of New York. I am usually walking my dog when we meet, and we linger and our conversations are wonderful and eccentric, for conversation with Murray is like listening to the flight of a great modern jazzman; it is as much rift as it is conversation, it takes off in flight, goes off in one direction, footnotes itself, changes direction, one subject constantly slipping into another, each reference bringing up yet another, as ever esoteric and ubiquitous: the decline of whatever New York mayor currently is in office, the unfortunate duplicity of whoever is president, the melancholia of being a sports fan in New York, the beauty of Michael Jordan. The conversations are always enriching, for he is usually trying out his columns on his friends, talking them out to see how they sound. The latest volume of his work, the first collection of Kempton since 1963, is Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, which brings together writings from the Post, Newsday, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.