Mandarin with a Knife

By CHARLES MICHENER

Could any other tabloid newspaperman have been found on a New York City sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, puffing a pipe and surveying the passing scene while listening to the music of Henry Purcell? It was Monday, the one working day he wasn't on deadline, and Murray Kempton was happy to slip off the earphones of his portable CD player and muse about Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events (Times Books; 570 pages; $27.50), a new collection of his writings.

Comprising 70-odd pieces from such journals as the New York Post, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the current home of his column, New York Newsday, Kempton's book calls forth a cavalcade of heroes and scoundrels of the past 50 years and more -- among them Benito Mussolini, F.D.R., Richard Nixon, Bessie Smith, Karl Marx, Goya, Roy Cohn, Cassius Clay and one Stella Valenza, a housewife on trial for "hiring three mechanics to rid her of her husband, Felice." To Kempton, the insignificant deserves as much attention as the momentous; he gives the auctioning of Marilyn Monroe's address book the same careful scrutiny as the postcommunism paralysis in Russia. Altogether, Rebellions provides proof of the conclusion reached long ago by its author's many admirers: Murray Kempton possesses one of the most penetrating minds in American journalism.

He speaks in tones as courtly as those of the English Baroque composer whose anthems he had clamped to his ears. At 75, wire-thin, white-haired and dressed in his working uniform of gray suit, white shirt and red tie, he more than ever fits Russell Baker's description of him as "the wise Episcopal bishop." Raised in a distinguished Old South family fallen on hard times, Kempton might be describing himself when he writes of the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph: "His only vanity is his manners."

Irony -- for which he has perfect pitch -- is his weapon of choice: "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 ((prison)) with a reference to Frank Costello." In the sentence that opens an essay about one of his favorite subjects, the tragedy (or comedy) of the self-deluded rebel, Kempton dryly sums up another progressive hero: "Paul Robeson's was a career whose rise and fall were both tethered to his identity as a man of conspicuous color." Kempton's asperity can be hilarious. Of the proprietor of Umbertos Clam House in New York's Little Italy, he writes, "Matthew Ianniello has been lost to Mulberry Street and on long-term lease to the federal prison system since 1986, and where are the scungilli of yesteryear?"

What really distinguishes these pieces is their sorrow -- particularly for the plight of American blacks and society's losers. Kempton measures leaders by their capacity for compassion, summing up the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. with this pronouncement: "A great man is one who knows that he was not put on earth to be part of a process through which a child can be hurt." His eye for the telling detail is never more acute than when rendering a scene of loss. Here he is describing Jacqueline Kennedy and her family entering St. Matthew's Cathedral at J.F.K.'s funeral: "And the children in their sunny pale blue coats began walking with their mother up the stairs, the little boy stumbling only at the vestibule, and then they were gone."

A columnist of the left, Kempton is anything but doctrinaire. He sympathizes as easily with Richard Nixon during his troubles over the buying of a Manhattan co-op as he excoriates Alger Hiss for failing to offer State Department protection to an American victim of Stalin. His prescience is often uncanny. Writing of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California in 1968, he could have been summing up Reagan's presidency 20 years later: "For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself."

Magisterial in style, Kempton has the mandarin's essential modesty. Sitting now over coffee, he is asked about the trials of continuing to put out a column four times a week, and he says: "The thing about writing at my age is you know when you're bad. But the thing about a column is you don't have any excuse for not writing." The columns have never been widely syndicated, and Kempton has shunned the limelight of TV punditry. Nor has he ever been granted the prestige of writing for, say, the New York Times. He does not regret it. "I like writing for the tabloids," he says. "I like being not over- conscious about the importance of what I say. Since, of course, there's very little importance to what you do say."

That, in Kempton's case, is untrue. When he goes on to remark, "There are very few columnists the insides of whose heads are lastingly interesting," he identifies exactly what gives this feast of Kemptoniana its permanent appeal.