WASHINGTON, D.C. -- I have managed to get to the threshold of middle age without ever having read through an entire Anthony Lewis column. It is utterly unnecessary to read beyond the lead to grasp the whole of Lewis's tendentious "thought." Ditto for most other liberal columnists you can name.

Such was not the case with Murray Kempton, who died on Monday of this week at the age of 79. For years I would always make a special effort to pick up Newsday or the New York Review of Books to see what outrageous view Kempton was promulgating this week. You always wanted to read all the way through Kempton, and then probably re-read him. His prose could be the reading equivalent of a wrestling match, and his thought process could stump the best medieval logician.

Kempton never fully abandoned the socialism of his youth, and remained one of the last dues-paying members of the Socialist party. But there was still something charming about his work for those of us with opposing views. William F. Buckley observed more than 30 years ago that Kempton's great virtue was his "impartial iconoclasm." "He is a poet, not an exegete," Buckley wrote. Just so.

I used to collect his leads in a file. Like this one:

"For more than a generation the atmosphere of the United Nations headquarters has been redolent with intimations that its very air conditioners have been fueled with sleeping powders. Inanition is a habit that dulls the senses."

Or this one, from 1987:

"The composition of Congress makes it peculiarly ill-equipped to engage a witness like Oliver North, who incarnates the heroic temperament that all but debars a lasting legislative career. A congressman encounters a hero on the benches around him too seldom to acquire the familiarity he needs to deal with a specimen of the breed when he meets one."


These samples make clear that if Kempton was ideologically wrong, he was dead-on with his perception of character, both individual and institutional. (He recognized, for example, that Alger Hiss was undoubtedly guilty.) And that was why he was worth reading. As Buckley wrote of him in 1963: "I have given the matter five minutes thought, and I can't come up with anyone so intensely partisan to whom all is forgiven, and whose most outrageous statements are allowed to rest in peace."

The passing of Kempton, along with the passing of Mike Royko last week, has deprived us of an original voice that belongs in the tradition of H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, writers notable because their style and character judgment was more significant than their ideology. In the Age of Al Hunt, the op-ed pages will now be even more of a snore-zone. I will miss Murray.

-By Steven Hayward