EVER SINCE graduate school, I've had a deep appreciation for the incisive writing of Murray Kempton, the Pulitizer Prize-winning columnist who died last week at the age of 79.
He wrote a lot about American politics and just about everything else - beginning in the 1940s for the New York Post and, in recent years, for Long Island's News-day.I confess to admiring Kempton because he was clever without being mean. He was an intellectual marvel who could sense all the nuances in any story.
While studying history at the University of Utah, I was especially impressed with an article Kempton wrote in Esquire (September 1967) called "The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower."
In it, Kempton took a long, hard look at the avuncular but seemingly ineffective "Ike," who, as president in the 1950s, was very popular as a father figure. Yet historians quickly dismissed his presidency as the time of "the great postponement."
A popular "doll joke" during his presidency asked, "Ever hear of the Eisenhower doll? You wind it up, and it does absolutely nothing for eight years."
Pretty tough joke, but it captured the spirit of the "chairman of the board presidency," in which Ike was thought to have heavily delegated authority to Cabinet members and operated mostly as a passive leader who loved golf.
Only six years after Ike left office, Kempton questioned that interpretation, suggesting that Eisenhower was much smarter and more effective than historians claimed.
Kempton said, "Dwight Eisenhower was as indifferent as Calvin Coolidge, as absolute as Abraham Lincoln, more contained than John Kennedy, more serpentine than Lyndon Johnson, as hard to work for as Andrew Johnson."
According to Kempton, Ike was so comfortable in his own skin and so assured of his own military stature that he was not worried what historians would say about him as president.
Kempton suspected the seemingly passive president who "had not the slightest concern for how things might look" was actually active and assertive.
"He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years. We laughed at him; we talked wistfully about moving; and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell."
Kempton's seminal work prompted historians to take a second, kinder look at Eisenhower. His image from the 1980s on has brightened considerably. Fred Greenstein, Ike's most compelling biographer, said he administered the presidency with "a hidden hand."
Kempton was not as fond of Reagan, whom he described this way: "For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself."
In his last column, published in Newsday on Jan. 15, Kempton described President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, neither of whom he admired, as sharing "a readiness to have God frequently on their lips and a habitual tolerance for the seven deadly sins commanding for attention within. And, unlike Dick Morris, they are much too smart to admit anything."i
As insightful as he was, Kempton was never self-impressed and did not consider himself to be a very good writer.
I talked to him just once - last year - when he was the first selection of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at our annual convention held at Snowbird. As convention chairman, I called him in New York and invited him to speak to us.
Kempton was humble, self-effacing and ironically confessed to being worried about being able to hang on to his job.
"I really don't think I could be away from the office that long," he said.
I still think he was a prime candidate for the honor, especially since honor was something he never sought. As another New York columnist, Jimmy Breslin, said, "He put more honor into the newspaper business than anybody in our time."
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Dennis Lythgoe, whose column is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, may be reached at (dennis@desnews.com).