When Theo Lippman Jr. called and offered to
write a remembrance of Murray Kempton '39, who passed away in
May, the decision was an easy one: Who better to write about one
of this country's finest columnists than a veteran newspaperman
himself? (See "Imperishable
Prose".)
Lippman, who wrote for the editorial pages of The Baltimore
Sun from 1965 through 1995, says he's long been a fan of
Kempton. Their paths began crossing at political conventions in
the early 1960s, around the time Lippman started covering the
national political scene. "I worked and lived in an age in which
journalists who tried to write about everything did it very
poorly--except for him," Lippman says. "He was quite a
rarity."
Lippman followed Kempton's work closely over the years. Before
sitting down to write the tribute that appears in this issue, he
revisited several collections of Kempton's work. "What reinforced
my appreciation of him was how well it stood up," Lippman says.
In daily newspaper journalism it's "typical for prose to be
perishable," to lose something with the passage of time, he
points out. "But the things I read of Kempton's did, in fact,
last. It makes you sort of proud as a newspaperman to see another
newspaperman doing something quite outstanding--something that
survives, and has a quality of literature about it."
Lippman, who taught opinion writing at Hopkins in The Writing Seminars from 1987 through
1996, has now retired from both journalism and teaching; he makes
his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. --SD
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SEPTEMBER 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS.