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Murray Kempton, of blessed memory. He was the most graceful prose stylist I have ever read in daily newspapers in my own lifetime other than William F. Buckley, Jr. (who happened to be his longtime friend - and who nagged him long enough that he finally assembled and published, in 1993, his splended anthology, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events), and he was one liberal who didn't suffer fools or B.S. artists gladly even in his own ideological camp. It was Kempton who actually began the pinpricking of Lillian Hellman's unwarranted reputation as a courageous liberal crusader (she, like her lover Dashiell Hammett, was a Communist; Kempton had become an anti-Communist liberal in the early 1950s, when he was making his reputation as a sharp reporter on the organised labour beat), when he exposed a few of the more pointed falsities in her despicable Scoundrel Time ("I would not want her overly much as a comrade," Kempton purred witheringly in the piece); it was Kempton, moreover, who was the first - and, for time enough, the only - liberal to say forthrightly that Bill Clinton was a disreputably untrustworthy liar even before Droopy-Drawers got elected. He also skewered Jimmy Carter - possibly the first liberal to do so - when it was exposed that Carter, in the runup to the Persian Gulf war, had written the heads of state of the U.N. Security Council member countries asking them not to support what began as Operation Desert Shield. ("Such," Kempton fumed, "is the inescapable effrontery of anyone who sets out to persuade the voters that they were wrong not to re-elect a saint." I have saved a copy of this column.)

And, as ironic as it may seem to many, Richard Nixon received no more empathetically humane sendoff in print - both in the last days of his illness and upon his death - than the four columns Murray Kempton composed in tribute in New York Newsday. (Kempton, interestingly, had long acknowledged a personal affection for Nixon that traced back to when one of Kempton's own children had been killed in an accident - Nixon had sent him a particularly embracing personal note of sympathy, and it touched Kempton deeply enough that he took pains to distinguish writing about Nixon politically from writing about Nixon personally, which may explain in part why Kempton was never considered material for the enemies list...)

He could also write with grace and insight about matters out of the political bullring - I have read essays by Kempton on Louis Armstrong, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, and the 1962 Mets that deserve wider reading. (As a matter of fact, Kempton's essay on the 1962 Mets and the return of the National League to New York is included in the new anthology edited by Nicholas Dawidoff, Baseball: A Literary Anthology.) In fact, Kempton received a Grammy award in 1986 for his contribution to the Frank Sinatra box set, The Voice: The Columbia Years, 1941-52; it was Kempton who wrote the gracious liner note to the fourth album in the box, Standards.

Kempton was something of a character in his understated, gentlemanly way. He was famous for making his way around New York City on a classic old three-speed bicycle of the sort we called, ages ago, the English racer. I sometimes saw him pedaling about - he was impossible to miss, with his shock of whitening red hair and horn-rim, almost military-style eyeglasses, and his overcoat, aboard that bicycle. In fact, when New York Newsday launched a brisk television ad campaign to promote the paper, they amplified Kempton as a selling point, showing him tooling about on his bike, then panning to a closeup-enough view of him, with the man himself saying, "I guess I've been around so long that people think they kind of have to like me." (This was shortly after Kempton won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, in 1985, an award that prompted George F. Will to note that it finally honoured "the class of our class".)

My favourite story about Murray Kempton (other than his having been a personal copy boy for H.L. Mencken for the last national convention Mencken ever covered, in 1948, before the stroke that forced his retirement): He was attending an awards ceremony for a prize given to journalists that was named after a reporter, I forget whom specifically. At the end of the evening, he lamented to his dinner companion that the one prize he wished he had ever won was this particular prize. His companion was astonished. "But Murray, you've won the Pulitzer!" "The Pulitzer," Kempton answered, "is named for a publisher. I'm rooting for my real friends - the reporters."