New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield Page A

appearance. No motorcycle gear for Murray: rep tie, tweed jacket, and cordovan shoes. He noticed other people’s clothes as well. When I introduced him to the literary agent James Oliver Brown, he complimented Jim on his English shoes. Once when I showed up in Murray’s office at the Post wearing a raggedy sport shirt and corduroys in need of a press, he looked at me with a grimace and said, “You look like something out of Judge Horowitz’s court.” That judge sat on juvenile delinquency cases.
    Murray discussed books, baseball, and politics with equal fascination and interweaved them all, if you could only see the pattern. He knew the details of everything, from Shoeless Joe Jackson’s batting average the year before the World Series to Thomas Jefferson’s reading preferences after he left the presidency. While we were both covering the Teamsters Union convention in Miami that elected Jimmy Hoffa president, I found Murray in his hotel room poring over what he said was the key to understanding this whole damn thing—Robie Macauley’s new introduction to Ford Madox Ford’s novel Parade’s End .
    Once I had lunch with Murray and with Marion Magid, whom Ithought of as one of the most brilliant and witty people I knew in New York. Even she sometimes felt daunted by the rush of Murray’s conversational connections and allusions. “After lunch with Murray,” she told me, “my mind is so tired I feel like I have to lie down for an hour.” We ate at Le Moal, a fancy East Side French restaurant near the office of Marion’s magazine where many of its editors dined, and Murray dubbed it “the Commentary commissary.” That consonance reminded him of the time he was having lunch at an Italian restaurant during the McCarthy era. As the diners discussed who was now an anti-Communist and who had become an anti -anti-Communist, the waiter came. A jaded reporter, despairing of getting everyone’s latest affiliation straight, tossed aside his menu and said, “I’ll have an anti-antipasto.”
    Toward the end of the summer of my work for Mills in 1955, I began to read about the case of a Negro boy from Chicago named Emmet Till, who was murdered in Mississippi for the crime of whistling at a white woman. The trial, scheduled to take place in the little town of Sumner, in the Mississippi Delta, promised to be one of those turning points in our history, a classic American courthouse drama like the Scopes trial, and I ached to go down and write about it. But not only did I need money to get there; I had to have credentials. I needed an assignment, and yet I hadn’t published anything in a magazine and so had no contacts. I called Murray Kempton.
    Murray was to cover the story for the Post , and he’d also been asked to do a piece for The Nation , which he didn’t feel he could or should write in addition. He picked up the phone and told the editor of The Nation that he ought to let a young guy named Dan Wake-field do the story for him. Completely on Murray’s recommendation, The Nation gave me a letter of introduction as credentials and the bus fare for the trip (I think it amounted to forty bucks).
    When I got the assignment, a line came into my head by John Reed, who wrote somewhere that when he knew he was going on one of his first foreign stories, it was like “being on the edge of a beautiful dream.” I was there. The dream was not just the story, and not just the nightmare of Emmet Till’s death, but the opportunity of being on the scene to transcribe in my own words a meaningfulmoment in American history, and the promise of doing it again in other places, for other big stories.
    On the bus that took me to Sumner (“A Good Place to Raise a Boy,” a sign just outside town proclaimed with what seemed now a dark irony), I purposely sat next to a Negro woman, as if to show my comradeship. She smiled and asked me, “Are