(The New York Times) James J. Kilpatrick, who was a prominent conservative voice for half a century as a newspaper editor and columnist, author and television personality, died Sunday in Washington at the age of 89. He died of congestive heart failure. James Jackson Kilpatrick was born on Nov. 1, 1920, in Oklahoma City, and grew up there as the son of a lumber dealer. He received a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and was hired as a reporter by The Richmond News Leader of Virginia in 1941. Mr. Kilpatrick was a prolific writer and a sharp debater, perhaps best remember for his intellectual combat with the liberal journalist Shana Alexander on "60 Minutes". When he wasn't tackling national issues, he took aim at flabby prose and bureaucratic absurdities. In the mid-1950's, Kilpatrick became something of a national figure, articulating constitutional arguments justifying the policy of "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation. He was once a strong supporter of segregation. He eventually dropped his defense of segregation a decade later.
Kilpatrick defined his ideological stance in Nation's Business magazine in 1978. "Conservatives believe that a civilized society demands order and classes, that men are not inherently equal, that change and reform are not identical, that in a free society men are children of God and not wards of the state," he wrote. "Self-reliance is a conservative principles," he continued. "The work ethic is a conservative ethic. The free marketplace is vital to the conservative's economic philosophy."
Mr. Kilpatrick's views on the larger issue of race came to the fore after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision outlawing school segregation. In a series of editorials, he provided a framework for Southern politicians resisting the court's decision. He popularized the doctrine called interposition, according to which individual states had the constitutional duty to interpose their separate sovereignties against federal court rulings that went beyond their rightful powers, and, if necessary, to nullify them. He debated on television with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and wrote on race and state's rights in The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (Regnery, 1957) and The Southern Case for School Segregation. (Crowell-Collier, 1962). He even wrote an article for the "Saturday Evening Post" in 1963 and claimed that the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race. Kilpatrick ultimately acknowledged that segregation was a lost cause and re-examimined his earlier defense of it. "I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920's and 1930," he told Time maazine in 1970. "I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, woudl like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50." Apart from surveying the national scene, Kilpatrick exposed overbearing local laws and judicial rulings.
I remember reading columns from James J. Kilpatrick in my local newspaper in the late 80's entitled, "The Writer's Art." He rallied against turgid prose. In his "On Language" column for the "New York Times Magazine", William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics." In 1966 he left The News Leaders after embarking on a column for the Washington Star Syndicate, "A Conservative," which was carried by newspapers throughout the country. Writing later for Universal Press Syndicate, which took over the Washington Star Syndicate, he continued "A Conservative View" until 1993, when he began a weekly coluumn "Covering the Courts," He ended that column in January 2008 and discontinued the other remaining column "The Writer's Art" in January 2009.
At his country home, Kilpatrick flew two flags, The Stars and Stripes and another alongside it that seemed to embody his views on the rights of individuals confronting the powers of the state. That flag, from the era of the American Revolution, bore the image of a snake and the inscription "Don't Tread on Me."
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