James Jackson Kilpatrick – journalist, television commentator and analyst, Southern gentleman, friend to many of high and low station – has passed on to his eternal reward. He was 89.
Kilpo’s passing is the occasion for obits predictably respectful and harsh. And it is true, there were two Kilpos. The first was the younger newspaper reporter and editor at the Richmond News-Leader where he labored for nearly three decades and preached “massive resistance” to civil rights progress in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
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The second Kilpo repudiated his former radicalism and made a separate peace with the new world that emerged from the South’s second reconstruction. In those years, he rose to national prominence as the most widely read conservative columnist of his era, then as a pioneering television controversialist on an often-combative “60 Minutes” opinion segment shared with the liberal Shana Alexander.
His star on the national stage faded steadily thereafter, but those who knew him unfailingly spoke of two things about Kilpo – His gentlemanly grace with all whom he encountered and his passionate love for the English language and its proper crafting, especially by those blessed with the opportunity to be journalists.
Sadly, I only knew Kilpo from a distance, but he made a deep impression on me early in my adult years with a now-lost narrative about his childhood growing up in Oklahoma during the Oil Boom.
Several of the images he evoked in that essay – the hard-scrabble life of the oil field roughneck, the suddenly rich Osage chief with a shiny new car he couldn’t drive, the suicidal high-roller who had lost it all in a deal gone bad – opened my young eyes to two wonderful realities, one cerebreal, the other more practical.
The first was the sheer beauty and power of the well-chosen word. I’d loved reading as long as I could remember but Kilpo’s images awakened in me an appreciation for the delights of writing what others would read.
The second was the encouragement that came of knowing it was indeed possible for determined young men from Oklahoma to find their way to success in a much wider world by using their minds rather than their muscles.
Somewhere along the way, I also chanced to read a Kilpo essay in a now-forgotten coffee-table tome about the seasonal delights of living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Because I, too, had grown up in a mostly tree-less, brown and windy Oklahoma City, I perhaps had a deeper appreciation of the intense joy Kilpo described experiencing every time he looked out across a stand of lush Virginia “palms” or buried his senses in the glory of April’s azealas.
Kilpo was a flawed man, as are we all in our own ways, but after his heart was changed, he found a kind of redemption in giving so generously to others from the gifts with which he was blessed. I have no doubt he is now talking with St. Paul about the proper construction of a certain passage in Romans.
RIP. James Jackson Kilpatrick.
