Local News - July 2003

Journalist covered world news over three decades

By CALEB HAWKINS, LTN Correspondent

These days, many people become bitter with the government merely by watching the news. For decades, Norman Kempster delivered the news straight from where it was happening and he isn’t bitter at all.

For the LA Times, Kempster was posted abroad, primarily in Jerusalem, then covered the State Department and the Pentagon.

He covered the White House for both the Washington Star and United Press International, the Senate and economic beat for UPI, and served as Deputy Bureau Chief in Sacramento and Bureau Chief in Olympia, both for UPI.

Kempster retired in December of 2001. His wife, Jane, had been part of a clergy team for seven churches in West Virginia.

When he retired, she was able to consider offers from other places. They decided on Lincolnton, and last June she became the minister for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

“Washington is a big city and there’s a lot of stuff going on, and Lincolnton is a small city and there’s a lot of stuff going on here, but it’s different,” Kempster said about the transition.

Even though he covered other subjects during his career, he considers the Middle East his specialty. Besides Jerusalem and Israel, he spent time in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Kempster said that when he covered the region, “it was a lot better than it is now, although the Israelis were fighting a real war in Lebanon. But the situation on the streets in Jerusalem was a lot quieter.”

“For the past 33 months,” Kempster said, “the Palestinian terrorism and the Israeli military response has been worse than it has ever been.

“When I was living in Jerusalem, there were skirmishes, there were times when Israelis killed Palestinians and when Palestinians killed Israelis, but there were no times when Israelis or Palestinians killed foreign tourists.”

While there was some danger living in the Middle East then, Kempster said he had no real war stories.

He did recount the time when he and a reporter for the Baltimore Sun went to watch the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and a few mortar shells landed a bit too close. “That does tend to concentrate the mind,” he said.

His wife was in more danger than he was once. While she was in the West Bank town of Hebron, some Israeli militants attacked the Islamic University there. The Isreali military then closed the town down to sort the problem out and watch for Palestinian retaliation.

The roadblocks stopped her from returning home until the military decided that an American woman living in Jerusalem would probably be safer back there.

However, neither of the Kempsters say they ever felt afraid to live in Jerusalem. Some of the reporters Mr. Kempster has talked with there now are a little nervous, “but you’ve got to be where the story is,” he said.

Kempster has never been to Iraq or Iran. During the ’80s, when Iraq was in a war with Iran, he was on a U.S. cruiser protecting a Kuwaiti oil tanker with oil for Iraq, and an Iraqi fighter plane fired a silkworm missile at the convoy.

It was apparently a mistake, possibly because a warning flare made the pilot believe he had been fired upon, but the cruiser readied weapons to shoot it down. The missile missed, making the need to shoot it down moot.

His stay on the cruiser was similar to how journalists are “embedded” in military units now. Kempster said he believes that embedding is good for both the Pentagon and the soldiers.

“(The reporters) are by-and-large writing the story of the troops they are with,” he said, adding that “there’s nothing wrong with writing a story that isn’t skeptical of the government.”

Not that there is anything wrong with being skeptical of the government, either. Kempster covered the White House under both Nixon and Ford, and says was not shocked over the Watergate scandal.

“It was a story we covered over the course of about two years, and it steadily unraveled,” he said. “It all reeled out incrementally.

“(Nixon) was convinced that the world was out to get him — and so were the people that worked for him.”   In the 1972 election, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman remarked that the press was being as hard on McGovern as Nixon.

“That was a shock,” Kempster said. “That indicated that Haldeman, and I believe Nixon, had believed that the press was out to get him, when in fact the press was doing its job of reporting things bad about everybody.”

Kempster reluctantly admitted that he was angry over Ford’s pardon of Nixon. When he was called up to the event on a Sunday afternoon, he parked in what he thought was a legal parking space.

When he came back, he found a ticket. “If the law is being perverted in that fashion…” he thought and tore up the ticket.

“Ultimately the District of Columbia police tracked me down and charged me double for the ticket, but it was probably worth it,” he said.

Nearly 30 years later, he laughed about the incident. In fact, Kempster looks back at several chapters of world history with a vision devoid of the cynicism held by many of his generation.

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

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