It is going to be illuminating this morning to see what homage is paid in the public prints to the Cold War hero Penn Kemble. We didn’t know him well, although we had met him once or twice during the struggle in which he played his part, but we heard about his impending death almost daily from our columnist, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who had played handball with Kemble for years and who visited him when he was on the bed on which he died of cancer over the weekend at the age of 64. Kemble’s passing invites reflection on the facets of American democracy. He was one of those who started out on the left, believing so many of the ideals claimed by the left and working within its parties and institutions, only to find, increasingly over time, that the right half of the political spectrum was more hospitable to the ideals that inspired him.

His story is sketched by our Stephen Miller in the obituary on page 4. He quotes an interview Kemble gave to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Intelligencer-Journal in which Kemble spoke of how as a high school junior, he made a trip to Italy only to be confronted with an anti-Americanism that startled him and awakened his passion for democracy. He was a Democratic Party loyalist, opposed to the Stalinists and active in what has come to be known as the Scoop Jackson wing of the party. In the 1960s, he worked on civil rights and in the 1970s voter registration. In 1972, he helped found the Social Democrats, USA. During the Reagan administration he was accused, as Mr. Miller puts it, “of being a neoconservative,” and, in 1983, he broke ranks with many prominent Democrats to support President Reagan in the war in Central America. He drew much fire for his work, but, as Mr. Miller so aptly put it, in 1990 “he had the satisfaction of seeing the Sandinistas voted out of office in peaceful elections.”

We don’t seek to reopen those debates here, and Kemble was no Republican. He advised Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and went to work for the United States Information Agency, becoming acting director in 1999. Eventually he joined Freedom House as a senior scholar, impressing on colleagues the need for organized labor as “the balance wheel of democracy,” as Mr. Miller quotes him. He lived his life in one of the greatest and most honorable traditions in American democracy. And we wonder what kind of honors will be given his memory in a Democratic Party that spent the last election carping about the leadership the Republic Party has provided in the current war, in which the left excoriates America and apologizes for its enemies. We are in a phase of our national life when idealists such as Penn Kemble are at a premium.