Penn Kemble

Richard Penn Kemble (January 21, 1941 — October 15, 2005), commonly known as "Penn," was an American political activist and a founding member of Social Democrats, USA. He supported free labor unions and democracy in the USA and internationally, and so was active in the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the social-democratic opposition to communism. He founded organizations including Negotiations Now!, Frontlash, and Prodemca. Kemble was appointed to various government boards and institutions throughout the 1990s, eventually becoming the Acting Director of the U.S. Information Agency under President Bill Clinton.

Biography

Early years

Penn Kemble was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1941 and grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He studied at the University of Colorado in the early 1960s, where he helped set up a local branch of the Young People's Socialist League, youth section of the Socialist Party of America.

While at the University of Colorado, Kemble was influenced by the thinking of Alex Garber, a professor of Sociology who espoused social democratic domestic political views while maintaining a hardline anti-Communist view of foreign affairs. Kemble later did graduate work at the New School for Social Research and Boston University. His first job was at the New York Times, but was fired for refusing to cross a picket line during a typesetters' strike.

Political career

From the middle 1960s, Kemble was active in the activities of the Socialist Party of America's national youth section. With the radicals who controlled the YPSL in the early 1960s departed from the SPA for the burgeoning New Left, Kemble was left to head a reorganization of the YPSL by what his colleague Joshua Muravchik characterized as a "rump of right-wingers." Kemble formed part of a triumvirate of social democratic leaders which shifted the Socialist Party to the right in the second half of the 1960s, working closely with Paul Feldman, editor of the party paper New America, and Tom Kahn, chief of the League for Industrial Democracy, in moving the SPA to a more fierce sort of anti-Communism.

Despite his anti-Communist proclivities, Kemble was a founder of Negotiation Now!, a group which called for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War. He was also active in the Congress of Racial Equality.

In 1972, Kemble was a founder the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an organized faction and pressure group which sought to do battle with the "new politics" liberals exemplified by Senator George McGovern. Kemble was Executive Director of CDM from 1972-76, at which time he left to become a special assistant and speechwriter for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He remained with Moynihan until 1979.

Anti-communism

Fiercely opposed to the Soviet Union and to nuclear disarmament, he helped found the Institute on Religion and Democracy and from 1981 until 1988 was the President of the Committee for Democracy in Central America (PRODEMCA), which opposed the Sandinistas and related groups in Central America.

In 1991, Kemble was appointed to the Board of International Broadcasting by President George W. Bush. He also became the Washington, D.C. representative of Freedom House. However, as a supporter of the Democratic Party, he refused to accept any official position in the first Bush administration.

During the administration of President Bill Clinton, Kemble served as the Acting Director of the U.S. Information Agency. He was also made a special representative of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to the Community of Democracies Initiative.

Death and legacy

Kemble died on October 15, 2005 at his home in Washington, D.C. after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was 64 years old at the time of his death and was survived by a wife, two sisters, and a brother. In an obituary published in the Washington Post Kemble's friend Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute observed that Kemble's ideas evolved from democratic socialism to a more mild social democracy over time, a similar rightward arc to that of many prominent neoconservatives. Although his views on many topics matched those of the neoconservatives, Kemble stopped short of leaving the Democratic Party and never considered himself neoconservative, it was noted.