WASHINGTON — James Kilpatrick’s in-your-face, conservative bickering with liberal commentator Shana Alexander three decades ago was famously parodied — and then copied for years to come on broadcast and cable channels.
Even more lasting were his contributions as the nation’s most widely syndicated political columnist and a dozen books on everything from politics and the Supreme Court to the use and abuse of the English language.
Kilpatrick, who rose from cub reporter to one of the nation’s most recognized conservative voices, died Sunday at 89, said his wife, Marianne Means.
“He was a hell of a fella,” said Means, 76, herself a former columnist for Hearst Newspapers. “He cultivated a public image on TV of being a cranky conservative, . . . but he wasn’t a cranky conservative at home.”
TV watchers in the 1970s knew Kilpatrick as the conservative half of the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Baby boomers, though, would always know the conservative-liberal pairing is what inspired the “Saturday Night Live” parody featuring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin — and Aykroyd’s dismissal of Curtin’s opinions with a terse, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
The “60 Minutes” segment’s popularity was not lost on Kilpatrick: “People love to watch other people go at it. It does make for good entertainment,” he said in 1981.
He spent many years trying to make amends for the columns he penned for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader as a vocal supporter of racial segregation. “He apologized over and over publicly and in print when he could about being on the wrong side of the segregation issue,” Means said. “He was a son of the South.”
Kilpatrick received numerous journalism awards and was one of the few columnists ever honored as a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists.
He worked for Universal Press Syndicate for years until retiring a couple of years ago.
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