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April
4, 2003, 12:30 p.m.
Full
of Life
Losing
Michael Kelly.
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have a telephone
book in which there are still some phone numbers of a handful of people
who have died, but whose deaths I cannot digest, and never will. People
so full of life, whose voices I can still hear, whose faces I still see,
whose ideas I treasure, whose humanity will always be with me.
Now
we've lost Michael Kelly, who died on the battlefield in one of those
stupid accidents that are so typical of war. And the only consolations
for this terrible loss are that he died young, at the height of his powers,
and that he died doing what he did best and what gave him his unique authority
and his strong voice: searching for the truth and presenting it to us
in his wonderfully spare and vigorous prose.
His reporting from
Iraq was the best, his editorship of The Atlantic was the best,
his political commentary was the best. He was a tough guy, an honest man,
a great writer, and a national treasure.
Dammit.
—
Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author
of The
War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen,
Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the
American Enterprise Institute, can be reached through Benador
Associates.
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