April
4, 2003, 2:40 p.m. A
Courageous Man
Michael
Kelly, R.I.P.
n 1997, the journalist Michael Kelly wrote a column for the Washington
Post entitled "The Fear of Death." In it, he described his
experience covering the first Gulf War, when he saw up-close the aftermath
of the slaughter known as the Highway of Death. "I had never seen
the results of war," Kelly recalled, "and the results horrified
me out of my wits. In this, I was of course typical of my generation of
reporters. The result is, in matters military, a press corps that is forever
suffering a collective case of the vapors. At the least exposure to the
most unremarkable facts of military life — soldiers can be brutes
and pigs, generals can be stupid, bullets can be fatal — we are forever
shocked, forever reaching for the sal volatile."
For many readers,
Kelly's extraordinary reporting of the first Gulf War, for The New Republic
and in his book Martyr's
Day, revealed those unremarkable facts of military life in ways
that could not be forgotten. And he was doing the same thing in this Gulf
War, reporting from a position with the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division,
when word came, Friday morning, that another one of those unremarkable facts
of military life — the accidents that inevitably take place when so
many men and weapons are assembled — had taken his life. Kelly was
46 years old.
Kelly certainly didn't
have to go to Iraq. He had made his name in the first war and had gone
on to the top of the journalistic ziggurat: the New York Times,
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. In his last job, he
had transformed The Atlantic, always a fine magazine, into an extraordinary
one, with a remarkable range of reporting and analysis. It turned out
he was as magnificent an editor as he was a writer.
But what was perhaps
most remarkable about Kelly was his courage. And it was not only of the
most obvious sort. Yes, he had the courage to go to war, but a lot of
reporters have gone to war — there are, after all, 600 journalists
in the military's "embedding" program. Kelly also possessed
a different kind of courage, one that is rarer, which might seem strange,
because it doesn't involve risking one's life: He had the courage to speak
his mind even when it might cost him his job and the approval of his less
independent-minded colleagues. Some writers would do anything rather than
say something that would risk the disapproval of the right people. Kelly
wasn't one of them.
He was fired as editor
of The New Republic because he relentlessly criticized the corruption
of the Clinton/Gore administration. And in February 1998, at the height
of the Lewinsky scandal, he wrote, for the Washington Post, the
best column to come out of those years. "I believe the president,"
Kelly began:
I have always believed
him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam
War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that
he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said
he hadn't had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when
he reportedly says he did.
I believe the president
did not rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, did not sell access to himself
and the vice president to hundreds of well-heeled special pleaders and
did not supervise the largest, most systematic money-laundering operation
in campaign finance history, collecting more than $ 3 million in illegal
and improper donations. I believe that Charlie Trie and James Riady
were motivated by nothing but patriotism for their adopted country....
I believe Paula
Jones is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Kathleen Willey
is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Monica Lewinsky is
a cheap tramp who was asking for it.
I believe Lewinsky
was fantasizing in her 20 hours of taped conversation in which she reportedly
detailed her sexual relationship with the president and begged Linda
Tripp to join her in lying about the relationship. I believe that any
gifts, correspondence, telephone calls and the 37 post-employment White
House visits that may have passed between Lewinsky and the president
are evidence only of a platonic relationship; such innocent intimate
friendships are quite common between middle-aged married men and young
single women, and also between presidents of the United States and White
House interns.
In 774 words, Kelly
simply destroyed the hopes of all those who had wanted to believe Bill
Clinton. It was not the kind of thing that would make a writer popular
at The New Yorker or the New York Times magazine. But Kelly
wrote it, and kept writing.
In recent years,
Kelly had enormous success. His work at The Atlantic Monthly resulted
in stacks of National Magazine Awards, and it seemed he might remain in
the editor's chair to achieve even greater things. But he moved on, becoming
editor-at-large as he worked on a book about the American steel industry.
Who knows what would
have been next? A man as talented as Michael Kelly, with a good 30 years
of productive life still ahead of him, was bound to do some magnificent
work. That won't happen now. But what wonderful work he did.
—
Byron York contributed to The Atlantic Monthly under Kelly's
editorship.
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n 1997, the journalist Michael Kelly wrote a column for the Washington
Post entitled "The Fear of Death." In it, he described his
experience covering the first Gulf War, when he saw up-close the aftermath
of the slaughter known as the Highway of Death. "I had never seen
the results of war," Kelly recalled, "and the results horrified
me out of my wits. In this, I was of course typical of my generation of
reporters. The result is, in matters military, a press corps that is forever
suffering a collective case of the vapors. At the least exposure to the
most unremarkable facts of military life — soldiers can be brutes
and pigs, generals can be stupid, bullets can be fatal — we are forever
shocked, forever reaching for the sal volatile."
