Breaking: Journalist Michael Kelly Killed at Baghdad Airport

ABC radio news | 4-4-03

[VOA]

This is the Michael Kelly. He's the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
He's the top conservative columnist, and the most respected.

Like Ernie Pyle, he gave the last full measure of devotion for his line
of work (working as an American war correspondent).
It will be interesting to see who leaps (or is pushed by events) forward to take his place.
Rest In Peace, Michael Kelly; "ya' dun good".

PS: kosciuszko, "Believe It Or Not", there is a street in downtown Los Angeles
named after your namesake Polish general...I saw it every morning for about
a week while riding the bus to jury duty...

[McGavin999]

What a shame. He was a good man, and even more, a good American. He'll be missed.

He died in a noble cause and at least he got to see for himself some of the fruits of that cause.

[happygrl]

FYI: Your link in Post #80 is for Mark Steyn, not Michael Kelley.

[JulieRNR21]

Thanks for posting that excerpt....one of his very best.

What a terrible loss for his family and for our nation.
Grieving & praying for his family.

[happygrl]

Imagine if E.B. White had been killed in WWII - that's the magnitude here.

Hmmm...do I sense some sarcasm here ? What say you ?

I don't see the comparison between Kelley and White, who was both a novelist and a writing stylist. Enlighten me, please, if you would.

[happygrl]

Someone is going to have HUGE shoes to try and fill.

I so much agree. The Atlantic has been one magazine that I can depend on for a wide-rangin read, and it has only gotten better under Michael Kelley.

I am so sorry to hear this and feel deep sympathy for his wife and young children.

This is truly a loss to conservative journalism in America.

[Paladin2b]

I think people are missing the point about Michael Kelly's integrity. He was no right-wing ideologue. Michael Kelly was a liberal, but he stemmed from the old school of hard-drinking, union member, non-college educated New Deal or GI Bill Irish Catholic reporters who used to dominate the nation's newsrooms and helped advance liberal causes like the Civil Rights Movement and cleaning up crooked government. They were the "Reagan Democrats" of pundits who turned right because of Clinton & Co.

He skewered people like Gore, Clinton, and particularly other lefty journalists because he perceived their liberalism was a pre-packaged, rareified product of being compartmentalized from the rest of American life. He was from a family of reporters, he marinated in the idealism of newspaper union halls, and he was a NEWSPAPERMAN, a "shoe-leather reporter", not a "media figure". He lived to pound the pavement, work to get the story, and be in sync with the rhythms of the newsroom. You can't say that about too many talking heads these days.

[Paul Ross]

This article corroborates that in part, alluding to a 'humvee accident'. washingtonpost.com

Atlantic Monthly Editor Killed in Iraq
Michael Kelly Was a Columnist for The Washington Post

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 4, 2003; 12:40 PM

Michael Kelly, 46, the Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who abandoned the safety of editorial offices to cover the war in Iraq, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.

Kelly, the first American journalist killed in the war, had also served as editor of the New Republic and National Journal. But his decision to join up with U.S. forces marked a return to his reporting roots, since he covered the first Persian Gulf War as a magazine freelancer and turned his observations into a book, "Martyrs' Day." While one Australian and two British journalists have been killed covering the war, Kelly's death is the first among the 600 correspondents participating in the Pentagon's embedding program.

He was quoted in the New York Times just four days ago as saying that he and other reporters enlisted in the Pentagon program because "there was a real sense after the last gulf war that witness had been lost. The people in the military care about that history a great deal, because it is their history."

Kelly is credited with revitalizing the respected but sometimes dull Atlantic, which won three National Magazine Awards last year and carried many high-profile cover stories, including a three-part series on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. He took the reins after Washington businessman David Bradley bought the Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman in 1999. Kelly stepped down as editor last fall and also planned to write a book about the history of the steel industry.

As a columnist, Kelly was a caustic conservative who was merciless in his criticism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and was generally supportive of President Bush, especially on foreign policy. In 1997, New Republic owner Martin Peretz, a close friend of Gore, fired Kelly as the magazine's editor over his continuing attacks on the Clinton administration.

Kelly is survived by his wife, Madelyn, and two sons, Tom, 6, and Jack, 3.

He grew up on Capitol Hill, the son of Thomas Kelly, a reporter for the now-defunct Washington Daily News. His mother is Marguerite Kelly, author of a syndicated column called "Family Almanac."

"I had always wanted to be a newspaper reporter, because I admired him most in the world," Kelly once told the Boston Globe about his father. "Still do."

Kelly began his career as a reporter at the Cincinnati Post and the Baltimore Sun. He later worked for the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Kelly's last column was published by The Post yesterday. It began:

"Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man – poor, not a regular soldier – judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Mark de New Brighton]

I don't see the comparison between Kelley and White, who was both a novelist and a writing stylist. Enlighten me, please, if you would.

E.B. White was a novelist and a writing stylist. He also was the best essayist of his generation and one of the best essayists of the entire 20th Century. If you want proof, get a copy of his collection of essays from the New Yorker from the late 30s and early 40s, titled One Man's Meat.

Although White's work and Kelly's work are not exactly analogous, I personally believe that at his best, Kelly's work approached White's standard of excellence. Although Kelly died as Ernie Pyle did, his career is more like White's than Pyle's, so that's why I made the comparison. No sarcasm at all. Genuine sadness.

MdNB

[Fury]

Damn.

I looked forward to each and every one of his pieces. He was from what I would call "the old school", and wrote a good book on his observations in the Persian Gulf War. I remember reading his work in 1998? titled "I believe" concerning all the things you would have to accept in order to believe former President Clinton's version of events in regards to just about - everything. What a knockout.

He will be so missed.

[happygrl]

You can't say that about too many talking heads these days.

You have written well.

I think that it was that aspect of his life (shoe leather on the ground) which enabled him to interpret so well the heart of what went wrong with Liberalism, the Democratic Party, and the beltway under Clinton. He talked (or wrote) himself out of liberalism into conservatism and took a lot of people with him.

(Still waiting for the comparison to E.B.White)

[happygrl]

Thank you for your response. I had thought you were referring to some war reporting of White's which I had never heard of.

Thanks for the directive to White's essays. I'll check them out.

[StopGlobalWhining]

Yet another:

I STILL BELIEVE

MICHAEL KELLY Wednesday, March 18, 1998 ; Page A21

I've just finished reading the 600 pages of material released last Friday by Paula Jones's lawyers, and I've just finished watching Kathleen Willey on "60 Minutes," and I've just finished reading Bill Clinton's statement that he didn't bother to watch Ms. Willey on TV but that he knows what she says isn't true anyway. And I still believe the president. Truly, madly, deeply, I believe. Also verily.

I believe that the president is "mystified" by Ms. Willey's claim that he sexually assaulted her when she visited him in the Oval Office on Nov. 29, 1993, to ask him for a desperately needed job. I believe the president did not grab Ms. Willey, kiss her, touch her breasts and place her hand on his genitals, against her will. I believe that Ms. Willey is perjuring herself to hurt the president, even though the record shows that she supported and liked Clinton very much, and continued to support and like him even after the alleged assault, and that she only talked in the end because she was compelled to by Jones's lawyers.

I believe Ms. Willey is, like Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers and Dolly Kyle Browning and Sally Purdue before her, and like the women who will come after her, a baldfaced liar. If Monica Lewinsky sticks to her affidavit that she never had sex with the president, I believe her. If she instead confirms the long hours of recorded conversation in which she detailed a sexual affair with the president and affirmed her intention to lie in the affidavit -- well, then, I don't believe.

I believe all this because I am assured of it by Robert Bennett, the president's sexual misconduct mouthpiece, which is a distinguished position. It is distinguished from David Kendall, his personal-finance corruption mouthpiece; from Lanny Davis, his campaign-finance corruption mouthpiece; from James Kennedy, his White House general scandal mouthpiece; from James Carville, his "independent" general scandal mouthpiece; and from Michael McCurry, his don't ask, don't tell mouthpiece. I believe that all presidents require, for the handling of daily press inquiries, enough mouthpieces to outfit the wind section of the National Symphony Orchestra.

I believe, as the White House whispering campaign already has it, that Ms. Willey is a bit nutty, and a bit slutty. I believe that, the way things are going, David Brock will write an article to this effect for Esquire.

I believe White House communications director Ann Lewis is right to suggest that Ms. Willey's desire to work in Clinton's 1996 campaign casts doubt on her claim that Clinton abused her in 1993. I also believed Ann Lewis in 1991, when she explained why Anita Hill continued to work for Clarence Thomas after he allegedly harassed her: "You don't know what it's like to be a young working woman, to have this really prestigious and powerful boss and think you have to stay on the right side of him, or for the rest of your working life he could nix another job." I believe Ann Lewis is not a rank hypocrite. I believe that it is not despicable for the president's henchmen and henchwomen to smear the reputations of others in order to protect their boss from allegations of misconduct.

I believe that Clinton-Gore fund-raiser Nathan Landow did not try to pressure Ms. Willey to lie in her deposition in the Jones case, and that there must be some perfectly innocent reason why, after Ms. Willey was subpoenaed in the Jones case, Landow's real estate company chartered a plane to fly Ms. Willey to Landow's Eastern Shore estate.

I believe Ms. Willey is lying even though her account of Clinton's amatory approach is remarkably similar to the account Ms. Jones offers of the Clinton modus operandi on May 8, 1991, in a room in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Ark. I believe Ms. Jones is lying even though her sworn account of what happened to her that day is supported, in graphic, pathetic detail, by sworn contemporaneous accounts from her sister, Lydia Cathey, and by her friends Pamela Blackard and Debra Lynn Ballentine. I believe Ms. Willey and Ms. Jones are lying even though their stories are buttressed by the sworn deposition of Judy Stokes, alleging a similarly sudden and unwanted sexual approach by Clinton against a former Miss Arkansas, Elizabeth Ward.

I believe that L. D. Brown, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, three former Clinton bodyguards, were all lying in their sworn depositions in which they described, to varying but conforming degrees, Clinton as a sexual adventurer of great recklessness and a man who used the resources and perks of office to further his sexual pursuits.

I believe everybody is lying except my Bill.

Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.

[rwfromkansas]

wow.

[CT]

Kelly may have not been a convert in the FR sense. He was, however, a liberal whose eyes were opened to the corruption of anything Clinton.

I believe many of us saw the transformation of Mr. Kelly during the late 1990's as a reason for real hope that there were even a few liberals with the integrity to call a crook a crook.

[Rudder]

When, early this morning, I first heard this on the radio, it took a few seconds to "process" what I had just heard. By that time the announcer was selling used cars. I posted this immediately thereafter, not fully sure if even my perceptions, let alone my interpretations thereof, were at all accurate. As a result, I mispelled Kelly (Kelley) and the location (find Nadhbad on the map.) My sincere apologies to all.

I didn't collect Michael's posters and I didn't seek him out when in search of a good read. But, whenever I encountered his writings I read them and found them to be esquisitely well-written and also with the insight of a rare journalist-genius.

My prayers are for Michael and for you all. Michael lost his mortal life in pursuit of his noble goals. All of us remaining have lost Michael, one of our true heroes. Nevertheless, we will soon recall what we have gained from his effort.

And we will go on...

[Theodore R.]

Yes, he started out on the left but moved steadily to the right over the years. The publisher of "New Republic," the pro-Gore Martin Peretz, fired him from that publication some six years ago. He thereafter went to the "Atlantic Monthly." He leaves a wife and two young children. I wonder if he realized the danger of covering this war. He must have been a very courageous person.

[lavrenti]

Kelly died doing what he believed in. He was a journalist who strongly supported this cause of liberating Iraq.

If only I had an ounce of his courage.

[Darksheare]

.

[FreeReign]

And he was on the right side! from his paper.... As a columnist, Kelly was a caustic conservative who was merciless in his criticism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and was generally supportive of President Bush, especially on foreign policy. In 1997, New Republic owner Martin Peretz, a close friend of Gore, fired Kelly as the magazine's editor over his continuing attacks on the Clinton administration. Kelly is survived by his wife, Madelyn, and two sons, Tom, 6, and Jack, 3, according to the Associated Press.

I first remember Kelly in 1998 and 1999 when he went after Clinton during impeachment. He was right on target with that. However, wasn't he a liberal before that?