solid conservative known to skewer wrongdoers from all sides with his unapologetic wit. Once a week.
Michael Kelly's weekly column often surprises, always informs and never hews to conventional thinking.
On topics as far-ranging as Bosnia, politics, infanticide and affirmative action, Kelly brings a fresh, iconoclastic view to newspaper editorial pages. He is based in his native Washington but his column is distinctly outside the Beltway.
"Writing within the boundaries of conventional political thinking is deeply unsatisfying to readers right now, because the arguments are almost archaic," says Kelly. "The columns I like to read are the ones in which you don't know where the writer is coming from, and you're not quite sure where the writer is going to end up.
In my column, I make my own argument, independent of conventional ideology."
During his award-winning journalism career, Kelly has covered politics, social issues, wars, spot news and has conducted investigations. During the Gulf War, he was one of the few reporters in Baghdad during the first 24 hours of the bombing and was in the first group to reach Kuwait City within hours of its liberation.
Kelly, born in Washington in 1957, grew up in the neighborhood around Capitol Hill. He is the son of former newspaper columnist Thomas Kelly and Marguerite Kelly, who writes the syndicated column, "Family Almanac." After attending District of Columbia schools and graduating from the University of New Hampshire, he landed a job in 1979 with ABC's "Good Morning America," first as a researcher, then as a news booker and associate producer.
He left ABC after four years for his first newspaper job, at The Cincinnati Post, where he worked as a general assignment reporter, a political reporter and an investigative reporter. His work won numerous awards from the Associated Press, Sigma Delta Chi, United Press International, and others.
In 1986, he joined the Baltimore Sun and soon became a Washington correspondent, where he covered the Iran-contra affair and the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis.
Kelly left the Sun to move to Chicago in 1989 and worked as the Midwest stringer for The Boston Globe and wrote articles for GQ magazine, Esquire and Playboy. He covered the Gulf War as a free-lancer for the Globe, GQ and The New Republic in 1990 and 1991.
In the immediate aftermath, he journeyed by foot from Iran into northern Iraq and traveled for nine days through territory held by Kurdish rebels against Iraqi forces to report the Iraq-Kurdish conflict. He also returned to Baghdad to report on life there after defeat.
His dispatches on these subjects for The New Republic won a 1992 National Magazine Award and the 1991 Ed Cunningham Memorial Award from the Overseas Press Club. He expanded on his war reporting in a book, "Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War" (Random House, 1992). "Martyrs' Day" was awarded the 1992 Martha Allbrand award for nonfiction by PEN and was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the year.
Kelly went to work for The New York Times in 1992 as a Washington correspondent and covered the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. The following year he became a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, where he wrote cover stories on President Clinton, Hillary Clinton and David Gergen. He spent the summer of 1994 in the Gaza Strip for a cover story on Yasser Arafat's regime.
He joined The New Yorker in late 1994 as Washington editor and author of the "Letter From Washington" column. He spent the summer of 1995 in Bosnia and Croatia reporting on the fighting there and the following year covered the presidential campaign for the magazine. Just after the election, he became editor of The New Republic and writer of its TRB column. In the fall of 1997 he joined National Journal as a senior writer and started his weekly column for The Washington Post. He is now editor in chief of National Journal and editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
Kelly lives in Boston with his wife Madelyn and two sons, Tom and Jack