Posted on 04/05/2003 2:21:06 PM PST by Pokey78
WASHINGTON — Michael Kelly was a lucky guy.
When he stumbled upon a column of Iraqi troops during Desert Storm, they surrendered to him, piling into his car with their white flags.
He was the only reporter to find passion in the Dukakis campaign; he met his future wife, Max Greenberg, a beguiling CBS producer, on the bus.
Michael always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to get the best quote and the best story, the best jobs and the best life.
"I've had one good break after another," he told The Boston Globe, in an interview last year about how he'd revived The Atlantic Monthly in just two years as its editor. Cruising in his 1966 baby blue Mustang convertible, he said he'd had "a long series of lucky breaks and good jobs and stories and a life I like living."
He did many things well enough to provoke envy: he was a dazzling writer, editor, dancer, cook. Except he wasn't the sort you'd envy; he was too generous. He'd had his share of donnybrooks, in print and out, but he was, to use one of his own terms of endearment, a "lambikins."
When I had boyfriend troubles or work troubles, I would show up at his house in Washington. He would always be sprawling on the chaise longue I gave him as a wedding present, reading Orwell or A. J. Liebling or John O'Hara. And he would always get up and make a gourmet meal, with wine he'd chosen and herbs he'd grown, for Max and me.
He liked to say he'd had "an unusually seamless life." He was crazy about his parents, Tom and Marguerite, and wanted to become a reporter because his dad had been a reporter at The Washington Daily News.
"My father would bring me in on Saturdays to the newsroom — an old-fashioned one with the bookie in the corner, reporters bringing in beer — and I would hang out," he told our friend, Diana McLellan.
Even at 46, the father of two little boys, Michael never lost the raffish air of an altar boy who'd just talked a nun into letting him smoke a cigar in the sacristy.
He looked like a Dead End Kid, an Irish imp with blue eyes, pug nose, round face and round glasses. He was wickedly funny, a great mimic who made people laugh so hard that the section where we worked at The Times was dubbed "Happy Valley."
He had many important jobs but no phony airs. He went to parties at his local firehouse way before 9/11. He was deeply sentimental about ordinary working-class people — and maintained an angry outsider posture in his column even as he was embraced by the conservative mandarins of Washington.
"He had enviable eyes," said Leon Wieseltier, his colleague at The New Republic. "He observed more in a glance than other reporters did in a week."
The boy could write.
On the decline of liberalism: "Its animating impulse is . . . to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue."
On Ross Perot: "H. Ross Perot made his way onto the national stage, barking like a dog and occasionally biting off small pieces of himself."
On the first gulf war's bombing of Baghdad: "The tracer rounds made lines of incandescent beauty, lovely arcing curves and slow S's and parabolas of light."
He said war reporters were people "who did not want to get in harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did."
But he put himself in harm's way because he wanted to go back to Baghdad and see America kick out Saddam. "Tyranny truly is a horror. . . . It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face."
Michael was the first American reporter to die in Iraq, when the Army Humvee he was riding in came under Iraqi fire and rolled into a canal south of Baghdad airport.
At an impromptu wake at his parents' house on Capitol Hill Friday, Marguerite Kelly, who writes a Washington Post column about raising children, put out her usual spread of food. And Tom told friends his son was lucky: He had had the best possible life for a journalist and died well, better than full of tubes in a hospital somewhere.
Michael died for two things he believed in: Journalism and ridding the world of jackboots.
And as Pat Moynihan said when he learned J.F.K. was dead: "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."
and therein lies the difference.
When I had boyfriend troubles... I would show up at his house in Washington.
How old is this broad - 13? Did she throw pebbles at his bedroom window?
From what I understand, he wasn't extremely conservative. He was just very turned off by Bill Clinton.
Dowd's typo or yours?
In any case, it's nice to see Dowd put down her bottle of Jack Daniels and write something poignant for a change.
He certainly didn't drink Democrat Kool-aid.
Nope, it's the proper spelling. Look it up.
Nice, touching tribute to her friend, Michael Kelly. If only I'd been so honored with his friendship.
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