Posted on 04/06/2003 5:37:39 AM PDT by billorites
AMONG THE MANY thousands of victims of Saddam Hussein's villainy have been a handful of journalists who voluntarily risked their lives to record the military struggles against the Butcher of Baghdad in 1991 and 2003. The greatest of those journalists was lost on Thursday.
Regular readers of this page will know Michael Kelly's excellent columns, which we have run for several years. Kelly was killed in a Humvee accident on Thursday while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. He left behind a wife, two small sons, and thousands of loyal readers who turned to him every week for honest, fair and insightful commentary.
One of the reasons we ran Michael Kelly's columns, which were syndicated by The Washington Post, was because he was a University of New Hampshire grad, class of 1979. There were many other reasons as well. Kelly was a keen analyst and a gifted writer whose razor-sharp wit and rich sense of humor made his work unique among the small group of top-tier columnists whose vocation is commenting on national politics.
To rise to the top tier of syndicated columnists in America, and to stand out as one of the best in that group, is a feat in itself. For Michael Kelly, it was just another in a series of impressive career accomplishments, any one of which would have been a pinnacle in most reporters' professional lives. Kelly had been a writer for the New Yorker, a New York Times political reporter, a freelance war correspondent, the author of an award-winning book about the Gulf War, and the editor of three national magazines, National Journal, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly.
An example of Kelly's remarkable journalistic skills was his tenure as editor of the 145-year-old Atlantic Monthly, based in Boston. In only three years, Kelly breathed new life into the once-revered publication and turned it from a declining old journal into a vibrant and once-again relevant player in American public affairs.
Aside from being a first-rate editor and reporter, Kelly was a notably funny satirist. Most columnists write in one voice, two at most. They are either moralistic, reflective or funny. Kelly was that rare writer who excelled in any voice. He was the only major political columnist who could switch with ease between serious reporting and devastatingly effective satire.
Kelly was also the only major political columnist in America to become an embedded reporter in Iraq. Asked by The New York Times why he went, he said, "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."
Not many people in Michael Kelly's position (he was 46 years old and at the prime of his career) would give up a cozy office for the sands of Iraq out of a sense of duty to history. That is one of the qualities that made him different. And it is why his death will leave an unfillable gap on editorial pages across the country.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.