War and Remembrance

George came safely home. But another cherished colleague, Michael Kelly, was the first American reporter to lose his life in the war. This was a great loss to us and our colleagues at National Journal and The Atlantic Monthly.

Why did Kelly, at the age of 46, decide to cover the Iraq war? Answers to that question touch on the reasons young men and women decide on journalistic careers and the incentives that exist once the decision is made.

Many who joined the profession years ago saw an opportunity to cover important events and trends of the times. Was this not a compelling occupation, to serve as a witness to history? I certainly thought so, under the tutelage of an early mentor, Theodore H. White, who invented modern coverage of presidential campaigns.

And didn't the occupation also offer opportunities to accelerate needed reform by exposing injustice and malfeasance? After all, one thought, no great movement of social or political reform can gather momentum without inspiration of the force of ideas made popular by the communications media. The Atlantic Monthly was an early advocate of abolishing slavery in the 1860s. Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle exposed inhumane working conditions in the meatpacking industry, leading to reform. In more recent times, Ralph McGill, Gene Patterson, Hodding Carter, Claude Sitton and others added fuel to the civil rights movement by writing of the indignities and brutalities visited upon African-Americans in the South, while David Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald wrote the revisionist history that shaped our perceptions of the American intervention in Vietnam.

Michael Kelly was rooted in these proud journalistic traditions. He served for a time as editor of National Journal and of The Atlantic Monthly, but like Teddy White, his first love was reporting; he could not stay away from the most important story of the new century.

Kelly also had strong views about how American society should be ordered at home-about justice and political integrity-and he often challenged liberal orthodoxy. He was, for example, a strident critic of Bill Clinton, wryly skewering presidential immorality and double-talk in columns syndicated by The Washington Post. Al Gore was a target too; in 1997 Kelly's criticism of Gore and Clinton got him fired as editor of The New Republic, whose owner, Martin Peretz was a friend of Gore's. The Boston Globe wrote that Kelly "turns a Mencken-like blowtorch on those he deems guilty of nincompoopery, dishonesty or both."

Kelly had strong views about America's role in the world. As his Atlantic Monthly colleague Cullen Murphy observes, he "shared Orwell's conviction that there are times when nations cannot stand idly-comfortably-by in the face of trauma in other places. He argued this case powerfully in the specific matter of Iraq-in the afterword to the new paperback edition of Martyrs' Day, his book about the 1991 Gulf War, and in many newspaper columns. He saw America as the catalyst of a transformative moment, and he wanted to be there to report on it and, if necessary, to argue for it."

Kelly leaves behind his wife Madelyn and two young sons, Tom and Jack. They will grieve for him forever, but they will have in his memory a great source of pride about a husband and father whose daring and achievement left an indelible mark. We who were privileged to work with Kelly in Atlantic Media Company will forever be thankful for the friendship and leadership that inspired us all.