Background

Michael Thomas Kelly was born on March 17, 1957, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, and grew up on Capitol Hill. He was the only son of Thomas Vincent Kelly, a journalist, and Marguerite Kelly, maiden name Lelong, a journalist and author. His parents' careers were a large influence on Kelly's decision to become a journalist himself.

Education

Michael Kelly attended Gonzaga College High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of New Hampshire in 1979.

Career

In 1979-1983, Michael Kelly worked as a researcher, booker, and associate producer for ABC's Good Morning America. In 1983-1986, he was a reporter and feature writer for The Cincinnati Post, covering crime, local and state politics, and special projects. Kelly was hired by The Baltimore Sun in 1986, and worked for three years in that newspaper's Washington bureau, covering the Iran-Contra affair and national politics. During the 1988 presidential election, he covered the campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis.

In 1989, Kelly quit the Sun to become a freelance writer and reporter and moved to Chicago. He wrote for The Boston Globe, GQ, and Esquire, among other publications. When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, Kelly convinced several publications, including Globe, GQ, and New Republic, to let him submit dispatches independently. While reporting from the front lines at risk to himself, Kelly remained unharmed and gained respect for his insightful, hard-hitting articles. He expanded his war coverage into a book, Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War, which was published by Random House in 1992.

In the spring of 1992, Kelly went to work at The New York Times as a political reporter. He first briefly covered the campaign of Ross Perot, then that of Bill Clinton. He worked briefly as a White House correspondent and then in 1993 moved to the Times Magazine, where he worked for a year writing cover stories on Bill and Hillary Clinton, David Gergen, and life in the Gaza Strip under Yasir Arafat's new regime.

Michael Kelly left the Times to accept a job as the Washington editor of The New Yorker, where he wrote the magazine's regular Letter From Washington, covered the Bosnian conflict as a foreign correspondent through the summer of 1995, and filed campaign-trail dispatches on the 1996 presidential race. He left The New Yorker in the fall of 1996 to become editor of The New Republic, and to write the TRB column for that magazine. He was fired from The New Republic in the fall of 1997.

In November of that year, Kelly joined National Journal as a weekly columnist, and also signed up to write a different weekly column for The Washington Post Writers' Group. In July 1998, following the departure of National Journal editor Steve Smith to the United States News and World Report, Kelly accepted the position of editor of the National Journal. In February 2000, he became the editor of The Atlantic Monthly and moved to Swampscott, Massachusetts with his family. In 2002, he became an editor-at-large of The Atlantic, planning to use his free time to write a book on the steel industry.

Eager to return to reporting, Kelly left Boston offices of the Atlantic behind for Iraq. On April 3, 2003, he was killed while traveling with the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division just south of the Baghdad airport. According to press reports, when the humvee in which Kelly was riding came under Iraqi fire, the soldier driving the vehicle tried to evade the attack, and the jeep ran off the road and rolled into a canal. Both Kelly and the driver drowned. On the last day of his life, he filed a column using a satellite phone about the capture of an enemy bridge. He was the first American reporter killed during the conflict.

Achievements

• By the age of 46, Michael Kelly had already enjoyed a brilliant career. It took him to the editorship of three eminent American magazines within a matter of five years, as well as his role as an admired and hated conservative columnist. His work for the Post won numerous Associated Press and UPI awards.
  
  The Atlantic Media Company, owner of the publications for whom Kelly worked from 1997 to 2003, annually honors journalists in Kelly's name with the Michael Kelly Award. First awarded in 2003, it celebrates "the fearless pursuit and expression of truth." In 2003, the University of New Hampshire, Department of English, established the Michael Kelly Memorial Scholarship Fund, which awards a sophomore or junior student "who is passionate about journalism."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War

    (A journalist for The New York Times recounts his year in ...)

    1993

Politics

According to Michael Kelly, politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality: what happens in the political world is divorced from the real world. It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true - yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters.

Both his politics, as an increasingly vehement conservative, and his sheer polemical ferocity, made him unusual in mainstream American journalism, with its prevailing liberalism. He detested Bill Clinton, and just as much "his morally bankrupt defenders" who had tried to establish him "as a sort of hero." And he derided liberalism which tried "to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue." While supporting George W. Bush politically, he could not hide his disdain for Bush's intellectual and personal inadequacies.

Views

Quotations: "I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, over-muscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Peter Beinart, columnist, journalist, and political commentator, called Michael Kelly "a conservative in the older, cultural sense." He commented in the New Republic that Michael Kelly "wanted to preserve the unwritten rules, built up imperceptibly over time, that define morality in most people's lives. He judged politicians as human beings. His politics were less ideological than characterological. He believed that some people acted with honor, and others did not. And the people who acted without honor in their private lives would act without honor in their public lives, especially toward the weak. In his columns, Mike could be combative, aggressive, unyielding. In life, he was gentle, warm, playful. And so, people who loved him have emphasized the distinction between the way he viewed politics and the way he lived his life."
  
  Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times, author: "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."

Connections

Michael Kelly married Madelyn Greenberg, a news producer, in 1991. He had two sons: Tom and Jack.

Father:

Thomas Vincent Kelly

For many years, Thomas Kelly was a political reporter, White House reporter, and columnist with The Washington Daily News, and later worked for Vista and as a freelance writer of books and magazine articles.

Mother:

Marguerite Kelly

Marguerite Kelly was involved in local Democratic politics, and later became the author of books and a syndicated column on raising children.

Wife:

Madelyn Greenberg

Madelyn Greenberg has been a producer at CNN before joining the CBS News Chicago bureau as a producer. As a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, Michael Kelly covered Michael Dukakis's campaign for the presidency. In the course of it fell in love with a television producer, Madelyn Greenberg, who also covered the Dukakis campaign.

Son:

Tom Kelly

Son:

Jack Kelly

References

• The Michael Kelly Award