April 6, 2003
LUCKY GUY:
'The Best Possible Life' (MAUREEN DOWD, April 6, 2003, NY Times)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 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. [...]
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.
How much we will miss a guy who could even get Maureen Dowd to write a fine column, though, we're obliged to note that, by the terms she lays down here, she's been rather pro-jackboot up to now. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2003 12:45 AM
If there is a God, he will welcome Michael as one of the few truth tellers. I will truly miss that man, not only for his columns, but for exemplifying what it means to be a columnist.
Posted by: Steve Martinovich at April 6, 2003 5:22 AMI've been thinking about his death. I truly wasn't concious to Kelly's work before his death but I've received an education from his admirers. I've been thinking that it's strange fate that such a prominent and respected journalist happens to be the won who dies. You expect someone mostly anonymous to most people...but then I realize that those mostly anonymous people all have people who rightly view them as very importent and ask "why him". It lets you in, if a little, on all those casualties and what sorrow they inspire.
Posted by: RC at April 6, 2003 9:41 AM