The Last Liberal
Lott, Jeremy
The Last Liberal Michael Kelly has become a writer worth stealing. That's harder than it sounds. BY JEREMY LOTT T he death of Michael Kelly hit the world of journalism like a brick to the gut,...
...Hard to say...
...We're hugging each other's trees...
...Those who knew Kelly well all painted a picture of a man who was not overly impressed with himself...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 He was a reverse snob: the meek had little to fear from him, but important people often came to loathe him, with good reason...
...Ted Kennedy...
...The easiest way around this problem would be to separate Kelly the two-fisted Irish Catholic columnist—including an unruly populism and a bad case of Irish Alzheimer's—from Kelly the fair-minded editor and reporter, and sheer off the former as an aberration...
...Kelly's profile of the most famous reader of Green Eggs and Ham began, "When Jesse Jackson hears the news, trilled in his ear in the elevator at the Democratic National Committee, that his friend Mitch Snyder has hanged himself with electrical cord, he is, of course, stunned, but it takes him just twenty seconds to see the silver lining of opportunity peeping from behind the cloud of this fetid summer day?' In his war dispatches and especially in Martyrs' Day, Kelly tried to play it straight, but that isn't quite the quality that comes through to most readers...
...He thought positive change could be enacted at the ballot box, but was highly skeptical of the ability of elected officials to bring this about...
...The irony that Kelly could get through the first war with nothing but his wits and dumb luck, but died as an "embed" under U.S...
...That same character would insure that the abridgment of freedoms during the war on terrorism on the home front would be minimal...
...I believed him when he said be had never been drafted for the Vietnam War, and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War...
...tening in on what some old colleagues had to say about Kelly's passing...
...Eulogies paint an idealized portrait of the dead, but a portrait nonetheless...
...But trying to divide Kelly's oeuvre down the middle presents all kinds of practical problems...
...In the Boston Phoenix Dan Kennedy wrote about "how different he was [in person] from the nasty persona he affected in his tinny, one-dimensional columns for the Washington Post?' Slate's Jack Shafer complained that the "jagged and brittle style [of Kelly's columns], so different than his fluid reportorial one, rasped and scrapped...
...How could a guy as nimble as Kelly die in such a stupid, pointless accident...
...Kelly gave the prez "full credit for restoring the Democratic Party and Democratic liberalism, if he wants to call it that, to viability...
...If Kelly sounded like a cheerleader for an American empire, he insisted he wasn't...
...Michael Ledeen lamented that America had lost "a national treasure, dammit...
...For many readers, the first time Kelly's name registered was a series of savage political profiles he wrote for GQ in1990...
...The passages about the rape and liberation of Kuwait are both moving and maddening...
...But it's a pretty horrifying victory...
...Still more were surprised when in the next few years Kelly refused to ally himself to some conservative camps...
...He lacked TNR's trademark faux sophistication, and he was unwilling to cotton to the administration's lying or its nannyish liberalism...
...The first paragraph, attempting to catch the mood of this new crowd, ended: "We're hugging trees...
...At best, it's a way for south-pawed admirers to get around his opposition to our former president and his running mate and his support for our current commander-in-chief...
...In fact, most nonconservative eulogizers played up this distinction...
...He loathed the pack mentality of journalists...
...The tension between Kelly's weekly column and the rest of the magazine was often so palpable that you could cut it with a knife...
...His final column was a pedestrian number praising Madeleine Albright ("not the woman her predecessor was") for being willing to keep troops in Bosnia to help knit it back together...
...Is, JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47...
...I first got the feel of this from a column titled, "Wonk New World"—a dystopian send up of everything Kelly hated about modern politics: polls, paternalism, political correctness—in which every last little thing has been politicized, including walking on sidewalks, riding bicycles, or smoking a pipe on one's porch...
...Though he was a liberal, Kelly wasn't a water-carrier for Democrats, and he frequently found himself at loggerheads with Peretz over employee relations...
...At least from the early '90s, when his byline began to find its way into publications of national scope, several threads weave consistently through Kelly's life and writings...
...Kelly returned to domestic affairs in time to usher in the Clinton administration...
...At every point he had not only evaded death, but thumbed his stubby nose at it...
...Peggy Noonan called his death "a sin against the order of the world," and maybe it was, though I'm not sure Kelly would have agreed, or put it quite so glowingly...
...Of Iraq before the war, he writes of a society in which the reach of Big Brother is so pervasive that people feel compelled to issue pro forma condemnations of America and Israel so as not to be denounced for insufficient nationalistic enthusiasm...
...For the punch line an old man's grandson asks his grandfather (sorry "grandperson") to "tell me again about the time when the era of big government ended...
...At the end of a recent column he told Lefty antiwar protesters, "You might have a hard time convincing the average Iraqi torture victim that [your solution] is a liberal one, or moral one...
...It's a free desert," said an Egyptian commander), accepted the surrender of several Iraqi troops, and found his way into Kuwait City for the liberation...
...In the early '80s, he took a big pay cut when he gave up a production job for ABC News to become a cub reporter for the Cincinnati Post...
...military protection was not lost on his admirers...
...American inwardness and American principles would serve as a restrainer on any such ambitions...
...On matters of day-to-day politics, Kelly at TNR was not wildly out of step with his own magazine...
...It is therefore worth lisJeremy Lott writes The American Prowler's weekly "Latte Sipping" column at www.spectator.org...
...According to Kelly, Clintonism "isn't actually liberalism...
...Many conservative readers were surprised when the supposed bomb thrower advocated the "extra-constitutional" option of censure...
...He flew to Saudi Arabia for the beginning of the ground war, rode into Kuwait with the Egyptian army ("Sure, why not...
...Reading the last few years of Kelly's column, what I found striking was his embrace of the liberal label...
...Strong stuff: It was reminiscent of William Gladstone's famous 1879 speech before an Edinburgh audience in which the statesman told his listeners to pass judgment on either the government or themselves...
...He refused to run an unsigned item absolving Gore of a controversy du 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 jour, and he forced his boss to apologize for a nasty memo written to copy editors...
...He was, as former employee Hanna Rosin put it, a reverse snob: the meek had little to fear from him, but important people often came to loathe him, with good reason...
...According to the early reports from Iraq, there was gunfire and a Humvee crash, and, well, details were still sketchy...
...He believed a disciplined government should accomplish big things, while simultaneously respecting people's basic freedoms...
...When New Republic owner Marty Peretz fired Kelly in 1997 after a seven-month run, he told New York magazine he had come to think of Kelly as "an obsessive" and "something of a crank?' Peretz protested—at the time and recently—that it wasn't over Kelly's manhandling of Al Gore and Bill Clinton in the magazine's lead TRB column...
...Easterbrook wrote: "The person in Mike's columns was not one you would want to invite into your borne?' Comments like the last one prompted this magazine's executive editor to ask, "What is wrong with these people...
...In his own eulogy, published in Salon, longtime New Republic alum Andrew Sullivan confessed to worrying that TNR's then-editor Hendrik Hertzberg might balk at running Kelly's war dispatches because of his hatchet job on Sen...
...Until his death, it would be a powerful pulpit...
...Nobody believes him, but it might be worth adding that it wasn't only because of this manhandling that Kelly was fired...
...I learned of it the day after, on April 4, during a phone call with an editor at a literary magazine...
...During the first Gulf War, he was in Baghdad when the bombs started to fall, then in Israel as the scuds descended...
...The popularity of his dispatches and his subsequent gem of a book—Martyrs' Day, the primer of choice for reporters covering GW2—preceded jobs at the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the New Republic, National Journal, and the Atlantic, the last three as editor...
...He was for welfare reform, against charter schools, pro-Israel, and, in matters military, a thoroughgoing internationalist...
...It's too bad that Kelly didn't live to see the answer, in Iraq or elsewhere...
...At first, I didn't believe it...
...In his last dispatch for the Atlantic, Kelly described the overwhelming superiority of the American military and wondered how it would be employed in the future: for liberty or empire, for good or evil...
...Kelly went into the Gulf War not in the employ of any news organization but as a stringer...
...To a man, the contributors praised Kelly the fair-minded editor and all-around nice guy while distancing themselves from the supposed caricature on display in his regular column for their magazine and the Washington Post...
...After the TNR debacle, the Washington Post offered to keep running Kelly's column (in the past the TRB column was often reprinted in the Post), so Kelly continued to hammer it out...
...He was enthusiastic about Bush's plan to spend billions of dollars trying to unilaterally eradicate AIDS in Africa and encouraged people to hold the administration's feet to the fire to make sure this actually happened...
...We're hugging each other...
...a large part of his work simply will not be digested...
...Probably the next hundred years hinges on the answer," he said...
...Often remembrances tell us as much about the speakers as the deceased...
...I refused to...
...In fact, it makes about as much sense as sawing a baby in two...
...I have always believed him...
...It began: "I believe the president...
...One could plausibly insist that he was too busy to be bothered, what with editing first the National Journal and then the Atlantic...
...It's possible that they were just being cads, but I think it's at least as likely TNR's eulogizers realized Kelly's voice will continue to resonate for some time—e.g., he's become a writer worth stealing...
...He followed it up with a widely noticed profile of the First Lady, which dubbed her "Saint Hillary"—presenting her as a heady mix of Paul Tillich, Lady Macbeth, and Trotsky...
...BY JEREMY LOTT T he death of Michael Kelly hit the world of journalism like a brick to the gut, with the pain quickly spreading from the vital organs to the extremities...
...But the "Two Kellys" approach is an artificial and Solomonic division...
...Saying this kind of thing elsewhere might have been fun, but in the pages of the New Republic, it came across to many readers as an act of bravery...
...I believed him when he said he hadn't had sex with Gennifer Flowers, and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did," and continued in the same vein for the rest of the column...
...However, Kelly insisted by inference in an article in the Boston Phoenix in 1999 that he was still a liberal...
...He was, broadly speaking, a liberal...
...The New Republic published four reflections online by John Judis, Gregg Easterbrook, Jonathan Cohn, and Jonathan Chait...
...His views represented authentic liberalism, which he defined as "an argument for a morally ordered world...
...All foreigners are assigned "minders" who operate quite a few rungs down from "the spies that matter, the sleek young louts of the Mukhabarat, [who] have the power to torture and kill, and act like it...
...Kelly's name was dropped (and picked up) in a half-dozen conversations that same day...
...Kelly's liberalism was based both on rights and on results, but it wasn't fuzzy...
...Kelly regularly held Bill Clinton up for scorn for everything from the campaign finance scandal to his absolute fealty to the abortion lobby, and he didn't exempt the vice president from his boss's vices...
...As a freshly minted Washington correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, he coauthored a cover story with Maureen Dowd to coincide with the inauguration...
...In 1994, before jumping to the New Yorker, Kelly penned another zeitgeisty piece for the Times magazine in which he blamed Bill Clinton's troubles on the president's problematic relationship with the truth...
...In fact, in many ways he saw himself as having the authentic stuff...
...Judis remarked on the "continuing contrast between the violence with which he would sometimes state his political opinions and his private gentleness and sensitivity...
...After September 11, from his column and in the pages of the Atlantic, he slapped down opponents of war in Afghanistan and then Iraq...
...In February 1998, the paper ran his famous "I believe" column...
...But, of course, Gladstone was playing at getting elected, and Kelly was playing a different game altogether...
...He hated cant and slovenliness and hypocrisy...
...The absence of overweening ambition had a freeing effect on Kelly and in many ways prepared the way for his success...
...He thought the character of America simply would not take to the role of world despot...
...From there, he went to the Baltimore Sun...
...His tentative support for Bush (as the anti-Gore) deepened over time...
...The issue featured a cover story in which Jonathan Rauch argued, contra Kelly, that decent people lie during sex scandals...
...Bush, said Kelly after last year's elections, "presides over an administration that is unusually intelligent—and also cunning—unusually experienced, unusually disciplined, and unusually bold...
...It is an incredibly cheap, shallow, profoundly cynical, deeply valueless emptiness...
...They wear sunglasses and black vinyl jackets and pleated Italian trousers and swagger about Baghdad like Toonland gunsels...
...Culturally, Kelly was not what would later come to be known as a blue-stater...
...Kelly then returned to Iraq and had to be smuggled out by northern rebels...
...However, it isn't possible for modern liberalism to swallow Kelly whole...
...As one friend of the family told me, "He did exactly what he wanted to do," including walking away from things that most of us would have clung to...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
