Lasting Kelly

...Later came Kelly's unprecedented serial transformations, as editor, of the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly...

...Kelly, "embedded" with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, was killed in a Humvee rollover on April 3 of last year...

...Yet Hayward the scholar assaults the ex-president not with the hyperbole of an Brock Yates is author, most recently, ofAgainst Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (Thunder's Mouth Press...

...In 1797 he challenged James Monroe, a Jeffersonian and former ambassador to France, whom he blamed for the exposure of the Maria Reynolds affair...

...Burr, however, wasn't privy to Hamilton's plan and made full use of his opportunity...

...His potted 1994 history-cum-diagnosis of the Gaza Strip, "Arafat Bombs on Opening Night," is particularly fine¡ªalmost reminiscent of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West's prophetic and compelling account of the Balkan Peninsula in 1937...

...He made the former a general-inter est magazine again, in the full mean ing of the term, and until he laid hands on the latter it wasn't the sort of thing you'd buy except by accident...

...Before the confrontation with Burr, Chernow says there were six occasions when Hamilton "had been involved in the duel preliminaries that formed parts of affairs of honor...

...I was bewildered when Peggy Noonan wrote in a eulo gy to Kelly that "He was going to be one of the great editors of his time...

...But it's not a self-sufficient epigram, and you could wait ten years even to steal it and work it into a conversation...

...Whenever something chances to make human beings interested in Bosnia or Kuwait, people will find it useful to consult this book...

...You've heard plenty about his gifts as a storyteller already...

...Speaking as a neophyte in that field, I must say I consider Things Worth Fighting For to have been a graduate education...

...His belief in strong central government often carried him away, as when he called for vigorous application of the Alien and Sedition Acts and proposed breaking the states into smaller, weaker units...

...The hard training prepared him better than most to react to September 11, and he reacted better than most...

...Indeed, our mental picture of that war¡ªparticularly of the atrocities committed by the occupiers of Kuwait, and of the carnage on the "Highway of Death" from Kuwait to Basra¡ªwas defined by him...

...Michael Kelly, to the life...

...The bit about being "someone who mattered" is, I think, one of the most personally revealing statements to be found in Kelly's body of work...

...Even by the standards of his day, Hamilton was appallingly reckless...

...How else can one explain Carter's unconscionable efforts to sabotage the 1990 Gulf War or his cozy relationship with anti-American terrorists like Yasser Arafat, Danny Ortega, Hafez Assad, and the North Korean gangsters...

...Hayward thankfully avoids laps es into psychoanalysis while carefully recounting Br'er Jimmy's dismal and often contradictory record as a public and private figure, but he cannot avoid describing a truly bizarre personality...

...A quarter-century later that brief interlude in the voting booth haunts me while it produces endless amusement for my wife Pamela, who saw the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, for what he was, a nasty, egocentric Lilliput whose Cheshire-cat smile shielded a blurred, disjointed, hopelessly murky and marginally schizophrenic personality that prompted comedian Pat Paulsen to quip, "They wanted to put Carter on Mt...

...Rushmore, but they didn't have room for two faces...

...His reporting on the first Gulf War made his reputation...

...As de facto commander of the army assembled when war with France loomed, he actively entertained the notion of going to war with both France and Spain to grab Florida, Louisiana, and South America...

...All and sundry took him to their hearts¡ªit seems that, given the sort of fellow he was, to do otherwise was impossible¡ªand dis BOOKS IN REVIEW missed his conservative ferocity as an idiosyncrasy...

...He's not bowing to his betters in that sentence: He's astonished at the effrontery of this...

...He was, and knew he was, someone who mattered to the consumers of newspapers and magazines¡ªnot someone who mattered only to their creators...

...Here, reporting aspires to the level of Stoic philosophy...

...It seemed ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡the right thing to do at the time, an angry reaction to the Nixon/Watergate mess and the dim bulb succession of Veep Gerald Ford, a man seemingly better qualified to bolt bumpers on Fords in his native Michigan than to take pratfalls in the White House...

...For better or worse, it's the half that will have to perpetuate his reputation, if that is to happen...

...It took him about four years, all told, to perform this...

...His writing is, hence, only half of his achievement, and maybe not even half...

...One cannot read about how Carter isolated himself from his Democratic cohorts in Congress, his demented selection of peaceniks like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and arms control chief Paul Warnke, plus lefties like Anthony Lake, Richard Holbrooke, et al., without puzzling over his sanity...

...Feeling, quite rightly, an almost proprietary interest in the outcome of America's struggle with Saddam, he went back to Iraq¡ªwhere the road ended...

...In 1800 he made a far worse one¡ªwriting a lengthy, bitter anti-Adams tract that did fatal damage to the president's re-election campaign, delivering the White House to Hamilton's longtime nemesis, Thomas Jefferson...

...It reads like humility: I, Mike Kelly, am not in any wise comparable to the Friedmans and Woodwards, the titans of the scribal world...

...He accepted Burr's challenge for the baffling explanation that he had to do so to preserve his political prospects...

...He sought to reflect, and learn...

...Upon hearing reports that John Adams had called him a British lackey, he wrote an angry letter demanding that he take responsibility for the charge...

...Setting aside the natural impulse to deify the man, I can do no better than to answer "maybe...

...But perhaps his anti-American behavior has nothing to do with politics, but more with jealousies directed at the Bush family and their connections to Ronald Reagan¡ªthe man who squashed him like a hollow cashew in the 1980 presidential election...

...this Clinton hack who thinks, Colby Cosh is a columnist for the National Post of Canada...

...Hamilton lingered for 31 hours before dying, leaving his seven children fatherless, his wife bereft and financially straitened, and the fledgling nation without the talents that had once been such an asset...

...As if, like Thomas Friedman, he would happily apply a layer of marzipan to some ambitious turd's geopolitical layer cake and present it to the world as Received Wisdom...

...Steven Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank populated by few, if any, fans of James Earl Carter, Jr...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW unreliable...

...Imagine Mike Kelly as "someone who mattered...

...Ever the Wonderboy The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry...

...He also displayed an almost pathological inability to accept the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics...

...Cripes, lady¡ªwhat more did you want...

...In 1796, he supported Thomas Pinckney over John Adams, which Chernow describes as "a mistake that would haunt him the rest of his life...

...This may not be a coincidence, since the piece was seri alized in the Atlantic in 1941...

...Hot-tempered and obsessed with upholding his honor, he had a habit of inviting his enemies to settle their disputes with firearms...

...8i Lasting Kelly Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings by Michael Kelly (The Penguin Press, 426 pages, $26.95) Reviewed by Colby Cosh NE DAY IN 1998," Michael Kelly wrote in November 2002, "I was invited to have an off-the-record chat with an important staff 0 person on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council...

...It is the significance of his work as a newspaper columnist that has been minimized somewhat by his colleagues since his death...

...In fact, at the time of his death he had already ascended to the well deserved Valhalla of the "editor-at large...

...In short, they wrapped him in the Blue State flag before they buried him...

...The subjects dealt with between the pages of Things Worth Fighting For are necessarily ephemeral, but will the prose last...

...And readers could do worse than to consult Things Worth Fighting For as a general meditation, accidentally compiled over a working life, on the nature and meaning of warfare...

...When the moment came, though, he apparently chose to fire his weapon harmlessly into the air¡ªgiving his opponent the chance to do likewise and allow the dispute to be resolved without bloodshed...

...But in 1800, Hamilton outdid himself...

...This of course only adds to Carter's appeal among the U.S.-hating European left, who awarded him a Nobel Peace Prize for his Quisling-like behavior¡ªa display of Yankee baiting unequaled until the year's awarding of the Cannes Film Festival Palm to that fat, socialist crypto-slob Michael Moore for anti-Bush agitprop...

...When confronted with the stench and surrealism of mass death on the Basra road, Kelly did not shut down his inquiring mind in favor of engaging an outraged tongue...

...arch-critic or political foe, but with the scalpel cuts of an academic surgeon, carefully dissecting the little man's political career and his more recent love-fests with every degenerate dictator on the planet...

...In the end, the one thing greater than Hamilton's genius for government was his aptitude for self-destruction...

...Marvels Chernow, "Hamilton was, implausibly, commencing an affair of honor with the president of the United States"¡ªthe first step toward a duel...

...someone ought to have sent it to me a year ago...

...One ongoing theme of Hayward's analysis centers on Carter's incredible pettiness and dark penchant for veiled hatred...

...Franklin's assessment of Adams might have been more aptly applied to Hamilton: "He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses...

...But Kelly was just too young to settle into a puffy naugahyde armchair and dictate dozy columns to an assistant once or twice a week...

...Kelly's fate, perhaps decided by his birth in Washington, D.C., was to be a man of hell-in-ahandcart propensities who worked in overwhelmingly liberal environments...

...President, in recent days you have been characterized as mean, vindictive, and hysterical to the point of desperation...

...Going to be...

...The column adjoined to these words is reprinted with dozens of others in Things Worth Fighting For, a new and solemnly accoutered collection of Kelly's journalism from the Penguin Press...

...Christ on a bike, that he can spin Mike Kelly...

...A week after I read it, I'm still chuckling over his line about a couple that had to divorce owing to "irreconcilable similarities...

...By Steven F. Hayward (Regnery Publishing, 272 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Brock Yates EA CULPA: I was one of the pathetic dupes who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976...

...That is generally a place no man leaves willingly to return to the world...

...It may not linger, qua writing...

...Mike Kelly...

...The whole experience was terrific fun, although I could never shake the feeling that it was all a mistake¡ªthat I was supposed to be someone else entirely, someone who mattered, Tom Friedman or Bob Woodward probably...

...Kelly didn't stay in any one place long enough to become synonymous with it, William Shawn-fashion...

...As if, like Bob Woodward, Kelly would happily accept precious, half-digested morsels of insider dope, whizzing across town to trade them for more of their like...

...It was during his failed 1980 presidential campaign that ABC's Barbara Walters noted in an interview, "Mr...

...ET KELLY'S REPORTAGE 15 indisputably terrific: as ¡¡¡¡¡¡a selector of devastating anecdotes there was none better...

...Adams said that if he had given Hamilton a free hand with the army, he would have needed another army to disband it...

...It also wrecked any remaining political future the author had...

...Adams was sensible enough to ignore him...

...Look closer¡ªlook for the cocky Irish dynamo who chewed right through the nucleus of American journalism in about a decade...

...Kelly's bon mots are tres bon indeed, but not the sort that get you into Bartlett's...

...Yet until the showdown with Burr, one friend said, Hamilton probably had never fired a pistol since the Revolutionary War...

...While the liberal media have elevated Carter to a position of "America's greatest ex-president" due to his hand-wringing, Chamberlain-like advocacy of peace at any price wrapped in a hopelessly hypocritical mantle of born-again Christianity, Hayward spikes this adoration with a prosecutor's indictment that reveals Carter as a petulant loser whose post-presidency actions often border on the treasonous...

...In the posthumous anthology, he rises again in all his Clinton-hating, hipster-crippling, Baby Boomer-excoriating glory...