Everyone's Favorite

...his talents and aspirations were too big...

...Washington is famous for its shameless self-promoters...

...In any healthy culture, regulated by objective expectations of propriety, the events Kelly describes would have ended Kennedy's professional life, and if they didn't then the public revelation of them in a reputable magazine would have...

...Kelly advanced himself instead by being talented and tireless and, strangest of all, not a jerk...

...He went to the New Yorker, where he served as the most sensible and clued-in Washington correspondent the magazine ever had...

...Of all the politicos Kelly wrote about, Daley was the most straightforward, the least complicated...

...His career as a writer of lengthy, reported stories was over, and he began moonlighting as a newspaper opinion columnist...

...Kelly left it...

...Vare includes a couple dozen of the columns...

...With his long labors at Republican White Houses, quasi-academic think tanks, uneven journalistic ventures, and the opinion mills of PBS, Gergen had come to personify the culture that made the Clinton presidency possible...

...His dispatches from the Gulf won all kinds of awards and provided the material for his greatest work, the book Martyrs' Day...

...As a matter of professional courtesy, journalists will lionize other journal-ists—if we don't do it, who will?—but the mourning of Mike Kelly spread outward to include tributes from the president of the United States and from many of the same personages he had written about, and not favorably, over his twenty years as a writer...

...Indeed, the story, and the capital's reaction to it, was Exhibit A in its own defense...

...Kelly believed that the private and the public aren't essentially separable, in politics or any other endeavor...

...Not only in Washington but elsewhere, his death was greeted with an effusion of grief and ceremonious display that must have struck some people as odd, or at least unexpected...

...They brought Kelly a whole new audience, who discovered in him a like-minded polemicist capable of casting their own opinions in language much more precise and elegant than they, or anyone else, could have mustered...

...To the contrary, it seemed like a damn good career move...

...Among his heroes were Rebecca West and A.J...

...the inner man doesn't have to travel up through an obstacle course of artifice and calculation before he shows himself to the world...

...Clinton's empathy is wholly real...

...When it first appeared in GQ, it preoccupied Washington for many days—a lifetime in the city of the eternal now...

...it was pathbreaking only in the limited sense that Kelly for the first time gathered into one place all the stories, and confirmed all the rumors, that Wash-ingtonians had been repeating to one another about Teddy for years...

...Washington's faithful forgot Kelly's story as a child forgets a scary dream...

...What happens in the political world is divorced from the real world...

...But as you may have noticed, Kennedy is still here, still lionized, still sought out for wisdom and looked to for leadership, still bellowing at his inferiors, Republicans, from a pose of moral outrage...

...Clymer prospered in the Times newsroom...

...A couple years later he quit to edit a succession of magazines, first the New Republic, then the National Journal, and then the Atlantic Monthly...

...Such a man requires a hospitable ecosystem for his flourishing, and when Clinton left Arkansas, the political culture of Washington was here to greet him...

...The president's face is a screen upon which plays a loop of expressions that have become insistently familiar: the open-mouthed grin of joyous wonder...

...He had just signed up as a Clinton adviser in 1993 when he sat (sat like a sitting duck) for the portrait Kelly wrote of him...

...Whether Clinton is moralizing from the pulpit of a black church or cutting a deal with shadowy Ozark businessmen, "it is also impossible to doubt that he believes utterly in what he is doing...

...The most famous of Kelly's early stories was a profile of Ted Kennedy—the uber-celebrity of American politics, whose continued prominence Kelly took to be a sign of some infection at the heart of the capital's culture...

...Profiles, Vare says, allowed Kelly to explore his grand theme: "the complicated relationship between talent and character...

...It is impossible to imagine him launching his own website, or tagging everyone he knew with email alerts about his latest article, or elbowing his way into a gossip column for the sake of professional vanity...

...a man is what he does, and no amount of skillful rhetoric or technical flimflam can detach one from the other...

...That Gergen should hire on with a president who was busy trying to undo the accomplishments of Ger-gen's previous boss, Ronald Reagan, seemed not at all odd to his fellow Washington strivers...

...Interesting as they are— some of us still can't get enough—the details of Clinton's appetites weren't as interesting as their source...

...What is important is the perceived image of what he is and what he does...

...In any case, they offered no room for the layers of detail and variations of color that gave his longer stories such force, and it's sad to think that his later fans knew Kelly's work only through his newspaper columns—but pleasing to think they now have a chance to see him at his best...

...David Gergen, more particularly, was here to greet him...

...The story was a painstaking deconstruction of Clinton's pre-presidential career, yet not long after it appeared he boasted, as if astonished at his feat: "I published twelve thousand words about Bill Clinton's past, and not one word about f—ing...

...There's no artifice in his stories, nothing jumped up...

...In an important sense, these expressions are entirely honest...

...Normal people joined in as well...

...Once again, you could see it in the face: The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms...

...Liebling, and like them—though neither he nor they would ever put it so pompously—he wanted to produce longer stories that had the force and durability of literature...

...In this new faith, it has come to be held that what sort of person a politician actually is and what he actually does are not really important...

...Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true—yet also maintain that it is the only truth that really matters...

...I don't mean he believed in the old lie that the personal is the political, or that the personal should necessarily be public...

...Yet it didn't contain any news...

...I heard the other day, by the way, that Gergen is now the Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University—an exquisitely Gergenesque job title that would have pleased Kelly deeply...

...The morning after he died, I happened to be at a meeting of history buffs in Richmond, Virginia, and was struck by how many people had heard the news and seemed shook up by it...

...He earned his reputation in ways that are unlikely for his time and place...

...Kelly invited his readers to look close...

...Kelly had many friends and many more admirers...

...A man like Ger-gen," Kelly wrote, "unafraid to admit that his loyalties and convictions are no more than outerwear, is always welcome at the table...

...For a reader who agrees with them, there can be great satisfaction in reading columns like these, though I'm not sure how much satisfaction there could be in producing them week after week...

...I think the same is true of Kelly's writing, clear and unadulterated as it is—put down on the page with great care and skill but in the end utterly transparent...

...He began writing profiles for GQ, which under the late editor Art Cooper was one of the last slick magazines to have large aspirations of its own, and later, as a freelancer, he covered the Gulf war for GQ and the New Republic...

...Kelly's view of him is of course subtle and fine grained, but it's also unusually tender, and as you read along you begin to see why...

...the scowl of righteous but controlled anger...

...The idea of image [has become] the faith of Washington," he wrote...

...In this world of passing surfaces, unlikely figures will assume the status of legend...

...With Things Worth Fighting For their numbers can only grow...

...After he became well-known he gave interviews once in a while, although only to promote the magazines he edited and the writers he published there...

...The gaping hollow that Kelly found at the center of the president's character explained much more than his sex life: It explained his elastic ideology, his flexible alliances, his fleeting friendships, and ultimately his political success...

...He gave no indication of any interest in prurient matters...

...A better way to describe Kelly's grand theme, in my opinion, is the relation between private character and public life—especially public life as it is shaped by politics...

...The story is not a puff piece, in other words...

...No longer of the present moment, his boorishness has ceased to exist...

...Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality...

...As with all of Kelly's Washington profiles, the story about Gergen was less about the subject at hand than about the political culture itself...

...the near tears of a man who is not afraid to show that he feels...

...He is the existential president, living with absolute sincerity in the passing moment...

...He was a better writer than any reporter I ever knew of, and a better reporter than any other writer, and realizing this, his fellow writers and reporters were content just to relax and admire him...

...Not every shameless self-promoter gets ahead in Washington, needless to say, but everyone who gets ahead in Washington is a shameless self-pro-moter—or so slackers liked to think, until Kelly proved the rule wrong...

...But it exists only in the moment...

...sometimes it seems as if the city knows no other professional type...

...Alone among successful people in the journalism business, he was hated by none of his friends...

...Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite...

...In fact, one of Kelly's former colleagues at the New York Times, a courtier journalist named Adam Clymer, even made Kennedy the subject of a long and worshipful biography, managing to avoid the unpleasant issue of character altogether...

...But as his friend Robert Vare, editor of Things Worth Fighting For, writes in a perceptive and touching introduction, his earlier profiles were "the making of him as a writer...

...the lip-biting, eyes-lowered glance of pondering humility...

...handful of times and always to his regret...

...BY ANDREW FERGUSON This collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles by Michael Kelly appears at the first anniversary of his death, on April 3, 2003, as he was covering the war in Iraq...

...He worked as a booker for a morning television show and made some noise as a reporter for the Cincinnati Post, but he wasn't a newspaperman at heart...

...What you see with Daley, as his admirers always say, is what you get...

...This is why not only his friends but also those who knew him solely through his work, longtime readers as well as those happening on the stories for the first time, will come away from his final book touched with admiration, gratitude, and heartbreak...

...Kelly was born and reared in Washington, but he started his career elsewhere...

...My own favorite of the stories here is a portrait of Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, caught in 1990, not long after he had succeeded to the throne occupied for so long by his father...

...He agreed to appear on television only a Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...In 1994, for example, he profiled Bill Clinton for the New York Times Magazine, where he was working as a staff writer...

...The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks...

...It exists for only the fleeting historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama...

...The Kennedy profile is exhaustive and exhausting, an encyclopedic account of an undisciplined and foolish man whose psychological difficulties had left a long trail of personal hurt...

...The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip...