Kelly was the first American journalist killed in the war in Iraq and thus far the only one to die of the approximately 600 embedded journalists covering the conflict. According to unconfirmed reports from other journalists with his division, Kelly was in a Humvee heading toward the airport when the vehicle flipped into a ditch, killing him as well as the soldier with whom he was traveling. One reporter with Kelly’s unit said this morning, “We’re driving around in terrain we don’t know with our lights off.”
Kelly had served as the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The National Journal and was a fiery presence on the American journalistic scene for more than a decade. In the first Persian Gulf War, his dispatches for The New Republic, GQ, and The Boston Globe were some of the most vivid reports filed from the field, and his book on that conflict, “Martyr’s Day,” stood out because of its focus on the human element of the war rather than the military operation. (Kelly’s gulf war stories for The New Republic won a National Magazine Award.) During the current war in Iraq, he had been writing columns for the Washington Post and preparing longer pieces for The Atlantic.
“It would have been hard to imagine the war with him not wanting to do it,” said David Brooks, an Atlantic contributing editor and a personal friend of Kelly’s, on Friday morning. “He’s one of those people who went into journalism because he wanted to see stuff happen.”
Kelly was a towering figure in American journalism, a man Tina Brown called the most important American journalist in the country last year. He is credited with singlehandedly revitalizing The Atlantic, which was a well-respected but often soporific journal when he took over in 1999. Last year, the Atlantic won three National Magazine Awards and it launched a number of high-profile, provocative projects, including William Langewiesche’s three-part series of the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. He stepped down as editor last fall to work on other projects, including a planned book on the history of the steel industry. He also wanted to write a book about the grunts in the field in this conflict.
“He had a special affinity for war reporting,” Brown said on Friday. In 1994, when Brown was the editor of The New Yorker, she recruited Kelly to write the magazine’s Letter from Washington column. “He has such a strange macho kind of streak. And he’d been a desk jockey, and this was a way to re-radicalize his old war-reporting roots,” she said. “He loved to fight. And he was hugely talented.”
In the 1990s, Kelly stirred up trouble at virtually every stop in his career. He was named editor of the New Republic and then fired by owner Martin Peretz because of his constant, withering attacks on the Clinton administration. As a Washington Post columnist, he continued to lambaste both Clinton and Al Gore, and he took strident, provocative stands supporting the war in Iraq. “He was somehow able to get a huge amount of admiration from the elite for his work as an editor and a writer while continuing guerilla warfare against the same elite in his columns,” said Andrew Sullivan, who edited Kelly’s gulf war columns at The New Republic.
Personally, Kelly seemed almost the opposite of his brawling print persona. Warm, engaging, personable, caring–Kelly wasn’t just charming, he was decent. “He was a brave guy,” Brooks said. “He was at once bookish and this sort of wild man.”
