The Real Michael Kelly, Ten Years On
By Jonathan Chait
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This undated handout photo shows Washington Post syndicated columnist Michael Kelly. According to media reports, Kelly and a U.S. soldier were killed while riding in a U.S. Army Humvee vehicle April 4, 2003 in Iraq. Kelly is the first U.S. journalist to die in the war in Iraq.
Photo: Getty Images/The Washington Post
The ideological aftershocks of the Iraq war, ten years later, have reverberated through a smaller debate over Michael Kelly, a journalist who died covering the war. Mike was a giant in the field, an intensely loved or hated figure even before he died, and the debate over the meaning of his life and death has broken down over largely, though
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Michael Kelly is not publicly notable because of his personal fidelity but because of his professional work. Faced with a historic conflict, Kelly’s professional work amounted to a gleeful embrace of what was wrong, and a gleeful assault on what was right.
Coates’s estimation of Mike’s opinion writing is fair. Actually, it’s more than fair. Mike was a dreadful columnist. I don’t mean that because I disagreed with him. He was incapable of marshaling evidence or crafting arguments. He assumed all his premises and used rhetoric as a moral bludgeon. In the light of history, when the premises have been conclusively disproven (“The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, in the matter of Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be”), the emptiness of the exercise is exposed.
But to define the man by his work as a columnist is a disservice. Mike became a legend in his own time as a long-form reporter, where he combined deep reporting skills with characteristic gorgeous prose. He subsequently became editor of the New Republic, where he was immortalized for things like this completely true episode captured in the movie Shattered