Michael kelly journalist iraq
Michael Kelly went to war, as a journalist, on his own terms. In 1990, following stints as a reporter for the Cincinnati Post and the Baltimore Sun, he decided to do an end run around the Pentagon’s tight restrictions on the news media for Operation Desert Storm and cover the conflict as a freelancer. “I wanted to go to Baghdad and see the beginning of the war and write something about it,” he later told an interviewer. “I had no larger thought in mind.”
Kelly ended up staying for the duration of the Gulf War, and his dispatches from the front, like the one reprinted here, brought him a boatload of accolades, including a National Magazine Award and an Overseas Press Award. They also formed the basis of a book, Martyrs’ Day: Chronicles of a Small War (Random House, 1993), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 1994. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, once said that Kelly’s account of the Gulf War stood alongside George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, about the Spanish Civil War, and Ernie Pyle’s reporting during World War II. Kelly went on to join the staff of the New Yorker and to become the editor, successively, of the New Republic, National Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly.
Then came the second Gulf War. Kelly decided to drop the project he was working on (a book about the steel industry) and head back to Iraq, this time as an embedded correspondent with the 3rd Infantry Division. “He wanted to see the second act,” a colleague later recalled. “He needed to be a witness.” On April 4, 2003, as one of the division’s forward units was bearing down on Baghdad, the Humvee in which Kelly was riding with Staff Sergeant Wilbert Davis, a 15-year U.S. Army veteran, ran off a road near Saddam International Airport and into a canal, killing both men. Kelly, at age 46, was the first American reporter to die in the war.
Hendrik Hertzberg, who was Kelly’s editor at t American journalist (1957–2003) This article is about the American journalist. For the Irish journalist, see Michael Kelly (Irish journalist). For other uses, see Michael Kelly (disambiguation). Michael Thomas Kelly (March 17, 1957 – April 4, 2003) was an American journalist for The New York Times, a columnist for The Washington Post and The New Yorker, and a magazine editor for The New Republic, National Journal, and The Atlantic. He came to prominence through his reporting on the 1990–1991 Gulf War, and was well known for his political profiles and commentary. He suffered professional embarrassment for his role as senior editor in the Stephen Glass scandal at The New Republic. Kelly was killed in 2003 while covering the invasion of Iraq; he was the first United States journalist to die during the war. During a journalism career that spanned 20 years, Kelly received a number of professional awards for his book on the Gulf War and his articles, as well as for his magazine editing. In his honor, the Michael Kelly Award for journalism was established, as well as a scholarship at his alma mater, the University of New Hampshire. Born in Washington, D.C. as one of four children, Kelly followed both of his parents into journalism. His mother is Marguerite (Lelong) Kelly, a columnist from New Orleans who wrote "The Family Almanac" for The Washington Post, and his father was Thomas Vincent Kelly (August 2, 1923 – June 17, 2010), a political and features reporter for The Washington Star, formerly The Washington Daily News, and later for The Washington Times. Kelly attended Gonzaga College High School, as his father had done. He graduated in 1979 from the University of New Hampshire, where he worked for the college newspaper, The New Hampshire, and graduate Twelve years ago, Michael Kelly was one of hundreds of reporters covering the war in the Persian Gulf, a 30-something stringer for The Boston Globe, GQ and The New Republic who was hardly a household name even in media circles. On March 5, Kelly filed his second column from Kuwait City. Under the headline, “Battle Stations for the Press,” Kelly wrote: In a few days the United States armed forces will attempt to discover if it is possible to successfully place about 500 journalists in military units (down to the company level) going into war. This experiment in what the military calls “embedding” entails grafting what amounts to a presidential-campaign-sized press corps onto an army in combat. The question of whether this is going to work, or implode, is a matter of much conversation among the involved parties here. By most accounts, the experiment has worked so far, although Michael Kelly did not live to gauge its ultimate success or failure. U.S. Ten years ago, the former editor in chief of The Atlantic died in Iraq while on assignment for the magazine. The editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a collection of Kelly's writings, remembers his colleague and friend as a writer and as a man. By Robert Vare At the time of his tragic death, at 46, Michael Kelly had already packed several lifetimes' worth of accomplishments and triumphs into a relatively short career. His membership in the Fourth Estate spanned two decades, but it was only during the last 13 years of his life that he truly came into his own as a journalist, producing a body of work that is remarkable for its variety, incisiveness, wit, literary grace, and enduring value. In the course of those 13 years Mike somehow managed to cover three wars and two presidential campaigns; to write laceratingly honest, state-of-the-art profiles of seminal political figures of our time; to produce—as a prolific reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times, as the sole staff writer of The New York Times Magazine, and as the author of the “Letter From Washington” for The New Yorker—a string of landmark campaign reports, White House chronicles, and cover stories that raised the level of political writing to literature; to turn out a wide-ranging, at times slashing, syndicated weekly column, first for The New Republic and then for The Washington Post; and to be, successively, the editor of three magazines: first The New Republic, then National Journal, and, later, The Atlantic. All in 13 years: an extraordinary period of fecundity and journalistic adventurousness. Mike's beat stretched from Capitol Hill to the concrete-and-sheet-metal headquarters of the Militia of Montana, from the battlefields of Iraq to the beaches of Cape May. To review his entire body of work is to be struck most strongly by the sheer breadth of his reporting and writing, his expansive palette of subjects and s
Michael Kelly (editor)
Early life and education
Michael Kelly’s Death and Life
Last month, Kelly returned to the Gulf to report on the war with Iraq, and what a difference a decade had made.
His gutsy and powerful dispatches from the first Gulf War had launched an illustrious and sometimes stormy career. Now 46, he was a media heavyweight, editor at large for The Atlantic Monthly, the 145-year-old magazine he’d infused with new life, a successful political writer who’d burnished his fame in the late 1990s as a Clinton-bashing columnist. A supporter of President George W. Bush’s war on Saddam Hussein, he wanted to be there to witness it.
On Thursday night, while embedded with the Third Infantry Division, Kelly died in a Humvee accident south of Baghdad, the Washington Post reported and Atlantic Media said Friday. He leaves his wife, Madelyn, a former producer for CNN, and their two sons, Tom, 6 and Jack, 3, in Swampscott, Mass. He is also survived by his father Michael Kelly in His Own Words