Michael Kelly in His Own Words
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 styles. He had not only a wide range of abiding interests and passions—politics, foreign affairs, war reporting, how we Americans live now, the adventures of his two young sons—but also a full panoply of literary gifts: for physical description and scene-setting; for the satirical insight, the precise image, and the transformative detail.
In retrospect, the magazine-profile form seems to have sparked the making of Mike as a writer. After a brief tour of duty as a booker at ABC's , he started out as a newspaperman at the and the Baltimore , covering a bright young reporter's fair share of worthy stories—the Midwest farm crisis, the Iran-contra hearings, Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign. But after seven years of daily deadlines and newswriting formulas Mike was ready to work on a broader canvas and to liberate his rapidly developing voice. In 1990, as a freelance writer for magazine, he burst onto the national stage with profiles
