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America Loses one of Its Finest Journalists in Iraq
A Comment on Atlantic Monthly
editor-at-large Michael Kelly
I
just lost a great friend and America one of its premier journalists, one of
the 600 “embedded” media in this war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large
Michael Kelly was killed while traveling with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry
Division. Kelly not only sat at
the helm of many of America’s most influential public policy journals of
opinion – including The New Republic, National Journal, and The
Atlantic Monthly – he wrote refreshingly hard-hitting, risk-taking
commentary about people in political power, and was unflinchingly caustic if
he smelled negligence of responsibility or an abuse of power. Kelly
became best known for his biting attacks against Bill Clinton’s personal
ethics. Kelly felt that Clinton
had betrayed the public trust and damaged the presidency’s prestige by not
only lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky – but by calculating that he
could play a game of moral brinksmanship against those bringing charges and
deceive the nation into believing his version of truth. It is a lesson about these times in
history to note that enormous resources were poured into the investigation of
Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades when little else commanded attention versus
this present time of war with Iraq, of potential wars with other nations, of
terrorism and bin Laden, and even of massive corporate scandals at MCI
Worldcom, Global Crossing, and Enron – if anyone remembers these. America could afford to obsess about
Clinton’s private life because so much else in the world was going well, but
today the reality is different in the extreme. But
Kelly was not attacking Clinton because there was nothing else to write about
– Kelly actually cared deeply about the massive impact that the president’s
lack of moral standards would have on the national psyche. He cared about the impact that
Clinton’s lessons would have on his own young children – and on Boston and Washington
kids he would see whom he felt were increasingly confronted by complex moral
choices in what looked to him like a ‘loser gets nothing, winner takes all
society.’ What made Mike Kelly’s
criticism of the president especially unusual, however, is that he was not a
card carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton
popularized. He headed the
leading journal of opinion most closely associate with the Democratic
party. Many
of his friends used to speculate about when the axe would fall on Kelly
because of his penchant for enthusiastically critical punditry of the
nation’s top Democrat. Then
publisher (and now co-publisher) of The New Republic, Martin
Peretz, let Kelly ride the ethics scandal wave without much external rebuke
though there was much internal strife at the magazine – after all, Joseph
Lieberman had done much the same within Democratic Party ranks thus preparing
himself for a shot at the Gore VP slot.
But when Kelly turned his capable guns on the Gore campaign – which
Kelly had felt was engaged in moral relativism when it came to the bad
example set by Clinton – Peretz fired him. Gore had been a student of
Peretz’s at Harvard and Peretz was committed to do everything he could to
make Gore President of the United States, and was on record for such. An independent minded New Republic
editor, despite the sanctity of freedom of speech and thought in
journalism, was ok when it came to challenging Clinton, but not Gore. Mike
Kelly was asked by National Journal and Atlantic Monthly owner
David Bradley to take the helm of both publications for a time and to whip
them into more cutting edge publications wrestling with the big ideas of the
day. Kelly could be counted on
to be creative, ferocious, chaotic, brilliant; often tough and searing in his
own commentary but intellectually honest and open to a variety of divergent
views. No one I know who worked
with Mike Kelly ever accused him of insisting that there be an orthodoxy of
views, or that other writers and thinkers had to parrot his own
perspectives. Kelly served as a
“convener” of the Next Generation Leaders Program of the New America
Foundation – and strongly encouraged inclusion of diverse and divergent
public policy players in our meetings. Kelly
was beyond the shallow and predictable grooves of the political right, or
left. His views existed on both
sides of the spectrum, and yet on neither. He was for this war in Iraq and wanted to witness it and
interpret it for the American public.
Mike thought that George Bush deserved praise for making the tough judgment
calls that leaders need to make when putting people in harm’s way to achieve
better ends. I
have opposed this war – mostly because I think that the Bush team has allowed
the Iraq action to distract from other threats like transnational terrorism and
other hot spots like North Korea.
However, like few others – Kelly could passionately embrace the
principles of even those with whom he ultimately disagreed. Steven C. Clemons is Executive Vice President of the New America Foundation, a centrist public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Artikel erschienen am 7.
Apr 2003 |
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