WASHINGTON, April 4 (UPI) -- Michael Kelly became the first American reporter to die in the war Thursday. Those of us who mourn him can take some solace in the fact that he died for two causes -- freeing Iraq, and wartime journalism -- in which he deeply believed.
If you knew Michael Kelly only through his columns, you either loved him or hated him, probably depending upon your political persuasion. My politics were quite different from his, and if I had known him only as a reader I probably would have hated him. But I also knew Mike as an editor and as a person, and because of that I loved him.
Mike served as editor of The New Republic for only 10 months -- from November 1996 to September 1997 -- but many of us who worked under him remember it as an exciting, irreplaceable time. The affection that I had for Mike came as a shock to my friends, especially my liberal friends, who knew him through his columns. What I tried to explain to them was that the Mencken-esque character who came though in his columns was an almost completely different person from the Michael Kelly we knew.
One fact about Mike that his readers did not know was that he had an unparalleled gift for editing prose. I've worked for some fantastic editors, and none of them came close to Mike in this regard. A writer often hopes his editor will change as little as possible. With Mike it was just the opposite. The first time I wrote a cover story for the New Republic, he rewrote the first half nearly from scratch. He sent me the draft, and told me that if there were any parts I didn't like, I was free to change them. I read over his handiwork - it was breathtaking - and I called to say only that I wished he'd rewritten the other half as well.
The most unusual, and endearing, thing about Mike was that his consideration for others was in reverse proportion to their status. The phrase "authoritarian personality" refers to those who suck up to their superiors and bully their social inferiors. I don't know of any phrase to describe the opposite syndrome, probably because Michael Kelly is the only person who ever had it. One of my colleagues once called him "a natural democrat." I think that's about right. He would pick a fight with someone who had power. But he was unfailingly generous with his time and his emotions to the young, underpaid staffers who worked for him.
He would sit in his office with you, offering advice -- or, more often, unwinding stories -- at the leisurely pace of a man who had no other responsibilities in the world. Often you'd hear the secretary paging him, with phone calls from prominent Washington figures, but inevitably Mike would let the messages stack up in his voice mail and continue the conversation.
The devotion he inspired in those who worked for him endured over the years. We would continue to call or write to him for advice, even years after his brief stint as our editor. His readers know that they've lost one of the greatest war reporters in the history of American journalism. His colleagues know they've lost so much more.
(Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic)
