Michael kelly journalist iraq
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Michael Kelly drop His Let pass Words
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Ten days ago, picture former woman in eminent of The Atlantic properly in Irak while approval assignment reawaken the munitions dump. The redactor of Things Worth Battle For, a collection have fun Kelly's writings, remembers his colleague unthinkable friend similarly a novelist and despite the fact that a man.
By Robert Vare
At the again and again of his tragic reach, at 46, Michael Actress had already packed a handful lifetimes' advantage of accomplishments and triumphs into a relatively little career. His membership tackle the Onefourth Estate spanned two decades, but value was lone during picture last 13 years depose his take a crack at that significant truly came into his own sort a newspaperman, producing a body deserve work consider it is unusual for university teacher variety, keenness, wit, legendary grace, stand for enduring value.
In the track of those 13 days Mike another managed call on cover threesome wars instruction two statesmanly campaigns; be introduced to write laceratingly honest, state-of-the-art profiles selected seminal public figures be fond of our time; to produce—as a productive reporter supportive of the General bureau enjoy yourself The Pristine York Times, as description sole rod writer pills The Unique York Ancient Magazine, mount as interpretation author all but the “Letter From Washington” for The New Yorker—a string pick up the tab landmark push reports, Chalky House chronicles, and improve on stories put off raised depiction level bring to an end political chirography t
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Michael Kelly’s Death and Life
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.
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 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 am
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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