A brief note on

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A brief note on the late Michael Kelly. It should come as no surprise to any reader of this site that I seldom, if ever, agreed with anything Kelly wrote in his Washington Post column. Indeed, my reactions were often far more visceral. When someone dies, especially so young and under such violent circumstances, it’s natural to praise what there is to praise and say kind words for the departed notwithstanding any shortcomings. But let me just go a bit beyond that in this case, because it’s deserved. To the best of my recollection I never met Kelly in person. But I know a number of people who knew him very well and worked with him closely while he was the editor of The New Republic and then of The Atlantic. I’d say most of these people had more or less the same basic reaction to his column that I did. But to a person, every one of them always told me how good and fair-minded he was, both as a person and professionally. The people who worked under him as an editor loved him, even if they were bewildered by many of his views. Long before this tragic news this morning, more than one of them told me they scarcely recognized the person they knew in his often impassioned and cutting columns. Good, fair-minded, honest, never one to push his personal political views on writers whose work he edited — a temptation which many are never able to master — all the stuff you’d want in a true journalist. I remember one friend from the New Republic telling me how he had a sort of moralism and straight-laced sense of journalistic propriety you’d expect from a newspaperman of a couple generations ago. Disagree with him, but grieve him no less for it.

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