Gone:

Michael Kelly killed in Iraq (accident).

UPDATE:

There have been many tributes to Kelly, but they fail to remember certain unpleasant aspects of his character. Everybody is saying how nice he was as a person, while occasionally admitting that he could be "fierce" when writing his essays. In fact, he was so rough that he got dismissed from The New Republic (mostly because he was attacking Gore and Clinton). Here is how the magazine announced the change: (emphasis added)

29 September 1997 issue

NOTE TO READERS: As you may have learned from the newspapers, with this issue Charles Lane succeeds Michael Kelly as editor. Lane first came to TNR fresh out of college in 1983. Hendrik Hertzberg was editor at the time and Lane apprenticed closely with him. Then, when Michael Kinsley sat at the editor's desk, he designated Lane to work with him as the magazine's principal editorial writer. After going to Newsweek as its Central American correspondent during the Nicaraguan civil war and subsequently serving as that magazine's Berlin bureau chief in the aftermath of the demise of communism, Lane was summoned back to Washington by then-Editor Andrew Sullivan to be TNR's lead foreign-policy analyst. So Lane represents continuity with the deepest traditions of this journal: political independence, intellectual seriousness, good writing and decency toward those with whom one disagrees. -- Martin Peretz

posted by Quiddity at 4/04/2003 08:58:00 AM