Michael Kelly
1957–2003
The Atlantic | Iraq | April 4, 2003 | Age 46
Both of his parents worked at Washington newspapers. He covered the Gulf twice himself. The first time, as a freelancer who rejected the military press pool, he came back with work that won the National Magazine Award. The second time, embedded as the editor of one of the country’s oldest magazines, he was killed.
The Journalist
Michael Thomas Kelly was born in Washington, D.C. on March 17, 1957, and grew up on Capitol Hill. His father, Tom, spent years as a political reporter, White House correspondent, and columnist for The Washington Daily News before moving into books and freelance writing. His mother, Marguerite, wrote a nationally syndicated column on family life that ran for decades. Kelly attended Gonzaga College High School, the Jesuit prep school his father had gone to before him, and grew up absorbing the culture both his parents spent their working lives covering.
He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1979, having worked on the student newspaper, and started a career that moved quickly across the industry: booking guests for Good Morning America, covering local news at the Cincinnati Post, taking on broader assignments at The Baltimore Sun. He was learning everything the business could offer, but it was during The Gulf War when he found the part of it he actually wanted to focus on.
The Work
The U.S. military organized press coverage of the 1991 Gulf War through a pool system where reporters were assigned to military units and required to submit material for security review before filing. The arrangement gave the Pentagon significant influence over what journalists could access and when. Kelly chose to work outside it. For this assignment he reported independently, without institutional backing or a place in the rotation, and filed pieces for major magazines through his own volition. He reached the highway north of Kuwait City where retreating Iraqi forces had been caught in airstrikes—the road the press called the Highway of Death—and wrote about what he saw.
“He came back with a description of horror that was in the tradition of George Orwell and Ernie Pyle,” David Remnick, later the editor of the New Yorker, told The New York Times. The Gulf War reporting won Kelly a National Magazine Award and the Overseas Press Club Award, and he later gathered it into a book, Martyrs’ Day: Chronicle of a Small War, published in 1993.
In November 1996, Kelly became editor of The New Republic, but ten months later, the magazine’s owner Martin Peretz fired him by phone. Tensions between Kelly and Peretz came to a head when Peretz, who had been close to former Vice President Al Gore since Gore was his student at Harvard in the late 1960s, wanted Kelly to publish an unsigned piece defending Gore’s fundraising practices. Kelly refused.
The episode echoed what he had done in the Gulf: in both cases, he removed himself from an arrangement that would have filtered his judgment through someone else’s priorities. The pressure in the Gulf had been logistical and official, but at The New Republic, it was personal and came from the man who owned the magazine. In both cases, Kelly’s response was the same.
In 1998, Kelly joined National Journal, a Washington policy publication owned by David G. Bradley. A year later, Bradley acquired The Atlantic Monthly and hired Kelly to run it. By the time Bradley acquired it, The Atlantic’s reputation as a platform for current affairs reporting was overshadowed by the legacy of its early contributors: Emerson, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But under Kelly, it won three National Magazine Awards and re-established itself as a home for long-form global journalism.
THE GULF WAR PRESS POOL
During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the U.S. military established a pool system that placed journalists in designated groups escorted by military personnel. Reporters had to submit dispatches for security review before filing and share their reports with all news organizations through the pool, and access to combat zones was controlled through the official rotation. Critics argued the system effectively let the military manage the war’s public image. When the U.S. military organized embedded journalism for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the approach was different: roughly 600 journalists traveled directly with military units and reported only for their own news organizations rather than through a centralized pool. Kelly was not the only journalist to go unilateral in 1991; Bob Simon and his CBS News team attempted to do the same and were captured by Iraqi forces and held for the duration of the war.
The Final Story
By early 2003, Kelly had stepped back from the Atlantic editorship to editor at large and was writing a column for The Washington Post. He had published pieces supporting the invasion, which he saw as a different kind of engagement than 1991, when he had gone to the Gulf without institutional cover and refused the military pool on principle. Now he was embedded in a war he had publicly advocated for. Margaret Talbot, who had worked with him at both The New Republic and The Atlantic, later offered the explanation that made most sense: “He wanted to see the second act. He needed to be a witness.”
He embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in the opening weeks of the war. On April 4, 2003, three weeks in, the Humvee he was riding in, maneuvering under hostile conditions near Baghdad, lost control, veered off an embankment, and plunged into a canal. Kelly and Staff Sergeant Wilbert Davis, a fifteen-year Army veteran, both died. Kelly was 46, the first American journalist killed in the Iraq War.
“He wanted to see the second act. He needed to be a witness.”
— Margaret Talbot, journalist, former colleague at The New Republic and The Atlantic
The Legacy
Kelly’s journalism was collected and published posthumously in 2004 as Things Worth Fighting For, with a foreword by Ted Koppel. Atlantic Media established the Michael Kelly Award, presented annually to a journalist whose work reflects, in the award’s description, distinctive voice, wide-ranging curiosity, and courage. The University of New Hampshire created the Michael Kelly Memorial Scholarship Fund.
He was survived by his wife, Madylyn Kelly, a CBS News producer, and their two sons, Thomas and Henry. Madylyn Kelly died in 2025. His father, Tom, who had spent his own career reporting on Washington, was at work on a book about his son at the time of his death.
This profile is part of the Fallen Journalists Memorial, honoring those who sacrificed their lives in service to press freedom and democratic values.
Content included in this publication was generously provided by the Freedom Forum’s Journalists Memorial through a partnership with the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.