But I think I know from those few encounters why he meant so much to the people who really did know him well. There are some people who strike you immediately by a kind of natural goodness that goes beyond good nature. Like obscenity in the Supreme Court opinion, natural goodness is something that's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. You know it by contrast with its absence, in yourself and others.

I don't mean goody-goody goodness; I don't mean New Age goodness, which tends to suggest that you should never get angry at things like injustice or hypocrisy, because it might disturb your inner peace and serenity, which, of course, is the absolute Highest Good. Instead, I'm talking about the kind of goodness that acknowledges that there are Things Worth Fighting For , which is the title of the just-published collection of Mike Kelly's work that Robert Vare has compiled.

Mike's kind of goodness encompassed a cheerful, unselfish and principled dedication to the word, the voice, the story, the craft, the role of writing-the thing itself, rather than the suits and trappings of prominence-that seemed to make everybody in his presence feel a little bit better about themselves, about being writers. Like it was worth laboring over making a sentence, rather than laboring over making a social connection for one's career.

So that's one reason I'm bitter at the cruel and capricious fate that singled him out for death on the outskirts of Baghdad a year ago. Yes, I know everybody dies, including many who don't deserve to, but if you ask me, Mike Kelly really didn't deserve to-not so suddenly and so soon, anyway. Actually, "capricious fate" is a euphemism; I'm bitter about something bigger. Recently, I was witness to a fascinating public conversation between Tony Kushner and Harold Bloom sponsored by the Classic Stage Company and moderated by the C.S.C.'s new artistic director, Brian Kulick, whose Shakespearean productions I've admired in the past. It was supposed to be a discussion about the relationship between religion and theater, and it was, but it turned into a fascinating psychodrama in which Mr. Bloom relentlessly pressed a reluctant Mr. Kushner to concede that there was a spiritual dimension, a spiritual argument going on in his work. A "charge" (Mr. Bloom admired Mr. Kushner's work precisely for this reason) that the playwright wittily evaded, mainly on Brechtian grounds.

"But what is Angels without angels ?" exclaimed Mr. Bloom. He cited two passages, one from A Dybbuk and one from Angels in America , in which he said that Mr. Kushner was giving voice to the ancient Jewish quarrel with God, the demand that He explain why He permits the persistence of evil and cruelty and the perverse fate of the good among us.

It's the quarrel over theodicy. A rabbi once told me that, according to some sage or another, this was one implication of the Abraham and Isaac story: that Abraham should have questioned the sacrifice of his son that God was demanding. Or, as that other son of Abraham, Bob Dylan (son of Abraham Zimmerman), put it: "God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son' / Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on ."

I'm down with that quarrel, and the death of Michael Kelly is one more count in the indictment. Another way of expressing this can be found in a line from Pat Moynihan that Maureen Dowd quoted in the beautiful column she wrote about Mike Kelly after he died. They had a blow-up of that column on an easel at the Mike Kelly event at Michael's restaurant, and I think that reading it was what triggered my renewed bitterness. It went something like this: "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually." Killer line. (I think "the world" is a euphemism for God.) It's the kind of thing that has always made me secretly subscribe to the theory that the Irish are the Ten Lost Tribes.

Anyway, what brought me to the Mike Kelly event was reading the remarkably perceptive piece about his work that Robert Vare has written in the April Atlantic . It's an adaptation of his introduction to Things Worth Fighting For . And it reminded me of how many things Mike Kelly did so superbly well as a writer.

I remember when I first read Martyrs' Day , his account of the 1991 Gulf War, that it was one of those books that I almost resented because it was so good. But don't take my word: The great critic Robert Hughes called it "the best piece of war writing in a generation; not since Vietnam and Michael Herr's Dispatches has anyone conveyed the pity and terror of war ... so well … he is a writer, with a precise eye and a voice that is by turns elegiac, supple, and bleakly funny … "

Mr. Vare mentioned this event, which was a kind of memorial commemoration, launch party for the posthumous collection and benefit for Mike's two children. It was sponsored by an informal alliance of guys named Kelly (including Keith Kelly of the Post and Jim Kelly of Time ), and I saw a lot of people I liked there, but the evening only made me feel the loss again, and more deeply. Especially after I bought a copy of the new book, took it home and read a lot of Kelly pieces I hadn't read before.

For one thing, it reminded me how funny he could be. In an early magazine column, he talked about the relentless sensitive-man epiphanies in the now-discontinued "About Men" column in The Times :

"I sometimes imagine the ultimate 'About Men' column …. It opens in a hospital room on an evening in April, the cruelest month. In a bed, limply, lies a man who has collapsed on a busy street, struck by a fairly major epiphany.

"He shows promise of a full recovery-until his father turns up. As the emotionally crippled older man stands by in mute despair, unable to verbalize his true feelings, the son suffers a second, more serious, epiphany.

"Incredibly, he rallies again. But at this critical moment his son from his first marriage, whom he has not seen in the decade since the child's mother divorced him … arrives at his bedside. He looks at his son with misty eyes. Ditto, the son at him. 'I love you, Dad,' says the boy. 'I lo-I, uh-I love … ' he begins, then stops, unable to say it. As he realizes that he is, in the end, the same man as his father -the final terminal epiphany racks his shuddering frame."

Then there's his hilarious parody of Robert Reich's self-important memoir of his Cabinet service ("'For God's sake, man, get a grip on yourself!' The secretary of labor's voice cut like the crack of a whip through the cabinet room. Robert B. Reich stood towering over the Treasury Secretary, who lay curled in the fetal position … "). It's a hilarious and mean send-up of all toadying office-holders who bite the hand they licked as soon as they leave office.

Indeed, distaste for the toady and toadyism is a thread that runs through his work. His classic piece on David Gergen as the ultimate Washington insider reflects it. So does the famous episode in which Mike was pushed out from the editorship of The New Republic back in 1997 (in the view of most, including him) because he would not tone down his criticism of the magazine's pet pol, Al Gore: a pre-emptive contempt that has been vindicated by Mr. Gore's pathetic campaign and his toadying to Howard Dean when, with his unerring bad judgment, Mr. Gore thought he could get a leg up by sucking up to the Deaniacs.

I was talking to some friends recently about the controversy among literati over confessional memoirs and the way so many of these allegedly bold confessions are ultimately self serving: Look how bad I was and how brave I am to admit it, that kind of thing. (I defended the David Denby memoir, however, because he had the courage to make himself look like a fool.) And we were trying to figure out what the one unspeakable, unconfessable sin left was, the one that wouldn't in some way make the confessor look good, in some respect, either for his bold venture into degradation or his bold venture into confessing that degradation. And we settled on toadyism. You'll never see Confessions of a Toady climbing the best-seller lists. (Although maybe The Apprentice will break the toady barrier.) You'll probably never see it written, and yet we all know that they're out there. Indeed, we could all name two or three ourselves,couldn't we?

And it occurred to me that the one thing Mike Kelly represented was the Anti-Toady. And re-reading Martyrs' Day , his chronicle of the first Gulf War, and his Washington Post columns on the run-up to the second, I began to realize that the thing he detested most about Saddam was that he had made toadyism his principle of rule, using fear, brutality and torture to turn his subjects into a nation of overt and (worse) internalized toadies. It wasn't the toadies alone that Mike Kelly despised; it was the bullies who turned the weak into toadies. Someday, someone will do a study of toadyism, which will include both sides of the relationship, the toady and the toadee, you might say. Mike Kelly was an acute observer of both sides of that equation, and I think his lack of awe for the great nabobs of Washington came from his observation that they required toadies to buttress their vision of themselves, to reflect their overblown sense of grandeur.

And when you think about it, his horror of toadyism, voluntary or enforced-a horror that is really an affirmation of individual dignity-may be at the heart of Mike Kelly's political vision. The vision that centers around "the boot." On the back of the book jacket of Things Worth Fighting For is a quote from that Maureen Dowd column I mentioned, the one that concluded with the way "the world is going to break your heart eventually." In it, she says that Mike believed that "war reporters were people 'who did not want to get in harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did.' But," she went on, "he put himself in harm's way because he wanted to go back to Baghdad and see America kick out Saddam. 'Tyranny truly is a horror [he wrote] …. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot stomping on a human face' …. Michael died for two things: Journalism and ridding the world of jackboots." The ability to put a human face on the victims of tyranny, petty or deeply evil, was one of the many things that distinguished his work.

As was his ability to personify the oppressor as "the boot." Here is what he wrote in a column called "Who Would Choose Tyranny?" written from Kuwait City, a place where the widowed and tortured still bear the scars of Saddam's boot. It was published on Feb. 26, 2003, and I've quoted it once before in this column, but, as the song goes, it bears repeating:

"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?" The 300,000 people (so far) discovered in the mass graves in Iraq-many of whom are there because they refused to be toadies-testify to the truth of this. So does the remarkable essay about the victims of Saddam's genocidal rule by David Gelernter (in the April 5 Weekly Standard ), the one called "The Holocaust Shrug," about the triumphalism displayed by some over the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the shrug of indifference they give to the mass graves and the genocidal torturers who filled them.

Once again, hail and farewell, Mike Kelly, foe of the boot and the toadies who lick it.

"They have different kinds of ambition," said Mr. Christensen about Anakin Skywalker (who about now should be one rattling voicebox away from turning into Darth Vader), and Stephen Glass, the disgraced former New Republic writer, whom the actor portrays in the upcoming Lion's Gate film Shattered Glass .

"Annakin's ambition is an all-dominating, rule-the-galaxy type of ambition," continued Mr. Christensen. "But yeah, they are both people who allow their sort of moral integrity to become questionable so that they can get what they want."

The comparison will flatter journalists who picture themselves as great protagonists in the epic sweep of history. But not since the pit-stained drama of All the President's Men -and the Watergate reporting that was its basis-has that picture been transposed to the silver screen with the dramatic effort of Shattered Glass . The film, which will be released by Lion's Gate on Oct. 31-but had its world premiere on Aug. 30, at the Telluride Film Festival-is set in the heart of journalism's roiling schism of self-love and self-doubt, and arrives in time to put a starry exclamation point at the end of a year in which that schism has taken up more self-referential column inches than ever before.

Whether anyone out there is watching-whether the last year's soft revolution in the fourth estate really matters to the public-remains to be seen.

Journalism: The Treatment

What a year it's been for journalism. First was the process of embedding reporters with coalition troops during the United States' invasion of Iraq, which produced almost as much reporting on the war as it did reporting on the reporting on the war. Then came the sad deaths of several journalists in the Middle East, including Atlantic and former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, who played a major role in the Stephen Glass story and is portrayed in Shattered Glass by Hank Azaria. But the self-flagellating climax of the media's year came in the form of Jayson Blair. The ambitious New York Times reporter's errors and lies led to the June resignation of top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and shot Mr. Blair to the tippy-top of journalism's 10 most wanted list, above plagiarist Ruth Shalit, Pulitzer Prize–winning fabricator Janet Cooke and, of course, former New Republic scribe and con artist Stephen Glass.

His story, and therefore ours, begins long ago (1998) in a galaxy far, far away (Washington, D.C.), when a sparky young journalist wrote a series of too-good-to-be-true stories for The New Republic . Envied by his colleagues and competitors, Mr. Glass was a much-sought-after hotshot, juggling freelance gigs from Harper's , George and Rolling Stone . But Mr. Glass was making up his stories, and the fabrications made it past the magazine's fact-checking department and by Mr. Glass' mentor and New Republic editor, Mr. Kelly. Forbes "Digital Tools" reporter Adam Penenberg, whose investigation of Mr. Glass' story about a nonexistent hacker convention and an imaginary company called Jukt Micronics precipitated his downfall, comes into the story after he is chastised for not having gotten the piece himself. Expecting to find the story he had missed, he found the story of his career: a reporter for the vaunted New Republic making up every word of his stories. Mr. Lane, who took over TNR when Mr. Kelly was fired by publisher Marty Peretz, pressed Mr. Glass for explanations to satisfy Mr. Penenberg, and the two men wound up in a narratively satisfying dénouement in a Maryland hotel lobby, where a nervous Mr. Glass' elaborate stories crumbled.

A 1998 Vanity Fair article by Buzz Bissinger made it clear that Mr. Glass' downward spiral had itself become the story too good to be true. (The story is the basis for this movie.)

Mr. Glass went into hiding and completed his law degree. He resurfaced this year with his novel The Fabulist , about an ambitious journalist who makes up his stories. He also granted a clammy mea culpa – cum –book-tour appearance to 60 Minutes , and was rewarded for his time on the circuit with an assignment from Rolling Stone , one of the magazines in which his fabricated stories once appeared. (The same week, Mr. Blair received assignments at Jane and Esquire , a double-play that inspired struggling freelancers with its boldness.)

The Hollywood Reporter

Screenwriter Billy Ray, who had done a semester's tour of duty at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism before returning to his native Hollywood, was commissioned to adapt Mr. Bissinger's piece into a screenplay for HBO-completing the story's journey from The New Republic 's scrappy D.C. offices to the Death Star of the New York magazine world to the Great White Way.

A regime change at the cable network left the project dormant for several years. When Mr. Ray wrested it back from HBO, he teamed with Mr. Christensen and his brother Tove, who had also been entranced by the Vanity Fair piece. They took the project to Tom Cruise's production company, Cruise/Wagner, and got funding from Lion's Gate.

What they created was a quietly ambitious movie that takes journalism very, very seriously. At one point, a full two minutes is spent on an explanation of The New Republic 's editorial process. The Glass character describes to a classroom full of high-school students how a story goes through two editors and back to the writer, then through a fact-check, a copyeditor, lawyers, the publisher, production, and finally back through all of these steps again. He also explains how a dry policy story about ethanol subsidies can be checked for discrepancies against "the Congressional Record , trade publications, LexisNexis or footage from C-Span."

It's not often that an independent film could double as a J-school seminar.

Mr. Ray was also spot-on when it comes to the youthful strivers who populate the media. In a scene set during a party at Mr. Glass's apartment, one beer-swilling man observes to another, "If they stoop any lower, pretty soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Time and People !"

Har!

Jealous glances between co-workers as Mr. Glass gets phone calls from other magazines help to flesh out the needy insecurities of the film's characters.

One of the most poignant moments in the film-at least on the journo-narcissism meter-comes after just such an episode, when one of Mr. Glass's fictionalized female colleagues abandons her dry business-writing style and aims for Mr. Glass's breezy, beer-keg bardic rhetoric.

"Is that what you want, Amy?" asks the reporter's colleague, Caitlin (played by Chloë Sevigny), when she's read Amy's freshman effort to remake herself as a journalist with more flair. "To get a bunch of smoke blown up your ass by a bunch of editors?"

"Yes," Amy replies without hesitation.

Mr. Ray said that his efforts to capture the spirit of journalism were so strenuous in part because he wanted to "apply the standards of journalism to the writing of the movie." He flew to Washington to meet with Kelly and Mr. Lane and everyone from TNR who was willing to speak to him, some of whom did so "off the record."

"Billy would make a really good journalist," said Mr. Penenberg. "Even information you couldn't get as a journalist, Billy either managed to get or deduce" from talking to as many of the saga's players as he could.

What he came up with was a portrait of Mr. Glass that-as played by Mr. Christensen-is sweaty, anxiety-stricken, self-impressed and self-doubting.

"Are you mad at me?" asks the unctuous Mr. Glass of his friends and superiors over and over again, until an audience-of journalists or regular humans-will want to choke him with his necktie.

No doubt those same people will warm to the compelling characterization of Mr. Kelly, who cooperated with Mr. Ray on the project before his death.

"There are good editors and there are bad editors," Mr. Glass' character tells his rapt audience of high-school students. "My hope for you is that once-at least once-you get a truly great one. A great editor defends his writers against anyone. He stands up and fights for you. Michael Kelly was that kind of editor. He had that kind of courage."

Mr. Azaria plays Kelly with a muzzy warmth and solidity that seems to serve as a tribute to the late, great editor-and makes it hard to believe that the film was entirely written and shot before Kelly's death.

"Kelly is the most principled man I have ever met in my life," said Mr. Ray. "It's sickening that he's dead." Mr. Ray also claimed that the late Kelly "would never have seen the completed film" and was "desperate to see it derailed," since it told the story of how he missed the signs of Mr. Glass' fabrications.

Kelly's TNR replacement, Mr. Lane, is portrayed by the soft-maned Peter Sarsgaard as a humorless pill who is reviled by his young staff of Kelly loyalists. Ultimately lionized for catching and firing Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane served as a paid consultant on the film, visiting the Montreal set on the day they were shooting a scene in which the young TNR reporters rip him to shreds.

"I was two feet from Chuck, and I said, 'Do you want to stop watching this?'" said Mr. Ray. "He said, 'No, it's probably a pretty accurate description of what they were saying about me.'"

"I was worried that I was coming off as this stiff, humorless guy who nobody at the magazine liked," said Mr. Lane about his characterization in the film. But then he thought: "First of all, you are a little bit stiff and a little bit humorless, so just get used to it. Secondly, the movie reaches a conclusion that if it wasn't for this stiff and humorless guy, the magazine would have been much worse off."

The characterization of the prim Mr. Lane as the ultimate savior translates very well into Hollywoodese. We feel sorry for the obviously unpopular but attractive Mr. Sarsgaard, having to take over a viper's nest of overachieving children after Kelly's firing by a particularly Mephistophelian Marty Peretz, as portrayed by Ted Kotcheff.

"I'm not gonna sit around and be a bullshitter. If I come off well, I'm not going to complain about it," said Mr. Lane. "For me, personally, this isn't the bad episode. I can see that for some people-not just Mike or somebody like Marty, who obviously comes off very badly-it's not such a great thing."

As could be expected of fusty journalists unused to seeing their names in type larger than 10 points, let alone their Hollywood simulacra on a real movie screen, most of them are just psyched to be in the movie.

"My wife says Steve Zahn does me better than I do me," said an obviously impressed Mr. Penenberg, who spoke to the actor by phone during production.

"I just wanted to know how he reacted when he figured it out," said Mr. Zahn of his interactions with Mr. Penenberg. "I asked, 'Did you go "Oh my God!", or is it something you expect every once in a while?' And he said, 'No, man'-and he was talking in layman's terms for me-'this was a very big deal!'"

Anonymous sources

Mr. Glass' closest female colleague, Hanna Rosin, preferred not to have her name used. The result is that while the movie features 20-foot versions of Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Peretz, Mr. Penenberg and even Forbes editor Kambiz Foroohar, the only actual woman played in the film is Mr. Lane's wife Katrina, who appears in approximately one and a half scenes.

The female characters played by Chloë Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey and Rosario Dawson are fictionalized amalgams of any number of peripheral characters.

"There weren't very many women at The New Republic , just as a plain fact," said Mr. Lane after thinking for a minute about this point.

Mr. Ray has another explanation: "There were a couple of sources that wanted to remain anonymous," he said. "Some of them were male, and the best way to protect their anonymity was to make their characters female. It also added to the notion subtextually that people mothered Glass."

Mr. Glass himself did not speak to anyone involved in the film, though an Aug. 21 Daily News item reported that Lion's Gate was so eager to have Mr. Glass' input that they offered him a job.

"I can confirm that the script was sent to Stephen Glass as a courtesy," said Tom Ortenberg, the head of Lion's Gate, "in case he wanted to make any comment. We sent it only as a courtesy. We never followed up; he never responded."

Mr. Ortenberg insisted that even if Mr. Glass had responded to the script, "we would have listened respectfully and acted appropriately in addressing any thoughts he might have had, but we never, ever would have allowed him to profit from this."

But why shouldn't he have profited? He was certainly allowed to publish his novel and promote it on national television. The kind of concern that Mr. Ortenberg and the rest of the team behind Shattered Glass are showing for journalism's rules-much as Mr. Ray had promised early in the project-comes off as sort of sweet. It's usually journalists and their readers who are obsessed with the scandals and mores of Hollywood players.

But if the lesson of Stephen Glass is that solid journalism, not popular success, is the high road, it's a lesson the filmmakers hope they don't come to exemplify. After all, popular success is what movies are all about. Will anyone other than J-geek Romenesko readers be able to appreciate the implications of Mr. Glass's ethical transgressions? Will they care about the delicately balanced relationship between Mike Kelly, Chuck Lane and Marty Peretz?

The filmmakers sure hope so. They're opening the movie in a mixture of art houses and multiplexes, and planning Oscar campaigns for Mr. Ray, Mr. Sarsgaard and Mr. Christensen.

"The story makes for a very good film, like a Brontë novel where the woman harbors a tragic secret," said Mr. Sarsgaard.

But it doesn't need to be Brontë. It just needs to be compelling. And it is.

No matter how freighted with inside-baseball LexisNexis talk, the movie traces the rise and fall of one hell of a needy kid. Journalism is a good place for those kinds of stories; the power of the recent Jayson Blair scandal should testify to that.

Even the players in the film, like Mr. Sarsgaard, realize that much.

"I wish it had come out three months ago," he said.

It's true that Mike Kelly was empathetic-and as much toward cab drivers and carpenters as toward his fellow scribblers. He was genuinely humane. Given his reputation as a sword-wielding columnist, people often found this strange: He seemed so gentle in person for someone so hard-edged on the page. After first meeting him, many remarked on his unpretentiousness, and indeed on the unlikeliness of the entire package-this intrepid war correspondent, this he-man career man, this relentless politico. He was elfish, affable, open-faced, bespectacled, curly-haired, rumpled, distracted, often thoughtful and endearingly disorganized. When he didn't show up for lunch dates or follow through on plans, you knew it meant nothing at all. His apologies afterward were sheepish and good-natured. He was just a very decent guy.

But those who decided that he was modest or shy got him wrong. He was not merely very capable, but utterly certain of it: In his inner world, he was not modest at all. As he gained experience, his life became an exercise in self-confidence, a loop in which his certainties begat successes, which begat further certainties. It's no wonder then that he rejected the liberal culture of self-doubt, and that his politics turned right-wing-how could they have turned otherwise? He achieved financial success, but he never became a selfish man. Quite the opposite. Money obviously meant little to him, and his conservatism remained purely of the self-confident kind. All this came out in conversation with him, hours upon hours of it, during which he delivered his thoughts and opinions as if they were absolute truths, enjoying himself hugely, as inevitably his companions did, too. Whether people agreed with him or not, his confidence was infectious. It swept aside the cautions and fears that might have diminished the writers in his stable, or the staff of the magazine as a whole. To the question of "Dare we proceed?", his answer was so often "Yes" that people learned not to ask. It's true that Kelly's "Yes" was usually tempered and shrewd, but his deep-seated courage was more important still. He was like a furnace on fire. His flame burned for his work, for his country, and most fiercely for his two young boys and his wife. He went to Iraq because he believed in the war, and knew he could cover it well. That does not make this end any easier for his friends to accept. It still seems impossible that our dear Mike Kelly has died. He has left an unfillable emptiness behind.

-William Langewiesche

For those of us hanging about the Kuwait Hilton and the military briefings in the past weeks, and paying the occasional easy-does-it visit to the frontier zone or to the safer bits of southern Iraq, the name of Michael Kelly was a frequent and somewhat guilt-inducing reference. In the first place, we had all read or were engaged in re-reading Martyrs ' Day , his enviable account of the last Gulf War. In the second place, we knew that he was miles up the road ahead of us, at the sharp end with the Third Infantry Division. I don't approve of "embedded" journalism myself, but nor was I pretending that I'd have had the discipline or fortitude to go that way. So, as we fiddled with gas masks during mostly false-alarm air-raid warnings in Kuwait City, one would say facetiously to another: "Mike must be within commuting distance of Baghdad by now." There had already been enough reportorial casualties to make this a respectful understatement.

The longest time I ever spent with him was very different. He heard that I was going to a Farrakhan rally at the Howard University campus a few years back, and asked if he could keep me company. We ended up as the only white guys present during an especially lurid harangue from the late Khalid Muhammad. The atmosphere wasn't all that menacing despite some efforts in that direction, and afterward we spent a good deal of time talking to the organizers and the members of the audience. The rest of the night, we sat up forever while he told me of growing up in D.C., of being by family origin a member of the opposite Irish-Catholic faction to Pat Buchanan, and of going with his mother to early civil-rights rallies. His curiosity and his humor, and his quick impatience with bullshit, were all of a piece. I often thought he was wrong, but I never knew him to be wrong for an ignoble or cowardly reason.

One tries to avoid sentimentality on occasions such as this, but Mike saw the essence of the conflict over Iraq very early on, and never relaxed his hold on the point. The advocates of regime-change have now lost a real champion and-this is where I dare to take the risk of sentimentality-the people of Iraq have lost a friend who would never have deserted them in the rugged times that they are passing through and that lie ahead. Everybody who cares about the survival of tough-minded journalism has lost an ally, too, even if (like the Iraqis) they may not have had the opportunity to know him.

-Christopher Hitchens

Mike Kelly was one of the happiest smart people I've ever known-continually amused (as well as outraged) by the world, mischievous, conscious always of living exactly the life he wanted to lead, but never smug about it. If you knew him only though his column in The Washington Post , which was often bellicose, you might think he was an ill-humored sort. Those of us who worked with him, and remembered that experience as singular in our careers for its high-spiritedness and sheer fun, its sense of being with Mike on a madcap but meaningful ride, know better.

I met Mike when I was on maternity leave with my first baby, and he had just been chosen as the editor of The New Republic , where I then worked. When he called to propose that we meet for lunch, I was feeling particularly milky, sleepless and disheveled. The prospect of squeezing myself into acceptable business attire, heading downtown for the first time since the baby, and making intelligent conversation with the famous journalist who was my new boss, seemed hopelessly intimidating. Maybe Mike noticed my moment of hesitation; maybe he just intuited how I felt because he and his wife, Max, had a new baby, too. But the next thing I knew, he was proposing bringing lunch to my house in Bethesda, and the next day he was there, bearing pâté and a baguette and the ingredients for a lovely simple pasta, which he cooked for me while keeping up a riveting patter about all the things he wanted to do at the magazine. He never made a big deal about instituting a "family-friendly" policy at The New Republic, where the staff was young and childless; he just said that, if I preferred, I could work at home a couple of days a week when I came back.

Mike was deeply courteous, and he managed to make the various accommodations he offered on behalf of my family life feel like a natural extension of that courtesy-just something you did to make somebody's life easier, without making a fuss about it or boasting about what a progressive employer you were. But part of it was that Mike delighted in his own children, in a way that made him generous toward and bemused about all children. He was the only male colleague I've ever had with whom I could exchange what-our-kids-did-last-night stories without feeling that it bored him, or pigeonholed me. He was a great and close, but unneurotic and noncompetitive, observer of his kids. There are so many ways in which the public Mike will be remembered and deeply missed-as an extraordinary war correspondent, a charismatic editor, a passionate columnist and a beautiful writer. I will remember him as my beau ideal of a working father.

-Margaret Talbot

I met Michael Kelly when I was an intern at The New Republic in 1996 and he was the magazine's incoming editor. I wrote to him asking for a staff job. He responded by taking me to a nice lunch in downtown Washington. Our lunch confirmed everything you'll hear about his kindness toward aspiring young writers whom other editors might impatiently brush off. At the time, I had a mere handful of short and rather insubstantial clips to my name, and came to lunch nervous and slightly intimidated. After 10 minutes, I felt completely at ease. Michael complimented my writing more than he needed to, showed a sincere curiosity about my interests and goals, and described his plans for the magazine with the enthusiasm of a man about to renovate his dream house. He never once condescended. I was still just a punk, but he treated me like a serious person.

But that lunch was less interesting than the second conversation we had. Michael had offered me a job as a TNR fact-checker, with a chance to write on the side. I had another offer, to write about politics for an alternative weekly in Boston, and decided I couldn't turn down a full-time writing job. Not only did Michael understand my decision, he seemed to turn a bit wistful. He began to offer me advice with a fatherly air that suggested that he envied a young writer setting out down the open journalistic road. He painted a romantic, admiring picture of Boston as a place where politics can be seen on its most primal level. He gave me names and numbers to call. A great mentor himself, he urged me to find "wise men," detached from the biases of daily political skirmishes, who could explain how the city really worked. (He recommended one man in particular, a Machiavellian political operative whom he described, with a hint of admiration, as "a real rat-fucker.")

He was most passionate in urging me to devote myself completely to my work. Go to every last campaign event and city council meeting you can, he told me. If you have a girlfriend, drag her along. Work hard, he said. "You don't have as much time as you think you do."

-Michael Crowley

Michael Kelly had so many things, but I will miss him most for what he lacked. He had brilliance, humor, stature, energy, generosity, taste, guts, vision. He lacked arrogance. He lacked the genetic code for smugness. He lacked the presumption, which so many vastly less gifted people carry around like change in their pockets, that something was true because he said it, or deep because he thought it. In a world full of people who never miss a slot through which to drop a name or a point of flattering self-reference, he lacked any particular urge to enlighten one that he had, oh, driven across a desert as it was being bombed in the Gulf War, or earned the fear and loathing of both Clintons. In short, he lacked that whole link between success and self-worship. This made him both a great guy and a great example.

It is generally vile, and particularly untrue to Mike Kelly, to overstate one's relationship to the celebrated deceased. I was miles away from the center of his life; just one of many writers lucky enough to have appeared in his line of vision. But that's just it. There are scores of us; underlings and aspirants of one sort or another who feel deadened by this death.

My memories of Mike are like my college diploma: very special to me, even though lots of people have them.

I remember the second I knew, before we even met, that I liked and trusted him completely, because he couldn't even smooth-talk me. It was the very end of 2000, and he was calling me in New York to talk about a job.

"Have you ever thought of moving to Washington?"

"No."

"Well, you should; it's really a very stimulating city, and just as vibrant in its way as New York and … oh, what the hell, you'll hate it, it's one big law firm-but you should come anyway."

I remember that when I did come anyway, it was inauguration week, and all the hotels were triple-booked. He sent me to stay at the Victorian manse on Capitol Hill where he was brought up-and where I could clearly see, in the sharp, sweet, much-loved parents, the origins of the sharp, sweet, much-loved son. I remember the time that I wrote an Atlantic piece that was an absolute disaster, and he wrote a rejection note that was an absolute gift: straightforward, to be sure, but so full of kindness and encouragement that I still have it. I remember thinking, pretty much every time I spoke to him, that I had drawn the long end of the straw.

When I left my job, to head for the war that claimed him, Mike called me up. With typically amazing grace, he wished me luck and offered me everything: useful friends, credentials, advice, ideas, editorial support. Even then, I choked up at what he said last, although he said it lightly. He said he wanted to keep me "in the gang."

What I wouldn't give to keep him there, too.

-Tish Durkin