The New New Republic

Michael Kelly became editor of The New Republic on November 11 and his first issue of the magazine, dated December 2, featured a drawing of President Clinton looking partied out, nose glowing like Rudolph's, under a headline - "The Hangover" - meant to suggest post-election malaise. In the same issue Kelly wrote his inaugural TRB column (nobody is sure what the letters ever meant, but it's the first piece in the magazine, syndicated to some fifty newspapers). In its third and fourth sentences he said of Clinton: "He is of course a shocking liar. He will say absolutely anything at all."

 His sixth, tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth sentences continued the theme: "He is breathtakingly cynical . . . . He is an opportunist of such proportions that the only thing that exceeds his reach is his grasp. . . . he is an occasional demagogue . . . . He is the fairest of fair-weather friends." The fourteenth sentence added, for good measure: "He is perhaps the greatest golf cheat in the history of the game."

 Still, for liberalism, the column went on, turning a hairpin corner, "all this bad news is the good news." Because Clinton's ability to feint right and left, to triangulate, means that he survived, "and thus liberalism, of a sort, and the Democratic Party, such as it is, lived to fight again." Liberalism, Kelly suggested, "needed a little mugging by reality," and "a leader constrained by the old pieties of honesty, commitment, and courage of commitment simply wouldn't have had the stomach for the job."

 The editorial in that issue proceeded to blast the president's Bosnia policy. Two pages after that Hanna Rosin, an associate editor, described his gender-ethnicity-geography contortions in picking a new cabinet. All this was a warm-up for the paired cover stories: Jacob Heilbrunn, an associate editor hired by Kelly, on how Clinton's foreign-policy weakness in his first term will haunt him in his second, and Carl Cannon, of the Baltimore Sun, on the drag from the "character" issues - the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit; the soft-money/foreign-money cloud from the campaign; and, of course, Whitewater.

 Two issues later in a cover piece, William Powers, another Kelly hire, inaugurated his new Media Rex press column with an argument that "by and large, the mainline media did not focus intense, sustained attention on the stories that could have been most threatening to the president's chances of reelection." And by extension, apparently, should have. Clinton character stories, Powers wrote, "became the dogs that didn't bark, or at least were not made to bark very loudly or very long."

The New Republic was making up for lost barks. In the next issue, December 23, Kelly woofed at George Stephanopoulos, who, in a letter to the editor and a phone call to Kelly, had pointed out that from January 1 through Election Day last year, a total of one hundred and forty three "'ethics' stories (Whitewater, FBI files, Lippo, Travel Office)" were published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times - all on page one. As for television, he cited Powers's own numbers and wondered why "sixty-two stories on the three major networks over the last sixty-four days of the campaign was somehow insufficient attention."

 Kelly, in his TRB column, likened Clinton's efforts "at manipulating and discouraging hostile press attention" to Nixon's. He then rejected Stephanopoulos's complaints this way: "To announce in one breath that the Senior Adviser to the President for Policy and Strategy is spending a considerable chunk of his Monday morning in an attempt to mathematically refute a not terribly shocking assertion by one columnist in one magazine, and to denounce in the next the very idea that there is anything remarkable ab out this White House's aggressiveness in press management - why, there's a boldness here that rises to a sort of beauty." (Kelly's reply had a beauty of its own. For the editor of The New Republic to suggest that his cover story was too insignifica nt to have occupied the senior adviser's mind is an agile turn of thought. So is the notion that there is something Nixonian in Stephanopoulos's responding to the piece with such black weapons as a Nexis search, a phone call, and a letter to the editor.)

 On January 20 came another TRB column on Clinton's ethics issues: "Why It Matters: Bill Clinton is Corrupting the White House." January 27, ditto: "Why It Matters (II)." A venerable and important magazine, which many had seen as drifting in the last few years, certainly seemed to have located a focus.

 The magazine's padrone, Martin Peretz, spoke haltingly, as if words could not express the joy he felt about the "best hire" he'd ever made since he bought The New Republic in 1974 (from a list that includes Michael Kinsley, now editing Microsoft's Slate, and Hendrik Hertzberg, the editorial director at The New Yorker). This was at Christie's, the Park Avenue auction house, where Peretz tossed a party January 14 to introduce Kelly to friends of the magazine in New York. Guests wound their way past some of Christie's wares to get in - Chippendale tea tables ($3,000 to $5,000); a set of Davis Hall woven baskets ($30,000 to $50,000; nice, but not altogether nicer than the $30 baskets at Crate & Barrel one block away).

 Kelly spoke briefly, charmingly, at the party about his relationship with theThe New Republic. He's thirty-nine, tousled, short and roundish, not quite a visual match with the hard-nosed prose. His countenance is owlish, unfazed. He looks like the newspaper reporter he used to be. But Kelly has long been unleashed from the bonds of neutrality and his fierce political passions have an effect on The Conversation in Washington and beyond. He's been hard to ignore, and now The New Republic has given him a megaphone.

 He told the Christie's crowd about how his girlfriend, Madelyn Greenberg (now his wife), a producer for CBS News (now on leave with their new son), was going off to Tel Aviv on the eve of the gulf war. He wanted to go with her and needed an outlet for his free-lance writing. He called Hertzberg, then the editor of The New Republic, who, it turns out, didn't need writers in Tel Aviv. How about Baghdad? The pay, he told the amused crowd, was twenty cents a word. The tale had been edited a bit for the party:The Boston Globe and GQ had also lined up Kelly to cover the war. But it was in the weekly rhythms of The New Republic that he hit his stride, turning out searing and lush accounts of the war, from the liberation of Kuwait City to the carnage along the Iraqi retreat route to the redecorating of the emir's palace in Kuwait - reporting that would later shape a well-received book, Martyr's Day.

 Here's Kelly on Baghdad: "It had become the ideal mob town, the perfect capital of a gangster nation. The new millionaires, Baathist bosses and government ministers and their merchant friends, tooled around the city in Mercedes-Benzes ...tossing stacks of new money on the baccarat tables."

 The power of Kelly's war writing launched him to journalism's loftiest peaks. Howell Raines of The New York Times hired him to help cover the 1992 campaign. But Kelly found the job too confining - "I just didn't want to do daily journalism that had to be as carefully controlled as White House coverage was with theTimes," he says - so the Times unconfined him, making him a writer for the paper's Sunday magazine, where he turned out some memorable profiles. He CAT-scanned David Gergen in October 1993, for example, when Gergen was Clinton's counselor, portraying him as the very embodiment of the modern Washington insiders who have turned spin into reality. "A man like Gergen, unafraid to admit that his loyalties and convictions are no m ore than outerwear," Kelly wrote, "is always welcome at the table."

 His equally tough "Saint Hillary" piece on the First Lady - which The American Spectator called an "enormously enjoyable Cuisinart job" - was, in Kelly's own estimation, less successful. Critics might say it was a set-up, since he got the First Lady to talk freely about her spiritual and moral yearnings and then let the inchoate nature of those yearnings present her as woolly-headed. But Kelly says, no, he "did her the courtesy of taking her seriously." He just isn't sure he understood her.

 He seems to suffer no such insecurity about Mrs. Clinton's husband, whom Kelly profiled in the summer of 1994 when the president's ratings were sinking and Whitewater and other character issues loomed large: "What has happened to Clinton has happened beca use he wanted, more than anything in life, to get to where he is today," Kelly wrote, "and because he wanted this, at least in part, in order to do good - and because the great goal of doing good gave him license to indulge in the everyday acts of minor corruption and compromise and falsity that the business of politics demands. Bill Clinton was perceptive enough to master politics - but not perceptive enough to see what politics was doing to him."

 In late 1994 Kelly went to The New Yorker, where he covered politics and wrote a strong and acidic Letter From Washington, "one of the great perches available to a writer." (He replaced Sidney Blumenthal on that perch, a writer distinctly more sympathetic to the Clintons.) But when the chance to edit The New Republic came along last year, he jumped. "I knew it wasn't going to come up a second time. It seemed impossible to say 'no' to," Kelly says. With the TRB column he could continue to write, while test ing his mettle as an editor and thinker. He told the people at Christie's that back when he had taken the job at the Times , an editor at The New Republic told him that he'd return, because he would never find a journalistic home quite like The New Republic. And, Kelly told the crowd, he hadn't.

 Other politics-and-policy magazines, he explained, offer "something like a religious tract." They offer comfort: if you are liberal, you get comfort from the liberal magazines; if you are conservative, you get comfort from the conservative publications. But "we don't offer comfort," Kelly said. "We offer intellectual honesty."

 Actually, conservatives have taken some comfort from The New Republic in recent years. Particularly under its most recent editor, Andrew Sullivan, a Brit who calls himself a Tory, the venerable magazine - which was founded expressly to define and promote something called liberalism - seemed to drift right. It famously published, for example, such cover pieces as a long excerpt from The Bell Curve, the controversial book on an alleged relationship between race and intelligence, and "No Exit," a piece by Elizabeth McCaughey, now the Republican lieutenant governor of New York, that helped drive a stake through the heart of the Clintons' health-care plan (an article widely seen as falling somewhat short on the intellectual-honesty scale).

 Some see Kelly as accelerating that trend. In the January 27 issue ofThe Nation, The New Republic's old rival to its left, Eric Alterman devoted his inaugural media column to the magazine. The impact of The New Republic in recent years, Alterman wrote, has been to "cut the legs out from under the tough-minded liberalism" it had historically stood for. For liberals who still hold some affection for the magazine, he suggested, Kelly means divorce.

 Articles in subsequent issues presumably supplied additional grounds. In the fifth Kelly issue, Stephen Glass, an assistant editor, attacked the Center for Science in the Public Interest - the "food police" Naderite organization that got the coconut oil out of movie-theater popcorn, among a number of other achievements. In Kelly's ninth issue, Charles Lane, a senior editor, excused the deplorable conditions - constant cold, darkness, isolation, rape, beatings, torture - in Peru's prisons. The "draconian confinement of terrorists," Lane patiently explained, "has a rational basis" and is "a drastic but defensible response" to the serious threat of rebellion.

 "What does it mean," Alterman wrote, citing parts of Kelly's first TRB, "when a magazine that has, historically, been one of America's most venerable liberal publications decides it hates liberals?"

 The people Kelly really disdains are those he believes have shanghaied the word liberal. The New Republic remains a liberal magazine, he says, "if you accept my definition of liberalism.

 "It's not everybody's definition," he continues. "What I'm trying to say is that people who are in fact not liberals, but radicals, leftists, or whatever, succeeded to a large degree in defining liberalism as their political philosophy, which made it an extreme minority political philosophy. Many people in this country who were very happy being liberal Democrats for generations then walked away from liberalism and the Democratic party." This is a theme clearly close to Kelly's heart, and he paces his offi ce, a small but comfortable room, as he elaborates. "It seems to me that in the last ten years or so the left has succeeded in trashing liberalism and ruining it."

 Kelly sees the nation moving toward his brand of liberalism, one whose idea of government is in some ways "minimalist" (The New Republic has serious misgivings about affirmative action, for example), yet "activist" (the magazine has "long advocated a serious, expensive federal work program" for job creation, according to a February 10 editorial). The government, Kelly says, should protect citizens not only from the vagaries of the marketplace but from such things as crime, "because liberalism, prop erly understood, recognizes that one of the duties of the state is to protect the rights of people of modest means to live decent safe lives, so that you don't have a situation where the average plumber has to live twenty-five miles out in a townhouse tucked away in what was a cornfield. There are very few neighborhoods left here where a person of that income level can sit on his front stoop in the evenings in comfortable safety and drink a beer and see his kids off to public school down the street, knowing that they're going to get a decent education and come home safe. We've destroyed that for those people and we've done it in the name of liberasm."

 Victor Navasky, The Nation's publisher and editorial director, salutes his press critic but does not agree with Alterman's early verdict on Kelly's tenure. "I have no feeling about Mike Kelly's politics one way or the other based on his stewardship of The New Republic," Navasky says. "I have not concluded that he is conservative. It takes a couple of years for an editor to become settled in. I'm prepared to wait and see. I think there's plenty of room for many independent voices at a time wh en the real threat comes from conglomeration, Murdochism, tabloidization, and so forth. These quirky little independent voices are more important than ever. The quirkier the better. They appear quirky. History sometimes decides otherwise."

The New Republic has been described as an "elite debating society." Elite it is; its 100,000 or so subscribers are 78 per cent male, 82 per cent professional/managerial, and have a median net worth of nearly $400,000 (17 percent are worth more than $1 million). But if the magazine is a debating society, it is one whose important arguments and visions get attention, a journal of opinion with historically outsize leverage on the nation's political center of gravity.

 From its beginning The New Republic has danced left and right, maybe even up and down, on the political spectrum. It defied pacifists and pushed for intervention in World War I, for example, and then, strangely, controversially, called for restraint in the face of Hitler. Its three founders parted ideological ways just six years after the magazine's birth in 1914 - Herbert Croly turning to religion, Walter Weyl returning to socialism (he went over to The Nation), and Walter Lippmann cruising off to the right. Its thinkers and writers have always gone at each other hammer and tongs. According to Dorothy Wickenden's fascinating introduction to The New Republic Reader, John Dos Passos once suggested to Edmund Wilson, who was the magazine's literary critic for a period, that The New Republic print a slogan at the bottom of each page: this is all bullshit.

 In the 1980s, under Kinsley and Hertzberg (who twice replaced Kinsley), many on the left side of the political spectrum were not comfortable with The New Republic, particularly on Israel, affirmative action, and the contra war in Nicaragua. But the magazine was passionate, serious, and unpredictable, and readers tended to pick it up with antennae fully extended, not knowing, in most cases, where a given piece might be coming from, but pretty confident of finding a well-crafted argument or solid rep orting that was ahead of the curve, or both. Although it remained worth reading under Sullivan, a thoughtful writer himself, some of the magazine's spirit of inquiry was lost in the 1990s. There was a "subtle shift from skepticism into cynicism," as Harvard professor Michael Sandel, a New Republic contributing editor, was quoted as saying in a tough piece about the magazine in the August Vanity Fair.

 Sullivan won some prizes and increased circulation, yet his magazine kept losing weight. Now the question is whether Kelly is the right doctor.

 A large-type handwritten note from a reader is pinned to Michael Kelly's office door: why are you so angry? what is your problem? The walls inside bear, among other things, an antique-looking "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply" sign and an old framed photo from a White House press conference with John F. Kennedy. The president has said something funny and the reporters are laughing. They are nearly all male, mostly print, and the atmosphere is relaxed and clubby. Another world.

 Kelly points to a man in the front row on the right side of the picture: is father, Thomas, who was a feature writer and a political reporter for the now-defunct Washington Daily News and went on to a career as a free-lancer. His mother, Marguerite, also is a writer, author of a best-selling book about child-raising. Kelly's parents met at The New Orleans States-Item and went on to raise three daughters along with their son. Their Washington, D.C., home, Kelly says, was often "full of newspaper people or ex-newspaper people."

 So journalism was a natural, and Kelly pursued it first at the University of New Hampshire, then at ABC's Good Morning America (as an intern, a researcher, a booker, and finally an associate producer), The Cincinnati Post (from suburbs and night cops to feature and investigative reporting), and the Baltimore Sun (where he moved onto the political beat and returned to Washington) before quitting to free-lance and, eventually, cover the war in the gulf.

 His mother remains a "yellow dog Democrat," Kelly says, while his father has moved from the near-radical left to "quite conservative; I'm not even sure how he's registered now." His own politics, he says, are somewhere between them. Just where in between is of keen interest to a lot of politics-and-policy types who are as involved as Kelly is in questions like What's a Liberal? and What's a Democrat?

 Oddly, given Kelly's first several issues of The New Republic, one of the people Kelly sees as "honorably engaged" in defining and shaping the future of liberalism is Bill Clinton, the man he called a liar, a cynic, an opportunist, etc., in his first TRB column. The point of that column, Kelly explains, "is not that Clinton is in some ways a flawed president, although the column says that. The point is that maybe the way we should look at it is that these flaws are necessary. If you are going to have a president who is going to reshape liberalism into something that can approach a majority philosophy again, maybe this is the kind of person you need, and maybe this is the kind of stuff that has to be done, even though a lot of it is not attractive."

 If, to redefine and reclaim liberalism, Clinton needs some dark tools, perhaps Kelly, who shares the mission, needs some, too. He has them.

 One of the reasons Kelly's writing is electric, for example, is the suggestion of a mean streak. Writing as combat, both ideological and personal. The first magazine piece Kelly wrote that gained serious attention - a 1990 GQ profile of Edward Kennedy - described the senator's face this way: "The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks. The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip. Deep corrugations crease the forehead and angle from the nostrils and the downturned corners of the mouth. The Chiclet teeth, too, are the color of old piano keys. The eyes have yellowed too, and they are so bloodshot it looks as if he's been weeping." Then he moved on to the senator's politics.

 A bit of this now shows up in his magazine. In Kelly's third TRB column he tells us he prefers Madeleine Albright as secretary of state by way of saying, albeit with humor and a bit of self-mockery, how much he personally dislikes two other early candidates, Richard Holbrooke and former Senator George Mitchell, both examples, Kelly writes, of the blowhard Washington Male. ("Where Holbrooke has ostentatiously clawed and grappled his way up the greasy pole, Mitchell has more gently floated ever higher, borne on the uplifting vapors of mediocrity rising to its natural level . . . .")

 Kelly is a writer of passion, and he occasionally lets that passion push his logic just past the facts. For example, in an otherwise strong July 15, 1996, New Yorker piece about how politicians and the press dealt with black-church burnings in the South - first ignoring then oversimplifying and hyping the phenomenon - Kelly's long lead was flawed. It centered on President Clinton's June 8 speech on the issue, which addressed the burning of the Matthews Murkland Presbyterian Church, in Charlotte, North Carolina, two days earlier. Clinton told the nation that while there was no evidence to date of any national conspiracy, "it is clear that racial hostility is the driving force behind a number of these incidents." But, Kelly went on to report, in the Murkland case the arsonist turned out to be "an emotionally troubled thirteen-year-old girl. Although the child was white, there wasn't the slightest suggestion that she had been motivated by racial animus."

 There was, however. Kelly and his researcher had gone with the assumption that the girl's tender age ruled out racial animus. They did so even though USA Today had reported earlier, on June 28, in part of that paper's massive examination of the church burnings - a series Kelly lauded in his article - that the girl "had anti-black views." Given that background, says Richard Price, who co-authored the USA Today series, "you have to ask, 'would she have burned a white church?'" Further, Clinton's assertion that racism was behind "a number" of church fires turns out to be a poor example of the exaggeration Kelly sought to portray. Some fires were found to be unconnected to racial motives, others remain mysteries, and others were indeed sparked by racism.

 In his December 9 TRB column, Kelly addressed the famous Texaco tapes, in which company executives were secretly recorded plotting to destroy documents that had been demanded in a federal discrimination lawsuit, and in which, it was first thought, an executive used the word "nigger." But after outside tape experts analyzed the recording, the suspect word was found to be "Nicholas," as in Saint Nicholas. What Kelly objected to is how civil rights types kept crying racism after the more accurate tape came out. "In short," he wrote, "while the tape does catch Texaco executives talking about destroying damaging papers in the discrimination case, it simply did not demonstrate racism." Yet the tone and content of that tape makes such an assertion questionable at best. Texaco's chairman, for one, said the new tapes "set the record straight" but "do nothing to change the categorically unacceptable context and tone of the conversations." More important, Kelly managed to diminish the larger issues: the case was not aut improper speech, but about Texaco's employment history, and it was that history, not a single epithet, that cost the company some $176 million. Kelly's no-"nigger"-no-problem reasoning didn't hold water.

 Kelly works hard. He edits every piece in the magazine, in partnership with one other editor, writes his own stuff on closing day, and, meanwhile, labors at shaping the publication and at trying to recapture something he thinks it once had. When we spoke in late January he was particularly proud of his February 3 issue, his ninth as editor, which was indeed full of tasty stuff: Hanna Rosin, in "Federico Pena takes Physics 101," set a funny scene at the Department of Energy,which had become a kind of Stanley Kaplan cram course for Pena, Clinton's appointee as energy czar, in preparation for his confirmation hearings. Roger Simon delivered a generous and detailed portrait of Rahm Emanuel, the new George Stephanopoulos. Jeffrey Rosen made a fascinating case for Clinton in the Paula Jones affair - arguing that even if her charges against the president are true, they do not (and should not) rise to the legal level of sexual harassment. Peter Beinart wrote the cover piece, "Doing the Inaugural Hustle" - an enlighning look at the history and meaning of presidential inaugurals, whose swollen size and televised pomp offer the illusion of democracy but require so much money from access-eager corporations and lobbyists that they promote the opposite.

 "It's immensely important to me that the magazine become the magazine that you liked and I liked" in the 1980s, Kelly says. "A magazine that you could not tell where it was coming from, that had a way of writing about ideas that amounted to news, a way of marshaling evidence which allowed you to look at something that was out there and around - race, government, politics - in a way that you had not looked at it before."

 And maybe look twice. Kelly points to a pair of solid articles in January by two of his senior editors that serve as bookends of a sort on the debate about whether a balanced budget matters - Matthew Miller, in "Scrooge for OMB," in the January 6 & 13 issue, arguing that it matters a lot, and John Judis, in a January 27 cover piece, "The Great Savings Scare," contending that it doesn't. Kelly points again to Rosen's piece on the Paula Jones case: "There are those who want to believe that this magazine a dheres to an anti-Clinton party line. All I can say is that they are going to be disappointed because you're going to keep picking up the magazine and see a piece that is harshly critical of the president on X and the next piece that defends him strongly on Y. The distinction I'm drawing is, regardless of where I think we should be in the spectrum, we're not going to have a party line. We're not going to say you follow the editor's position."

 Which is kind of a relief, since our chief executive has become our national punching bag, as easy to hit as a blimp and just about as threatening, in terms of power to return journalistic fire. It's partly because of the zeitgeist and partly because Clinton is Clinton, but it seems that the president gets it consistently and predictably from every angle - left and right, substantive and shallow,The Nation and The Weekly Standard, Maureen Dowd and Jay Leno. Even from Michael Kelly playing Jay Leno. George magazine recently asked people for some one-word answers to the question - What will Bill Clinton do when he retires? Kelly's widely reprinted answer: "Eat." He was quoted on the question along with a columnist from Weekly World News, the statue of elvis found on mars tabloid. (That esteemed writer's answer: "Screw.")

 Alone on Kelly's back wall, facing his desk, is a framed front page from The New York Times of November 4, 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected president. Kelly and Clinton have, in a way, traveled in tandem - Kelly was rising as a big-league national political reporter as Clinton was rising to national power - and they share something of the same mission, helping to redefine liberalism. They'll both be with us for a while, and both could grow in office.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe