Media

Bracing for change at the Atlantic

by Dan Kennedy

Michael Kelly, who had just been named editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was on the phone from the Four Seasons. It's a sentimental place for him: he and his wife, Madelyn Kelly, met there for the first time in 1988 while they were covering the Dukakis presidential campaign, she for CNN, he for the Baltimore Sun. But on Tuesday afternoon he sounded uncharacteristically hoarse and nervous; hoarse from a cold he's been fighting off, nervous because, within a half-hour, he was to meet with the 142-year-old magazine's understandably anxious staff.

"I have, I hope, a great appreciation and respect for what the magazine is," said Kelly, choosing his words carefully. "I believe that when an editor comes in to a magazine that existed before his arrival, the first sacred job is to respect that which is there. So what I am not contemplating is anything that would do violence to the deep-rooted identity of this magazine."

Monday's announcement that real-estate and publishing magnate Mortimer Zuckerman would sell the Atlantic to David Bradley, publisher of the small but influential National Journal, was traumatic enough. But what really creased the worry lines at 77 North Washington Street was the news that Bradley would replace long-time editor William Whitworth with Kelly, who's been editor of the Journal since mid 1998. In addition to editing the Atlantic, Kelly will serve as editor-in-chief of the Journal, a position he describes as being strictly advisory; the Journal's deputy editor, Charles Green, will become editor.

Whitworth, 62, a former high-ranking editor at the New Yorker, is a beloved figure at the Atlantic, which has won nine National Magazine Awards during his 19 years at the helm. "The thing I'm focusing on is what a loss it is to this magazine. That is just the biggest and achingest thing about this. We love and respect him so much," says senior editor Jack Beatty, who ranks Whitworth with such legendary Atlantic editors of the past as James Russell Lowell and William Howells. Kelly, for his part, says Whitworth will help him during a transitional period, adding, "He's a great editor, and he's had an astonishing career at the magazine. He's been a continuing source of vitality in the American discussion and American literature."

But there's little doubt that the 42-year-old Kelly, who plans to commute between Washington and Boston, will quickly make his own imprint on the Atlantic. A native of Washington, Kelly comes from a family of journalists. He covered the Gulf War for the New Republic, and later, as a writer for the New York Times Magazine, attracted national attention for his deeply reported, and brutally negative, profiles of Hillary and Bill Clinton. From there it was on to the New Yorker, where he headed the Washington office and reportedly threatened physical violence to fellow staffer Sidney Blumenthal, who had not yet made the transition from Clinton sycophant to Clinton employee.

Kelly is probably best known for his stormy year as editor of the New Republic, which ended with his being canned by editor-in-chief/chairman/owner Martin Peretz in 1997. Peretz claimed Kelly had to go because he had taken the traditionally centrist/liberal magazine too far to the right; Kelly retorted that Peretz feared the magazine's increasing anti-Clinton animus was getting too close to Peretz's friend Al Gore. In any event, no one ever said the editorship of TNR was a stable job. Just this week, Kelly's successor, Charles Lane, resigned after he learned Peretz was planning to replace him with senior editor Peter Beinart.

Despite his occasionally aggressive manner, Kelly inspires loyalty among his writers. The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson remembers that Kelly stood up for him after he wrote a tough TNR piece on anti-tax activist Grover Norquist -- and failed to disclose a conflict of interest involving an old dispute between Norquist and Carlson's father. "You really get the sense that Mike Kelly would get into a fistfight on behalf of his writers, and probably has," Carlson says. Such loyalty isn't always warranted, though; Kelly himself admits to being humbled by revelations last year that TNR's star political writer, Stephen Glass, had inserted gross fabrications into his pieces, a number of which were published during Kelly's tenure.

"I spent most of my working life as a reporter and writer, and when you're sitting on that side of things, it is pretty easy to look at editors and see all the stupid things they do, all the mistakes they make, and to see clearly how you could do it so much better," Kelly says. "I've had to learn that I'm entirely capable of screwing up and judging people wrong and making the wrong decision. I don't know if that translates into wisdom, but I think I'm at least more aware of how hard it is to do it right than I was three years ago."

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.