Well I Didn't Know He Was Gonna Die When I Fired Him

Always a class act, Marty Peretz notes the really important thing about Michael Kelly's death:

I do not mean at all to mar the coverage of the tragic death of Michael Kelly in Iraq by quibbling. But I did not fire Mr. Kelly as editor of The New Republic in 1997 because of how he configured the "magazine's coverage of Vice President Al Gore."

Mr. Kelly wrote incandescent prose. As an editor, however, Mr. Kelly's single-minded focus on President Bill Clinton's improprieties distorted his perspective on the policies of the Clinton-Gore administration and brought him into conflict not only with me but also with much of the intellectual history of the magazine.

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