Michael Kelly and the Smearing of Pacifists

By Colman McCarthy

As the first U.S. journalist to be killed after the war began in Iraq, Michael Kelly was also among the most strident promoters of the war before it began. Incessantly, predictably and feverishly, he wrote column after column after column in The Washington Post calling for large-scale military violence against the Iraqi government.

Few rightwing voices were as hotly martial, and few echoed as loudly the Bush view that this was a time for good to destroy evil.

In early April, Kelly, a Catholic who attended a Jesuit high school in Washington DC, drowned in a Humvee wreck in a canal near Baghdad. Embedded with the Third Infantry, he died in the war he so ardently wanted.

In memorial tributes to the 42-year-old Kelly, colleagues praised his personal graces. He had been a loving son, husband and father. He was witty, unpretentious and warmhearted. Professionally, he assumed a different identity. He savaged people with whom he disagreed. In that, the same colleagues said, he was “merciless,” “ferocious,” “pugnacious”,” “intolerant” and ever willing “to hammer somebody.”

Much of this abusiveness—approvingly published by his Post editors—peaked on Sept. 21, 2001 when Kelly wrote: “Organized terrorist groups have attacked America. These groups wish the Americans not to fight. The American pacifists wish the Americans not to fight. If the Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And now we know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murders of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorists.”

Such low-grade smearing put Kelly in the ranks of Joseph R. McCarthy and Richard Nixon. And Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Reich-Marshall who stated at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders [who want war] This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Equating pacifists, as Kelly did, with mass murderers and terrorists goes well beyond the line of acceptable commentary, no matter how passionately his feelings may have been about the violence of Saddam Hussein—feelings expressed with equal fervor by pacifists. It also placed Kelly among those who, out of ignorance or deceit, equate pacifism with passivity. He chose to deal in cheap moralizing about pacifists. Who did he have in mind? Stanely Hauerwas? Mairead Corrigan? David Dellinger? Joan Baez? Daniel Berrigan? The Catholic Worker Community? Those at Pax Christi? The Fellowship of Reconciliation?

“I am now a hawk,” Kelly wrote last fall, “and during the Vietnam years I was certainly a dove.” He explained his conversion as the result of covering the first Persian Gulf War. He had witnessed the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s killing machine, a horror that

he reported in stories that eventually led to jobs at the New York Times, the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly.

This isn’t the first time that a born-again hawk turned vicious. There is the example of Michael Novak, a man of the antiwar left in the 1960s who toiled for the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign. By the end of that decade, he decamped. The National Review made him a contributing editor. To credentialize himself with his new patrons on the right, Novak firebombed the priests and nuns of Maryknoll. In the fall of 1979, he wrote in a column that “the Marxists are plainly riding high at Maryknoll.” In a second column, he heaved again: “Maryknoll has been promoting Christian Marxism.” Congratulating himself on his hit-and-run smear job , Novak wrote told about of “a marvelous woman in Unionville, Ind., who stopped sending money to Maryknoll since reading my column.”

Fifteen months later, two Maryknoll sisters were among the four churchwomen murdered by anti-Marxists hit men in El Salvador.

Whatever prompts the Kellys and Novaks to defect to the right may well be an evolution of thinking based on a reconsideration of facts and feelings. That should be respected. Minds change. But no respect should be given to the ventings of nastiness that all too often follow the shift.