Moynihan and Kelly Pass Away

Author: Dan Shea

I am going to talk about the war in Iraq. Not about its geopolitical causes or consequences, but about some of the casualties that have occurred during its run. These casualties are the memories of two great Americans, whose deaths this past week were adumbrated by troop movements. I ask you now to take a moment to remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Michael Kelly, politically-inclined Irish-Catholics, both of a school which, in its candor and eloquence, takes no prisoners - of a school whose gradual disappearance can only leave a hole in America's conscience.
Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, representing New York from 1977 to 2001, died last week at the age of 76 from complications following an appendectomy. A Middlebury College-educated academic who entered politics in order to improve the society he studied, Moynihan was famously sometimes-right and sometimes-wrong in his methods, but his posture was always a morally erect one.
Thus it is a sign of his tragedy that Moynihan's Capitol Hill colleagues were more apt to listen to him because of the poetic lilt in his language than because they too felt for the common man. This came to bear during the Reagan years as, having foretold in 1980 the collapse of the Soviet Union and seeing no reason for his fellow legislators to be military wastrels, Moynihan called for increased domestic spending to little avail.
Now it is fate's con that a man who tirelessly and thoughtfully - and often without immediate results - made a career of fighting for the lower rungs of the American socio-economic ladder, has since been deprived of a fruitful period of retirement. Still, Moynihan's ideas remain, and it is they that indicate the man's character - a character from which we can learn. Although today's Midd-kids attend a different College on the Hill from the one at which Moynihan enrolled, here's hoping that some of us will lend a life long ear to our consciences, as Pat Moynihan did his.
Tragedy is compounded when death points its bony finger at a man young in years, and Michael Kelly's passing has especially affected me. The 46-year-old Kelly, killed on April 4 en route to Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, was a journalist able, as colleague Ken Ringle eulogized, to "delight in [his craft] not for any illusion of status, but for the joy of language and the chance to prod people into thinking."
An unknown Kelly's 1990 Gulf War reporting - which is literally breathtaking 12 years later - earned him a staff position at The New York Times. Writing columns for publications up and down the East Coast, he became the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly in 1999, a position he held with great success until stepping down last fall. Often intoning against the hypocrisy of politicians and the media, in recent months Kelly criticized the hyperbolic rhetoric of the anti-war movement: "It is hard, if rewarding, work being the Conscience of Our Culture," he, himself a Conscience of Our Culture, quipped about the left.
Last Friday, the penultimate day of Kelly's short but prolific life, I read the last Michael Kelly piece that The Atlantic was to publish before his death. The article argued against "phony" anti-warism while a "short, exceedingly one-sided conflict" stands before us. Tonight, I thought about the irony of this article: "It wasn't short enough for a good man to escape with his life."
Yet the state school-educated Kelly, like the Moynihan whose knowledge of poverty came from a childhood in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and Hell's Kitchen, had to experience his subject firsthand. According to the Third Infantry's commanding officers, the physically diminutive writer insisted that he ride at the head of the battalion. And he did.
Please remember fondly Moynihan and Kelly and the silver tongues that twisted Washington's ossified mouths into frowns. Raraeaves in their scruples, their souls surely alighted in Heaven a half hour before the devil learned of their deaths.
It is for America to pray that the next wave of second- and third-generation immigrants to the United States proves to be just as principled but less "eventually heart-breaking" - if this world allows for that.

Junior Dan Shea is a math major from Belmont, Mass.