On July 11 David Warsh, a former reporter for both Forbes and the Boston Globe, wrote a wistful essay for the Web site Economic Principals, which he now edits. He wondered whether Michael Kelly, who died outside Baghdad on April 3, 2003, would still approve of the war in Iraq. Mr. Warsh maintains that Kelly, who wrote eloquently about the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s regime and who Mr. Warsh describes as “the leading American journalist of the post-Vietnam War generation,” would stick to his original endorsement.

It’s a matter of less consequence, but I’d like to know what Kelly’s reaction would be to the current state of the Atlantic Monthly, the 147-year-old magazine that he edited from 2000 to 2002. I think he would be appalled that the magazine, which he worked so assiduously to transform during his brief tenure there, has month by month drifted into predictable, standard-issue liberal thumbsucking mush.

When David Bradley and Kelly took over the Atlantic, the title, under the studious but dull editorship of William Whitworth, was in a period of decline. Most periodicals that survive more than a generation go through periods of editorial highs and lows, depending upon inertia, shifts in demographics, competition, and the men and women who shape the content. The New Yorker, Time, Esquire, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone, for example, have all experienced bouts of brilliance and mediocrity.

The Atlantic of 2000 was a magazine, like the New Yorker of William Shawn’s last decade there, filled with earnest and well-written articles but destined to rest on the coffee table, unread until a long airplane flight, prolonged insomnia, or flu forced a diligent reader to catch up with the past several issues. Kelly was a young man – he died at 46 – but he had a long resume, including stints at the New Yorker, the New York Times, and a stormy patch as editor of Martin Peretz’s New Republic. Within months of his appointment at the Atlantic, he had completely turned the stalled title around.

That Kelly, who was viewed with intense skepticism by the incestuous and predominantly liberal members of the political press, was able to produce, in the words of the New Yorker’s Anybody-But-Bush writer Hendrik Hertzberg, the “hot book” of 2002, shocked critics who feared he’d destroy this “national treasure.” Likewise, the “insiders,” reacting to Kelly’s weekly column in the Washington Post and work for the New Republic and New Yorker, had branded him a diehard conservative simply because of his disgust with the Clinton administration’s moral and ethical transgressions.

Kelly’s politics were far more complicated – he was a “Hubert Humphrey liberal,” he told me in a 1998 conversation. Kelly certainly wasn’t above the nitty-gritty of, say, a presidential campaign, but as an editor he was far more interested in compiling the best possible roster of writers available, regardless of whether he agreed with their views.

Under Kelly’s guidance, Atlantic readers were offered an eclectic array of articles each month, including authors from both sides of the political divide. David Brooks, a moderate conservative, was given wide berth to write about apathetic college students, exurbia, and (before it was an unbearable cliche) the sociological differences between “red” and “blue” states. At the same time, one of Kelly’s first hires was the piously liberal James Fallows (who’d left the Atlantic in 1996) – an indication that Kelly’s mix had no boundaries.

No American magazine offered the same breadth of opinion. A reader, in any given month, could read Jonathan Rauch on the merits of gay marriage (in May 2002, before it became such a contentious issue); P.J. O’Rourke asserting that the Enron scandal was hardly unique; conservative Byron York on the downfall of the American Spectator; the Washington Post’s liberal Thomas Edsall on future Republican demographic troubles; Christopher Hitchens (before September 11 reshaped his worldview) offering contrarian views on Winston Churchill; and New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum on sex at Yale University. Kelly even allowed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in January 2003, to write a long and impassioned defense of his cousin Michael Skakel, who’d been convicted in the long-ago death of Martha Moxley.

To a large extent, the editor of a publication sets its tone, and Kelly didn’t shirk from that duty. He wrote the lead essay of the Atlantic’s “Agenda” section, a collection of oped length pieces that opened the magazine. One of his most memorable was from the February 2002 is sue, a piece titled “Getting Hip to Squareness.” Reacting to the burst of patriotism after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Kelly mused as to whether this phenomenon was likely to last. He wrote:

Can we be square again? We were last square half a century ago. Then we were, more or less successively, hep, hip, cool, wild, beat, alienated, mod, groovy, radical, turned on, dropped out, camp, self-actualizing, meaningful, punk, greedy, ironic, Clintonian, and, finally, postmodern, which is to say exhausted. … Square: virtuous, chaste, modest, honest, brave, industrious, tough, kind to children and waiters. Anti-square: vicetolerant, promiscuous, boastful, hon est when it suits, don’t-get-mad-get-even, sharp, retains a tough attorney, kind to Kennedy children and waitresses who look like supermodels.

Kelly was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but he turned serious at the conclusion, arguing that there was no “square,” no “irony,” in the 1930s and 1940s.

The values of this America were values that came to be associated with square: courage, bravery, strength, honesty, love of country, sense of duty. Then, though, these values were not seen as square. Nor were they seen as square’s political analog, conservative. There was then no necessary disjunction between cool and patriotic, or cool and strong, or cool and conservative, and no understood conjunction between square and patriotic or strong and liberal. This seems to me a cultural state that might again, finally, be attainable.

Another mark of a potent editor is a vivid imagination. Were he alive today, Kelly would probably chuckle at the preceding words, considering the current venomous presidential campaign, where celebrities are “Cool for Kerry” and Southerners are, in the eyes of the mainstream journalists, Bible-thumping racists for Bush.

Kelly wouldn’t be amused at all, though, to see how the current version of the Atlantic has turned into an organ of the left, barely distinguishable from the New Republic, the Washing ton Monthly, the Nation, and the New York Times. In fact, many of the magazine’s new contributors work at those very publications.

The cover story of the June 2004 issue pictured a forlorn British prime minister, with the headline “The Tragedy of Tony Blair: Spin, Scandal, and a Fateful ‘Yes’ to a War He Could Have Stopped.” The author, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, contributed to Kelly’s Atlantic, but I doubt this piece would have been the lead feature under his command. A short piece in the same issue, written by Ross Douthat, is about Howard Stern and how his rants about President Bush could tip the election to Mr. Kerry. Kelly never would have published this article – not because of its content, but because the story was old. The same theory had appeared earlier in countless newspapers and magazines.

The following month, Mr. Fallows wrote about the upcoming presidential debates. Although he concedes that Mr. Bush ought not be underestimated, his clear conclusion is that the Democratic nominee has the upper hand (just as he did four years earlier, when he portrayed Al Gore as “the most lethal debater in politics”).

Mr. Fallows, in his research, watched the eight 1996 debates that pitted an unprepared Gov. William Weld against the incumbent Mr. Kerry in their campaign for the Senate. He writes: “Sitting through the videos of Kerry’s old debates and interviews produced an effect I hadn’t remotely anticipated: I was sorry when they were finished, because it was a treat to see this man perform… This man knows a lot, he is fast, and he has an interesting mind. Kerry was usually effective without being ugly or unfair. Kerry’s lightness of touch, compared with Bush’s relentless plodding, is a surprise considering what we all know about their backgrounds.”

The Atlantic’s September issue, on newsstands now, hits a new low. The embarrassment quotient is so high, so disconcerting to those readers who not long ago eagerly anticipated the magazine every month, that one can only dread what October will bring. In “The Agenda,” Alexandra Starr writes an inexplicable essay about “Dixie Chicks,” Southern women who could be “the Democrats’ salvation in the South.” Ms. Starr focuses on Inez Tenenbaum, who she claims is running a highly competitive U.S. Senate campaign in South Carolina against Republican Rep. Jim DeMint. Never mind that all current polls show Mr. DeMint well ahead, or that South Carolina is a bastion of conservatism. Ms. Starr’s naive cheerleading seems more suitable to a long-forgotten issue of Ms. Magazine.

There’s also the New Republic’s Ryan Lizza on the sudden rise of charismatic Illinois senate candidate Barack Obama – have you read that before? – and the scabrous Eric Alterman with the groundbreaking news that Democrats rake in campaign contributions from Beverly Hills.

That Mr. Alterman, who isn’t shy about flogging his books and friends, should make an appearance in the Atlantic is particularly unsettling. It was Mr. Alterman, upon Kelly’s appointment as the monthly’s editor, who raised the red flag. In his October 25, 1999, column in the Nation, after a defense of Mr. Whitworth’s editing of the magazine, Mr. Alterman writes: “Now that legacy will be entrusted to the alarming Michael Kelly, a reporter and editor with no literary background, a volcanic temperament and history of colossal bad judgment. If Bradley looked under every proverbial bog and slush pile in every periodical from Raritan to Teen People, it is hard to imagine his coming up with anyone less suited to the stewardship of this cultural treasure.”

The stain of Mr. Alterman’s prose on the pages that Michael Kelly once graced with his fine journalistic mind is, in the admittedly small world of devoted magazine readers, reason enough for this middle-aged man to shed a tear.