From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

Most journalists discover their calling in fairly direct ways: a pep talk from an English teacher, perhaps, or a stint on the high school newspaper. Jim Kelly got the news bug when he was negotiating a treaty on long-range nuclear missiles. It happened when he was an undergraduate at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, preparing to take part in a mock U.S.-Soviet negotiating session on SALT II. "I thought the exercise was pretty silly," says Jim. "Besides, doing the reporting on both sides' positions was more intriguing to me than being part of the action. That's when I began to think I was a born observer."

After graduating from Princeton in 1977 (and getting his own pep talk from author and former TIME writer John McPhee, with whom he took a journalism class), Jim came to TIME. He started out writing Milestones, where he learned that a life story could be told in a paragraph if necessary. He went on to handle slightly longer pieces in the Nation, World and Press sections, and became World editor in 1988. Last fall Jim was named assistant managing editor, overseeing a variety of sections, including Nation, Law, Education, Books and Interview.

That eclectic array of responsibilities is perfectly in keeping with Jim's range of interests. He is a voracious reader, of everything from Hollywood trade papers to international political journals, and can opine as fluently on David Letterman's monologues as on the Middle East peace talks. "I'm almost as curious about why the royals split up as about why Tsongas quit the Democratic race," he says.

As Jim's duties have changed here, so has the magazine. "When I first came to the Nation section, we would write lots of stories about the President's week," he says. "Now we're not satisfied just to recite what happened. We analyze why things happen and why they matter." As the magazine continues to change, you can be sure that Jim will be intimately involved. "Working here is a selfish endeavor," he says. "It satisfies my interests, curiosities and passions." Those are precisely the qualities that define a first-rate editor.