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Mary Louise Kelly
Mary Louise Kelly has done her fair share of traveling and in-person engagements as an NPR correspondent but not lately, due to the pandemic. So, traveling to New Albany for a March 10 interview with H.R. McMaster for the New Albany Lecture Series is something she’s looking forward to.
“Just the ability to see someone’s face and their reaction in real-time and read the body language,” Kelly says. “Even bigger than that is having a live audience who becomes kind of third participant in the conversation as you’re gauging the energy of the room, what they’re responding to, and that informs how I choose to pace my questions.”
Live, in-person events have a different energy than the interviews she facilitates as a co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, Kelly says.
“I know there are a few million people listening when I interview someone on NPR, but I can’t hear them,” she says. “You always have them in your head as you’re asking questions, but you don’t have them in person. So that’s a little bit different and one of the lovely, lovely things about a live event is you’ve got a bunch of people all in the conversation at the same time.”
Kelly and McMaster, who served as national security advisor from 2017-18 under President Donald Trump, will meet on stage for a conversation about national security hosted by the New Albany Community Foundation.
Kelly started on NPR’s national security beat in 2004 and worked as a national security correspondent for 10 years before anchoring All Things Considered. She’s reported on the CIA, terrorism, wars and foreign policy. In addition to her work at NPR, Kelly has lectured at both Stanford University and Harvard University, her alma mater, and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. She has moderated interviews at a variety of forums around the world.
A published author, Kelly says she’s stepped away from the news in the past to raise her family and write her two books – spy thrillers Anonymous Sources and The Bullet – but she always comes back.
“I had never stopped missing that feeling of now we’re in the newsroom, now we’re getting to write the first draft of history,” she says. “It just has felt like an honor and the thrill of a lifetime from a very early age. And as long as it keeps feeling that way, then I’m in.”
Kelly says a curiosity has driven her since her early days as a journalist. A high school experience interviewing an intimidating vice principal led her to realize the power she had as a reporter as she asked the questions her classmates wanted answers to – and the vice principal answered.
Kelly says she’s kept that same curiosity today.
“I feel that the ability to ask a genuine question about something you’re curious about and you want to understand: Why do we do it this way? Could we do it better? Why does this work this way? And having them take my questions, not because they owe me anything, because there’s a huge audience of NPR listeners and reader who are invested in that question and they deserve that answer, pushing for that answer has always been really fascinating to me and really feels like a privilege,” she says.
That curiosity can be seen in Kelly’s educational path. She earned degrees in government, French language and literature from Harvard in 1993 and, later, a master’s degree in European studies from the University of Cambridge before embarking on her career.
“I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I keep exploring and writing books and writing other things and there’s a million things I want to do, but I keep coming back to journalism,” Kelly says. “I love asking questions. I love getting to see the world. I love getting to write about it and then engage in a conversation with our audience. All of that brings me joy. But I’ve seen a lot of things around the world along the way and I think that hopefully has helped me become a better journalist.”
As exemplified by Kelly, lifelong learning is one of the four strategic areas of impact for the New Albany Foundation. It’s one of the most important values the Lecture Series hopes to promote, says foundation President Craig Mohre.
Over 30 schools in central Ohio and 22,000 students have participated in the Student Lecture Series since it began in 2002.
“We want to engage everybody from the youngest kids to the oldest adults in the community in participating,” Mohre says.
The McMaster event will take place 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 10, at the Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts. Robert Reich and Karl Rove will take the stage in the final event of the series on April 7. Find more information at www.newalbanyfoundation.org.
Claire Miller is an editor. Feedback welcome at cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com.
