Michael John Elliott

Michael Elliott, a British journalist who held top editorial positions at three major newsweeklies and who later was chief executive of a global humanitarian group founded by the rock star Bono, died July 14 at a hospital in Washington. He was 65.

The cause was an aggressive form of bladder cancer, said his wife, Emma Oxford.

Mr. Elliott gave up a career as a tenured professor at the London School of Economics to enter journalism in the 1980s, first at the Economist magazine in London. He quickly became one of the most accomplished political analysts of his time, launching the magazine's "Bagehot" column about British politics and later, after coming to Washington, its "Lexington" column about politics in the United States.

In the 1990s, Mr. Elliott was editor of the international editions of Newsweek before holding a similar post at Time. He traveled the world, including a two-year stint in Hong Kong, and had a knack for being at the scene of major events.

He appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; he covered the Iowa caucuses; he dined with South African leader Nelson Mandela; he was an eyewitness to the devastating Asian tsunami in 2004; he often appeared on CNN as an analyst of world events; and, in 2003, he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

"Michael is one of the very few people I've ever known who deserved the description 'larger than life,' " Time editor Nancy Gibbs said in an obituary posted on the magazine's website. "He lived life large, buoyantly, flamboyantly, delightedly chasing the next big idea, spotting the next great talent, inviting us all to his table to listen and learn. He was preacher and teacher, mentor to generations of journalists and model to all of us as editors."
Mr. Elliott, who spent most of the past 30 years in the United States, traveled widely throughout the country by car.

"I was always struck by how clearly he saw American politics," political journalist Joe Klein, a onetime Time colleague, told the Journal News of Westchester County, N.Y., in 2003. "He was one of the very first to understand that Bill Clinton was a great political talent, and he was the very first - I believe - to discover Clinton's favorite barbecue stand in Little Rock."

In 1996, Mr. Elliott published "The Day Before Yesterday: Reconsidering America's Past, Rediscovering the Present," an influential book in which he discerned a kind of national malaise in a once-optimistic country. Many Americans, he found, pined for the faded memories of a golden age while overlooking their present-day good fortune.

"The period after 1945 has become the great, defining American myth, as if it determined what we must aspire to be," he wrote.
The idea was so persistent, Mr. Elliott argued, that it had become almost a psychological fixation.
"It is a false yardstick with which to measure the scale of our present discontent," he wrote. "Our obsession with those years is like the ultimately hopeless task of trying to recapture a dreamtime."

Michael John Elliott was born May 31, 1951, in Liverpool, England. His father was a mathematics teacher.

At the University of Oxford's Worcester College, Mr. Elliott received two degrees in law, in 1972 and 1974. He taught for a year at Northwestern University's law school in Illinois, then pursued an academic career at the University of Warwick in England and later at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He worked at a British think tank before joining the Economist in 1984. He moved to Newsweek in 1993.

At Newsweek, Mr. Elliott conducted an interview with Bono about social issues that proved to be so compelling - "He was brilliant. He was passionate. He was funny," Mr. Elliott later said - that he persuaded the singer to reconsider his off-the-record stance.

The resulting article in 2000 helped put Bono on the international stage as someone who was more than just a rock star. After Mr. Elliott moved to Time, he helped edit a 2002 cover story with the headline, "Can Bono Save the World?"

At Time, Mr. Elliott wrote more than 20 cover stories and was considered a versatile writer who could tackle any subject from U.S. politics to economics to turmoil in the Middle East. After witnessing the 2004 tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, he wrote about the resulting devastation across Asia: "They are burning bodies on the shore of Tamil Nadu in southern India. .?.?. In Patong, a honky-tonk beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. In Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, dozens of men have lined up on either side of a bridge, watching for bodies trapped underwater to pop up to the surface."

Mr. Elliott spent five years as editor of Time's international editions before leaving in 2011 to become chief executive of ONE Campaign, a humanitarian organization co-founded by Bono. Mr. Elliott helped increase the group's worldwide membership and lobbied to help African countries expand electrical power and manage hunger and disease. He stepped down from his executive post earlier this year but appeared at a ceremony in his honor two days before his death, wearing his signature Australian bush hat.

A service to celebrate Michael's life is being planned and details will be made public on Monday, July 18, 2016.

Arrangements under the direction of Joseph Gawler's Sons LLC, Washington, DC.