James Fallows
Charles Peters, born in Charleston, West Virginia, just before Christmas in 1926, died at his home in Washington, D.C., on Thanksgiving Day. He was 96.
Charlie, as he was universally known, had been in declining physical health for several years. His mind, wit, encyclopedic recall, passion, curiosity, and sense of humor were undiminished until his last days in the same modest house in Washington where he and his beloved wife, Beth, had lived since coming to the city in 1961 as part of John F. Kennedy’s new administration. They had jointly determined that, if possible, Charlie would remain at home in familiar settings until the end. Thanks to Beth’s strength, constant presence, and hospice support, he could do so.
You’ll hear in this space and on our website, washingtonmonthly.com, from many people who have learned from, worked for, or in other ways been shaped by Charlie’s enormous presence in our field. Most of them will have laughed with Charlie and argued with him—perhaps both at the same time. They will have loved him and been exasperated by him, marveled at his insights and resented his quirky or imperious demands, rolled their eyes during his animated editorial guidance pep talks known as “rain dances,” but then been motivated or chastened by what he said. All of them have become more aware with the passing years of how deeply grateful they are to have been part of his world.
Few could dispute that Charlie Peters has mattered. His presence in the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors is only the most obvious indicator. It is more important to realize that he matters and that his ideas and example can play an ongoing, indispensable role in responding to our country’s deepest problems.
Charlie matters in the example he has given us for journalism: for reporting that is hardheaded but
not hard-hearted; that rides on stories but is anchored in fact.
Charlie Peters matters in the example he has given us for journalism: for reporting that is hardheaded but not hard-hearted; that rides on stories but is anchored in data and fact; that calls out the evil and failures in people and institutions but also recognizes their possibility for good.
He matters in the ideals he has set for his country: that it should be patriotic but not jingoistic; that it can respect the military without being pro-war; that it can celebrate ambition and entrepreneurship without forgetting those left behind; that it should be skeptical of government failures precisely because effective government is so crucial to America’s success.
He matters as a person: showing that one can be flawed but triumphant; that awareness of one’s flaws can be the greatest strength, and that an open mind and a ready laugh are gifts to all. He fully enjoyed life’s pleasures, including, for many decades, season tickets to what was then a good local NFL team.
We will miss Charlie tremendously even while his example remains with us.
James Fallows is the author of 12 books and writes Breaking the News on Substack.
Jonathan Alter
There is so much to say about Charlie’s impact on journalism, but I’d like to tell a more personal story.
That summer, I was eager—even desperate—to meet the man, but it was not to be. The year was 1978, and I was a ridiculously overprivileged kid, then working as an intern in the White House. I had shaken President Jimmy Carter’s hand on the South Lawn. Thanks to being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club, I had also met Martin Luther King—and, as an eight-year-old, had seen the Beatles play in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
While I was hardly blasé, none of these legends were central to who I wanted to be. But the idea of possibly meeting Charlie Peters, already a deity in my little world of aspiring political journalists—now that would be thrilling.
My boss that summer was Jim Fallows, Carter’s chief speechwriter. Jim was a Charlie protégé, as was another journalist I revered, Nick Lemann, who had been the top editor of The Harvard Crimson when I was a freshman. Nick, amid his tenure as an editor, suggested I come to the Monthly’s ramshackle offices, and maybe I could meet Charlie. Maybe.
Charlie was around 50 then, and, as in so much else, decades ahead of his time in his decision to work almost exclusively from home, a tiny house on V Street NW—twice borrowed against to keep the magazine afloat.
The only time Charlie ventured out of the house was to drive his aging Oldsmobile sedan downtown for a wine-soaked lunch, which he used as a way of charming everyone from obscure Pentagon whistleblowers to Katharine Graham.
Charlie would usually stop by the office for 10 or 15 minutes. Nick figured I might catch him, and I almost did. But the moment I arrived, Charlie was scurrying out, a smiling West Virginia butterball, maybe five foot six, with deep-set raccoon eyes (like mine!), and better things to do than talk to Nick’s friend.
When I moved to Washington after graduation, with a couple of New Republic pieces under my belt, I applied for a job at the Monthly. No dice. I wrote a short article, which one of Charlie’s talented editors, Gregg Easterbrook, rewrote, and with good reason. I was finally granted an interview with the great man. To my horror, it lasted four minutes and consisted mostly of Charlie asking me if I got along with my father. I later learned that he believed anyone who didn’t would never get along with him and should not be hired. It turned out I gave the right answer, which also had the advantage of being true.
I was hired in 1981 with the understanding that I would put in 16-hour days doing everything from writing cover stories to taking out the garbage—then move on to a real job (in my case, at Newsweek).
Charlie’s intensity and (usually) endearing eccentricities lent a slightly comic dimension to what we called “the gospel”—the coherent collection of ideas that undergirded the magazine. “Rain dances”—when Charlie would jump up and down and tell you what was wrong with your article, you, the country, and the world—lasted longer and, though he did no line editing, always led to a much better draft. Rain dances were not conversations. Those would come later. This was especially true of the last time we spoke, earlier this year, as he sat in his basement, aided by an oxygen machine and the glow of an artificial Christmas tree that—his own person to the end—he kept lit all year long. We talked about his road trips with JFK in West Virginia in 1960, the Biden presidency, and mutual friends, but mostly just basked in our warm feelings for each other. I had loved a Beatle and, like others in our extended alumni family, had come to believe a Beatle loved me, and my life was the richer for it.
Jonathan Alter, an author, historian, and filmmaker, is the publisher of the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter. His most recent book is His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.
Gregg Easterbrook
One of the important figures of the past half century of Washington politics and journalism, Charlie Peters’s founding insight was that much of Washington news is self-serving make-believe. Today, everyone believes that; when Charlie began saying it, it was heresy. He further said, back when liberalism considered “private enterprise” a swear phrase, that government should set the goals, but market forces should make the choices about how to realize them.
And Charlie had no journalism training. He’d gone to law school.
Peters loved the United States and argued against the fashionable anti-Americanism of the Ivy League and Manhattan media. Sadly, he got no purchase at all with this.
You might hear about his unorthodox business strategies, such as “paying” a bill by deliberately sending an unsigned check. The vendor had to mail the check back for signature. That bought Charlie another month to seek investors.
When the history of this period is written, Peters will be ranked as equal in importance to the literary editors Harold Ross, William Whitworth, Philip Rahv, Arnold Gingrich, and William Shawn.
Before Peters, literary nonfiction was too Ivory Tower. Charlie insisted that every article enfold the “Big Three”—reporting, thinking, and writing. And though he relentlessly mocked snobs, Charlie had a nose for elegant writing, discovering James Fallows, Michelle Cottle, David Ignatius, Kate Boo, Matt Cooper, Jon Meacham, James Bennet, Joe Nocera, Walter Shapiro, Josh Green, Amy Sullivan, and numerous others. Me too! Charlie taught all of us that style need not be boring.
Two favorite Charlie anecdotes:
First. I was a young man in Chicago working for a trade magazine about toxic waste. The very best trade magazine about toxic waste! And I was a die-hard Monthly reader.
I wrote a freelance article for Charlie, and it made the cover. I knew Peters had a track record of gambling on unknowns. I called him up and told him that if he’d hire me, I would give up my glamorous toxic waste lifestyle and work for him.
Charlie said, “I don’t have the budget to pay your moving expenses. If you lived in Washington, I’d hire you in a heartbeat.”
So I quit my job, drove to Washington, found a Hill staffer looking for a roommate, and a few days later sat on the Monthly’s office steps waiting for Charlie to come into work.
“I’m here,” I said.
In 40 years of knowing him, it was the only time I saw Charlie speechless.
Second. After I had been a Monthly editor for a few months, he invited me to lunch at a Middle Eastern place off Dupont Circle. The host asked what drink he should bring to the table. “Two dry gin martinis, a half carafe of rosé, and a Heineken,” Charlie said. Then he turned to me and asked, “And would you like something to drink?”
In Psalms, we read, “The upright shall behold the face of God.” I wonder if the Maker will be able to win arguments with Charlie.
Gregg Easterbrook has published three novels and nine nonfiction books. (This article originally appeared in his Substack, All Predictions Wrong.)
Nicholas Thompson
The first time I met Charlie Peters was in 1999: I was 24, he was 72, and I was a candidate to be an editor at the Monthly. I trudged up the stairs of 1611 Connecticut Avenue to a well-worn office filled with old magazines and crossed by the occasional cockroach. “What is your relationship like with your father?” he asked.
Charlie’s intensity and
(usually) endearing eccentricities lent a slightly comic dimension to
what we called “the gospel”—the coherent collection of ideas that undergirded the magazine.
“Well,” I responded, “my father drinks way too much, but we get along great.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but the interview essentially ended right there. I was hired.
I lived with my father, sometimes slept on the office floor, and learned from Charlie new ways of saving money. We borrowed internet from the office downstairs when I routed an ethernet wire up the fire escape. In return for all these sacrifices, I got to edit and write stories that people with power read.
Charlie wasn’t easy. The second story I filed was about the gambling industry in Georgia. I handed it in, and the next day, when the phone rang, I picked it up and heard Charlie’s familiar West Virginia drawl. There was no greeting. Just a rhetorical question: “Why would someone give me a story like this? Because they’re an asshole. A fucking asshole.” Then he hung up.
The next day, I apologized and asked for clarification on what I had done wrong. The problem, he explained, was that I had written it like “a pompous dickhead.” I didn’t get much guidance beyond that. I then took the draft to Robert Worth, a Monthly editor at the time, who laughed and helped me fix the work.
There are different ways mentors can help you improve, just as there are different ways parents can help their children. One can be tough; one can be inscrutable; one can be kind; one can offer detailed instructions and guidance. There’s no one right approach. Now that I’ve had children and thought more about it, I’ve decided that there’s one variable that matters most: the parent, or mentor, must have genuine care or even love. And this is what made Charlie’s method work. I knew he hated the gambling story. He screamed at me more than a few times in the years to come. But I never doubted that he cared and that he wanted the best for me as well as the magazine. He cared intensely about the country; the magazine was the tool he had to help; and his young editors had to shoulder the burden of getting the darn thing out. So, I kept going, kept working, and kept trying to improve. After two years, I was unquestionably a better journalist than when I began.
He cared intensely about the country; the magazine was the tool he had to help; and his young editors had to shoulder the burden of getting the darn thing out.
Last year, I made my final visit to his house, the same one out in Georgetown that he had moved into in 1961. I went down to the basement where Charlie sat, covered mostly in a blanket; he was 95 years old, and didn’t have much time left. We talked about our years together and his hopes for The Atlantic. When I left, he said something that men don’t really ever say to each other: “I love you.” I should say it here that I loved him, too.
Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, is the former editor in chief of Wired.
Steven Waldman
The part of Charlie’s vision that touched me most was his injunction against letting our writing be warped by our prior convictions or wanting to win approval (even unconsciously) from our own social group. When I was a young editor at the magazine in 1986–87, he taught that we should be willing to “say good things about the bad guys, and bad things about the good guys.” Today, our entire media system—both the ratings-driven and the algorithm-driven media—penalizes that kind of heterodox thinking. But decades of Monthly editors and writers tried to carry that intellectual honesty—relentlessly challenging one’s priors—onto the mainstream media outlets we moved to in our careers.
I certainly tried to as a correspondent for Newsweek, then as cofounder of Beliefnet (a multifaith religion site), Report for America (a national service nonprofit that places and supports reporters in local newsrooms), and Rebuild Local News (which advocates public policies to save local news).
But one of the most admirable aspects of Charlie’s legacy is not what happened while he was editor but what has happened since. A great measure of an entrepreneur’s success is whether their creation lives on and even evolves into something better.
When Paul Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, the spirit of idealism and great reporting persisted, but the nature of its impact changed. Under Charlie, the Monthly’s most significant influence was arguably on journalism itself—on how the press covers Washington. Under Paul, its most profound impact has been on public policy.
For instance, fighting monopolies is now a central plank of the Biden administration’s economic agenda. That’s a direct result of muckraking anti-monopoly stories the Monthly started publishing more than a dozen years ago—some of which were written by Lina Khan, now chair of the FTC and Joe Biden’s most prominent antitrust enforcer. The Monthly’s innovative college rankings spurred the federal government, first under Barack Obama and now under Biden, to crack down on predatory for-profit colleges and to publish data on how much students at specific colleges earn after they graduate.
The modern Monthly has also continued to train young reporters with a fervor for original thinking and honest analysis. The prominent journalists who have worked at or written for the Monthly under Paul include Nicholas Confessore, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist at The New York Times, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, an author and former deputy Washington bureau chief of Time who’s now back at the Monthly. Even the interns have gone on to do astonishing work (witness Ezra Klein, cofounder of Vox Media and now columnist and podcaster for the Times).
The Monthly had an amazing 32 years under Charlie Peters. It’s been just as remarkable for the past 22 years under Paul Glastris.
Steven Waldman is chair of the Rebuild Local News Coalition and cofounder of Report for America.
