On January 29, Suzannah Lessard, a Stanford White descendant who wrote an acclaimed memoir of her famous American family and was one of the first editors of the Washington Monthly, died peacefully at 81, surrounded by loved ones.
The news hit us hard here, even shockingly, although perhaps it should not have. Suki, as she was known to those close to her, was an octogenarian and had been wrestling with cancer. But shocked we were. When we heard about it from Taylor Branch, the historian who was one of her co-editors here in the early 1970s, along with the late author John Rothschild and the magazine’s founder, Charles Peters, who died in 2023, we were deeply saddened.
The first female editor of the Monthly, she was assuredly a groundbreaker but, perhaps more importantly, a beacon. While many of the magazine’s editors would become acclaimed historians, journalists, Pulitzer winners, and, to use that dying phrase, public intellectuals, as well as publishers and Hollywood producers, Suki seemed most comfortable exploring worlds of moral ambiguity that had nothing to do with elections or legislation. Whether it was her Monthly years, her tenure at The New Yorker, or writing books on topics as varied as her haute-WASP family and America’s physical landscape, she had literary sensibilities not just because her prose could be novelistic but because, like great fiction writers, she explored people’s interior lives and the interior life of our nation. In a letter Peters wrote to Suki in 2001, which was shared with me, he noted that people tend to remember her pieces from 30 years prior because “they showed unusual originality and intellectual courage unsurpassed by any I’ve encountered in my life.”
The Monthly meant a lot to Suki, too. In a paid death notice, the family encouraged donations to this magazine, and her wife, Noel Brennan, urged us to include that fact about donations to the Monthly in any memoriam to her. And so we do.
Lessard was frequently a judge of our annual Kukula Award for the best in nonfiction book reviewing, the only annual award of its kind and a living memorial to Kukula Kapoor Glastris, our books editor who died in 2017 at 59.
When I graduated from college in the 1980s and moved to Washington, D.C., first to intern here and then to work in the government before becoming a magazine journalist, I was an au pair for Branch and his wife, Christy, when they lived in the then-very-ungentrified Columbia Heights neighborhood. I remember meeting Suki at their house once. She seemed to radiate a sense of calm and tranquility, as did Branch, a family man who rose at 5:00 am to work on what was then the first volume of his award-winning Martin Luther King, Jr. trilogy. Perhaps I’m misremembering, and I only met her a few times, but I got the same sense of Suki at later Monthly functions. It was far from the tortured, dramatic personae the college version of me associated with great journalists.
Little did I know until Suki’s memoir was in the works, and when The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family appeared in 1996, that I had only a modest appreciation of her family’s legacy, or that beneath that poise I saw in Columbia Heights was the fallout from a violent American story.
White was the third-named partner of McKim, Mead, and White, the Gilded Age architectural firm whose New York City works included the campus of Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Washington Square Arch, and the glorious Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station, leveled to make room for the low-ceilinged rat maze under Madison Square Garden where Amtrak riders were condemned to wait for trains. In Washington, D.C., the firm was behind the East Wing of the White House, recently demolished to make way for Donald Trump’s ballroom.
Suki grew up in St. James, on Long Island’s North Shore, on an estate/compound where her family settled in the 17th century, and Stanford built the property’s most regal home. White himself died in 1906, on the roof of an earlier incarnation of Madison Square Garden, another Gotham landmark built by his firm, when the millionaire husband of a showgirl shot the famous architect. Stanford had sexually assaulted her when she was 16. Alas, his predations were not family outliers.
On New Year’s Day, in 1989, one of Suki’s sisters called a family meeting to reveal the sexual molestation and torment she’d experienced from her father, a composer. The other sisters slowly chimed in with their own haunted memories. As The New York Times described it in their obituary for Lessard last month:
Over the years, each had tried to convince herself that the encounters weren’t abuse — that their childhoods had been safe and that their father’s behavior was somehow normal. Their memories, finally voiced, gave Ms. Lessard “a sense of something like the sound barrier breaking,” she wrote, “a psychic reverberation.”
Suki had described the years of writing the haunting family story, later a bestseller, as torture, which is a reminder that each of us contains multitudes. Outer calm, perhaps. Inner storms, certainly.
If you look at a sampling of Suki’s works from the Washington Monthly, you see elegant prose, a probing eye, and a nuanced sensibility in what were mostly works from her 20s, when nuance (at least in my case, but I suspect in many others) was rarely in abundance.
In 1979, The New Republic rejected, and the Monthly ran, a piece of hers: A buzzy must-read in its time, “Kennedy’s Woman Problem—Women’s Kennedy Problem,” was an account of Ted Kennedy’s raucous life on the eve of his 1980 presidential bid, his first and only. (The piece had been accepted and commissioned by a former Monthly editor, Michael Kinsley, TNR’s editor. Kinsley resigned from the storied publication when the publisher, Martin Peretz, refused to run the piece, but was quickly rehired, thank goodness.) The piece was often cited during Bill Clinton’s impeachment scandal for its centered sensibility as it navigated what’s appropriate to weigh about the private lives of our very public politicians. With a journalist’s hunger to know more, Suki sided against those liberals and others who wanted to look away from Kennedy’s personal life and toward his legislative advocacy and accomplishments on behalf of women and their rights. It was brave and controversial.
Similarly, in 1972, just a few months before Roe v. Wade enshrined a constitutional right to abortion that would later be revoked in a sneering Supreme Court opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, Lessard wrote in these pages, “Aborting a Fetus: The Legal Right, The Moral Choice,” in which she stood wholeheartedly behind the growing crusade to legalize abortion, which had been gathering strength in state legislatures.
But Lessard also raised the moral stakes, questioning whether the advocates for legal abortion were doing justice to the moral gravity of aborting a fetus—a tricky, hypernuanced view of the issue which had yet to galvanize conservatives and fundamentalist Christians. Liberals, just seeing daylight on the issue at a time when abortion was a felony in a majority of states, were in no mood for self-reflection.
Her opening sentence cut to the heart of the issue: “The belief that abortion must be legally available to those who want it comes to many of us first as a gut certainty, not that the procedure itself is morally acceptable, but that to deny women the option is intolerable and insane.” The piece’s common sense still echoes in the polls. An American majority favors legal abortion but sees it as a weighty choice: not murder, but not without consequence. “I’m not implying that the experience must be a great agonizing tragedy,” Lessard wrote of abortion, “just that more is involved than the removal of a blob of protoplasm and that most women know that and react accordingly.”
Multitudes: She saw them.
Lessard didn’t see herself as gay when she wrote “Gay is Good For Us All” in the Monthly in 1970. (She’d marry a man, become a mother, and later marry Noel.) Like other Monthly titles of that era, such as “Criminals Belong in Jail,” her gay piece trumpeted a simple truth that was shocking at the time and is more likely to elicit a quizzical “That-was-a-big-deal?” look today. Lessard captured the moment as the gay pride movement was embryonic:
“Oh no, not the fairies too!” said a woman watching the Gay Liberation Movement march up Sixth Avenue last June, with a quizzical, good-humored expression on her face, as though they were so many puppies. “I’m from Ohio. I think it’s funny,” said a tourist. “I’d like to kick the shit out of them,” said a clean, tense young man turning on his heel. No one quite knew how to react. Few grasped the implications or viewed it as more than either a circus or an abomination. But the marchers were confident…”
Lessard understood that Gay Liberation wasn’t just in the interest of homosexuals, that it could liberate us all from sexual stereotypes, and that those on the Left who jeered homosexuals—from feminists like Betty Friedan to Black Power advocates, who wanted nothing to do with them—had much to learn from their gay brethren.
We still have much to learn from Suzannah Lessard.
That includes those of us who work with words for a living but also anyone who wants to make sense of a world where beauty and horror not only live side by side, but are intertwined: where identity shorthand like “WASP aristocrat” and “white woman” and “assault survivor” and “LGBQT+ person” and “bestselling author” don’t begin to do justice to the moral complexity of each of us (including Suki, to whom, of course, these labels apply), let alone our country of 330 million-plus souls. We’re proud to have been part of Suki’s extended family and would be so grateful if you could help keep this magazine going in its 57th year and beyond. At a time when everything seems unsure, we’re sure she would have wanted that.
