When I did my first stint at the Washington Monthly in the 1980s, as a 24-year-old, the magazine was in a ramshackle office near Washington’s Dupont Circle. I worked long hours for $10,000 a year ($28,111 in today’s dollars) as we all did, including Paul Glastris, also in his 20s, who was finishing his tenure at the magazine and is now the editor-in-chief. Our boss, the magazine’s founder Charles Peters, was deeply inspiring, but he could also be, shall we say, infuriating. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. (These were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t that the Coloradan had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. But that Hart, whom we liked, was cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired. 

The Washington Monthly is always trying to get at the real story, unafraid to say bad things about people we liked or good things about those we opposed. But we can’t do it without your help. Can you make a tax-deductible contribution to keep us going? 

This year was no exception when it came to challenging shibboleths of the left and right. The Monthly broke ground by raising questions about the “abundance” critique of some liberals we admire, such as Ezra Klein, who maintain that red tape and regulation are holding back the country and liberals. While acknowledging that bureaucracy is often burdensome—the Monthly was born with the idea of making government work—we found that other factors, such as monopolies and corporate lobbying, were often bigger drivers of our national dysfunction. See “The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals” by Glastris and my colleague Nate Weisberg, and “The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong” by Glastris and Kainoa Lowman. 

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The Washington Monthly was born 56 years ago during a crisis for liberals. It was 1969. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s had crashed on the shoals of the Vietnam War, riots, and the 1968 presidential election, where the combined vote of Richard Nixon and George Wallace was just under 57 percent. The magazine was born to examine how government should work, where it succeeds, and where it often fails. Peters had been a New Frontiersman and a founder of the Peace Corps. 

When Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, liberals, progressives, and common-sense centrists were on their back foot after the 2000 elections. But he enriched the magazine with a newfound focus on antitrust and sophisticated, big-idea thinking about industrial policy, health care, and international trade. While some in the center pushed for incremental solutions and some on the left advocated big, but bad, ideas, the Monthly fused ideas that were both big and smart. The result was the acclaimed magazine you’re reading today, where a new breed of young editors and some wizened hands like me and Glastris keep this venerable institution going.  

We need your help. The Washington Monthly is a nonprofit, so your donation is entirely tax-deductible. Whatever you can afford helps. For just $50, you’ll receive the magazine’s print edition, going strong since 1969.  

The post When the Country Is in Trouble, the Washington Monthly Is There  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Washington Monthly is often at its best in times of liberal despair. Charlie Peters founded the publication at just such a moment—in 1969, in the early months of Richard Nixon’s presidency, as the New Frontier and Great Society ended, and the McCarthy-era redbaiter hated by liberals made an impossible political comeback. (Sound familiar?) The Monthly is thriving right now, in this perilous moment, as Jimmy Carter’s century of service ends and Donald Trump’s comeback culminates in his swearing-in as the 47^th president of the United States. But we need your contributions to keep going. 

Peters, a former West Virginia state legislator, founded the Monthly amid Nixonian darkness, believing that government could help Americans do great things. A World War II veteran, FDR lover, GI bill beneficiary, and JFK appointee, he knew from his life experience, including as a founder of the Peace Corps, that government is not the enemy. But as he saw with LBJ, it could go off the rails, whether sinking into the Vietnam quagmire or running amok through failed programs and misplaced altruism. “Criminals Belong in Jail” was an early Monthly cover story—an unremarkable truism but, at the time, heresy for a liberal to say. As Nixon took office, Peters wanted a magazine about making government work, skewering conservative misanthropy, and saving liberalism from itself. 

Peters encouraged journalists to do the same because he had worked in politics and government. Monthly alums are the rare journalistic tribe who have often worked in government, often at the highest levels. Two Washington Monthly contributing editors—James Fallows and the late Walter Shapiro, who we lost this year—were White House speechwriters in the Carter administration, as was Chris Matthews, the author, historian, broadcaster, and our contributing writer. Jon Meacham was a biographer and friend of George H.W. Bush and a friend and ally of Joe Biden during his presidency. Steven Waldman helped run AmeriCorps. Taylor Branch ran the George McGovern campaign in Texas with a fellow named Bill Clinton before becoming the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King. I had two stints in government, working on independent commissions investigating civil rights and the financial crisis. 

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Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of this magazine, took over from Peters after serving as a speechwriter toward the end of Bill Clinton’s administration, penning addresses on everything from education policy to American engagement in Europe, where he had been a correspondent during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Liberalism was in another crisis as Glastris took the helm. Clinton may have left behind peace, prosperity, and surpluses, but George W. Bush was in office; the country, barreling blind toward Baghdad and the Democrats, again, lost. The Monthly was full of ideas, often championing tried-and-true liberal solutions that had fallen out of fashion even among Democrats, like VA health care, sensible regulation, and vigorous antitrust enforcement. Some of those new-old positions put Glastris’s Washington Monthly at odds with the deregulatory zeal of the Carter years when laissez-faire came to the airline industry and energy prices. But being willing to reassess one’s positions has always been a hallmark of the Monthly, and, hopefully, anyone who isn’t a lemming. 

The Washington Monthly has always operated on a slim financial margin. Finances always feel like a high-wire act around here, and this is especially true now. That’s why we need your help. We can’t do our investigative reporting without your help. We can’t be a fount of new ideas for reviving liberalism without your donations. Do it now. As Jimmy Carter’s body takes the long journey from Plains, Georgia, to lie in state in Washington and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ready to take office, this is a vital and essential time to donate to the Monthly. 

It’s entirely tax deductible. For $50 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary subscription to the magazine’s print edition. 

All the best, 

Matthew Cooper 

Executive Editor-Digital 

The post Jimmy Carter, the Washington Monthly, and the Future of Liberalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In August 2023, I was stressed. I had graduated from college in New England in June and moved to Washington, D.C., a week later for a summer internship at Politico with their magazine team. In a leap of faith, I had signed a one-year lease on a rowhouse with a couple of buddies, far from my home in Los Angeles.

I had a folder of Chrome bookmarks labeled “Jobs” containing the career page for every publication where I wanted to work. I’d log on daily and peruse mostly blank pages or jobs for mid-career journalists. Due mainly to Big Tech’s monopolization of ad revenue (which Phil Longman has written about in the Washington Monthly), the print-media industry is famously declining, as is pretty much all written-word media, and the job market for young up-and-comers is brutal as a result.

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But I found another internship soon after, this time at the Washington Monthly, funded not by trying to squeeze every penny out of a monopolized online advertising industry but by generous donors like you.

I was sold on the Monthly’s compelling, original journalism that combined deep reporting with productive solutions. The prose was snappy, sharp, and smart, the kind that you look forward to reading, not the kind where you look forward to having read it. I was also sold on their illustrious list of alums. The intern alumni include Ezra Klein of The New York Times, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, John Harris, the co-founder and Global Editor-in-Chief of Politico, not to mention Paul Glastris, the Monthly’s editor-in-chief, and Matthew Cooper, its executive editor–digital.

I started by fact-checking, like all magazine interns (at least at the ones that still have internships). But quickly, I was assigned two stories to report and write. The first was about the unlikely event that a presidential candidate drops out (or is forced to drop out) after the primaries. The second was about the vicious fight between ultra-MAGA state legislators and their medium-MAGA colleagues, who were choosing to fight mostly about their allegiance to Donald Trump and less about the new policy ideas the populist wing of the GOP wanted to bring in.

The first piece turned out to be more prophecy than contingency. The second previewed the intra-MAGA squabbling that could be the second Trump presidency’s hallmark, unless all Republicans bend the knee. Similar to some state legislators, Representative Matt Gaetz, I noted, spends far too much of his time fighting Trump’s battles (and perhaps breaking the law) when he ought to spend more time on his policy ideas that are uncommon in the Republican Party, like his distaste for omnibus budget bills that obstruct the workings of government. Gaetz is also a staunch anti-monopolist who calls himself a Khanservative (because of his alignment with Lina Khan, who wrote early important pieces on antitrust for the Monthly as a young lawyer before her fame as the Federal Trade Commission chair.). Now, Gaetz is Trump’s pick for Attorney General, and the ultra-MAGA vs. medium-MAGA feud has boiled over into the Republican-run Senate over confirming him.

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I had gone from admiring the Monthly’s prescient ideas to doing my small part to keep the tradition going.

While I was working on that piece, Charlie Peters, the founder of the Washington Monthly, died at age 96.

Monthly alumni called in from their esteemed perches—The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker—to tell us (and write for us about) how much the John F. Kennedy appointee and the magazine’s long-time editor had meant to them. At his memorial, I met alums of the Monthly who were accomplished in journalism and had the Monthly to thank for helping them get their start. I was in a room full of role models, and we had this magazine in common.

In January, I was promoted to associate editor. Over the past year, with the help of terrific colleagues, I’ve written pieces on the scandal of overpriced master’s degrees, which rely on government inaction to scam thousands. I’ve learned how to commission, edit, and write stories in that classic Monthly style—how to find ideas where nobody else is looking, anchor the story in deep, interesting reporting, and look towards solutions that can make our country better.

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None of this would be possible without the generous support of Washington Monthly donors like you. The media has dramatically changed since 1969, and the pipeline for young journalists has shrunk tremendously. But the Monthly is still kicking and screaming, picking up young whippersnappers who can aid in the same mission we’ve always had.

I’m proud to be one of those young whippersnappers, and if you want our lineage to continue, we hope you’ll consider donating to the Monthly today. Please do it now. A $50 donation gets you a free subscription to the print magazine and ensures that we can continue being a beacon of ideas no matter how dark the world seems.

The post I Was a Washington Monthly Whippersnapper appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Charlie Peters, my original mentor in the magazine world, used to say that the hardest talent to find among aspiring writers was a true, light, instinctive comic touch. Lots of people could work hard, write fast, and stay up late. Lots of people were politics nuts or history buffs. Many people were willing to ask questions and do research and go through the repeated self-education that is the reporter’s life.

But somebody who had an innate sense of the one-liner, of the observation that would crack up a too-serious gathering, of the set-up joke that didn’t seem set-up at all—and who could do all that with the ability to turn the one-liner toward a “serious” point… Each time Charlie found such a person, he would practically cry with gratitude.

He found a lot of them during his long run at The Washington Monthly. Art Levine. John Rothchild. Gregg Easterbrook. Michelle Cottle. Tim Noah. Matt Cooper. Garrett Epps. Josh Green. I could name more. Even Mike Kinsley, who was a longtime New Republic writer and editor but who contributed pieces for Charlie at the Monthly.

But the name that for me will always be first on that list is my dear friend Walter Shapiro. Half the world of political journalism is referring to Walter as a “dear friend,” while reeling from the unexpected news of his death on Sunday, at age 77. Walter was funny. But beneath that, he was loving in an important way that I think will always distinguish him.

Walter and I had an Odd Couple-style “meet cute” in the summer of 1972. That was an eon ago in many ways—Richard Nixon was steamrolling toward landslide re-election, the Democrats nonetheless held huge majorities in both the Senate and the House. But it also had surprising connections to our time. A Vietnam veteran in his 20s staged his first run for Congress. That was John Kerry, and he lost. A lawyer in his 20s staged a run for the Senate. That was Joe Biden, and he won. Two Yale Law students in their 20s worked on George McGovern’s doomed campaign in Texas. They were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. These people are still in the news.

And in that same cycle, a 25-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan, who had just passed the Constitutional minimum age for his candidacy, ran in the House primary in the Ann Arbor-Livonia district. He came within a thousand votes of winning the Democratic nomination. But he lost.

That was, of course, Walter Shapiro, who showed up a few weeks later in Washington—unemployed, ready for anything, hoping to find some journalistic job. At that time I was 23 years old, just out of graduate school and a stint with Ralph Nader—unemployed, ready for anything, hoping to see whether journalism could provide any job. The main thing in common between us is that we’d both worked on college newspapers and had our Nader experience. Charlie Peters was at the time bidding farewell to his very first cadre of Washington Monthly staff writers—Taylor Branch, Suzannah Lessard, and John Rothchild. He needed to fill some slots, and he happened to meet me and Walter at about the same time.

He signed us both on. I was the “policy” guy of the duo. Earnest; few laughs. Walter was the one with the twinkle that Charlie always looked for and prized. (The Monthly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy one week after Charlie hired us—he’d never mentioned this prospect when signing us on. But it survived then and is still around, more than 55 years after its founding.) The first time I met Walter was in the Monthly office. On learning that we would be partners, I thought: This guy is different from me. But he had a sense of fun and liveliness in his eyes that made us friends then and ever since.

Through those two years in the early 1970s, Walter and I spent 18 hours a day together doing Charlie Peters’s bidding in writing, editing, and reporting. A few years later, we both worked as speechwriters in the Carter administration. In the 1980s, my wife, Deb, and I and our kids were delighted to welcome Walter and the love of his life, his wife Meryl Gordon, to Japan when we lived there. Going with Walter and our two young sons to a public bath in our Yokohama neighborhood, where we all disrobed (amid a pool of tattooed yakuza mobsters), is an enduring memory from those years. Since then, Deb and I have stayed with Walter and Meryl in their historic apartment in New York (the structure serves as the setting of the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building), seen them in D.C., and treasured them as friends. I exchanged emails with Walter about the election landscape a few days before he fell ill.

Walter wrote hundreds, probably thousands, of mainly political articles for nearly every publication in existence (and many no longer around). Less than two weeks ago (!), he published a trenchant TNR piece arguing that “Biden’s enablers” should face the reality that Biden himself finally faced two days ago—as it happens, just a few hours after Walter breathed his last.

But I will remember Walter mostly for these two pieces of writing, more than 30 years apart:

One was his hilarious, mordant debut Washington Monthly piece—the one that convinced Charlie Peters to hire him. This story was about how close he had come in that Congressional primary, and what he had learned from actually being a candidate, something practically no other “political analysts” have done. Sample, with the background that “Stempien” is the opponent who edged him out:

At the Monroe County Fair I encountered a mother and her four-year-old son, happily holding aloft a red “Stempien To Congress” balloon.

Discreetly ignoring the balloon, I introduced myself as a candidate for Congress. The boy looked up, pointed to the balloon and asked, “Is that yours?” As I shook my head “no,” the little boy let go of the string of his red, helium-filled balloon and said, “I like you better.”

The other was Walter’s wonderful 2004 book One-Car Caravan, about what politics is like in the early stages of a primary cycle—before the first votes are cast, before contenders and pretenders are sorted out, and while the eager, earnest candidates are face-to-face with voters and a handful of the press. I have always thought that this book deserves a place in the campaign canon alongside better-known works like Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes or Timothy Crouse’s Boys on the Bus. Or even the Theodore White genre-creating Making of the President series.

What distinguishes Walter’s voice, in this book and so many other places, is his big-hearted but non-sappy love—for the candidates and how hard they are trying, for the process with all its absurdities and defects, for the electorate (most of them) as they try to figure out the right path, for the press with all its foibles, for the whole operating-level panorama of American democracy. For America itself.

Walter never wrote a sappy line in his life. He was too canny about what was really going on, and how many promises go unfulfilled, how often dreams were likely to end in heartbreak. But he almost never wrote a snarky line either. His moral and emotional imagination encompassed so many people.

The last words of his foreword to One-Car Caravan are how I will remember Walter:

I did not write this book as a scholarly reference work or a dense study of the political process. Rather it is a tale of one reporter’s adventures with this season’s political dreamers, who each fantasize that he will become the forty-fourth member of an illustrious chain dating back to George Washington. The joy of this book, I hope, is in the narrative…. If I am lucky, you will read it in bed at night with a smile on your face.

We are lucky. We think of you, Walter, with tears. And a smile.

This piece was copublished with The New Republic.

The post The Reporter Who Made Us Love Politics—Or Tried  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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 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.

“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.

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. 

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The first time I met Charlie Peters was in a job interview. It was the fall of 1999: I was 24, he was 72, and I was a candidate to be an editor at the Washington Monthly. I trudged up the stairs to the third floor of 1611 Connecticut Avenue to a well-worn office filled with old magazines and crossed by the occasional cockroach. Charlie sat across from me and a big wooden desk with a box for incoming manuscripts and one for outgoing manuscripts that he had marked up with a felt green marker. “What is your relationship like with your father?” he asked a few minutes into the conversation.

“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 didn’t know much about Charlie at the time. Google barely existed, and Charlie didn’t care that it did. I had only ended up there through happenstance. I was an ambitious young man flailing around trying to figure out a career. I had gotten an interview to work with an environmental group in New York City, but I showed up in a sweater and pants that didn’t fit. I probably hadn’t combed my hair. After about half an hour, the woman interviewing me declared that this wasn’t the place for me. She mused, correctly, that I probably didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. She suggested I apply to work at the Washington Monthly. “They hire people like you.” I had never heard of the Monthly, but that afternoon I sent in a letter asking if I could apply.

A week or two later, an editor at the magazine named Robert Worth gave me a call. He didn’t have a job, he explained, but maybe I could write them a story for which they would pay 10 cents a word. A few months later, my story had run, and I was sitting across the wooden desk, inhaling the musty scent of the office and wondering why Charlie had asked me about my dad.

Charlie grew up in West Virginia and came to Washington in 1961 along with John F. Kennedy. He worked in the Peace Corps and then, in 1970, decided to found a magazine devoted to the principle that journalism could make the government work better. It could expose corruption, puncture the image of the city’s many phonies and grifters, it could reward the heroic bureaucrats who did their best inside of unheralded agencies. He wasn’t political. He wasn’t conventional. He wasn’t predictable. He loved the practice of politics but found the horse-race coverage tiresome. He had no social pretensions and scoffed at the many folks in the city who did. He didn’t care a wit about money unless he needed it to pay off a debt accrued by the Monthly.

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He also wasn’t really a journalist, but he had an eye for them, as any reader of this website knows. To start the publication, he hired three young editors, all of whom would go on to have extraordinary careers: James Fallows, Taylor Branch, and Suzannah Lessard. As the years went on, he rarely faltered in the young men and women he chose. The contributors were pretty good too. Not long after I began there, we started running submissions from a brilliant upstart by the name of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I don’t know whether Charlie had an eye for talent, or whether he nurtured it. Maybe it was a bit of both. There were usually two editors at a time, and they served two-year terms. The deal was tough: you were paid very little and worked very hard. In return, you got responsibilities you probably didn’t deserve. I was paid $12,000 a year, and I worked around 100 hours a week. I sometimes slept on the office floor, and I very rarely took weekends off. I lived with my father and learned from Charlie new ways of saving money. You should call people during lunchtime when they’re away, so they’d ring you back and save you on the phone bill. 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 and Charlie didn’t much care for it. I handed it in on a Saturday morning and was sitting in the office the next day when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard Charlie’s familiar West Virginia drawl. There was no hello or 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 sheepishly walked up Connecticut Avenue with my draft to meet Charlie at the restaurant where he was working and having lunch. I apologized for the draft 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 Worth, who laughed at my tale and helped me fix the work. The story ran that month.

There are different ways mentors can help you improve, just as there are different ways that 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.

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I left the Monthly in 2001, right about when Charlie passed the reigns over to the wonderful Paul Glastris, a former Monthly editor who had just wrapped up his tenure as a White House speechwriter. Everyone who loved the Monthly feared that Charlie wouldn’t last long once he’d stepped away. He had lived hard and didn’t exercise much. How could he go on without the thing that, besides his family, he loved the most?

Charlie kept going though. He wrote a column for the magazine, which was like a proto-blog before blogs became a thing. He continued to mentor his former editors. When my career was going badly, he’d tell me to keep faith. When it went well, he took delight. He was charming to me, just as he’d been charming to all the people who didn’t work for him during the years running the Monthly. When my wife first met him, after months of hearing my war stories, she declared, “He’s just a big teddy bear.”

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 had made it through Covid, but he was now 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 had made plans to visit Charlie this week when I came down to Washington for the Atlantic Festival. I got news the night before my trip, though, that he had lost consciousness and wouldn’t be able to see me. He died Thanksgiving week at his home with Beth, his wife and beloved companion of 65 years. I should say it here that I loved him too.

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The journalists James and Deborah Fallows are best known these days for their hit book and HBO documentary Our Towns, a journey-by-small-plane look at the resilience and renewal of unheralded communities across America. I’ve known them for almost four decades as colleagues, mentors, and friends, and I am delighted to publish features by each of them in our annual college guide and rankings issue. But behind their two stories and our long friendship is another story—one that explains how the Washington Monthly came to rank colleges in the first place and what we aim to do next.

Jim and Deb were writing for The Atlantic and contributing pieces to this magazine in the mid-1980s when I joined the Monthly as a young editor—the same job Jim had held a decade earlier. In 1996, when I was working as a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, Jim took over as editor. His and Deb’s home in Northwest D.C. became an after-hours haven for a group of us trying to figure out how to reinvent the newsmagazine. 

One of the subjects of those deliberations was what to do about U.S. News’s annual college rankings. Though the rankings were influential in the higher education world and produced a river of revenue for the magazine, their underlying metrics raised eyebrows within and outside the organization. Jim decided to commission a study for internal use by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The study concluded that the ways in which U.S. News weighted and combined its various measures into one overall rating lacked “any defensible empirical or theoretical basis.” 

Raising doubts about the publication’s most valuable franchise was probably not the best way for Jim to endear himself to its owner, the real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman—and in the summer of 1998, Mort fired him. I quit right after that and went to work as a White House speechwriter (another job Jim had previously held). In 2000, the internal NORC report fell into the hands (who can say how?) of another young Washington Monthly editor, Nick Thompson, who wrote a pioneering takedown of the U.S. News rankings. 

After my White House stint, I took over from Charlie Peters as editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, and the magazine continued to hammer away at the flaws in the U.S. News lists. Then, in 2005, we published the first of what would become our annual alternative college guide. Where U.S. News rewards colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity, thereby aggravating America’s racial and class divides, the Monthly ranks schools based on three very different criteria meant to do the opposite. The first is how well colleges recruit and graduate students of modest means with reasonably priced degrees that lead to decent-paying jobs. The second is their record of producing the scholars and scholarship that drive economic growth and human progress. The third is the degree to which they encourage students to become active members of the democracy through voting and public service. 

There is a fourth criterion, however, by which the value of colleges should ideally be judged: their contribution to the economic and civic life of their communities. We all know of examples of this—for instance, how research from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley gave rise to the Bay Area’s tech economy, or how certain small towns manage to retain jobs and cultural life thanks to the presence of a local college. There are also plenty of examples of the opposite—of universities doing little for their locales, leading to familiar “town and gown” resentments. 

It’s hard to quantify how much a college does or doesn’t give back to its community, and harder still to do so in ways that allow colleges to be compared to one another. It’s therefore a phenomenon that can’t be accounted for in rankings but must be documented qualitatively, on a case-by-case basis, by on-the-ground reporting. 

The two journalists in America who have probably done the best of this kind of reporting are Jim and Deb Fallows. Fortunately, when we reached out to see if they would write on the subject for us, they enthusiastically agreed to contribute not one but a series of stories for the Monthly over the next year. 

In this issue, they focus on one school and city they know well: Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In his piece, Jim explains how the university, under the leadership of its energetic president, Geoffrey Mearns, accepted responsibility for running the city’s failing public schools. In hers, Deb homes in on how the college’s student newspaper has all but taken over coverage of the schools from the hollowed-out local paper.

The Fallowses believe that something genuinely new is happening in America. As Jim writes, “An under-noticed generation of college leaders is deciding to use their institutions as deliberate instruments of community, civic, and regional advancement.” The aim of these stories is to help turn that trend into a movement. 

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