CHARLES PETERS, 1926-2023 — Charlie Peters, who died on Thanksgiving age 96, was a Washington legend. He founded The Washington Monthly in 1969 and ran it until 2001. Even if you didn’t know Peters, you heard a lot about him. He was this lovable rascal from West Virginia who adored Negronis (decades before they were cool again). He could be a tad challenging to work for and was famous for his “rain dances” — editing suggestions delivered with love, though at a high volume. Modeling his publication on the Peace Corps, Peters took 20-something aspiring journalists and put them through a two-year boot camp running a small national magazine read by the Washington elite. The pay was paltry and not everyone survived, but those who did were prepared to step into jobs in the upper echelons of political journalism. Alumni of the Peters program filled the ranks of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic, the (old) Newsweek and Time, and they spread out from there. This small band of writers and editors trained by Peters had a profound and disproportionate influence on American media. We reached out to some of the many people Peters mentored over the years and they shared some heartwarming, hilarious and sage remembrances that we hope — even if you’ve never heard of Peters — offer you some wisdom this holiday weekend. JON MEACHAM: “Charlie saw through to the essence of things. If a draft of a piece was unnuanced and strident — self-righteousness being the besetting sin of the young, and almost all of Charlie’s editors were young — he would call from his lair in Northwest Washington and say something like: ‘It might not be the worst thing in the history of literature for you to consider that not everyone is a total SOB. A partial SOB, maybe. So you might show the awareness of that.’ Show the awareness: Lord, how often we heard those words. And how much I will miss them. And when he turned that X-ray vision on you, he could offer unsettling truths that were, nonetheless, truths.” JAMES FALLOWS: “Of the million things Charlie taught us, not all of them intentional, one that stands out is an ‘empty gas tank’ mindset when writing a book or article. He didn't use that term, but the idea was that you should use up everything you had — scoops, new concepts, reporting details, the best writing you could manage — on the article you were doing now, rather than saving up anything ‘for later.’ It's like wanting to roll across the finish line with the last drop of gas. If you saved things for later, who knows when ‘later’ might come.” GREGG EASTERBROOK: “Charlie once reduced me to tears, an incident much discussed among the alumni. This taught me a lesson I have never forgotten: really, really care about writing.” JOSHUA GREEN: “One thing he instilled in his charges that I'm especially grateful for — and that's more necessary than ever today — is the necessity of shedding lazy partisan thinking and taking on the best arguments of the other side, whether those arguments were coming from Republicans or Democrats. Charlie called this ‘playing Notre Dame’ (Notre Dame being, at that time, an unrivaled football powerhouse). … His voice is still the one in my head every time I sit down to write something, which I assume is true for generations of Monthly editors.” MICHELLE COTTLE: “For all the stories about his temper, he liked that my response to his bad moods was often to burst out laughing. I remember once, when something went wrong with a direct mail campaign, he was flipping out at the office. At some point, I started yelling back, ‘You are NOT going to have a heart attack on me today!’ That cracked him up. And once you survived the two years, of course, he would do anything in the world for you.” JOE NOCERA: “The thing Charlie taught that has stayed with me always is that it should never matter whether something you’ve written is embraced by ‘the other side.’ What matters is whether you’ve told the truth, no matter whose ox it gores. As I was writing ‘The Big Fail’ about America’s Covid response, it is a teaching I reflected on almost every day.” STEVEN WALDMAN: “Charlie challenged reporting and writing that seemed about validating our own priors or earning validation from our own crowd. My favorite of his aphorisms was to be willing to ‘say good things about the bad guys, and bad things about the good guys.’ It was a push toward raw intellectual honesty.” CHRISTINA LARSON: “What I learned from Charlie Peters — and Paul Glastris, who carried on his legacy — is that the most important criticism is often the hardest. It wasn’t always easy to smile immediately after being told why you needed to rewrite your entire 5,000-word story. But learning to accept thoughtful criticism — careful, wise and sometimes humorous feedback — early in my career proved enormously helpful.” JONATHAN ALTER: “I remember in the early '80s he assigned an article on rising tuition costs. When the writer mentioned his story on why college costs so much, Charlie got angry: ‘No, that’s NOT the story! The story is on why college SHOULDN’T cost so much.’ This completely changed the emphasis from the role of inflation and the need to pay professors better to an explanation of useless deans and the snob appeal of high-cost colleges — a completely different and of course much better story.” PHIL KEISLING: “Charlie was certainly strongly opinionated — but he could change his mind! About one and a half into my editorship, he insisted I change my byline to my full name and middle initial lest I not be taken seriously as a journalist and more like a sportswriter. Then when he learned a friend was urging me to return home to Oregon and run for the state legislature — a path he’d taken himself in West Virginia — he was very enthusiastic. ‘But you have to run as Phil Keisling — Phillip sounds too pretentious!’” TIMOTHY NOAH: “I think what Charlie taught me above all was that the race was not to the swiftest. I was 25 and had gotten on very well by thinking fast and finishing my bosses’ sentences for them. … It got me absolutely nowhere with Charlie. He could not be railroaded into a decision. He applied the same deliberation to editing my pieces, pointing out areas where I’d glossed over in my haste or where my reporting lacked heft. He was the antithesis of the Washington TV booker who urges you to oversimplify. For this reason he was terrible on TV — and interestingly — so in the end were most of his disciples, including me.” JASON DePARLE: "Neither age nor status diminished the ferocity of Charlie’s commitment to what he called ‘the underdog’ (in modern terms, ‘social justice’). Of his many remarkable qualities, that was one I admired most.” MARKOS KOUNALAKIS: “Charlie taught me that politics can be practical, rational, and efficient if provided the right structural incentives, motivations, and checks. Otherwise, people will do the opposite — avoid risk, play CYA, and invent wild rationalizations for practicing the insane.” NICHOLAS CONFESSORE: “Even those of us who worked at the Monthly after Charlie semi-retired found ourselves contending with his jukebox of ideas and maxims. Would turning half of all federal employees into patronage hires make agencies more accountable? Would working a stint in government actually make reporters better at covering government? He had an endless supply.” JAMES BENNET: “There was not just an urgency but a kind of ferocity to Charlie’s honesty, originality and goodness that made him the toughest and finest editor and friend that anyone could hope to have.” DAVID IGNATIUS: “Charlie Peters was a crusading journalist, for sure, but he was also a mischievous rogue. He dodged creditors for years and thought he’d made a breakthrough when he realized he could lengthen the float on his checks by not signing them. He loved being a confessor and moral counselor for his young acolytes, and his seances would often begin with a statement like: ‘David, I know what your problem is. …’ It was hard to please him, and that was the point.” WALTER SHAPIRO: “Little attention has been paid in the obits to his favorite book, Five Days in Philadelphia, his recreation of the 1940 Republican convention that nominated internationalist WENDELL WILLKIE instead of isolationist BOB TAFT. Charlie argued persuasively that the GOP's rejection of isolationism made possible Lend Lease aid to Britain, a peacetime draft and, ultimately, American political unity after Pearl Harbor. Like his life, Charlie's book was passionate, contrarian — and totally right. God, will I miss him.” MARGARET CARLSON: “Charlie Peters could see right into people and his masthead showed it. I was working for RALPH NADER and just finishing law school and Charlie thought I should throw three years of torts and contracts away. ‘You're not a lawyer. You're a journalist.’ He had a good eye but he also liked to butt in. It was both and he was right. Love to Charlie. I wouldn't have the life I have without him.” T.A. FRANK: “Charlie always knew how to express a complicated thought in a simple way, so his adages are numerous and unforgettable. I’ve always loved this one, which comes from a late-in-life interview he gave: ‘Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself in the interest of what you believe.’” PAUL GLASTRIS: “Charlie may have left this Earth, but all of us who worked for him still have his voice inside our heads demanding, in that West Virginia accent, that we do better. You never lose it.” Obituaries: WaPo … NYT … AP … Washington Monthly Happy Black Friday. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line and tell us what a great mentor taught you: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.
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