Charlie Peters, who died yesterday on Thanksgiving at age 96, left many people with much to thank him for, not least the many writers who, as young men (or, in some cases, young women), were noisily edited by him and, having learned from that experience, have gone on to illustrious and successful careers. Check out Politico for testimony from many of them, most of whom worked for him in the many years (1969-2001) he founded and edited the Washington Monthly.
He also left behind many readers with reason to give thanks. Charlie grew up in a politically active and liberal Democratic household in Charleston, West Virginia. He squired candidate John F. Kennedy around during the 1960 campaign and, as I remember him telling me, when he was asked at one point by the candidate who was the terrific looking blonde over there, answered, “That’s my wife.”
GLOOM: CONSUMER SENTIMENT FALLS AND INFLATION EXPECTATIONS RISE
Charlie worked for Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver and was head of the office that hired young men to go out to countries with Peace Corps volunteers, schmooze with whoever they could find, and report back on what was really going on there. Shriver, brother-in-law of the president and son-in-law of the man who may have been at one point the richest Roman Catholic in the world, understood that subordinates will always eagerly report good news, even if it has to be manufactured, and will almost never report anything negative.
Charlie was a liberal who believed that government programs could help people in need, but he was alert to the possibility, which sometimes becomes a certainty, that they will do much less to help the intended beneficiaries than the “planning analysts and deputy assistant administrators” (a characterization quoted in the New York Times’s obituary) who are being paid liberally to help them.
The fine obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Washington Monthly itself do not mention his 2005 book, Five Days in Philadelphia, a combination of personal memoir and political history in which he recounts how his father and he traveled to Philadelphia and witnessed Wendell Willkie’s surprise nomination at the 1940 Republican National Convention. Peters believed that the nomination of Willkie, who was open to aiding Winston Churchill’s Britain, which was facing Hitler’s forces fresh from their conquest of France, made it politically feasible for incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt, nominated for a third term, to aid Britain and increase American preparedness and institute a military draft in that momentous year in which Hitler and his then-ally Josef Stalin seemed on the brink of total control of the landmass of Eurasia.
I was asked to review Five Days in Philadelphia for the Wall Street Journal and wrote a rave review of what I called (I can’t find the review online) a “wonderful book.” It’s a story of how a 13-year-old boy with unusual political awareness is witness to an episode that was, in his estimation, looking back and, in my estimation now, part of an uphill fight to save Western civilization. A few days after the review appeared, Charlie called me to thank me and invited me to lunch; I think he was surprised that the Wall Street Journal reviewed the book and that the review was a rave. We had a wonderful lunch in a restaurant out MacArthur Boulevard near his house and shared recollections about a lot of history that we had, in one way or another, witnessed — a golden moment.
And by the way, if you’re depressed about where American politics seems headed and how government still seems to operate, you might want to pick up a copy of Five Days in Philadelphia and read about how a liberal who loved America and spent his life trying to make it better got his start as a precocious teenager witnessing great events when the fate of civilization was in doubt.
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Charles Peters RIP — a footnote
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25.11.2023
Charlie Peters, who died yesterday on Thanksgiving at age 96, left many people with much to thank him for, not least the many writers who, as young men (or, in some cases, young women), were noisily edited by him and, having learned from that experience, have gone on to illustrious and successful careers. Check out Politico for testimony from many of them, most of whom worked for him in the many years (1969-2001) he founded and edited the Washington Monthly.
He also left behind many readers with reason to give thanks. Charlie grew up in a politically active and liberal Democratic household in Charleston, West Virginia. He squired candidate John F. Kennedy around during the 1960 campaign and, as I remember him telling me, when he was asked at one point by the candidate who was the terrific looking blonde over there, answered, “That’s my wife.”
GLOOM: CONSUMER SENTIMENT FALLS AND INFLATION EXPECTATIONS RISE
Charlie worked for Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver........
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