The Editor Who Humbled Me — and Made Me a Better Journalist

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I was at the office on a Sunday afternoon, the phone rang, and a familiar West Virginian voice came on the line. There was no “hello” or greeting. I just heard a simple question: “Why would someone send me a story like this?”

Then there was a pause, and then my correspondent provided the answer to his own question.

“Because he’s an asshole, a fucking asshole.”

Then I heard a dial tone. 

I was 24 and one of two editors at The Washington Monthly, a delightful, historic, brilliant, exhausting small publication that aimed to explain how the city really worked. I’d been there for about two months, and the story was the first draft of a piece that I’d written on the lottery industry. The caller was Charlie Peters, the founder and editor of the magazine.

Charlie rarely came to the office, and so, the next day, I traveled up Connecticut Avenue to meet him at a restaurant and to ask him for a more detailed critique of the piece. He was sitting at a table near the window, papers sprawled everywhere, marked up with the green pens he favored. He looked at me incredulously and declared that the problem was that I’d written it “like a pompous dickhead.”

When I pressed him to, perhaps, provide further clarification, he explained that he had hated a sentence I’d included, about a program in Georgia, called “HOPE,” in which revenues from a lottery were given to high-achievers in high school. I had written, “The ironically named HOPE program,” which he declared pompous and dick-heady because I hadn’t yet explained what the program was. And, furthermore, even if lotteries were bad, helping high-school kids was good.

Charlie was right. I had been snarky; I had assumed I understood everything; and the sentence was indeed pompous. (The final version of the piece is quite different: “HOPE works. It has financed higher education for hundreds of thousands of students in Georgia. It also seems wondrously simple … But despite HOPE's success, there's a trap in its seeming simplicity.”) Charlie, in fact, was almost always right. He’d been guiding young men and women into careers in journalism for close to 30 years, and about half of my favorite journalists had gotten their starts with him.

There was a simple deal when I worked at The Monthly. Spend two years working 100-hour weeks in a cockroach-infested office for Charlie and, at the end, he and the other alumni would help launch your career. If you broke and left before the two years were up, then you got nothing. Ultimately, as you can probably guess, it turned into one of the most rewarding periods of my career. I was given responsibility I didn’t deserve and forced to work and study until I deserved it. I improved as a journalist every month. Charlie taught me thousands of things, but the most important one was that journalism matters. He truly believed that his magazine could improve the work of his government and the life of his country. That was a cause worth devoting your life to.

Charlie never erupted at me again quite like that. As I improved, he maybe even came to like me a bit. And when I was hired as a senior editor at The New Yorker, I went to lunch again with him and he gave me one of the great compliments of my life. “Ah, good. Now I know you’re going to be OK.”