Peters, Charles 1926–

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Peters, Charles 1926–

(Charles Given Peters, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born December 22, 1926, in Charleston, WV; son of Charles Given (an attorney) and Esther (Teague) Peters; married Elizabeth Hubbell (an executive assistant at a day school), August 3, 1957; children: Christian Avery. Education: Columbia University, B.A., 1949, M.A., 1951; University of Virginia, LL.B., 1957. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Presbyterian.

ADDRESSES: Office—Washington Monthly, 1319 F St., N.W., Ste. 710, Washington, DC 20004. Agent—Esther Newberg, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th St. New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Editor, writer, and lawyer. Admitted to the Bar of West Virginia, 1957; Peters, Merrick, Leslie & Mohler (law firm), Charleston, WV, partner, 1957–62; West Virginia House of Delegates, Charleston, member, 1960–62; Peace Corps, Washington, DC, director of evaluation, 1962–68; Washington Monthly, Washington, DC, founder and former editor in chief, beginning 1969, also "Tilting at Windmills" columnist. John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in Kanawha County, WV, manager, 1960; Poynter Fellow, Symposium on Social Criticism in the Media Today, Yale University, 1980; Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, NY, former faculty member. Military service: U.S. Army, 1944–46; served in the infantry.

AWARDS, HONORS: Don Hollenbeck Award from New York University, 1973; Columbia Journalism Award, 1978; John Hancock Award for Investigative Reporting, 1980; Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, 1980; named West Virginian of the Year, 1980; University of Missouri Award for Excellence, 1981; American Society of Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame inductee, 2001; Richard M. Clurman Award, for work with young journalists.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Timothy J. Adams) Inside the System: A Washington Monthly Reader, Praeger (New York, NY), 1970, 5th edition (with Jonathan Alter), Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1984.

(Editor, with Taylor Branch) Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest, Praeger (New York, NY), 1972.

(Editor, with Edward A. O'Neill) The Washington Monthly's Memo of the Month Book: A Sampling—Some Hilarious, Some Horrifying, All Real—From the Culture of Bureaucracy, Washington Monthly (Washington, DC), 1973.

(Editor, with Fallows) The System, Praeger (New York, NY), 1976.

(Editor, with Michael Nelson) The Culture of Bureaucracy, Holt, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1978.

How Washington Really Works, Addison-Wesley (Reading MA), 1980.

(Editor, with Phillip Keisling) A New Road for America: The Neoliberal Movement, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1985.

Tilting at Windmills: An Autobiography, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1988.

Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Willkie!' Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World, Public Affairs (New York, NY), 2005, also published as Five Days in Philadelphia: Wendell Willkie, FDR & the 1940 Convention that Saved the Western World, 2005.

Contributor to newspapers and magazines, including Washington Post, Harper's, Newsweek, Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and New York Times Book Review.

SIDELIGHTS: As founder and editor in chief of the muckraking liberal journal Washington Monthly and the author and editor of numerous books on public affairs, Charles Peters has earned the reputation of a fierce and uncompromising critic of government bureaucracy, careerism, and inefficiency. Peters approaches government administration from an insider's perspective, having formerly served as a state legislator and Peace Corps evaluator, and has attracted top investigative journalists and high-ranking public officials to contribute to his small but highly influential magazine. Peters has emerged as a leading exponent of the political current known as neoliberalism, a movement within the Democratic Party. According to Peter McGrath, writing in Newsweek, Peters "has added a dimension to political journalism."

Peters's books reflect the reformist and antibureaucratic concerns of his magazine. He has coedited five editions of Inside the System, a collection of outstanding Washington Monthly articles on government, written largely from an insider's perspective. In 1972 Peters also coedited Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest, a group of articles—many of which originally appeared in his journal—specifically about "whistle-blowers," or people who expose government wrongdoing from within. Among the cases detailed in the book are those of a Pentagon analyst who was fired for exposing cost overruns on a weapons system, and a Food and Drug Administration biochemist who publicized the agency's failure to restrict cyclamates, despite evidence that the chemicals caused birth defects. Blowing the Whistle is "studded with precedents proving that you can fight City Hall, even if you work there," noted Victor S. Navasky in the New York Times Book Review. Navasky went on to describe the Washington Monthly as "that indispensable ombudsman whose exposes will, in the long run, probably save the taxpayer as many dollars as any Congressional budget-cutter."

In How Washington Really Works, Peters argues that the government in Washington does not really work at all but spends most of its time engaged in "make believe" projects that amount to mere exercises in self-validation. According to the author, none of Washington's powerful political players—elected officials, the permanent bureaucracy, the press, the courts, and the special-interest lobbies—have an interest in pursuing real solutions to real problems; they are all out to build their own personal or sectoral power bases and inflate their images with high-visibility but often fatuous activities.

In the case of the permanent bureaucracy, Peters writes, this charade could be brought to an end by replacing the current civil service system with one in which half of the jobs remain under civil service but half are appointed by elected officials. He further argues that empowering elected officials to appoint and dismiss functionaries would restore accountability to government agencies by vesting ultimate authority with an individual who can be "fired" by the voters. A return to patronage and accountability in state administration, Peters contends, would also strengthen political parties as brokers and mediators of diverse political interests, and would thereby undermine the power of the single-issue lobbies. New Republic contributor Richard Cohen found the "Peters Prescription" to be "a bit on the simple side." John Leonard of the New York Times lauded How Washington Really Works as a "satisfying and surprising book about the folkways of permanent government" that is "obvious, sensible, straight-forward, wise, funny [and] mad." Leonard wrote: "I wish Mr. Peters were a Washington daily."

In his landmark article "A Neoliberal's Manifesto," which appeared in the May, 1983, Washington Monthly, Peters outlines a general political program intended to promote individual initiative, overcome bureaucratic practices, and foster a new sense of national unity. He had articulated many of the views expressed there—infuriating traditional liberals with his unorthodox solutions—years before the term "neoliberal" was coined and came to be associated in the early 1980s with the opinions of such Democratic party politicians as Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt and former Colorado senator and presidential aspirant Gary Hart. Peters presents a more detailed discussion of neoliberalism in a 1985 volume he coedited with Phillip Keisling, A New Road for America: The Neoliberal Movement, based on a conference on neoliberalism that the Washington Monthly held in October, 1983.

In his Washington Monthly article, Peters summarizes the neoliberal movement as follows: "If neoconservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices." Peters blames such "prejudices" for traditional liberalism's failure to find solutions to the economic decline and political disunity he believes prevailed in the United States during the 1970s and led to the conservative backlash that elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Principally, Peters faults liberals for their automatic support of union wage increases without commensurate productivity gains; opposition to patronage and performance standards in public sector hiring; support for ever-larger and more expensive government benefits programs without regard to their effectiveness; and dogmatic refusal to acknowledge any merit in conservative attempts to address these issues. According to Peters, these liberal positions helped to undermine the economy and lock out new political and economic players while protecting those with a vested institutional interest; hence liberalism, like conservatism, "was becoming a movement of those who had arrived, who cared more about preserving and expanding their own gains than about helping those in need."

Peters's "Manifesto" responds to this perceived failure of traditional liberalism with a number of provocative proposals intended to meet the liberal goals of "liberty and justice and a fair chance to all … mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out." Along with many conservatives, he calls economic growth the key to social equity, declaring that "our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products." Peters urges fiscal and regulatory incentives to promote new industrial investment and encourage competition. He opposes inflated "management compensation that encourages a focus on short-term profit instead of long-term growth," but he also calls for linking workers' wages to productivity gains and urges employees in distressed basic industries to accept wage cuts in return for a share of ownership in their companies. Describing high wages as "a substantial factor in this country's economic decline," Peters asserts that lower labor costs "could mean our economic future lies just as much in revitalized basic industries as in high technology."

Regarding the public sector, Peters judges the key issue to be a return to enforceable performance standards. He writes: "We aren't against government, period, as—with the exception of the national security apparatus—many conservatives appear to be. But we are against a fat, sloppy, and smug bureaucracy. We want a government that can fire people who can't or won't do the job." Peters suggests that weeding out incompetent public school teachers is particularly important to ensure the equal opportunity and economic productivity of new generations. And to make government more responsive, Peters advocates replacing many of the federal government's civilian employees with political appointees, and limiting them to five years on the job. Besides increasing performance accountability, Peters avers, these short-term appointees would empathize more readily with the problems of outsiders and show more inclination to take risks and shake up rigid bureaucratic procedures. The remaining permanent civil service force would provide institutional continuity and experience, and a vigilant press corps would help guard against political abuses in public administration.

Indeed, the press plays a vital role in Peters's program for more flexible and effective government. The author faults the media for focusing on policy formulation and scandal rather than on how government programs actually work in practice. He advocates that aspiring reporters should first seek out jobs inside the state government and learn to approach government officials and organizations with "an anthropologist's feel for the interaction of attitudes, values, and institutional pressures." Likewise, citizens should endeavor to educate themselves on a wide range of issues to make informed political choices and transcend special-interest politics. "I think the only possible salvation for this republic is a citizenry that is determined to inform itself on a broad range of important issues—and that will vote for an elected official on the basis of his or her stand on all the issues," declares Peters in his "Manifesto."

This system of "democratic accountability," Peters contends, would help overcome the "politics of selfishness" that he says has sapped the political vitality of the United States. The author detects "a trend toward separatism—not only by race but by class and interest group" in such political and social developments as the increased enrollment of middle-class children in private schools, the explosive growth of interest-group lobbies, and an increasingly adversarial approach to problem solving. Among his suggestions for bringing people from varying social backgrounds together and helping overcome the adversarial spirit, are restoring the military draft (the volunteer Army, Peters notes, presently recruits almost exclusively from the poor and working classes) and substituting mediation for lawsuits to resolve most civil disputes. Furthermore, the author attacks the divisive snobbery he finds in "credentialism," an undue regard for degrees and other paper credentials as against a demonstrated ability to perform (for example, he believes that a regard for "education" degrees above subject knowledge and teaching ability resulted in inferior public schools and inferior education for the poor), and he excoriates "liberal intellectuals' contempt" for traditional values. "Instead of scorning people who value family, country, and religion," Peters explains, "neoliberals believe in reaching out to them to make clear that our programs are rooted in the same values." Ultimately, Peters writes, success for the neoliberal program depends on "a rebirth of patriotism, a rebirth of devotion to the interests of the national community, of the conviction that we're all in this together and that therefore fair play and justice for everyone is the vital concern of us all."

Peters told CA: "I'm still an FDR liberal who believes in taking from the rich and giving to the poor—in fact, I believe in more help for the poor than we are now giving—but I want that help to be more effective, serving the best interests of the poor, not of the bureaucrats administrating the programs."

Although he has retired from his duties as editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, Peters has continued to write and contribute to the magazine. He has also authored Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Willkie!' Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World, which was also published as Five Days in Philadelphia: Wendell Willkie, FDR & the 1940 Convention that Saved the Western World. Peters examines how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his party's 1940 nomination for president and was eventually elected for four terms. The author describes how Roosevelt's primary opponents within his own party were isolationists, as were a large portion of the general public, and against any involvement in World War II. The book also delves into how FDR's eventual opponent in the presidential election, Republican Wendell Willkie, was an internationalist and won the nomination from isolationists in his own party, thus making Roosevelt's internationalist stance more acceptable to the public and enabling his reelection. "FDR enthusiasts and buffs of political history and reminiscences will thoroughly enjoy this lively account," wrote William D. Pederson in the Library Journal. Booklist contributor Jay Freeman commented: "Those who view the current political polarization as unprecedented should harken back to 1940." In a review in Campaigns & Elections, Ron Faucheux called the author's recounting of the times "a riveting story."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July, 2005, Jay Freeman, review of Five Days in Philadelphia: Wendell Willkie, FDR & the 1940 Convention that Saved the Western World, p. 1882.

Campaigns & Elections, September, 2005, Ron Faucheux, review of Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Wilkie!' Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World, p. 42.

Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 1980, Peter C. Stuart, review of How Washington Really Works, p. 17.

Esquire, February, 1982, Randall Rothenberg, "The Neoliberal Club," p. 37.

Library Journal, July 1, 2005, William D. Pederson, review of Five Days in Philadelphia, p. 98.

Mediaweek, February 26, 2001, Lori Lefevre, "Peter Makes the Hall," p. 16.

Mother Jones, May, 1985, David Osborne, "'But Charlie …' 'Now Bob …,' Charles Peters & Robert Kuttner Battle for the Soul of Liberalism," p. 24.

New Republic, August 16, 1980, Richard Cohen, review of How Washington Really Works, p. 44.

Newsweek, February 6, 1984, Peter McGrath, "The Peters Principles," p. 69.

New York Times, June 9, 1980, John Leonard, review of How Washington Really Works, p. C14; November 1, 1984.

New York Times Book Review, April 30, 1972, Victor S. Navasky, review of Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest.

People, July 13, 1981, "The Capitol Lobbyist Is a Hale Fellow, Well Met—If You're in Congress," p. 44.

Washington Monthly, May, 1983, Charles Peters, "A Neoliberal's Manifesto," pp. 8-18; September, 2004, Charles Peters, "Was I Right?," p. 4.