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Charles Given Peters Jr. (December 22, 1926 – November 23, 2023) was an American journalist, editor, and author. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly magazine and the author of We Do Our Part: Toward A Fairer and More Equal America (Random House, 2017). Writing in The New York Times, Jonathan Martin called the book a "well timed … cri de coeur" and "a desperate plea to his country and party to resist the temptations of greed, materialism and elitism."
In 1946, he went to New York City to enter Columbia College. After receiving his BA in 1949,[3] he entered graduate school at Columbia and received his MA. in 1951. In 1952–53, he worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. During the summers from 1946 through 1954, he performed various backstage roles at summer theaters in Boylston, Massachusetts; Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Newport, Rhode Island. He had his own repertory company in Charleston, West Virginia.[1]
Peters returned to Charleston to practice law with his father's firm, Peters, Merricks, Leslie and Mohler. His practice included libel, criminal defense, corporate and labor law, as well as representing plaintiffs and defendants in civil trials.[1]
In 1959, he was named chief staff officer of the Judiciary Committee of the West Virginia House of Delegates, and in 1960, he was elected a member of the House.[2] In 1960, he also managed the primary and general election campaigns in Kanawha County for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. After serving in the 1961 session of the legislature, he went to Washington, D.C., to help start the Peace Corps. After returning to serve in the 1962 legislative session, he was named the Peace Corps' director of evaluation, a position that required him to report on the performance of the agency's programs overseas and on how they could be improved.[2]
Peters served as editor of the Washington Monthly until he retired in 2001, but continued to write a regular column Tilting at Windmills for the magazine until 2014.[5]Russell Baker, in an interview in the alumni magazine Columbia College Today, called Peters "a great editor in an age that's not producing great editors."[6]
Founding of Understanding Government
In 1998, he founded a non-profit organization called Understanding Government with the purpose of improving press coverage of the executive branch of government. Understanding Government sponsored the first-ever Prize for Preventive Journalism, given in 2008 to journalist Michael Grunwald, and has published reports on federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Peters retired from the nonprofit in 2012, and it ceased operations in 2014.[citation needed]
Personal life, illness and death
In 1957, Peters married Elizabeth Hubbell, a former ballet dancer who had attended Vassar College. They had a son.[2]
After several years of poor health due to heart failure, Peters died at his home in Washington, D.C. on November 23, 2023, at the age of 96.[1][2]
A New Road for America: the Neoliberal Movement (with Phil Keisling)
Inside the System (with Timothy Adams – first ed.; with John Rothchild – second ed.; with James Fallows – third ed.; with Nicholas Lemann – fourth ed.; with Jonathan Alter – fifth ed.)
As well as his awards, he received a number of notable ceremonial appointments and positions, such as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1994[10]. In 2001, he was elected to the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Hall of Fame of the D.C. Society of Professional Journalists. In 2002 he was the Times Mirror David A. Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a Public Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, September 2002 through April 2003.
