Charles Peters

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."

Early life and education Charles Given Peters Jr. was born in December 1926 in Charleston, West Virginia. He attended public schools, graduating from Charleston High School in 1944. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944, serving at Ohio University, Camp Atterbury in Indiana, and Fort McClellan, Alabama, where an injury in a training accident resulted in his being in Army hospitals for several months, and his discharge from the Army in 1946.

In 1946, he went to New York City to enter Columbia College. After receiving his BA in 1949, 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.

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. 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."

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.

Personal life, illness and death In 1957, Peters married Elizabeth Hubbell, a former ballet dancer who had attended Vassar College. They had a son. the Columbia Journalism Award in 1978 and was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University in 1980. the Carr Van Anda Award from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism.

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. 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.