Charlie Peters Was Always About Hope

Charles Peters asked that no funeral be held for him when he died. Those of us who edit the magazine he founded were and remain eager, as always, to follow Charlie’s directions. But when he died on Thanksgiving Day at 96, we also wanted to allow the many people who have worked at the magazine since its founding 55 years ago to gather for a celebration of Charlie’s rich life and why he still matters. So, on Saturday, February 9, close to a hundred friends and family of Charlie gathered in Washington, D.C. to honor our old boss. Charlie’s wife, Beth, asked Jon Meacham—an editor of the magazine in 1993 and 1994 before going on to Newsweek—if he would say a few words about our dearly departed friend and lodestar. If you want to help carry on Charlie’s work and celebrate his life, you can donate here. –The Editors

Few of us gathered here this evening likely know this, but a crucial date in all of our lives was Thursday, March 17, 1960—the first day Charlie Peters spent in the company of the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was visiting West Virginia in preparation for the state’s May presidential primary.

It was a long day. JFK went from interview to interview, from radio stations to TV stations, to make his case in the heavily Protestant state. A lovely photo of Beth with State Senator Ward Wylie of Mullens captured the ribbon-cutting of Kennedy’s campaign kickoff in the downtown hotel. Kennedy, of course, would win the primary and the election. Seeking a seat in the House of Delegates, Charlie himself polled 57,362 votes to 49,582 for his Republican opponent, Dr. Charles Staats, a physician and Scottish Rite Mason.

Our Charlie served in what we now think of as a super-majority: There were 89 Democrats and 11 Republicans in the House of Delegates—but Charlie liked the Republicans, who could be reasoned with. An experientially-based openness to seeing the other fellow’s point was born.

Thirteen months later, on Wednesday, April 12, 1961—the anniversary, as Charlie surely knew, of FDR’s death at Warm Springs—the Gazette reported that West Virginia Delegate Charles G. Peters, Jr., was to join the nascent Peace Corps in Washington.

In a feature that ran on the same page as news about a crackdown on gambling and an ad for a Dr. Scholl treatment for corns, the Gazette profiled the man whose life we commemorate at this hour. In a blind quote, a fellow lawmaker anonymously told the paper: “There was never any doubt about Charlie’s position as to liberal versus conservative. But he wasn’t fanatic about what he believed. He was willing to listen, and he was willing to compromise when it became necessary.”

In reply, Charlie told the paper: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I try to be: A practical instrument of the ideas of Roosevelt, Kennedy and of the people I believe in.”

I know what I try to be: There it all was, even in the beginning: Charlie, the liberal but a pragmatic one. Charlie the idealist, but with an appreciation of the complexities and uncertainties of the human condition. In sending him off to Washington, the Gazette noted: “Charles G. Peters, Jr., fits neatly into the [Kennedy] type. [He] is young, personable, well-educated and articulate.” How Charlie must have loved that hometown verdict.

Born three days before Christmas in 1926, Charlie’s world is at once remote and resonant. The Gazette, on his birthday, reported President Coolidge’s decision not to authorize the building of ten new navy cruisers. The next day, Hirohito ascended to the emperorship of Japan.

There’s no one here who doesn’t feel as if they’ve experienced the 1930s in the way Charlie did. That decade was his Book of Genesis, FDR his Abraham, Truman his Moses, JFK his Joshua, the New Deal his foundational myth. As a thirteen-year-old, Charlie watched Eleanor Roosevelt address the 1940 Democratic National Convention—the political equivalent, for a New Dealer, of the old song “I danced with a man who danced with a woman who danced with the Prince of Wales.”

And as Charlie perennially argued (so many of his arguments were perennial, weren’t they?), we emerged from the crisis of the 1930s not least by heeding the better angels of our nature—narrowly, yes, but decisively.

And so, Charlie was always about hope, for he had seen hope prevail over fear in his own life and in the life of the nation—hope that our politics could be more fulfilling, hope that our lives could be varied and various, hope that the history we make could stand the test of time.

His worldview was political in the purest sense of the term, for it encompassed all of life. His cares and concerns included art, culture, faith, honor, and love. He often wrote of the state, but his true focus was the soul.

Here was a generous-spirited Democrat with no time for liberal pretensions or hypocrisies, a believer in government who labored under no illusions about its limitations, and an observer of humankind with a preternatural capacity to pinpoint both the best and the worst of those on whom he trained those Argus-like eyes.

He was fearless, sacrificing most worldly comforts for a life of the mind and of the heart. In this, he was fortunate beyond words to have married Beth, who was game to go along on this great and often difficult adventure. Loving, calm, and generous, Beth is an architect of so much, and we owe you a debt we cannot begin to repay.

Charlie loved Beth, Chris, his grandchildren, Franklin Roosevelt, gossip, Washington football, Negronis, Turner Classic Movies, William Butler Yeats, Virginia ham, baseball, print newspapers, old hymns, Will Rogers, long lunches, short phone calls, and the United States of America.

And let us be honest. His tempestuousness was an essential part of him, the price of everything else. The passing selfish storms made decades of unselfish sacrifice possible. The family, friends, and apostles of Charlie Peters may not have always been happy, but we were never bored. And that was a great gift in a world dominated by a single set of numbers: 337-2351; by a milk box on the porch; and by “Tilting” translation sessions with generations of production managers who pored over Charlie’s aphorisms like medieval monks.

The “gospel” that lives still is both empirically based and big-hearted. Charlie once wrote: “We … believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. In our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.”

Charlie penned that plea for a more rational politics more than three decades ago. And “penned” is the right word: Can’t you just see the green scribbles on the yellow pages, or in the margins of Al Kamen clips?

Late in his sublime and glorious life, in his V Street lair with the Christmas tree on permanent display and with his father’s New Deal print of FDR on the wall, he would tell visitors: “Remember to tend to your soul.”

And let’s remember, too, Charlie’s words in that distant April of 1961: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I try to be: A practical instrument of the ideas of Roosevelt, Kennedy and of the people I believe in.”

Of the people I believe in.
Of the people I believe in.

Those of us here believed in—and believe in—Charlie. And we always will.

May that grand and noble and funny and infuriating and loving and tireless soul rest in peace and rise in glory.

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