The Reporter Who Made Us Love Politics—or Tried

Charlie Peters, my original mentor in the magazine world, used to say that the hardest talent to find among aspiring writers was a true, light, instinctive comic touch. Lots of people could work hard, write fast, and stay up late. Lots of people were politics nuts or history buffs. Many people were willing to ask questions and do research and go through the repeated self-education that is the reporter’s life.

But somebody who had an innate sense of the one-liner, of the observation that would crack up a too-serious gathering, of the set-up joke that didn’t seem set up at all—and who could do all that with the ability to turn the one-liner toward a “serious” point.…  Each time Charlie found such a person, he would practically cry with gratitude.

He found a lot of them during his long run at The Washington Monthly. Art Levine. John Rothchild. Gregg Easterbrook. Michelle Cottle. Tim Noah. Matt Cooper. Garrett Epps. Josh Green. I could name more. Even Mike Kinsley, who was a longtime New Republic writer and editor but who contributed pieces for Charlie at the Monthly.

But the name that for me will always be first on that list is my dear friend Walter Shapiro. Half the world of political journalism is referring to Walter as a “dear friend,” while reeling from the unexpected news of his death on Sunday, at age 77. Walter was funny. But beneath that, he was loving, in an important way that I think will always distinguish him.

Walter and I had an Odd Couple–style “meet cute” in the summer of 1972. That was an eon ago in many ways—Richard Nixon was steamrolling toward landslide reelection; the Democrats nonetheless held huge majorities in both the Senate and the House. But it also had surprising connections to our time. A Vietnam veteran in his twenties staged his first run for Congress. That was John Kerry, and he lost. A lawyer in his twenties staged a run for the Senate. That was Joe Biden, and he won. Two Yale Law students in their 20s worked on George McGovern’s doomed campaign in Texas. They were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. These peoplThese people are still in the news.

And in that same cycle, a 25-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan, who had just passed the constitutional minimum age for his candidacy, ran in the House primary in the Ann Arbor-Livonia district. He came within a thousand votes of winning the Democratic nomination. But he lost.

That was, of course, Walter Shapiro, who showed up a few weeks later in Washington—unemployed, ready for anything, hoping to find some journalistic job. At that time I was 23 years old, just out of graduate school and a stint with Ralph Nader—unemployed, ready for anything, hoping to see whether journalism could provide any job. The main thing in common between us is that we’d both worked on college newspapers and had our Nader experience. Charlie Peters was at the time bidding farewell to his very first cadre of Washington Monthly staff writers—Taylor Branch, Suzannah Lessard, John Rothchild. He needed to fill some slots, and he happened to meet me and Walter at about the same time.

He signed us both on. I was the “policy” guy of the duo. Earnest; few laughs. Walter was the one with the twinkle that Charlie always looked for and prized. (The Monthly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy one week after Charlie hired us—he’d never mentioned this prospect when signing us on. But it survived then and is still around, more than 55 years after its founding.) The first time I met Walter was in the Monthly office. On learning that we would be partners, I thought: This guy is different from me. But he had a sense of fun and liveliness in his eyes that made us friends then and ever since.

Through those two years in the early 1970s, Walter and I spent 18 hours a day together doing Charlie Peters’s bidding in writing, editing, and reporting. A few years later, we both worked as speechwriters in the Carter administration. In the 1980s, my wife, Deb, and I and our kids were delighted to welcome Walter and the love of his life, his wife Meryl Gordon, to Japan when we lived there. Going with Walter and our two young sons to a public bath in our Yokohama neighborhood, where we all disrobed (amid a pool of tattooed yakuza mobsters), is an enduring memory from those days. Since then Deb and I have stayed with Walter and Meryl in their historic apartment in New York (the structure serves as the setting of the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building), seen them in D.C., and treasured them as friends. I exchanged emails with Walter about the election landscape a few days before he fell ill.

Walter wrote hundreds, probably thousands, of mainly political articles, for nearly every publication in existence (and many no longer around). Less than two weeks ago (!), he published a trenchant TNR piece arguing that “Biden’s enablers” should face the reality that Biden himself finally faced yesterday—as it happens, just a few hours after Walter breathed his last.

But I will remember Walter mostly for these two pieces of writing, more than 30 years apart.

One was his hilarious, mordant debut Washington Monthly piece—the one that convinced Charlie Peters to hire him. This story was about how close he had come in that congressional primary, and what he had learned from actually being a candidate, something practically no other “political analysts” have done. Sample, with the background that “Stempien” is the opponent who edged him out:

At the Monroe County Fair I encountered a mother and her four- year-old son, happily holding aloft a red “Stempien To Congress” balloon.

Discreetly ignoring the balloon, I introduced myself as a candidate for Congress. The boy looked up, pointed to the balloon and asked, “Is that yours?” As I shook my head “no,” the little boy let go of the string of his red, helium-filled balloon and said, “I like you better.”

The other was Walter’s wonderful 2004 book, One-Car Caravan, about what politics is like in the early stages of a primary cycle—before the first votes are cast, before contenders and pretenders are sorted out, and while the eager, earnest candidates are face-to-face with voters and a handful of the press. I have always thought that this book deserves a place in the campaign canon alongside better-known works like Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes or Timothy Crouse’s Boys on the Bus. Or even the Theodore White genre-creating Making of the President series.

What distinguishes Walter’s voice, in this book and so many other places, is his bighearted but non-sappy love—for the candidates and how hard they are trying, for the process with all its absurdities and defects, for the electorate (most of them) as they try to figure out the right path, for the press with all its foibles, for the whole operating-level panorama of American democracy. For America itself.

Walter never wrote a sappy line in his life. He was too canny about what was really going on, and how many promises go unfulfilled, how often dreams were likely to end in heartbreak. But he almost never wrote a snarky line either. His moral and emotional imagination encompassed so many people.

The last words of his foreword to One-Car Caravan are how I will remember Walter:

I did not write this book as a scholarly reference work or a dense study of the political process. Rather it is a tale of one reporter’s adventures with this season’s political dreamers, who each fantasize that he will become the forty-fourth member of an illustrious chain dating back to George Washington. The joy of this book, I hope, is in the narrative.… If I am lucky, you will read it in bed at night with a smile on your face.

We are lucky. We think of you, Walter, with tears. And a smile.