I've tilted at windmills, and the windmills won.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

Jonathan Alter, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1981 to 1983, is a senior writer at Newsweek.

Six years ago, I was offered an unusual job at Newsweek that was at least partly the result of the efforts of the editor of this magazine. While I'm grateful to Charlie Peters for assisting my career advancement, the job he helped arrange also points up some practical failures associated with his view of how to get the truth out of the bureaucracy.

One of Charlie's all-time heroes in this regard is a woman named Lorena Hickock, a journalist and close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Hickock traveled across the country during the 1930s and delivered candid reports to the Roosevelts and Harry Hopkins about the way New Deal programs were really working. She deserves Charlie's canonization, for these are models of the kind of journalism that The Washington Monthly seeks to publish. Instead of merely reporting the pseudo-important spin of highlevel officials, she went out and assessed how their programs were affecting reat people. By circumventing the hidebound chain of command, FDR was able to learn what was actually happening in his own administration.

Hickock's success reinforced the lessons of Charlie's own experience at the Peace Corps, where he supervised a crew of independent evaluators who burrowed into programs in an effort to report the truth to the top. In 1978, Charlie convinced James Fallows, then Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter, to seek a similar arrangement with the Carter White House. Because of opposition from high-level aides, the proposal for a corps of independent evaluators was scotched. Charlie later wrote that perhaps Carter's administration might have been saved had someone like Fallows reported in advance the truth about the preparations for the Iran hostage rescue mission of 1980, which ended in humiliation.

In 1982, Charlie got a chance to try his idea on a much smaller scale. Newsweek hired a new editor, William Broyles, who was a fan of the Monthly. Partly at Charlie's urging, he soon hired me for a variation on the Hickock role: to report directly to him on what was wrong with Newsweek, and to suggest ways to fix it. Ironically, this was a journalistic variation on a role the Monthly had traditionally detested-that of the management consultant. But bearing the Hickok and Fallows models in mind, I plunged ahead.

From the start, the idea failed. As anyone who has ever worked in a large organization knows, a person in...