Windmills, revisited: the once and future mission of the Washington Monthly.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: 40TH ANNIVERSARY

I reported for duty at the Washington Monthly on July 1, 1976. For the magazine, it was a time of economic distress (nothing new there) and psychological glee. Jimmy Carter, by then the certain Democratic nominee for president, was an actual subscriber to the Monthly, meaning that every year a renewal check came in drawn on his personal bank account and signed by him. And he had just hired one of the magazine's alumni, James Fallows, as his chief speechwriter. To Charlie Peters, the Monthly's founder, owner, and editor, it was clear that we were now going to be listened to. The previous year, Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift had been published, and my conversations with Charlie that summer and fall reminded me distinctly of Bellow's renditions of the fevered conversations between Von Humboldt Fleisher and his protege Charlie Citrine about the coming glories of the Adlai Stevenson administration.

Everybody in Washington dreams of having a new president's ear, but in the case of a political magazine the dream is usually highly particular: the program the magazine was founded to advocate will become at least an important part of the new administration's thinking. This may have happened for, say, National Review or Commentary in the Reagan administration, but it did not happen for the Monthly in the Carter administration. I watched Charlie's hope turn inexorably into a hurt disappointment.

It's hard, thirty years later, to recapture that moment, but it's worth doing because it helps bring a larger point about the Monthly, and about political magazines, and about liberalism, into focus. In those days, in Dupont Circle circles, President Carter was suspiciously right-wing, Ralph Nader was the Establishment, and it was unimaginable that Ronald Reagan was on the verge of being elected president. Although the Washington Monthly had published its first issue, in 1969, in the aftermath of a Republican victory in a presidential election, it had been a very close election; it was nowhere in Charlie's thinking that, as he was planning his new magazine, he was witnessing the beginning of a string of seven wins and three losses by the Republicans in presidential politics.

The Monthly was a direct descendent of the Peace Corps' department of evaluation, which Charlie had founded and run. It was imbued with the Peace Corps' liberal, reformist spirit, but it also had the reality-testing ethos of Charlie's evaluators: the writers were supposed to go out in...