He Arrived With Kennedy And Is Left With Willkie

Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters, one of the capital's last idealists, came to Washington with John F. Kennedy's election in 1960 to help launch the Peace Corps. The West Virginia native led the Monthly for three decades as its editor in chief, where he mentored some of the country's most prominent journalists.

Peters, who turns 80 next year, published a book this year celebrating the underappreciated Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940. His book -- "Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Willkie!' Convention of 1940 and How it Freed FDR to Save the Western World" -- is the story of how an isolationist Republican Party was wise enough to choose an interventionist nominee, giving Franklin D. Roosevelt the political cover he needed to make the crucial preparations for war.

"I wrote this book because I wanted people to understand that it was better then so why the hell can't it be better now," Peters said. "These two great men at this key moment in the history of the world, they did the right thing."

His study of Willkie attracted the attention of presidential aide Karl Rove, who visited Peters at home with a college paper he had written on Willkie and several copies of Peters's book to be signed.

In an interview this month, Peters described what was right about politics then, what is wrong now, and how things could change again.

On the modern primary election system and the death of political conventions :

"You hear the announcers talking about the dull conventions, the staged conventions. There was a time when they really decided things. In 1940, you had started out with a Republican Party that was 80 percent isolationist. But you had the nominee, a firmly anti-Hitler internationalist, just six months later. It was incredible.

"You had this system then that could recognize a Willkie which was so important. This primary thing we've got now is crazy. You are trapped by April 1st. If the present system had existed in 1940, the Republican nominee would've been Thomas E. Dewey. That would not have been great for this country. . . .

"There was a long time before the need for Willkie did not become clear. That need began to become clear in the period between April 9 and June 23, the Nazi invasion of Norway and Denmark on April 9, then the invasion of France, Belgium and Holland on May 10, and then above all, and I'm convinced this was the key thing that gave Willkie the nomination, the June 23rd fall of France, the day before the convention started."

On journalism's obsession with personal flaws of politicians :

"The whole book was such a lesson for me in the absolute insanity of the sex reporting now about public figures. Franklin Roosevelt would've been destroyed, Wendell Willkie would've been destroyed. What the hell would've happened to this country and the world if those two men had been destroyed?

"There is a terrible cynicism in the press today that doesn't lend itself to making Mr. Smith go to Washington. You think Washington's just a total mess and Mr. Smith wouldn't get elected anyway. The wonderful thing about the '30s and the early '40s was the Norman Rockwell self-image: A lot of people lived up to it, not all the way, but a lot of the way. The Frank Capra movies that seem so sentimental today, almost absurdly sentimental, a lot of us really thought that way. 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' was my favorite movie. . . .