Neo-Guru Tilting At Windmills

By WALTER ISAACSON

At the tenth-anniversary dinner for his spunky little journal, the Washington Monthly, Editor Charles Peters stood up and baptized his iconoclastic movement. "We're neoliberals," he told his disciples. That was in 1979, and since then, they have worked a quiet revolution. By exposing the dusty tenets of American liberalism to some fresh ideas and empirical questioning, Peters and his followers have helped rescue it from the clutches of interest groups, entrenched bureaucratic thinking and post-Viet Nam neuroses. Now, in Tilting at Windmills, Peters offers an amiable tract designed to elucidate what he jocularly refers to as "the one true faith."

In the gospel according to Peters, the most fundamental maxim is that ideas cannot be divorced from experience. Consequently, his book comes cloaked as an autobiography. As he ambles through the events of his life, Peters collects simple lessons and weaves them into a political creed. From his childhood in Charleston, W. Va., he developed an ideal of community values based on a willingness to share society's burdens. From his Army service, he picked up a lasting disdain for class distinctions. And a stint as a Peace Corps administrator left him with a sharp eye for the foibles of Government bureaucracies.

With the Washington Monthly's piquant mixture of myth-piercing reporting and clear-eyed opinions, Peters created a new style of journalism that looked at Washington, in his words, "the way that an anthropologist looks at a South Sea island." Equally important, he trained a cadre of young followers who went on to apply his rigorously intellectual approach at larger publications.

For nondisciples, Peters' book is destined to be disappointing in parts. It tends to treat issues involving race and poverty as grist for abstract ideas rather than emotional commitment. It occasionally lapses into homilies rather than serious expositions of a philosophy. Yet it is the simple goodness of these homilies that accounts for much of Peters' allure. With a sweetness and grace that make him the least jaded journalist in Washington, Peters turns Windmills into an inspiring account of a good man's quest for ideas that make sense and for deeds that can make a difference.