E-Mail This Article to a Friend Parthian shots: The Atlantic’s editors have a final say BY MARK JURKOWITZ
	MORE: The Atlantic goes south - After 148 years, the magazine of "the American idea" leaves Boston for the Beltway. BY MARK JURKOWITZ

It was part celebration, part wake on Tuesday night when staffers, friends, and admirers of the Atlantic Monthly gathered in the dark, wood-paneled confines of the Harvard Club to wish the magazine good-bye as it leaves for Washington after 148 years in Boston. (Although an Atlantic employee was seated strategically at each table, owner David Bradley — who is bringing the publication to the Beltway — was not there.)

With national correspondent Jim Fallows acting as master of cermonies, the two-and-a-half hour proceedings followed a respectful and incident-free cocktail hour, and were constructed as a tribute to past editors of the magazine. Five different speakers represented the line of succession that ran from Ellery Sedgwick (1909-1938) to Edward Weeks (1938-1966) to Robert Manning (1966-1980) to William Whitworth (1980-1999) to Michael Kelly (1990-2002) to Cullen Murphy, the departing managing editor who succeeded Kelly.

No one suggested that the Atlantic Monthly wasn’t a magazine built on the foundation of great writing. But the theme of the bittersweet event was that it was the larger-than-life (and sometimes notoriously idiosyncratic) editors who gave the magazine its character and drive.

One of the more stirring tributes on Tuesday night was delivered by Nick Lemann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Education, who was an Atlantic writer under Whitworth. (An editor emeritus who was at the helm from 1980-1999, Whitworth was at a Friday party for the magazine but did not attend the Tuesday event). Starting slowly, almost shyly, Lemann built up a head of steam as he described the unorthodox work habits of Whitworth, a Little Rock, Arkansas native and a protégé of New Yorker editor William Shawn.

"He didn’t believe in deadlines and he didn’t believe in assignments," declared Lemann, who compared his former boss to "Mr. Magoo," the dangerously near-sighted and apparently oblivious cartoon character who somehow managed to safely navigate life’s challenges.

"In every way, the magazine was a sort of cult of Bill," declared Lemann, who went on to detail one of Whitworth’s typical editing and management techniques. Every so often, Lemann said, he’d get a call from Whitworth — who would absently ask him to please refresh his memory about whatever story Lemann had been working on for the last few months. Once that happened, Lemann recalled, Whitworth would ask the one question that would throw the basic underpinnings of the piece into doubt and force him to practically begin from scratch.

In an email to the Phoenix, Whitworth described his tenure thusly: "We weren’t guided by market research or by attempts to guess what an imaginary reader might want; we did what we thought was interesting, important, or funny. We assumed that if we were sincere, readers would find us. Our biggest newsstand successes simply happened; no consultant could have conceived them or predicted them. And we weren’t bound by any political allegiances. Liberals thought we were too conservative and conservatives thought we were too liberal."

One former Atlantic editor on hand Tuesday night to speak for his own tenure was Manning, who has been one of the more vocal and open critics of the move to Washington. In a December 12 op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, he wrote:

"Why move it into the city of political spam and spin? We are already served (if that is the right word) by enough writers, editors, and news people who work there under the influence of the incestuous Beltway atmosphere, amid the lobbyists and the spinmeisters. The Atlantic has always looked at the world from a different perch. Why put it in with all those other birds and risk the onrush of Potomac flu?"

In well-received remarks at the party, the 86-year-old Manning proved he had lost none of his bite, once again voicing his serious concern about the migration of the magazine to the Beltway and acknowledging that "farewell doesn’t always mean celebration. Sometimes it means melancholy and I feel some of that now."

Manning also proved old grudges never die when he took the occasion to jab away at former Atlantic owner Mort Zuckerman, a man Manning sued as part of a very public and nasty dispute after Zuckerman purchased the magazine in 1980. (In a quote he once gave to the Boston Globe, Manning memorably declared that if dueling were still legal, "probably one of us would be dead.")

As a soft crowd chuckle gradually built into heartier guffaws, Manning — alluding to the fact that Atlantic national correspondent Fallows had been unceremoniously deposed as editor of the Zuckerman-owned U.S. News & World Report in 1998 — went into a bit of a riff on his former boss that ended with the unifying declaration that both he and Fallows now belonged to "The Mugged By Mort Club." Manning clearly enjoyed himself. Fallows seemed to laugh, blush, and grimace at the same time.

The evening’s comic relief came largely from managing editor Murphy, who has been in charge of the magazine since 2002, but who — like most of the Atlantic’s 37 Boston-based staffers — is not making the move to Washington. (Bradley, who is searching for a new top editor, says there have been more than 1,000 applications for the three dozen positions.)

Murphy has had a difficult task at the Atlantic. Not only did he have to succeed the dynamic and popular Kelly as the magazine’s top editor when Kelly stepped aside in 2002 to pursue other projects. He also had to keep the place functioning and spirits afloat after Kelly’s death at age 46 while on assignment in Iraq in April, 2003. It was Murphy who convened a meeting of Kelly’s mourning co-workers at the magazine’s offices after learning of the tragic news.

In a gracious and graceful presentation on Tuesday night, Murphy read aloud from several hilarious letters to the editor that were, for the most part, pitching unsolicited stories and poems from some very desperate authors. He also touched on the ticklish issue of Boston’s self-perception, at one point suggesting that even if the city suffers from an inflated opinion of itself, it deserved better than the dubious description once offered up in an episode of HBO’s The Sopranos — "Scranton, with clams."

Asked about his future plans, Murphy says he’s under contract with Houghton Mifflin for two books. The first, Are We Rome?, is about America’s obsession with the comparison of itself to the Roman Empire and will be completed this summer. The second book is about the Inquisition—an institution, he says "whose active life stretches over many centuries, and seems to have resonance with our own time in more ways than one."

Somewhere down the road, Murphy adds, he wants to get back to magazine work.