Susan Zakin
When someone dies, it’s natural to reel back the years to when you met. With Walter Shapiro that’s easy. I was struggling to finish a novel, occasionally writing an article to remind myself there was something I actually knew how to do. It was 2013. I’d published a piece about Republicans attacking Hillary Clinton on the basis of her age. She was in her mid-60s then, which is either not old or too old, depending on how one views recent political events.
I had come to the daunting realization that Baby Boomers and Millennials had something in common. Nobody was hiring people over 50, and if you were in your 20s, you might never have the stability your parents had taken for granted.
Walter, a far more august political writer than I could ever hope to be, read the article and offered to take me to lunch. I remember that we met at a rather elegant restaurant in Washington, D.C. He imbibed a martini. It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. For me, and I suspect for others, Walter was not only a friend but a mentor, and along with these, somewhat of a father figure.
Walter Shapiro was a brilliant writer, and remarkably fast. To write well on deadline is an almost magical skill, one that he honed while working at Time. He also was an immensely good listener, a rare quality in male journalists, you might be surprised to hear. (My female colleagues will attest to this.) He was compassionate, and very, very clever. I was embarrassed, more than once, when his jokes went over my head.
We were colleagues, but we were different, and that’s where the father-daughter dynamic came in. In the 1960s, Walter had been a campus radical at the University of Michigan, calling for revolution as a columnist on the student newspaper. By the time I met him, he had covered nine presidential races; 2024 would have been his twelfth. He was so intimately familiar with the workings of Washington, D.C. and presidential politics that Yale tapped him to teach a class in the university’s political science department. While writing for three different magazines, including The New Republic, where his columns were a must read for political junkies, he regularly rode the train to New Haven to share his hard-won wisdom and vast knowledge of twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. history with the Ivy League.
He also shared his incredible depth of knowledge with me and with the readers of this magazine. When we started Journal of the Plague Years, he told me he didn't have time to write for us so I interviewed him instead. You'll find these interviews on our website. I did prevail upon him to contribute a short piece about what he was reading during the pandemic. The answer was Dickens, which made perfect sense. I believe Walter saw the political scene as quite Dickensian.
I was more enamored of visionaries than he was. More romantic, perhaps, although I suspect Walter, deep down, was a great romantic, a man who cared deeply about his country and the principles upon which it was founded. He had a long and happy marriage to Meryl Gordon, an impeccable journalist whose book on Bunny Mellon I reviewed, using Mellon as a jumping off point for writing about my mother. I remember hoping that the memoir aspect of the piece obviated any charge of conflict of interest and did not diminish me in Walter’s eyes, or Meryl’s. We did not discuss Bernie Sanders other than to acknowledge that Walter found him tedious and I found him a benign grandpa who embodied the values I felt were the best part of my Jewish identity, and besides, Bernie was right about pretty much everything even if he would never become president.
Walter was known for his strong sense of loyalty to his friends. They belonged to both parties, and he stood his ground while tolerating differences of opinion. I once asked Walter how he could be friends with a columnist who had worked for Ronald Reagan. Reagan, in my view, set the country on its current destructive course: busting unions, deregulating corporations, and making tax cuts for the rich an article of faith for aspiring Joe the Plumbers. This columnist’s bombastic if occasionally powerful prose had helped create the myth, elevating a vapid B movie actor to the status of demigod. I found this unforgivable, particularly because the writer was still burnishing the myth. In a rare moment of impatience, Walter called me “judge-y.” He wasn’t wrong; neither was I.
Washington, D.C., historically, was marked by a collegiality too often absent today. In that spirit, Walter's graciousness stood out. He had been around long enough to know how easy it is to snipe from the sidelines and how hard it is to get things done. This is a lesson in life, as well as politics, and it is a journalist’s job to convey to readers both principle and pragmatic reality, mining the messy territory between these two poles. That is journalism at its best, as practiced by Walter Shapiro. It is also Shakespeare.
Or Dickens.
When it comes to admitting mistakes, journalists - the good ones - are among the few professionals in this litigious age willing to admit they were wrong, and change their mind when new information becomes available. In February, when Ezra Klein of The New York Times wrote a blockbuster piece making the case for Joe Biden to step aside from the 2024 race, I interviewed Walter for our magazine. He gave me a cogent argument for why it was too late for the Democrats to switch candidates.
In June, Walter reversed course, arguing that Biden could not mount a sufficiently strong campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Like any sentient being, Walter was alarmed at the prospect of a Trump presidency, and while he was kind, he was not, I don’t think, a sentimentalist, particularly when it came to politicians. Proximity will do that.
I, on the other hand, found myself in sympathy with renegade Republicans like Lincoln Project co-founder Stuart Stevens and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. They thought Democrats were crazy to abandon Biden, arguably the best president since F.D.R. Stand by your man, was their credo. I kept badgering Walter, asking What is Plan B? When I pressed him, Walter speculated that it was - you guessed it - Kamala Harris.
Our disagreement stemmed from this: I loved ideas, the big picture. Walter understood the need for pragmatism, despite my panicked need for the security of a Plan B, mindful that there were less than four months before the election.
My resistance stemmed, in large part, from my resistance to the realities of our culture. I couldn't accept that that a lack of telegenic prowess zeroed out Biden’s truly astonishing competence. What did this augur for America’s future? Is it all Kim Kardashian, all the time, even for a president?
Full disclosure: I’d been so impressed with Biden’s foreign policy knowledge in 2008 that I thought he’d make a better president than the relatively inexperienced Barack Obama. I still believe that might have been the case. It took me a long time to accept that Biden’s fluency and verve were not coming back. I cried after watching Biden's Lester Holt interview.
Was I losing a father figure? I think so, and no apologies for that. Biden made me feel safe in an unsafe world. With his deep knowledge of policy, proven ability to deal with even this most recalcitrant Congress, and a story of tragic loss that mirrored my own, he represented values I learned as a girl and still believe in: empathy, common decency, rationality, the crucial importance of history if one wishes to understand the present.
But Walter was right. I have slowly allowed myself to feel excited about the candidacy of Kamala Harris. After all, it is time for a woman to lead, and competence comes in many pantsuits. There is a changing of the guard.
Walter Shapiro died on July 21, the day that President Biden gave up his campaign for re-election. Walter had been unconscious for several days. A rational person would believe he never found out that he'd gotten the story right one last time. But I couldn’t help feeling that, somehow, Walter knew.
Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.