In the spring of 1985, I walked into my father’s office on the seventh floor of National Geographic and found myself face-to-face with what, arguably, would become the most famous photograph in the history of the magazine. “Afghan Girl” is a portrait of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. The photograph was taken photojournalist Steve McCurry near the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

“Afghan Girl” would appear in the upcoming June 1985 issue of National Geographic. My father had it pinned to a large board he used in his office to track upcoming stories. I remember walking into dad’s office and stopping, stunned, when I saw the amazing photograph. “Yeah, I know,” my dad said. He didn’t need to elaborate. It was a spectacular shot.

I was thinking about that shot when I was reading Graydon Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Carter is the legendary editor who founded Spy magazine in the 1980s and ran Vanity Fair during its delirious high point from 1992 to 2017. Under Carter, Vanity Fair was the premier glossy magazine in America, the place for glamorous celebrities, first-rate journalism, award-winning photography, and iconoclastic columnists like Christopher Hitchens.

It would be easy for conservatives to dismiss Grayson Carter. It would also be a mistake.

Yes, Carter is a liberal, and Vanity Fair today is awful. Yet in its heyday the magazine, like many others of its time, was producing fantastic stories and think pieces that were much more expansive, daring, and rigorous than the fair one finds online today—including at most conservative websites. Indeed, many modern conservative media outlets are raking in big profits while continuously producing the same unimaginative takes on the same boilerplate issues. They’re not much better than the legacy media of the left.

In a review of When the Going Was Good, journalist and former Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough summed up the Carter era well:

Vanity Fair’s ethos and popularity in the 1990s and 2000s were a sort of coda to the ‘New Journalism’ perfected by Esquire during the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese produced long, probing articles and in-depth profiles. Their style of writing went beyond the staid reporting and hard facts that readers had come to expect in print. Instead, they imbued their pieces with the stuff of novels: immersive stories, lyrical writing, vibrant descriptions, pacing on a par with the best propulsive fiction.

It was also a generation, as another reviewer put it, “profoundly influenced by an earlier so-called golden age defined in the 1960s by Harold Hayes’s Esquire and Clay Felker’s New York magazine.”

When I stopped by my father’s office and saw the “Afghan Girl” photo in 1985, America was in the midst of one of those golden ages. Vanity Fair was then edited by Tina Brown (Carter would take over in 1992). Harpers had undergone an elegant redesign and was producing brilliant essays under editor Lewis Lapham. Rolling Stone had brought on Kurt Loder, a strong leader who would eventually write for the libertarian outlet Reason. The great British weekly Melody Maker had a brash new editor named Allan Jones, who famously refused demands from the owners to put a bubblegum pop band on the cover, opting instead for a new group called The Smiths. At National Geographic, my father and Senior Editor Bill Garrett wanted to do more serious stories that would attract younger viewers—stories on war, AIDS, and environmental disasters. 

It was an amazing time for long-form, literate journalism. A single issue of Vanity Fair at the time could contain, as Bryan Burrough noted, ”well-sourced tales of Washington intrigue, of fallen royals and CEOs, of Silicon Valley shenanigans and whatever scandal was befalling Michael Jackson at the moment.”

Vanity Fair was first to reveal the Watergate source Deep Throat, and gave space to Christopher Hitchens, who defended the Iraq War. Annie Leibovitch was brought in and produced incredible photographs for the magazine. Hitchens, Burrough, Maureen Orth, Dominick Dunne, and other writers were paid ridiculous rates. Burrough noted that:

For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Born in 1949, Graydon Carter grew up in Ottawa, where he feared he was “destined to become little more than one of those faceless, nameless men in the scenery of someone else’s better life.” He never graduated college but made it to New York, where he worked at Time magazine. In the 1980s, Carter and his friend Kurt Andersen founded Spy, a brilliant satirical monthly. Andersen called Spy’s voice “literate sensationalism,” while Carter envisioned “a bemused detachment but witheringly judgmental.” In 1992, Si Newhouse, the CEO of Conde Nast, picked Carter to edit Vanity Fair. It was a controversial choice, as Spy had spent a lot of its time mocking the very same literati and monied class that was Vanity Fair’s bread and butter.

Carter had to win over both staff and advertisers. “I would have hated me if I was in their place,” Carter remembers.

Carter succeeded and Vanity Fair became a smash success. Carter bought suits in London spoke in an upper-class accent that sounded almost British. He was a brilliant editor in the days when an editor really did … well, edit.

Carter reveals that in 1992 the magazine sent Norman Mailer, one of the most famous writers in the world, to cover the Democratic National Convention. When Carter saw Mailer on television lounging with the elites in the expensive seats instead of reporting, he spiked the story, eating Mailer’s $50,000 fee. He then did it a second time when he sent Mailer to the Republican convention. Stories took weeks or months to complete. Writers were talented or were trained. Vanity Fair became famous for its Hollywood issue and Oscars party, but it was a lot more than that.

It’s hard to imagine any of that happening today. We have Substack, X, blogs and a thousand websites for writers to express themselves. Very few stories get killed, as every stray thought is burped up and posted.

Young journalists are not challenged in the way they once were under editors like Carter. They write the same stuff, over and over again, for decades.

When was the last time Ezra Klein or Rich Lowry went out and reported on a story that was outside of their strike zone or inside the beltway? When asked by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times about today’s journalists, Carter described them as “very hair shirt,” a term meaning ascetic and self-punishing. He went on to say journalists are now “people with earphones, computers with partitions, no longer freewheeling. Editors became clerks rather than editors, just at their computer terminals all day long. In the past, it was about moving around and talking to people.”

Ironically, the so-called freedom of the Internet has killed a lot of imagination. A few years ago, a venerable conservative media property was relaunching and they wanted me to write for them. I would come aboard, I said, if I could write what I wanted. Skateboarding, comics, war, video games, fashion, religion, novels, surfing, movies … whatever inspired. The editor agreed, even though he is obsessed with politics. I made my priorities clear to him: “I will write about Christian surfers and UFOs before I go to Capitol Hill to smell Sheldon Whitehouse’s farts.” I wrote about skateboarding, Batman, baseball, the war in Ukraine. I drove traffic, so much so that I was called out and praised for it in an editorial meeting. 

At one point I discovered a fascinating character, a man who lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A DUI lawyer, he is also a daily surfer and deeply spiritual sage who preaches about the joys of sober living. He is the kind of character who, once upon a time, would have made for a great profile in Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair or National Geographic. It was too outside the box for my editor to handle. Eventually, he let me go.

“What we really need,” he said, “is for someone to be our Man in Washington.” The piece eventually found a home here at Chronicles.

Today it’s difficult to name many young journalists who seem destined to write books that are outside of a very narrow scope—Trump either sucks or is awesome, depending upon who you ask and who’s paying them, for example. And even then, how many of them have the experience to produce works that are even interesting? Bryan Burrough, who wrote for so many years for Vanity Fair, went on to author Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, a great piece of reporting that is beautifully written. His forthcoming book is The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild.

Simon Reynolds, one of my favorite writers from the old Melody Maker, has written several outstanding books, including the recent Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today. Tom Wolfe went from being a beat reporter covering crime to pen the classic books The Right Stuff, about the pilots of U.S. space program, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, the best novel about 1980s New York. It’s hard to imagine Ben Shapiro or even Candace Owens producing similar work.  

In his review of When the Going was Good, writer Terry McDonell makes an important observation. If a media company assumes a hunger in the public for quality journalism, that media company can succeed. It happened with Substack and it is also the case with The New York Times which, even though its politics are pure socialism maintains arts and cultural coverage that is vastly superior to anything regularly produced on the right. Here McDonnell describes the support that Conde Nast CEO Si Newhouse gave to Carter:

Si’s support meant everything to Graydon, more than he recognized at the time. Si was building a magazine empire based on quality editorial when, meanwhile, one of the richest and most powerful publishers in the world, Time Inc., was beginning to erode under management increasingly concerned with short-term profits. I don’t think I was naïve about magazines as a business, and at Sports Illustrated I was responsible for editorial budgets of more than $50 million, but I suffered through too many meetings that turned into platitude festivals about building a 21^st Century Media Company but were really about saving obsolete business models. The lack of confidence in consumer demand for quality journalism was always the subtext. In retrospect, the autonomy and resources Si gave all his editors in chief—especially at VF, Vogue, and, later, the New Yorker—were why Condé Nast was winning what we all thought of then as the magazine wars.

Forty years ago, I walked into my father’s office at National Geographic and got to be one of the first people in the world to see what would become one of the most famous photographs in history. “Afghan Girl” was the result not of some kid with an iPhone, but a creative journalist, Steve McCurry, who had been supported, trained, encouraged—and paid—by mentors and good editors who knew what they were doing.

Grayson Carter acknowledges that “that world is gone.” It’s certainly not going to be replaced by today’s mainstream conservative media, which boasts a billion-dollar company like the Daily Wire but lacks the guts and imagination to produce a Tom Wolfe.