William Whitworth and the Lost Spirit of Journalism

Under William Whitworth and his open-minded ethos, The Atlantic published some of the defining public policy essays of the late twentieth century.

• Robert D. Kaplan
• The National Interest

William Whitworth, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic from 1981 to 2000, died at the age of eighty-seven last week.

If his name escapes you, that was part of his design.

After Mortimer Zuckerman hired Whitworth away from The New Yorker to run the Boston magazine that Zuckerman had just bought, Whitworth, despite having been a…

William Whitworth and the…