Bob Woodward

I first met Alice in 1972, when Dick Snyder took Carl Bernstein, Alice and me to dinner at the Jockey Club in Washington and he told us, “She’s your editor on your Watergate book.” We debated over the next 18 months or so how to do it. Because the story was exploding, we decided we should follow that old journalism rule, write about what you know best, so we wrote a reporting book.

Alice’s genius was that she understood you’re writing for a reader, so she had a great sense of pacing — not including things that are unnecessary or that were sidetracks — and a sense for tone and presentation.

In December 1973, Carl and I were at the St. Regis. Alice would come over during the day and we’d write at night. The book was coming out in April and at that time, it was normally a year or 18 months before a book was released, so we were thinking, “My God, it’s coming out in April, that’s going to be so fast.” I remember vividly: She came over with this 90-page section, an account of our reporting efforts that led nowhere, leads that didn’t pan out, and she said, “You need to cut it.” I said “O.K., by how much?” And she said, “Cut it to two pages.” She was right.

She had that sense of how to keep the story moving. She would write in the margins, “not necessary” — it was her trademark. It could be a page, a section, an adverb, an adjective. She was serving the reader, not us, in a way. Carl and I quickly learned that’s exactly what we need, and that’s exactly what editing is about. The hymnal she sang from was: Be straightforward, be direct.

I did 19 books with her. The last one was “Fear,” about President Trump. I’m working on the second Trump book now. I talked to her 10 days ago and she was very anxious to read some material. I reminded her of her rule: She didn’t want a manuscript until it was half-done. But she said “No, I’m so anxious to see this.” I didn’t end up sending her anything.

From 1972 to 2020, that’s 48 years — it may not be an all-time record, but that’s a long time.

Walter Isaacson

When Evan Thomas and I were very young Time magazine pups 35 years ago, we visited Alice Mayhew to pitch a group biography about six obscure statesmen of the Cold War era. Nobody else would have considered it. But she immediately said, “I get it. We will make it a prequel to Halberstam’s ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ and we will call it ‘The Wise Men.’” So we did. She had a laser-like ability to find a theme. Throughout our first draft, she relentlessly disciplined us to stay with a chronological narrative. “ATIGT,” she would scribble in the margin, meaning “All things in good time.” Her faith in narrative came partly from her religious training. She would always invoke the fact that most of the Bible is a narrative, starting with “In the beginning….”

* * *

Here is a direct linkto complete article.

Joumana Khatib, a senior staff editor on the Express desk, headed to the Books desk in January as its new audience editor.