When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

By Graydon Carter

Penguin Random House/March 2025

Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen

April 5, 2025

The first time I saw Graydon Carter, he was loping (striding? sauntering? … he’d pick the right word) across the lawn toward where I was playing with my dog, Weirdo. I was 10 years old, and he introduced himself as though I was a fully-grown human. He may have shaken my hand.

He was wearing a tennis sweater, like a character from a classic Hollywood movie or a figure in a J.C. Leyendecker Arrow ad from the shiny book on our living room coffee table. He seemed to belong to a different time, or at the very least someplace other than our back lawn, making small talk with me and Weirdo.

He was the fiancé of my big sister Tina’s friend Marie, and a protegé of my father, who occasionally wrote for The Canadian Review, the magazine that Graydon, still in his early 20s, edited out of Ottawa U.

Where he did belong, based on his own recounting in When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, as well as the incontrovertible evidence of subsequent events, was New York. By the time I was a teenager, Graydon had moved to Manhattan, which made absolute sense to me. It was as if he’d been hatched from a pod on the wrong side of the border and had finally made his way back to the mothership.

So, to me, what stands out in Graydon Carter’s memoir is not the hilarious stuff about Anna Wintour’s table manners or the diva tantrums of highly strung contributors (I digress here with a heartfelt thanks to Policy writers for their sober, low-maintenance collegiality). What stands out are the three early chapters devoted to his boyhood in the Ottawa inburb of Manor Park, his months working as a lineman for CN in Saskatchewan (that era’s version of tree planting out West as a character-building summer job), and the time he spent at The Canadian Review.

It turns out Graydon Carter’s as much a romantic about Canada — his upbringing in a city small enough to be one big backyard but important enough to provide a window on the world; his mandatory national service playing neighbourhood hockey; and his brief stint (in some ways more of a biographical bombshell than his gig riding the rails) as an efficiency consultant for the federal government — as he is a romantic about America.

Aside from the unfailing generosity he showed me over the years, Graydon kept in touch with my father and kept him on the Vanity Fair comp list until the day he died. Not only did he never forget the place he came from, he never forgot the people. That approach to life — the friends, staff and writers who stayed with him over decades, the loyalty to principle over power (especially in relentlessly decrying the invasion of Iraq when so many media were not only endorsing it but enabling its concocted casus belli) — hums through the book. There’s no celebrity-menu index, no image-burnishing image gallery. There is one personal, whimsical line drawing by Eric Hanson introducing each chapter.

By the time I was a teenager, Graydon had moved to Manhattan, which made absolute sense to me. It was as if he’d been hatched from a pod on the wrong side of the border and had finally made his way back to the mothership.

Carter’s memoir has landed during the most fraught, belligerent period in Canada-US relations since 1812, thanks to the presidential performance and unprovoked trade war of his long-time nemesis, Donald Trump. Trump’s obsession with Graydon dates back to the author’s first reference to the size of his subject’s hands in a 1984 GQ cover profile. He later refined that note to exquisite adhesiveness with the choice of “short-fingered vulgarian” as Trump’s standard ID-prefix at Spy, the cheeky monthly that Carter founded in 1986 with fellow TIME defector Kurt Andersen. Trump’s hate-mail and toxic-tweet screeds against Carter are so numerous, their target has papered whole walls with them.

While the memoir went to press before the worst of Trump’s most recent, similarly obsessive harassment of Canada, Carter has been prevailed upon to comment on the timely topic of Canadian-ness in post-release interviews. “People underestimate Canadians,” he told The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd for her recent profile, The Not-So Discreet Charm of Graydon Carter. “They mistake politeness and conviviality for weakness. Canadian winters are so brutal that after generations and generations of surviving those winters, Canadians have spines of steel. He would be wise to stay away from this in the same way Hitler made a mistake charging into Russia. If he does it in the winter, he’s going to lose. Canadians are good on ice.”

In some ways, the arc of Carter’s mostly non-consensual, epic association with Trump serves as a psychosocial atlas for the quarter-century during which he edited Vanity Fair and the years since he left; the evolution in the anthropology of American power, the incremental marginalization of truth, the weaponization of hostility as a form of domination and of chaos as a path to political power.

Carter started his job as editor of Vanity Fair in July 1992, six months before the dawn of the colourful Clinton presidency. He left it in December 2017, just over a year after Trump’s breathtakingly ironic victory pre-empted its reprise. During that span of history, the internet redefined the allocation of power in America in ways still playing out, hacked the rules of Wall Street with predictable results, fatefully disrupted the magazine business and flooded journalism with new and exotic economic, financial and curation pressures. That sectoral meteorite made the run of fun Carter had had at Vanity Fair, to say nothing of the monthly orgy of bubble-wrap ego popping that made Spy such a hit, seem like life on a distant, far more civilized planet. “You never know when you’re in a golden age,” Carter writes. “You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.”

In that sense, the book’s title could have been While the Going was Good rather than “When”. By 2017, it was clear that the adapt-or-die conditions for survival on the new media planet were too onerous for someone of Carter’s position, disposition, and worldview, so why not make a timely exit of the variety pro-tipped for dinner parties and galas in his final chapter, Some Rules for Living?

Carter did just that, moving to the South of France, where he lounged recuperatively for a few weeks before dusting off the drawing board and inventing Air Mail, the Saturday-morning email launched in 2019 that condenses the sensibility and style of Graydon’s Vanity Fair into a newsletter for newsy (gasp) globalists.

Then, he wrote a memoir. One filled with more grace and gratitude than score-settling, and that fills in the gaps of a bilateral life well-lived. “If the book has a flaw, it’s that it can feel a bit Canadian, a bit nice,” writes former VF writer Bryan Burrough, in his review.

Yes, it can. At the risk of using a kicker Graydon Carter would likely cut for being too clichéd: You can take the boy out of Canada.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.