, about Philip Dutart Carter

Born in New Orleans on October 20, 1939, Carter was educated through ninth grade in Greenville’s public schools. His father, Hodding Carter, was founder and editor of the local daily newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials in 1946 and where Betty Werlein Carter, a New Orleans native, worked as publisher after her husband’s death, at 65, in 1972.

His older brother, Hodding Carter III, left his job as the newspaper’s editor in 1977 to serve in the administration of President Jimmy Carter followed by consecutive careers in television, national foundation administration and university education. Philip Carter served as editor until the paper’s sale in 1980.

A 1957 graduate of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Philip Carter was founding editor of that boarding school’s literary magazine, The Daemon, acted in school plays, played tackle and linebacker on the junior varsity football team, once came in third in the pole vault and won the poetry prize.

By way of friendly counsel, an assistant football coach and English teacher at Episcopal High suggested Carter attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina and thereby perhaps unleash his inner cornpone Dylan Thomas.

But that famously progressive institution closed its doors before he could apply. Instead, Carter duly went to Yale and was rusticated twice, in 1958 and 1961. (He did pass French.)

He also studied African colonial history at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 1959 and English, anthropology, economics and political science at Tulane, where he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and in 1964 was finally awarded a B.A. degree in English while married to his first wife, Marcia (McGhee) Carter of Washington, D.C.

Aside from his disjointed formal education, Carter worked in his teens as a printer’s apprentice and proof reader on his parents’ paper, where he also wrote occasional book reviews and feature stories. Between academic labors, his big city journalistic debut came in 1961, when he went to work in Manhattan for the Herald Tribune—first as a copy boy and then as a general assignment reporter, covering everything from Brooklyn police news to race relations in Manhattan.

His next employer was Newsweek magazine, which he joined in 1964 as a Washington correspondent under bureau chief Benjamin C. Bradlee. After a brief reportorial stint in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House and a year and a half in the Southwest as Houston bureau chief, Carter returned to Washington and shortly was working again as a national reporter for Bradlee, by now executive editor of the Post. ☛