Remembering a Writer Whose Stories Moved Faster Than the Speed Limit

Vic Gold, a longtime Washington political operator and writer, died in June and yesterday there was a celebration of his life at Acadiana, a DC restaurant that specializes in the New Orleans food he loved.

There were a lot of political types in the room and much of  the talk was about politics—Vic was closely tied to President George H.W. Bush and before that to Barry Goldwater, Spiro Agnew, and other Republican pols. He was a conservative but with an open and interesting mind.

In talking with Vic’s family and friends about his writing—he wrote books, newspaper columns, and many articles for the Washingtonian magazine—I mentioned my basic editorial mindset: How fast does this story move? A lot of stories came into the magazine going 45 miles an hour and my goal was to speed them up to 70 mph. You do that by going through a piece two or three or four times looking for words, sentences, and paragraphs that can be cut. I rarely changed a writer’s language—that belongs to the writer—but the length of the piece belongs to the editor.

Vic was pretty rare in that his pieces came in going 70 or 75 miles an hour. He was a pleasure to read and edit and a reflection, I assumed, of a very sharp mind that had not been ruined by going to law school and then into politics.

Then one of his daughters told me that Vic’s wife, Dale, always edited his pieces before he submitted them. I often tell young journalists that given the state of the business today try to marry someone with a good, steady job. For a writer, maybe it’s even better to have a spouse who is a good editor.