Book Editor Alice Mayhew: “Her genius is two things: pace and tone,” Bob Woodward said.

From the Washington Post obit, by Harrison Smith, on book editor Alice Mayhew:

Alice Mayhew, a top editor at Simon & Schuster who assembled a roster of literary heavyweights and helped pioneer the modern Washington political chronicle, most notably through her work on the Watergate book “All the President’s Men,” died Feb. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She had long declined to give her age, but her birth certificate indicated she was 87. . . .

Ms. Mayhew was one of the most prominent editors in her field, celebrated in the acknowledgments section of best-selling books by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, President Jimmy Carter and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Walter Isaacson, among many others.

She was also one of publishing’s most fiercely private figures, turning down an interview request for a 2004 New York Times story about her influence with the line, “I don’t think that’s legitimate.” Diminutive but forthright and often abrupt, she made relatively few public appearances but was “a ferocious defender of her authors, in all cases,” said Washington Post journalist David Maraniss, who worked with her on 12 books. . . .

Widely admired for her work in shaping manuscripts at the conceptual level, she was “somebody who can hear a pitch for a book idea and just know instinctively whether or not it’s a good book,” author Barbara Feinman Todd once said, and know “whether or not that’s the book that you should be writing.”

Ms. Mayhew focused on popular histories and biographies as well as the journalistic genre known as “the Washington book.” Released only a year or two after the events they covered, the books featured heavily reported, insider accounts of Beltway politics and White House intrigue, tailored for readers who wanted details that were often unavailable to daily journalists.

While such works sometimes drew the ire of critics who questioned their sourcing, literary quality and occasionally melodramatic tone, they became increasingly popular after the publication of “All the President’s Men” (1974), in which Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein recounted their sometimes torturous reporting on the Watergate scandal that consumed Richard M. Nixon’s presidency. The book was later adapted into a celebrated film and “transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of the media,” Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda wrote in a memoir, “Another Life.”. . .

Her other authors included journalists Jill Abramson, Jonathan Alter, Richard Engel, Ron Suskind and James B. Stewart; and historians Stephen E. Ambrose, Taylor Branch, James Chace and Diane McWhorter. By the early 1990s, her office was putting out some 30 to 40 books a year, a figure that led some of her peers—and authors—to question how closely she was reading her manuscripts. . . .

“Her genius is two things: pace and tone,” Woodward said by phone. “She would cut out whole sections, words and sentences, anything that was a little snide or self-approving,” always writing the phrase “not necessary” in the margins with a blue pen. On one occasion, she cut 90 manuscript sheets from a draft of “All the President’s Men,” deciding—correctly, he said—that the section took readers too far afield from the story. . . .

Ms. Mayhew’s advice to authors was sometimes unconventional, as when she gave lawyer and journalist Steven Brill a book about the Titanic while he was working on “The Teamsters” (1978), a survey of the labor union led by Jimmy Hoffa. “You tell me what the sinking of the Titanic has to do with a book about the Teamsters,” Brill recalled telling her, according to the Times. “She said, ‘Think of this as a narrative form.’”
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From the New York Times obit, by Anita Gates, on Alice Mayhew:

Alice Mayhew, a widely admired editor who shepherded into print best sellers by a veritable who’s who of writers—along the way popularizing the Washington political narrative, beginning with “All the President’s Men” in 1974—died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. . . .

“All the President’s Men,” the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account of how they uncovered the truth about the Watergate burglary and the subsequent White House effort to cover it up, became an immediate best seller and had a decided impact on American history. . . .Ms. Mayhew also worked with notable public figures, including President Jimmy Carter (“A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” 2015) and the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“My Own Words,” 2017).

The countless best sellers that Ms. Mayhew edited include John Dean’s “Blind Ambition: The White House Years” (1976); Taylor Branch’s “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years” (1998); Walter Isaacson’s books, including “Steve Jobs” (2011) and “Leonardo da Vinci” (2017); David Brooks’s “On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense” (2004), an examination of contemporary American society; Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history, “Carry Me Home” (2001); and the first volumes of Sidney Blumenthal’s political biography of Abraham Lincoln, beginning with “A Self-Made Man” (2016).

Though Ms. Mayhew was highly regarded, her own life was something of a closed book, so rigorously did she defend her privacy. When The New York Times ran an article about her in 2004 with the headline “Muse of the Beltway Book,” she declined to be interviewed. The article relied on the observations of those who worked with her, some of whom said her greatest talents lay in conceptualization and structure.

“She is particularly adept at unearthing submerged themes,” the Times article concluded, “developing swift transitions, unsentimentally pruning away digressions, even when—especially when—they are hundreds of pages long. Mayhew’s faith in chronological organization is said to be nearly religious.”