Famed magazine editor Graden Carter rose through the ranks at time, life, spy, the New York

Observer, and ultimately Vanity Fair, becoming known for his sharp wit and keen eye for talent.

Under his leadership, Vanity Fair transformed into a cultural juggernaut, known both for its

celebrity profiles and quality journalism.

Now Carter is sharing his story and a new memoir,

when the going was good, an editor's adventures during the last golden age of magazines.

I spoke with them last week.

Graydon Carter, welcome to the News Hour.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

Let's start our conversation where you open your memoir,

the heavy anxiety you were feeling as Vanity Fair was about to out Mark Felt as the Watergate informant deep throat scooping the Washington Post on their own story. What was going through

your mind at that moment? And what did that story represent in the life of Vanity Fair? Well, it was a great scoop for us, but it was also a sort of display of how

we played a very long game. And it started two years earlier when I'd gotten a call from a lawyer

who said he represented a man called Mark Felt, who I'd never heard of before, and said that he was

deep trouble. And we talked for a while, and I thought we'll follow up on it, because I used to

take any phone call that came in just in case there was a lead on to something. And I signed one of

my editors to the story, David Friend, and he worked with the lawyer off and on

for two years on this, finding out about Mark Felt, trying to verify that he was, in fact, deep throat.

And we had issues because he was suffering from creeping dementia at the time, so it wasn't

100% solid.

And then I got married and went on my honeymoon item, was waiting at the

Nassau airport to come back to New York. And I got a call from David Friend on my wife's cell phone

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