Critic of George Bush picked to edit Texas Monthly

Dan Goodgame, author of a book critical of the first President George Bush, will edit Texas Monthly starting January 28.

Goodgame, 64, covered the White House for Time magazine during the Bush and Clinton years. With fellow Time correspondent Michael Duffy, he authored Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (1992).

The New York Times called the book “a valuable primer on the Bush Presidency. The theme: George Bush is an elitist who believes in winning at all costs, the better to preserve the status quo.” Publishers Weekly called it “an indictment of the Bush presidency, [portraying] a do-nothing president who has set no real national priorities.”

Goodgame later edited Fortune Small Business. He left journalism in 2008 during a round of staff cuts at the magazine. For the past nine years he has worked in communications at Rackspace, a San Antonio cloud computing company.

Texas Monthly‘s owner and chairman, Paul Hobby, is the son of longtime Texas Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby, a Democrat. He purchased the magazine in 2016 through his private equity firm Genesis Park LP for a price of $25 million.

Hobby told staff at Texas Monthly, “I have hoped we could get Dan Goodgame to join us for a couple of years,” according to a report by the magazine itself. “The stars have now aligned, and I could not be more pleased. Dan is a proven editor, a decorated journalist, and an honest-to-goodness Rhodes scholar. More importantly, he is a gentleman with a curious mind and poetry in his soul. This is a wonderful milestone in the history of Texas Monthly.”

Goodgame’s experience also includes stints as a night police reporter, foreign correspondent, and investigative reporter at Florida newspapers. Goodgame replaces interim chief editor Rich Oppel, a former editor of the Austin American-Statesman, who plans to retire.