WASHINGTON — Charles Peters, founding editor of The Washington Monthly and its editor-in-chief for three decades, died Thursday at age 96.

In confirming his death in his Washington home, the journal reported that Peters had been in declining health for several years, mainly from congestive heart failure.

Peters, a native of Charleston, West Virginia, brought an influential neoliberal voice to the politics of his day, challenging the left as well as the right in political circles cleaved along those ideological lines. He served as the magazine’s editor from 1969 to 2000.

The author and journalist James Fallows, who began his career at the magazine, told readers of Peters’ death on the journal’s website.

“He matters in the ideals he has set for his country,” Fallows wrote. “That it should be patriotic but not jingoistic, that it can respect the military without being pro-war, that it can celebrate ambition and entrepreneurship without forgetting those left behind, that it should be skeptical of government failures precisely because effective government is so crucial to America’s success.”

He said Peters’ wife, Beth, had been caring for him with hospice support in the same Washington house where they had lived since coming to the capital in 1961.