Dwight Macdonald in East Hampton, New York, 1979.
Courtesy: Nick Macdonald
DWIGHT MACDONALD, A “CRITICAL (UN?)AMERICAN”
CUM LAUDE ON THE “AMERICAN ‘HONORS LIST’” OF SUBVERSIVES
If there was one thing that J. Edgar Hoover fiercely cherished, it was the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the incorruptible, all-powerful guardian of America from its nefarious enemies, both domestic and foreign. From 1924 to 1972, Director Hoover carefully sculpted his proudly held image of the honest G-man through a public relations campaign that portrayed the Bureau in a flattering light in books, magazine articles, newspaper reports, films, radio programs, and eventually television shows.1
From this sensitivity grew a tradition of trying to counter any individual or group that threatened what Hoover saw as the integrity of the agency that he had crafted into an Argus-eyed behemoth—indeed, into one of the most powerful national police forces in the world. As a result, innocuous though the threat might have seemed, it did not pass the Bureau’s watchful gaze unnoticed when a little-known Trotskyist-anarchist-pacifist journalist had the audacity to scribble a few lines of defiant graffiti on Hoover’s masterwork.
In 1942, puckishly defiant journalist Dwight Macdonald (1906–82) tweaked Hoover’s nose in a fledgling, left-wing, New York little magazine and thereby ran afoul of Hoover’s massive public relations machine. Because of Macdonald’s activities on behalf of various radical causes and his writings in the quasi-Trotskyist intellectual quarterly Partisan Review—destined to become the leading literary journal of the post-war era yet still relatively unknown outside New York intellectual circles—FBI agents compiled a dossier on Macdonald in the spring of 1942. They tracked his life since 1929, noting the places he worked, the articles he wrote, and the political affiliations he established. Their fact gathering was spotty: for instance, they claimed that Macdonald (usually spelled “McDonald”) was a registered Communist Party (CP) member in New York in 1937 and thereafter broke with the party. In fact, Macdonald was never a CP member; he despised the Stalinists, chafed at party discipline from commissars of all kinds, and was a consistent enemy of orthodox Soviet communism and its fellow travelers throughout his long career.
Dwight Macdonald was, however, a heterodox socialist and (as one FBI agent put it) “Trotzkyite.” In September 1939, following the Nazi-Soviet pact in August and the subsequent invasion of Poland by the Germans and Russians, he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which had been formed from a Trotskyist group that had split off from the Socialist Party. During the previous year, after serving as a staff writer for Henry Luce’s Fortune and contributing regularly to various Trotskyist magazines in the mid-1930s, Macdonald had joined the editorial board of Partisan Review, which at this time was sympathetic to Trotskyism. In 1943, Macdonald broke with his PR colleagues and in 1944 founded his own magazine, politics (which he always proudly lowercased). He had fallen out with editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips over support for the Allied war effort and on a variety of cultural matters. Macdonald wanted to express with unbridled freedom his own idiosyncratic anti-war views and hold forth on what he regarded as the lamentable state of American radicalism.2
The FBI began keeping tabs on Macdonald once he started raising money for politics from like-minded former (and current) Trotskyists and/or Socialist Workers Party members. Macdonald probably would have been pleased to know that he remained on the Bureau’s checklist of political radicals for a quarter century. He would have agreed with E. L. Doctorow that an FBI dossier placed one “on an American ‘honors list.’”3 He might have been chagrined to learn, however, that he never rose to the august level of “security risk” (unlike his former assistant, Irving Howe, a onetime politics editorial board member and Trotskyist).4
The FBI’s agents struggled vainly to make sense of where Macdonald fit in the broader picture of American dissent. They could never quite get a handle on him, though they pursued him for decades, to use Oscar Wilde’s phrase, with “all the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.”5
Macdonald’s FBI file totals more than seven hundred pages—hundreds more than suspect writers (such as Ernest Hemingway or Dashiell Hammett) or other former Trotskyist intellectuals (such as Howe). Scrutiny of its contents not only furnishes a fascinating snapshot of what was happening in one corner of the Left in the middle decades of the twentieth century but also anatomizes how a uniquely gifted—and burdened—intellectual engaged with his times as the political landscape altered and his social and cultural convictions evolved.
Although the FBI’s failure to comprehend the American radical scene led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Macdonald’s politics (and politics), that alone does not fully account for the Bureau’s confusions about him. The fact is that Macdonald was a gadfly and avowed outsider—and he was sui generis, as Czeslaw Miłosz noted.6 Fundamental to his sometimes puzzling eclecticism and irrepressible distinctiveness—and an abiding source of his interest today—was his conservative ethos. For although Macdonald was invariably a left-wing anti-capitalist whose political stands zigzagged from Trotskyism to anarcho-pacifism to quietism to liberal anti-communism to born-again New Left radicalism, he was fundamentally a cultural conservative on aesthetic matters and a vocal highbrow defender of traditional cultural norms. Radical by conviction, Macdonald was conservative in temperament and taste, and this made him an unabashed champion of established classical standards and even a curmudgeonly elitist in his later years. He came to hate avant-garde art and lashed out at both the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Unlike most of his fellow intellectuals associated with Partisan Review, Macdonald supported awarding the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos in 1948. A great admirer of sophisticated European modernism, Macdonald condemned the poetry for its anti-Semitism, but he praised the judging panel for having conferred the prize on the basis of literary quality, leaving aside all political considerations, including the fact that Pound was accused of treason for his participation in Italian fascist propaganda against the Allies during World War II. Macdonald noted approvingly that no such state-supported award honoring the autonomy of art could possibly be given in a fascist or communist country.
And yet for concerned citizens today, the ultimate significance of the FBI’s misguided pursuit of Dwight Macdonald is not the stale joke that “U.S. intelligence” is a contradiction in terms, let alone that Macdonald is a forgotten literary burnout. Rather, it is that we Americans need to remain wary of official rationales for invading our privacy, which invariably invoke issues of “national security” or “patriotism” or even the “public good.”
Equally notable in light of the Bureau’s misconceptions about Macdonald is his freelance style—in life as well as in literature. For if ever there was an “individualist” whose eclectic career amounted to its own one-man, quixotic crusade, it was Dwight Macdonald. Czeslaw Miłosz once called him “a totally American phenomenon in the tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville—‘the completely free man,’ capable of making decisions at all times and about all things, strictly on the basis of his personal and moral judgment.”7 It is this Macdonald, the moralist and outsider, who speaks to so many libertarians of our time and yet also wins allegiance from cultural conservatives (Christopher Hitchens) and academic radicals (Alan Wald). His anti-statism, his anarchist impulse, his Veblerian distrust for the academy and its pretensions, his impassioned defense of cultural norms and the Western literary tradition: these capacities are indispensable field artillery in the ongoing culture wars of the twenty-first century. For all these reasons, Macdonald should still exert a claim on our interest and attention today.
DWIGHT MACDONALD, MCDONALD, MACDONALD HAD A … JOURNAL
In the course of circulating fund-raising letters in late 1943 for politics, Macdonald caught the attention of the FBI, which opened another dossier on him and launched a fresh investigation into his activities. What especially piqued the FBI’s interest was the correspondence between Macdonald and a potential contributor to the magazine, Victor Serge, whose real name was Kibalchich. The Bureau believed that Macdonald was trying to arrange for Serge to settle in the United States. Serge was an ex-Communist and prolific author whose rejection of Stalinist orthodoxies and fierce commitment to democratic socialism had rendered him persona non grata in the Soviet Union. Although the independent-minded Serge was a fearless critic of the Bolshevik state’s claim to represent revolutionary socialism, the FBI regarded him as a dangerous subversive who should be kept out of the United States at all costs. He was living in Mexico when Macdonald contacted him about contributing an article to politics. The FBI was compiling a list of writers who represented national security threats, and Macdonald’s name joined that growing number. Unlike the case of Irving Howe, however, a Security Index file was never formally opened on Macdonald.
The Bureau’s probe of Macdonald’s activities intensified in 1944 after he founded politics, which he almost singlehandedly published, edited, and even wrote during the next five years. With a bureaucratic mix of clumsiness and thoroughness, the Bureau carried out a background check on Macdonald—spelling his name incorrectly as MacDonald or McDonald even after he became an internationally recognized writer. They also began to monitor his mail; copies of Serge’s letters to him can be found in Macdonald’s dossier. Checking the magazine’s office, the Bureau discovered to its surprise that politics’ entire staff consisted of just three people: Macdonald; his wife, Nancy; and a secretary/assistant, Dorothy Frumm. The Bureau then launched an investigation of Frumm, finding nothing of significance.
The Macdonald file serves as an ironic commentary on the FBI of the mid-twentieth century, exposing yet another huge blind spot when it came to the Bureau’s surveillance of the American Left. The Bureau tended to equate everyone on the left with communism, since few agents were familiar with the immigrant origins and European context of radical politics in America.8 The FBI viewed anyone with a liberal or radical past as suspect for tolerating communists and defending their constitutional rights. The Macdonald file reflects little awareness of the sectarian battles that raged within the American Left. The lasting impression is of a sense of bewilderment on the part of various agents as they try to disentangle the complex connections among rival left-wing groups. Macdonald’s dossier possesses significant historical and political value, offering a revealing glimpse of the vicissitudes of post-war U.S. intellectual life—seen from the veiled side of government intelligence documents—as the American Left lurched along in turmoil during World War II, through the Cold War, and into the era of the Vietnam War protests.
OR DWIGHT “MCCARTHY”?
On January 26, 1944, J. Edgar Hoover ordered a full-scale investigation of Macdonald and his new journal. On April 6, the Albany branch of the FBI’s New York office filed a report, “Dwight Macdonald alias McCarthy.” The name McCarthy had already appeared occasionally in the FBI reports on Macdonald, indicating that their agents claimed he was a well-known Stalinist in Washington, D.C., in 1937. The FBI periodically would record the possibility that Macdonald was (to use the then-current phrase) “a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.” The source for this misconception was an informant who had read (and misunderstood) Macdonald’s magazine.
The FBI seldom took such regional office reports as the last word. Yet the very claim that Macdonald (“alias McCarthy”) was a Washington, D.C., Stalinist operative in 1937 reflects the Bureau’s confusion about American radical politics. In 1937, when Macdonald was supposed to be agitating for Stalinism in the nation’s capital, he was living in New York and embroiled in literary politics, devising strategies and tactics with his fellow Trotskyists for seizing Partisan Review from the Stalinists who had founded the magazine in 1934 and still controlled it. He was also involved that year with John Dewey’s American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, which was challenging the accusations against Trotsky emerging from the Moscow purge trials—scarcely the activities one would associate with a Stalinist.
It is not apparent whether the FBI ever cleared up its New York/Washington, D.C., “Doppelgänger Dwight” identity confusions. Toward the end of Macdonald’s file, which closes in the early 1970s, however, the references to him as a Communist dwindle. Nonetheless, the mix-up attests to the FBI’s uncertain grasp of the nature of the wartime and post-war American Left.
The April 1944 report also includes an up-to-date thumbnail biography of Macdonald: his various residences, his financial status, the names of his wife and children, and a review of the first two issues of politics. Subsequent reports obtained from what the FBI called “confidential informants whose identity is known to the Bureau” dispute the contention that Macdonald was a Stalinist or Communist sympathizer. One informant told the FBI not only that Communist Party orthodoxy repelled Macdonald but also that he could not abide even the milder variant found among Trotskyist sects. He could not in fact stomach the shibboleths of Soviet ideology, especially after the start of the war in September 1939 and Trotsky’s murder the following August. The informant stated that Macdonald “left the [Socialist] Workers Party in 1941 because he could not accept Bolshevism in its original form. He believed that Leninism as practiced in Russia had failed and believed a Socialist revolution unlikely but thought that new ways and means would have to be devised in order to accomplish it.”9
Another instance of Macdonald’s opposition to Stalin’s Russia was gathered from FBI informants. They noted that he had been arrested for disorderly conduct on August 30, 1940, outside the Soviet consulate in New York, where he was protesting Stalin’s alliance with Hitler.
Another “confidential informant” told the FBI that Macdonald was secretary of an organization including influential anti-Stalinist leftists (such as James T. Farrell, Sidney Hook, Norman Thomas, and Edmund Wilson) that was created to protest the pro-Soviet film Mission to Moscow (1943), a Hollywood drama designed to strengthen the wartime alliance with “Uncle Joe.” Based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, ambassador to Russia from 1937 to 1939, Mission to Moscow was a full-scale whitewash of Stalin’s crimes and his purge trials. The film also rationalized the Nazi-Soviet pact as a step forced on Stalin by the West.10 One would think Macdonald’s anti-Soviet stance would have satisfied Hoover that politics represented no real threat to the nation’s security. It also should have alerted the Bureau to the complexities of American intellectual radicalism and some of the distinctions between the anti-Stalinist Left and the Stalinist Left at this time.
But it did not. The Bureau’s agents stayed on Macdonald’s case. They even took out a subscription to politics “through a confidential mail box maintained by the New York office.” Macdonald would probably have been gratified to learn that the Bureau was a paid subscriber, given that politics struggled throughout its five-year history and never gained more than five thousand subscribers.11
The FBI’s assiduous monitoring of the wartime politics unearthed no juicy scandals or bombshell revelations. Much of the magazine’s anarchist-pacifist, anti-capitalist, and anti–New Deal editorial line seemed unexceptional to FBI agents. Still, the FBI was puzzled by Macdonald’s left-wing anti-communism, especially when the USSR was a valued ally during the war years. FBI agents continued to deliver periodic reports of politics’ contents, all of which they forwarded to the main office in Washington. Hoover found nothing much of interest.
HOOVER’S “GESTAPO IN KNEE-PANTS”
That all changed in the post-war years. Macdonald commissioned an article in 1947 on Hoover and the FBI by a freelance writer, Clifton Northbridge Bennett, a self-declared anarchist and pacifist. Hoover was thin-skinned about even discreet private criticism, let alone any public castigation of the Bureau; he made strenuous efforts (with considerable success) through his public relations machine to ensure that only positive stories appeared.
By the early post-war era, Hoover’s close working relationship with leading Washington politicians of both parties and with the nation’s print barons and broadcast media newsmen guaranteed a constant stream of positive propaganda about his intrepid G-men. Their job was made easy because Hoover also had enjoyed “a good war.” To glamorize the FBI’s roundup of Nazis or pro-Nazi sympathizers in the United States, Hollywood added to Hoover’s aura with The House on 92nd Street (1945), a highly successful film about the breakup of a Nazi espionage gang in New York. Hoover was so pleased by the film that he entered into a deal with Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century–Fox studios to make a film every year based on FBI cases. The two men soon clashed, however, and the project fell through.12
So the last thing Hoover wanted was for some muckraking, fellow-traveling Commie editor with a Leninist (or Trotskyite?) goatee and his hireling hack writer to dig up dirt on the director and his beloved Bureau—and then to publish it in their un-American scandal sheet. Macdonald and Bennett, however, were not intimidated by the FBI’s reputation or cowed by Hoover’s publicity machine. In April 1947, Bennett wrote to Hoover requesting an interview for his forthcoming article. Hoover was suspicious, refused to grant the interview, and then ordered that Bennett be investigated. The ensuing inquiry riveted the FBI’s attention on politics once more.
The Bureau report on Bennett uncovered that he had been arrested by the FBI in 1945 for draft dodging and spent more than a year in jail before being released in December 1946. The report also asserted that Bennett was officially connected to politics, though FBI agents were not yet certain just how. In fact, he was writing his exposé of the Bureau as a freelancer. The report also noted that Bennett toured the FBI facility in Washington in 1947 and subsequently asked to meet with an FBI agent. At the meeting he asked a number of searching, uncomfortable questions that aroused the suspicions of the agent, who immediately drew up a report and sent it to Hoover.13
How Hoover dealt with unfavorable publicity can be gauged from the fact that the FBI thereupon contacted Bennett’s parole board to see if there was any evidence to recommit him to prison. The parole board rejected that step on the grounds “that persons of Bennett’s type would welcome this type of action and would therefore consider themselves martyrs.”14 The New York office told Hoover that Bennett’s research agenda was to write “another smear attack against the Director.”15 Even gossip columnist Walter Winchell, then at the height of his popularity and quite cozy with Hoover, entered the fray. He got wind of Bennett’s article and had his secretary forward a copy to Hoover, receiving a “Dear Walter” letter of thanks from the director in return.16
Hoover’s ire was now aroused. In a memo written in late 1947 or early 1948, Hoover ordered Bureau agents to “keep an eye on MacDonald [sic] and his publication. He must have resources to put this out. He could easily be used by Commies even though he may claim to be pacifist.” The FBI also checked the funding of politics to determine if any Stalinist front organizations were financing the journal.17
Hoover was apparently convinced that politics was a Stalinist front, a complete misreading of Macdonald and his magazine. Why the Bureau thought that Stalinists would back Macdonald—at a moment when politics was publishing a series of bitter assaults on Stalin’s Soviet Union—is mystifying. Did they deem the series a clever ruse, an instance of Stalinist machinations, or an attempt at a disinformation campaign? Or was it another mini version of a nascent Popular Front strategy that would unite Stalinists with anarchist-pacifist intellectuals? Macdonald’s dossier furnishes no clear answer.
Shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, Macdonald adopted an even harsher anti-Soviet line. He began castigating Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, as a Stalinist dupe. Some of Macdonald’s politics columns on Wallace appeared in Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948), a fierce polemic that dismissed Wallace and his supporters as Stalinist hacks. Evidence of Macdonald’s vociferous anti-communism and anti-Stalinism occasionally emerges in the FBI reports but never registered with Hoover, especially after Bennett’s article appeared in the Winter 1948 issue of politics. It represents a classic case of how out of touch the FBI was with the post-war left-wing scene in America.
Bennett’s article, “The F.B.I.,” is a sustained critique of the Bureau. Written in plain prose, it traces the full development of the FBI under Hoover’s leadership since the 1920s. Bennett implies that Hoover built his reputation falsely, even noting that his law degree was conferred without a written thesis. Bennett also points out that many of Hoover’s articles and books, which Bennett describes as “lurid, alarmist, and imaginative with regard to fact,” were ghosted by a professional writer, Courtney Ryley Cooper. Here especially, Bennett hit a raw nerve with the publicity-conscious Hoover.18
If that weren’t enough to rankle Hoover, a section of Bennett’s article bore the title “Gestapo in Knee-Pants.” Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo made Hoover apoplectic. Bennett also cast doubt on two of Hoover’s proudest accomplishments. First, Bennett claimed that Hoover had exaggerated his role in the arrest of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the head of Murder Inc. Second, Bennett contended that the Nazi saboteurs who landed in New York had not been hunted down by an FBI dragnet but rather had simply been betrayed by one of their own. Hoover was incensed. But he granted that he could not do much about politics—and he did not need to do much. Short of funds, politics was appearing sporadically; with its circulation declining, it was near collapse.
THE 1950S: “WHO IS HE?”
Shortly after the appearance of Bennett’s piece, the FBI’s New York office informed Hoover that Macdonald was planning to close down the magazine in early 1949. After this report, Macdonald dropped off the FBI’s radar screen. He had in any case become disillusioned with the political scene and was now preoccupied with the world of culture, where he would channel his iconoclastic energies throughout the next decade, supported by his well-paid position as a freelance writer with the New Yorker.
Although his name would occasionally surface on one of the FBI’s periodic investigations of American left-wing movements in the 1950s, the FBI lost interest in Macdonald during these years: he was not on any FBI watch list or its Security Index. Nonetheless, he still surfaced occasionally in FBI reports as a “Communist” or Communist Party member, as the FBI reports failed again and again to sort out intelligibly the plethora of leftist factions, wings, and sects. One frustrated agent wrote to Hoover that conducting interviews with members of the Socialist Workers Party and other Trotskyist groups was difficult because they “tend toward argument,” an understatement that Macdonald would likely have affirmed with his trademark response on hearing such ingenuous obtuseness: a loud and long guffaw.19
Throughout the 1950s, the FBI collected Macdonald’s articles from both the New Yorker and the London-based Encounter, for which he wrote occasional pieces. But agents found little that interested them. Hoover had forgotten him. In an April 1958 letter to the FBI’s New York office about a negative New York Times review of his latest book, Masters of Deceit, Hoover noted that “Dwight Macdonald” was mentioned in passing in the review. “Who is he?” queried the director.20 So much for the impression that politics and Macdonald had made on the FBI a decade earlier.
The biting review of Hoover’s book in the New York Times, with its reference to Macdonald, triggered yet another investigation of “subversive” intellectuals. The FBI gathered up its old dossiers on Macdonald, but the only new information entered into his file concerns his role in protesting the pro-Soviet Conference on World Peace in March 1949—generally known as the Waldorf Conference, because it occurred at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In its report the FBI describes Macdonald as a well-known “anti-Communist” and notes that his questions from the floor “attempted to turn the Conference into an anti-Soviet inquisition.”21
Macdonald’s name crops up periodically in FBI reports of the 1950s, primarily when he traveled abroad. For example, in the mid- and late 1950s, the Bureau tracked his trips to England and Argentina, though, here again, the FBI agents discovered little of interest. Hoover must have been aware that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was monitoring Macdonald’s activities (and soon putting him on its payroll—albeit without Macdonald’s knowledge—as an editor of the FBI-subsidized Encounter). Macdonald’s name also turns up in connection with the campaign to secure clemency for Morton Sobell, who was convicted in the Rosenberg spy case. But Macdonald was a peripheral figure, and Hoover was no longer concerned about him.22
MY COUNTRY, DWIGHT OR LEFT
Even as the FBI lost interest in Macdonald, his activities abroad were arousing the interest of the CIA and the State Department, precisely because of the negotiations that Encounter had commenced with him to become the associate editor of the magazine, replacing the staunchly pro-American Irving Kristol. Encounter, a London-based magazine supported by an American foundation and affiliated with the anti-Soviet Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), was a special project in the CIA’s cultural campaign to promote the superiority of Western civilization over Sino-Soviet communism. The agency was secretly funding the magazine as part of its clandestine “Free World” outreach program to Europe under the auspices of its Paris-based front organization, the CCF. Macdonald occasionally contributed to the magazine, as did many other members of the PR circle.
Yet it was something completely different for him to be working in London as the American editor of Encounter, where he would presumably have regular contact with members of the British Committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and visit on a regular basis the CCF’s Paris headquarters. He would inevitably learn all about the magazine’s background and funding. This did not so much concern the CCF’s executive director, Michael Josselson, who simply assumed that Macdonald was cut from the same cloth as most of the members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), such as Kristol, Diana Trilling, Sidney Hook, and others. But ACCF members were alarmed and aghast. Josselson was surprised and dismayed to discover that Kristol and Hook, along with a majority of the other members of the ACCF, strongly objected to Macdonald receiving the nod as Kristol’s replacement. Josselson had made a firm offer to Macdonald but soon backpedaled. Josselson tried to soften the rejection essentially by buying Macdonald off, appealing to his sense of adventure and his distaste for a conventional editorial desk job. Josselson’s new gambit was simply to make Macdonald a contributor based in London, with no reduction in salary and even more freedom to travel.23
For practically anybody else, especially a working writer interested in promoting his own career by establishing his credentials on the international scene, this change would have been very welcome news. But Dwight Macdonald immediately perceived the snub and was outraged. Josselson was coming to understand that his friend Dwight was a congenital iconoclast whose reputation in New York was that of a mercurial gadfly. Yet Macdonald was also no fool, and after a few weeks of vituperative breast-beating, he calmed down and saw the benefit of Josselson’s revised offer. Macdonald became an assistant editor and agreed to a one-year experiment during which he would serve as a kind of roving London-based correspondent.
Because Macdonald was traveling so much and enjoying his London activities and the new social world that it opened, his stay during 1956–57 was uncontroversial until shortly before his departure. What triggered the explosion, which worried voices on the ACCF had forecast and feared, was a Macdonald submission to Encounter that was rejected because it was deemed excessively critical of the United States. Macdonald later published it in another London-based magazine, Twentieth Century. But he fired off a proud, sharp letter to the editor of that periodical in December 1958, protesting the editorial introduction to “America! America!,” Macdonald’s essay that had appeared in the October issue. The editors of the British magazine had written that they “would not publish Dwight Macdonald’s spirited and witty comment on American life” if Macdonald himself were not “a good American.” Macdonald replied that “patriotism has never been my strong point.” He continued, “I don’t know as I’d call myself A Good American. I’m certainly A Critical American, and I prefer your country, morally and culturally, to my own.”24
Macdonald had published his essay in Twentieth Century after Encounter had withdrawn its acceptance and rejected the piece. Macdonald suspected that Encounter had reversed itself on political grounds because his piece was sharply critical of Eisenhower-era America. Macdonald voiced his suspicions in a short Dissent essay published in the autumn of 1958. The issues were especially complicated because Macdonald had served as an editor of Encounter (1956–57) and because its editor-in-chief (who had accepted and then rejected “America! America!”) was Kristol, a friendly acquaintance and fellow member of their New York intellectual circle. Kristol was indeed under political pressure from the CCF and its administrative secretary, Josselson. On first reading the Dissent piece, which also appeared in October in New York, an enraged Josselson wrote to John Hunt, a CCF staff member who was soon to be promoted to executive secretary of the international office of the CCF in Paris, that “America! America!” was “the most anti-American piece I have ever read and belongs in Literaturnaya Gazeta.”25
Five months later, Josselson wrote from the CCF offices in Paris to Kristol about “Dwight’s little introduction to his ‘America! America!’ in Dissent.” Josselson ridiculed Macdonald’s “two exhibitionist pieces about America that you and Stephen [Spender] were wrong in accepting in the first place. Dwight is mistaken if he thinks we were afraid of losing the support of some of the foundations if Encounter published his silly piece about America. I don’t know how he ever got that idea.”26
But Macdonald was right in his surmise about the “foundation” support generally and about the fate of his essay in particular. In 1967, news broke that the CCF and its magazines had been funded from the outset by the CIA. Later it became known that Josselson himself was on the CIA payroll. Josselson, who remained on friendly terms with Macdonald despite all their political disagreements, wrote to him, “In the whole business there’s nothing I’m ashamed of—except for the letter I wrote you about your Encounter piece on American life. My very next trip to the US showed me how much more you were in touch than I was. I am sorry to say I didn’t apologize to you then and there.”27
Indeed, when the revelations about the CIA’s surreptitious funding of the CCF exploded in 1967, Macdonald professed to be shocked and outraged. He complained loudly to any available ear that he felt humiliated as “a CIA stooge.”28 Such wails of pained protest, however, simply confirmed the perceptions of his intellectual colleagues that he was a political buffoon, a jokester more in love with a good quip than with serious analysis.29 To Irving Howe, Macdonald possessed a “table-hopping mind.” Daniel Bell mocked him as “the floating kidney on the Left.” Indeed, Macdonald could mothball intellectual fashions, but his own mercurial political enthusiasms rivaled the rise and fall of women’s hemlines.30
Consistency never was Macdonald’s strong suit. Yet it is also true that he was not taken seriously—especially by pure political types such as Hook and Rahv—because his sense of humor was unusual in the rarified atmosphere of the Partisan Review crowd, where comedy was considered something for the borscht belt. By the late 1940s he was in danger of being marginalized. His fellow PR editor, William Barrett, summarized the ultimate verdict of their intellectual community when he later wrote that for Macdonald, “every venture into politics was a leap toward the Absolute. … He was a kind of Don Quixote or Galahad, tilting at windmills in quest of the Holy Grail.”31
THE 1960S: BACK TO THE BARRICADES
Another glancing blow at the windmill called Hoover—another bold leap to stomp on the director’s photogenic public face—got under Hoover’s skin and drew the Bureau back to Macdonald’s case in the 1960s. This new act of Macdonald bravado exposed the gap between FBI publicity and reality. Once again, the circumstances highlight Hoover’s sensitivity regarding his public image.
The occasion was Macdonald’s slashing review in the March 1962 Esquire of a film sympathetic to the FBI, Experiment in Terror. Released by Columbia Pictures, directed by the highly regarded Blake Edwards, starring Glenn Ford and Lee Remick, and produced with the cooperation of the San Francisco FBI office, the film purported to show how the Bureau caught a bank robber and kidnapper. The film was a popular and critical hit. But Macdonald characteristically remained unimpressed. He found the film simplistic, nothing more than another exercise in Hollywood hagiography, a made-to-order product aiming to beatify the FBI. Reporting to Hoover on the Esquire review, FBI agents noted that Macdonald “does not like the movie. This is of no concern to us except that Macdonald uses the occasion to viciously criticize the FBI.” One line from Macdonald’s review surely ruffled Hoover’s feathers: “It has been clear to me for a long time that J. Edgar Hoover is as adept at public relations as he and his G-men are inept at actual detective work.” (The FBI memo quoted this passage from Macdonald’s essay.)32
So Macdonald was investigated—yet again. The Bureau retraced the same old ground, but this time Macdonald stayed on the FBI’s radar, if only intermittently. This monitoring coincided with Macdonald’s renewed interest in U.S. politics, especially electoral politics. Macdonald was undergoing yet another sea change in his personal and professional life as the 1960s opened. He found his political interests revived in the new decade by the Vietnam anti-war movement and the student power movement. Now in his sixties, Macdonald was radicalized by these twin causes, both of which Hoover was convinced were controlled by the Communists.
For Macdonald, the 1960s became a heady replay of the 1930s. He admired the actions of the student protesters who took possession of university buildings, boycotted classes (and denounced unsympathetic faculty), and marched in pro–North Vietnamese demonstrations. Suffering from a severe writer’s block and drinking heavily, he bristled on hearing expressions of worry from family and friends. Angrily declaring himself “an alcoholic, damn it,” he embraced the movement, finding a radical cause again, responding to an inner voice calling him to mount a new barricade in the name of Revolution.33 Macdonald also came to the attention of the FBI briefly in another context in the mid-1960s. The Bureau was asked to investigate him in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson decided to hold a White House Festival of the Arts in June. Oddly, Macdonald had been placed on the guest list. Inviting Macdonald turned out to be a major mistake on Johnson’s part: Macdonald cleverly exploited the event as a high-profile opportunity to militate against the war by gathering signatures for an anti–Vietnam War statement. Of course, from the point of view of the White House and those sympathetic to America’s conduct of the war, Macdonald spent his visit making a general nuisance of himself.34
That is how the Johnson White House later downplayed it. Yet Johnson’s ill-timed White House Festival of the Arts—a literary gala intended to emulate the Kennedy administration’s courtship of the world of culture—represents a watershed moment in American intellectual history, and Macdonald put in a show-stealing cameo appearance in the drama. For one brief and shining moment, as it were, the festival vouchsafed the exuberantly outspoken, irresistibly feisty Dwight Macdonald another fifteen minutes of fame and caused the vigilant gaze of the G-men to fall upon him. This last consequential episode in these odd-couple meetings between the earnest G-men and the PR highbrows further illuminates why the Bureau failed throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, even as the Cold War thawed out, to understand the American left-wing intelligentsia in general and ex-Trotskyists such as the PR writers in particular.
Dwight Macdonald at La Salle College (now La Salle University), in Philadelphia. Along with Frank S. Meyer, a prominent libertarian conservative and editor of National Review, Macdonald participated in a panel discussion on “The Future of American Politics” on November 15, 1963, just a week before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Macdonald occasionally visited Philadelphia at the invitation of his friend, the European historian John Lukacs, who taught part-time at the college. As the 1960s wore on, Macdonald typically addressed political issues, most often his opposition to the Johnson administration’s escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Courtesy: La Salle University Archives
As in the case of the Whittaker Chambers material in Lionel Trilling’s FBI file, the documents related to this single event in which Macdonald enters in a walk-on role—the June 1965 festival—represent the highlight of Macdonald’s dossier. Moreover, this section of Macdonald’s FBI file spans almost one-fifth of the total (118 pages) and provides a fascinating glimpse into how the worlds of culture and politics intersected during the opening years of America’s Vietnam saga. And this first and only White House Festival of the Arts stands today as the sole major example in modern America of a joint cooperative venture in the arts between the federal government and the intellectual elite. Indeed, the Kultur clash between the Johnson politicos and the liberal intellectuals in 1965 possesses broad implications today. It signaled the end of a period of mutual admiration between Democratic leaders in Washington and the liberal intelligentsia. Decades of suspicion and mistrust of liberal and radical intellectuals would follow, not only minimizing the impact of public intellectuals specifically but also bearing more widely on issues dealing with both government policies in the arts and standards of decorum in contemporary intellectual life.
A BAD FAIRY’S “DAY AT THE WHITE HOUSE”
A series of unforeseen developments propelled Macdonald to the epicenter of controversy in the spring of 1965 as the minidrama of the White House Festival of the Arts unfolded. A rejected invitation turned out to be the opening act—followed by a tragicomic climax and denouement.
Among those invited to the festival in late May 1965 was Robert Lowell, the much-admired New England Brahmin man of letters who was widely regarded as the unofficial poet laureate of the nation. Johnson’s advisers selected Lowell to represent America’s writers, and he initially accepted the White House invitation. But he had second thoughts after discussing the matter with some of his confreres in the literary-intellectual community, especially novelist Philip Roth and Robert Silvers, the coeditor of the New York Review of Books. In early June, Lowell sent a rejection to Eric Gold-man, the Johnson White House’s “intellectual in residence” and the planner of the gala. Lowell also published a letter in the June 3 New York Times that expressed his disapproval of the administration’s foreign and military policies, especially the escalation of the Vietnam War, which was turning America into “an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation.” Addressing the president personally, Lowell continued, “Although I am very enthusiastic about most of your domestic legislation and intentions, I nevertheless can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust. … I know it is hard for the responsible man to act; it is also painful for the private and irresolute man to dare criticism. At this anguished, delicate and perhaps determining moment, I feel I am serving you and our country best by not taking part in the White House Festival of the Arts.”
Twenty artists and intellectuals, including Alfred Kazin, signed a telegram sent to the Johnson White House in support of Robert Lowell’s June 1965 decision not to participate in the Festival of the Arts. Their reason, which Lowell had also voiced, was that they had become “more and more alarmed by a stance in foreign affairs which seems increasingly belligerent and militaristic.” They were, of course, referring to the escalation of American participation in the Vietnam War. All the names are blacked out in the FBI file except for Hannah Arendt, whose name appears first because the signers had listed themselves in alphabetical order. (Kazin’s name is not blacked out in his own file.)
At this point Macdonald was invited to the festival as a representative of the intellectual community. The letter of invitation had obviously gone out before Lowell’s statement appeared in the New York Times, which his supporters backed by sending a telegram to Johnson. On June 4, the Times printed the telegram, endorsed by Macdonald and twenty other distinguished signatories, including Hannah Arendt, John Berryman, Lillian Hellman, Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Mark Rothko, and Robert Penn Warren. Having cosigned as an expression of support for Lowell, Macdonald was now in a quandary. He had not expected to receive a White House invitation and was not sure what to do. Yes, he realized, consistency would have required him to reject the invitation. But to repeat: consistency had never been Dwight’s strong suit.
No, controversy was. Macdonald therefore decided to attend the festival, as he later insisted in “A Day at the White House” (his seven-thousand-word piece that ran in the New York Review of Books on July 15, 1965), so that at least one critical observer “would be there to report on just what went on.” It was, he conceded, “a complicated, inconsistent, perhaps absurd tactic,” but he deemed it essential to have added at least one “bad fairy at the christening.” Or as he later wrote, “I sacrificed, not for the first time, consistency, and possibly even good taste, in the interest of a larger objective.”35
Eric Goldman at the White House was perplexed. His fresh and wondrous idea was rapidly turning sour. He believed that Macdonald “hoped I would disinvite him” because he supported Lowell’s protest. When Macdonald asked if he was still welcome, Goldman replied that “he had been invited without any test of his attitude toward the president’s foreign policy—in fact, with full knowledge of his hostility to the Vietnam War.”36 Such a statement was very noble but also more than a bit naive. For as practically all of cultural New York had known for decades, Macdonald was invariably a loose cannon prone to firing off in all directions. Or more: Dwight could be dynamite.
With respect to at least one significant detail, however, Goldman was not fully candid with Macdonald. Goldman did not explain that before issuing the invitation, the White House—acting at the behest of a key Johnson adviser, Marvin Watson, the president’s top hatchet man—had ordered an FBI check of Macdonald and the other potential invitees.
The FBI dossier covering mid-1965 on Macdonald (repeatedly misspelled here as McDonald) furnishes keen insight into the mentality of a Johnson White House already under siege as the Vietnam conflict heated up. The file also reveals how the FBI investigated and monitored the intellectuals. The file is comprehensive: in addition to editors at the New Yorker, Commentary, Random House, and other publications, the two senators from New York, Jacob K. Javits and Robert F. Kennedy, were interviewed about Macdonald. Twenty-three other persons, including professional associates, social acquaintances, and former and present neighbors were also interviewed.
Yet Macdonald’s file is at the same time rather amateurish and off-target. The reason for the ineptitude is that the FBI was plunging into largely uncharted waters, probing a cultural world about which its agents were almost totally ignorant. The FBI dutifully gathered information on Macdonald from his birth to the present. But the outcome was a compendium of the comical and the trifling. For example, one FBI memo noted that in January 1958, Macdonald addressed a forum of the “Young Socialists League” in New York on the topic of “mass culture versus high culture.” A January 28, 1965, memo reiterates the old misinformation that Macdonald “was well-known in communist circles, under the name of McCarthy.” But the memo elaborates on the 1944 file, making clear that “communist” encompassed Trotskyism for the reporting G-man: “The Albany office of the FBI also interviewed a former communist revolutionary in Birmingham, AL who had known Macdonald. His name was Hall, and Macdonald had visited Birmingham to research a Fortune article. Hall briefed Macdonald on the labor picture locally as background for the article.” Macdonald was “not friendly to Hall at the time,” which “might have been due to [blacked out] Party connections. Macdonald had a reputation as a Trotzkyite [sic] at the time.” (The FBI agent repeatedly writes “Trotzkyite.”)
That spelling howler would have amused Macdonald to no end—and perhaps even elicited a boffo essay on political language either to match his sterling critiques of the Revised Standard Bible and of Vice President Henry Wallace’s speechmaking or to rival Macdonald’s brilliant parodies of Hemingway’s later prose style and of Douglas MacArthur’s foul-mouthed pep talks to the troops. The rationale for ordering an extensive FBI background check on Macdonald was equally risible. It was occasioned not by his invitation to the upcoming gala. Rather—amazingly enough—the White House was considering Macdonald for a position in the administration’s anti-poverty program. “And if this be the case,” one informant told FBI agents, Macdonald “would be a highly suitable choice for such a program.”
If one takes that recommendation straight—rather than as an attempt to feed the G-men a line—its basis can only be Macdonald’s New Yorker cover story on poverty in early 1962 and his well-known radical sympathies for the underclass. And it is certainly true that Macdonald played a cameo part in the launching of the anti-poverty program by popularizing Michael Harrington’s book on the state of the poor, The Other America (1962). One of Macdonald’s associates at Esquire, probably publisher Arnold Gingrich (all names are blacked out in the FBI files but the context suggests Gingrich), informed the Bureau that Macdonald’s review of The Other America had come to President Kennedy’s personal attention and sparked Johnson’s War on Poverty.37
Perhaps Macdonald’s intellectual friends at the White House from their times together in New York—among them trusted Kennedy advisers who were still in positions at the Johnson White House, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith—had drawn JFK’s attention to Macdonald’s New Yorker essay.38 Nonetheless, the notion that Macdonald might have been seriously under consideration for a staff position in the Johnson administration, serving in a program that would become the cornerstone of the president’s Great Society, stretches credulity. In fact, the thought that Macdonald, by nature a crotchety malcontent and maverick, would be considered for any bureaucratic appointment, is quite beyond imagination.
This portion of Macdonald’s FBI file makes especially fun reading. Several memos expressed indignation that Macdonald was critical of “the FBI and the director,” noting that he had edited politics and that the magazine’s winter 1948 issue “contained a vicious attack on the director and the Bureau from a self-styled anarchist [Clifton Bennett] who received a five-year sentence in 1945 as a draft dodger.” The FBI memo also mentioned that Macdonald had “falsely criticized the FBI” in his November 1962 Esquire review of Experiment in Terror.
But the FBI agents did not simply zero in on Macdonald’s criticisms of Hoover and his men. They sniffed throughout the country for information about Macdonald’s past. They did a decent job of assembling a thumbnail biography of Macdonald and a detailed chronology of his manifold activities. Still, their unfamiliarity with both the complex history of American radicalism and of the arcane subtleties of left-wing sectarian politics steered them onto some strange and misdirected byways.
The G-men correctly established the basic facts of Macdonald’s life, family background, and education. When they discussed the implications and significance of this material, however, they often went astray. For example, they correctly noted that Macdonald worked for Fortune in the early 1930s but listed him as one of its founders, a point that would surely have surprised both his employer, Henry Luce, the real founder, and Macdonald himself.
In another report, the FBI accurately wrote that Macdonald had a long record of opposing Soviet communism and was highly critical of Stalin. But here in particular, they were obviously uninformed about the nuances of American radical politics. Some of the sources whom they interviewed for information about Macdonald gave implausible interpretations of his various shifts in political positions, which Bureau agents reported as if they were indisputable facts.
For example, one source, probably Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review—here again, the name is blacked out yet the context indicates Rahv—pulled the FBI’s leg with several bits of amusing disinformation. He told the FBI not only that Macdonald was “anti-communist, anti-Stalinist, and anti–Red Chinese” (accurate) but also that politics—Macdonald’s radical magazine advocating “anarcho-pacifism”—was “strictly of the non-political type.” Given the journal’s title, this statement is quite a whopper. Moreover, since the charge “nonpolitical” was precisely the accusation that Macdonald had fired off in politics against Partisan Review’s increasing emphasis on cultural and artistic topics in the early post-war era, the report shows Rahv’s own love of vengeful mischief and much-underrated sense of roguish humor—both well-known Macdonald trademarks. The same source also described Macdonald as an “amateur anarchist.” The FBI agents recorded this observation but made no comment on it. Either they took it also at face value or, perhaps more plausibly, had no clear idea what the term meant.
Continuing the playful disinformation, a number of informants described Macdonald as an upstanding citizen and even “a loyal American.” A New Yorker colleague stated that “nothing had ever come to his attention during the past thirteen years which would cause him to question the appointee’s morals, political affiliations, or choice of associates.” This colleague knew of “no reason why the appointee should not be placed in a position of trust with the United States government.” Another New Yorker colleague stated that “the appointee is one of the greatest literary critics in the United States today” and that “his intellectual curiosity and his ability to write his thoughts are unquestioned,” though he “never looked upon [Macdonald] as a very conventional individual.” Still another New Yorker colleague stated, “Macdonald and members of his family are individuals of excellent character and ones who are loyal American citizens.” The source also laughably maintained that Macdonald “has always handled himself in an excellent manner and has always been well-behaved,” further claiming “that Macdonald does not drink alcoholic beverages to any extent.” Even Macdonald’s casual acquaintances were well aware that such statements were ludicrous. Delivering more half-truths, the informant described Macdonald as having a rather flamboyant personality, as a person who likes to argue a point for the sake of argument. However, Macdonald was always pleasant during these periods of argumentation. Indeed, for anyone who knew Macdonald even slightly, perhaps just a single encounter at a social gathering, these statements in toto amount to an hilariously absurd portrait. They could in fact form the basis for a wondrously unforgettable humorous essay à la Macdonald’s bravo sendups, which even extended to literary lightweights such as James Gould Cozzens and Colin Wilson.
An editor at Commentary (probably Norman Podhoretz, who worked closely with Macdonald on a few pieces) was also interviewed. This editor, too, emphasized that Macdonald was “anti-communist and anti-Stalin” and that “there is no question of Macdonald’s loyalty to the United States.” The FBI agent noted approvingly that Commentary is “one of America’s foremost anti-communist periodicals.”
A reference at Random House, probably Jason Epstein, another member of the New York Intellectual circle, told the Bureau that he had known Macdonald for twelve years and that he was “a man of high morals and character. His reputation in the literary field has been above reproach.” The FBI memo concluded that this interviewee “would recommend him as a loyal citizen capable of assuming a position of trust and responsibility.”
A source at New York University, possibly James Burnham (who had belonged to the same Trotskyist sect as Macdonald in the 1930s), reported that he had known Macdonald since the mid-1930s and that he “is the type of writer who writes what he believes, and if he has been wronged he would turn around and write that which was correct. Macdonald has always written on anything regardless of what it was, just so long as he believed in it.” Another interviewee also spoke about Macdonald in similar terms, telling the FBI that he had known Macdonald professionally and socially for more than twenty years and that he is “a person of the highest integrity” and is “incapable of telling a lie.”
Among other aspects of its data gathering, the FBI tracked down the numerous places where Macdonald had lived, his trips abroad, how he had voted in past elections, and where he had banked and what his credit status was.39 (The Bureau even checked up on his brother, Hedges, a conservative banker who was a vice president of Northern Trust Company in Chicago.)
Always a fierce critic of corporate capitalism, probably the cavalier, improvident Macdonald would have laughed about the fact that he had an excellent credit rating. Macdonald’s favorable record probably resulted from his years of marriage to his first wife, the wealthy radical activist Nancy Rodman, whose inheritance had bankrolled politics (and whom Dwight’s magazine had virtually bankrupted by the time of its demise in 1949). The FBI also investigated the couple’s divorce, documenting the court records and interviewing several participants in the proceedings.40 They found nothing sensational or embarrassing about the divorce. In fact, after initially refusing to be interviewed, Nancy cooperated fully and said only positive things about her ex-husband.
The FBI interviewed at least twenty-five individuals for information about Macdonald as part of a White House background check. Among the references were both former classmates at Yale University and fellow intellectuals associated with the leading magazines of the 1960s. All of the references recommended Macdonald unhesitatingly; he was “a loyal citizen capable of assuming a position of trust and responsibility.” One of the sources apparently was Mary McCarthy, who “recommended the appointee very highly for any position of trust and confidence.” Likely these sources were tweaking the nose of the FBI agents. Surely some of his intellectual contemporaries were well aware of his notorious 1958 article in Twentieth Century in which Macdonald specifically repudiated the intended praise of a British editor that he was a “Good American,” insisting instead that he was (in his own proud phrase) a “Critical American.”
As part of its investigation, the FBI also contacted the two senators from New York, Macdonald’s home state. Javits, a liberal Republican, voiced a highly favorable opinion of Macdonald, though Kennedy claimed to have no knowledge of Macdonald. This was disingenuous, to say the least. As Michael Wreszin points out in his superb biography of Macdonald, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (1994), Macdonald and Kennedy had exchanged correspondence early in 1965, with Macdonald prodding the senator to denounce Johnson’s Vietnam policy.
However improbable, the FBI’s final report on Macdonald was wholly approving. The overall judgment was that Macdonald was a distinguished literary critic with strong opinions who was beyond doubt a “loyal American.” His vociferous attacks on the Bureau and on Hoover himself went mysteriously unmentioned.41
When the Festival of the Arts opened on June 14, 1965, therefore, White House officials believed that everything would go smoothly and that they had a good idea of what to expect from Macdonald and the other guests. In his memoir of his White House years, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, however, Goldman claims that he wasn’t so confident. True, he was buoyed by the fact that he had gathered a distinguished cross section of the American intellectual community. The list included first-rate novelists (John Hersey and Saul Bellow), respected poets (Mark Van Doren and Phyllis McGinley), a few recognized painters and sculptors (Mark Rothko), plus the main speaker for the festival (the renowned conscience of American foreign policy, George Kennan). Despite this impressive lineup, however, Goldman had been worried about the festival for months—since the February letter in the New York Times from Lowell and the other signatories. Johnson himself took a dim view of the proceedings, distancing himself from the planning details, adopting a pose of Olympian disdain, and all the while expecting the worst from those East Coast liberals whom he typically referred to as “the Harvards.” (The event was officially hosted and organized by Lady Bird Johnson.)42
The White House social secretary, old Johnson friend Bess Abell, immediately put her finger on the problem on hearing about Goldman’s idea. “These people,” she remarked of the intellectuals, “can be troublesome.”43
How right she would prove to be! And none of “these people” more fully amounted to a life-size, walking, gesticulating, radicalized definition of “troublesome”—complete with anachronistic Leninist goatee—than Dwight Macdonald.
A MACDONALD “SPECTACULAR”: “EYEBALL TO EYEBALL” WITH CHARLTON HESTON
On June 14, Macdonald arrived in Washington armed with a statement he had drafted (along with Tom Hess of Art News) announcing that attendance at the festival in no way signified support for the administration’s foreign policy. Throughout the day and into the evening, an increasingly disheveled Macdonald—he was wearing a rumpled suit, white shirt sans tie, and tennis shoes for the occasion—buttonholed (and in at least one exchange challenged and provoked) other invitees, asking them to sign his petition.
Macdonald never shied away from making a scene—indeed, making scenes was a Macdonald specialty—and his behavior during his infamous “Day at the White House” led, not surprisingly, to unpleasant run-ins with several of the guests. African American novelist Ralph Ellison spurned Macdonald, calling his actions “arrogant.” The painter Peter Hurd objected that circulating a critical petition “when you are a house guest is just plain uncivilized.” Saul Bellow, after first agreeing to sign, reconsidered on the same grounds, arguing that it was an offensive way to act as a guest in someone’s house. (Macdonald countered that the White House belonged not to Johnson but to all Americans.)44 In a 1975 letter, Macdonald criticized Bellow’s “flimsy/odd reasons” for attending and reading at the White House Festival: “To confront the truth/actuality of his role at the Festival would have forced Saul to the kind of new self-understanding and rejection of his old values that Ivan Ilyich had to make.”45 Years later, in an interview with Michael Wreszin, Bellow—a Partisan Review contributor and close colleague of several New York Intellectuals who was already shifting rightward in reaction to the counterculture and escalating anti–Vietnam War protests—lashed back. He countered that Macdonald “pranced into the rose-garden like Pan in tennis shoes—a sex-symbol on a political mission.”46 (Macdonald was also the object of Bellow’s satire in Humboldt’s Gift, appearing in the figure of Orlando Higgins, the nudist proselyte and intellectual lightweight.)
Macdonald had his most direct and disagreeable encounter with the actor Charlton Heston, who arrived just after performing another one of his many screen roles featuring world historical figures (in this case Michelangelo). Heston was a featured guest at the festival: the administration had selected him to close the daytime program by serving as narrator for a short documentary celebrating post–World War II American cinema. Heston and Macdonald got into a shouting match about the appropriateness of Macdonald’s behavior. (Macdonald was always good at raising the decibel level in his discussions.) When Heston refused to sign the petition, according to an organizer of the event who witnessed the exchange, Macdonald pilloried Heston as “a lowbrow lackey of Hollywood.”47 According to Macdonald, Heston said during their “eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in the Rose Garden” that Macdonald’s actions showed an utter lack of manners and that it was “arrogant” for “mere” intellectuals (mere was Macdonald’s word) to question the administration’s foreign policy. After all, claimed Heston, the White House and the State Department “must” know more about international affairs and about what the country needed than did Dwight Macdonald and his radical cronies.48
Although Macdonald professed not to harbor any disappointment, his petition had little success. He and Hess approached between forty and fifty people, and only a handful signed: Goldman says seven, Macdonald nine.49 Goldman claims a certain vindication for his brainchild by noting that more than four hundred people attended the festival, yet only a handful endorsed Macdonald’s petition. Or as Lady Bird Johnson later cracked, “I’ll take a 397 to 7 majority any time.”50 Yet in the higher calculus of American cultural politics, that landslide margin equated to nothing more than a pyrrhic victory. The numbers really added up to a public relations “disaster” (Goldman’s word) among the intelligentsia and glitterati.51
Macdonald seemed quite pleased with his performance, however. By supporting Lowell’s protest, he believed that he and Hess had sent a jarring message that spread dismay within the White House. Macdonald ended his essay on the festival by quoting Alexander Herzen’s observation about a literary attack against the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I: “It was a shot that rang out in the dark night. … It forced us all to awaken.”52
If so, the slumbering Johnson White House awoke to a hellish nightmare—and the aftereffects of Macdonald’s actions proved more complicated than he allowed in his retrospective on the day. The Johnson administration’s decision to sponsor the festival tumbled the president and his advisers into a policymaking disaster in the world of culture that would soon escalate into a proto-Vietnam—this time, of course, a quagmire on the home front pitting him anew against another hated enemy to the north, Johnson’s domestic bête noire, the liberal East Coast intelligentsia.
The hubbub before and during the festival doomed such events for the future. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton invited entertainers and musicians galore—ranging from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson—but no administration in the past five decades has possessed the assurance (or the audacity) to invite a disparate troupe of politically minded intellectuals and artists to the White House. The risks of another smashup have seemed too great.
That fact, too, is part of the “tragedy”—the word is strong yet not exaggerated. Goldman’s high-minded dream of bringing together the worlds of politics and culture crashed around him. It appears in hindsight as the pivotal event marking the break between the government and the nation’s leading critical intellectuals. From another angle, the failure of the White House Festival represents the first historical signpost on the road to ruin between the American presidency and the intellectuals as it races downward from the Vietnam War era to the Watergate Affair between 1965 and 1974. Although the Reagan White House of the 1980s and later Republican administrations have been quite hospitable to right-wing intellectuals—especially the neoconservatives—liberal intellectuals have experienced an enduring alienation from Washington, with only liberal policy wonks developing close relationships with later Democratic administrations.53
Despite his breezy piece about the festival in the New York Review of Books, Macdonald himself had second thoughts about his White House conduct, composing two letters that indicate that he privately reevaluated his behavior and judged it less than tasteful. Writing to his son, Nick, on July 6, 1965, Macdonald defended his actions during the White House visit. Nick essentially echoed the criticism of his father’s opponents, arguing that it was not right to come “as a guest to some place, only to run around and knife him in the back.” Dwight replied that the festival was a public event and “those who attended it had a right to express … their disenchantment with the things being done in Vietnam and Santo Domingo.” Dwight did admit that he might have been wrong to circulate the petition against Johnson. But he maintained, “I decided it was at least as much a public celebration as a private affair.”54
Macdonald also backtracked somewhat in a December 8, 1965, private letter to his closest friend, Nicola Chiaromonte, who chided him for his behavior at the festival. Macdonald admitted that Chiaromonte’s criticisms hit home. But then Macdonald made light of the entire incident and dismissed Time’s report on the festival, which had also chastised him for acting in poor taste. In a letter of protest to Time, Macdonald said its account omitted his waggish remark about his grounds for attending: “I like to review spectaculars and this one promised to be even more spectacular than Ben Hur and King of Kings put together”—a good line that gains additional resonance in view of Macdonald’s shouting match with Charlton Heston, the star of Ben Hur.55
MEMORIAL FOR A REVOLUTIONIST
The 1965 White House Festival of the Arts represents the closing act of Macdonald’s colorful and controversy-laden career and the final instance of the FBI’s close attention to him. As the 1960s progressed, Macdonald increasingly displaced his prodigious critical energies into anti-war activism: his return to the radicalism of his youth was largely an attempt to distract himself from his literary impotence and dependence on the bottle. By the mid-1960s and even more so in the 1970s, he found it nearly impossible to complete any intellectual projects he had undertaken—and his journals show that he lacerated himself mercilessly for this failure. He wrote very little of any consequence during his last dozen years. In 1967 he gave up reviewing movies for Esquire to write a monthly political column; it soon petered out. Instead, he began teaching at various colleges and universities, which gave him a perfect excuse for reneging on his prior literary commitments and declining new assignments.
Why were anti-war activism and college teaching not enough to fulfill Macdonald? By all accounts, he was an excellent teacher. Beginning in 1956, he taught both at major universities and at commuter campuses, among them Northwestern University, Bard College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Hofstra University, the State University of New York at Buffalo (for several semesters), and John Jay College of the City University of New York. When he taught in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin as a distinguished visiting professor (with feigned patrician pretentiousness, he delighted to cite his academic title), he was sometimes the only faculty member at campus rallies sponsored by the local SDS chapter. Excited to listen to Esquire’s movie critic discourse on contemporary cinema, the students enjoyed his course on film history. Both the Daily Texan and the Austin American-Statesman were filled with reports of his political pronouncements, and several Daily Texan pieces featured him on the front page.56
But this was not enough. Macdonald’s fundamental identity was that of a writer. He regarded teaching as a sideline—he was “like a tennis bum” at universities, he felt, because teaching was “more output than input”—rather “like mining, an extractive industry,” not a productive activity such as farming or manufacturing.57 As he wrote in one journal entry in the 1970s, “I am a writer and I must keep in contact with my mother earth, or like Antaeus I begin to die. If character is destiny, MY character is a monochrome = 100% writing.”58 During one of his frequent attempts to find a visiting professorship, he wrote to a friend that he wanted desperately to teach because his flow of written words was “dammed to a trickle.”59 And Macdonald damned himself for that. He demanded from himself “100% writing.” And so—like Antaeus—he began to die.
Nobody was tougher on Macdonald’s unproductivity than Macdonald himself. By contrast, his editors and publishers were far more understanding, even though by the mid-1970s, Macdonald seldom delivered on a writing commitment—not the study of mass culture, not the book on Edgar Allan Poe, and above all not his long-planned intellectual autobiography. He could do little more than relive the past by updating or gathering together old work—for example, adding a few postscripts to a reprint of a selection of his old politics pieces (originally published as Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 1957) and collecting in a separate volume some of his later essays (Discriminations, 1974). It was all due to his “Bartleby neurosis,” he told one scholar in 1973 as he backed out of a promise to write a preface to her critical study of Poe, explaining (in his biographer’s words) that he “could not write anything more than a letter—and not many of them either.”60
The coup de grâce had been quietly delivered a few months earlier. In 1972, a supremely patient William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, finally insisted that the lovable “Dwight” relinquish his office; Macdonald had written nothing in the magazine for nearly a decade. His participation in the protest movement of the 1960s was his way of investing his life with a new, enlarged significance. But he was just a marginal figure in the protest scene as far as the FBI was concerned. Additions to his file dwindled as the decade advanced.
The FBI followed Macdonald’s anti-war agitation of the 1960s but mentioned him only in passing. For example, when fifty people walked out in protest against a 1967 speech by Vice President Hubert Humphrey before the National Book Conference, the Bureau noted that Macdonald was among the protesters. In December 1969, Macdonald and Dr. Benjamin Spock participated in an anti-war march on the Department of Justice. Once there, he beseeched young men to turn in their draft cards as a form of protest. FBI agents investigated him once again—this time for organizing draft dodgers—but decided that since Macdonald “is not a member of any basic revolutionary group, no recommendation is being made at this time for inclusion of his name in the Security Index.”61
Ironically, it was a repeat of the story from a decade earlier: “Who is he?” Macdonald couldn’t ever get the FBI to take him seriously for very long. And so, much to his likely disappointment—if he had known—Macdonald quietly faded from the FBI’s attention after 1970, much as he also did from the national intellectual and literary scenes. Sporadically memorialized by the publications for which he had once served as a mainstay, he died in December 1982 of congestive heart failure, largely a forgotten man.62 His fame had passed long ago. He was an old-fashioned libertarian deemed no longer relevant—either to his “herd” of fellow intellectuals or even to the FBI agents who snooped on them all.
FROM LUCE TO LENIN TO LENNON
Macdonald’s celebration of the counterculture of the 1960s, which extended even to enthusiasm for the Yippies and for the student demonstrators who occupied professors’ offices and closed down colleges, confused the FBI even as it disturbed (or outraged) many of his New York Intellectual colleagues (particularly Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook, both of whom were shifting sharply rightward by this time).
In hindsight, Macdonald erred in his blithe enthusiasm for the student radicals and counterculture faddists, whereby he undermined the very traditions and norms of excellence that he otherwise championed. Such misjudgments represented a political and moral surrender that has had long-term, disastrous consequences. The counterculture of the 1960s has given rise to the anti-intellectualism that currently pervades the American academy, which has witnessed the ascendancy of intellectually fashionable theories such as multiculturalism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. Furthermore, that decade marked the beginning of the eclipse of serious print culture by the pop cultures of video and MTV. Today infotainment, soft porn, and debased language infest our cultural life. One encounters them everywhere, vomited by an indolent, sensation-seeking media whose barrages of images and sounds displace the written word. The outcome of all this slovenliness is a zombie-like state of shallow thinking bereft of introspection, “the gramophone mind,” in the phrase of George Orwell, Macdonald’s cherished pen friend and politics contributor.63
Macdonald’s career is both an exemplar and an omen for us today. As was true for Lionel Trilling, it is no surprise that the FBI, whose agents were seldom versed in the dialectical disputes within the sectarian Left—let alone in the nuances of intellectual debates in New York—did not comprehend such a nonpareil individualist as Macdonald. They failed to appreciate how he was, if not a “Good American,” indeed a “Critical American.” Macdonald’s complicated sociopolitical coordinates, short-lived impassioned enthusiasms, and seemingly inexplicable lurches of allegiance every few years—from Luce to Lenin to Lennon, as it were—did not make it any easier for Hoover’s G-men. His seismic ideological shifts—from mainstream liberalism to radical libertarianism to “anarcho-pacifism” to “I Choose the West” pro-Americanism to (finally) SDS/counterculture activism—baffled the FBI even as it frustrated the majority of Macdonald’s rightward-turning coevals. Most of them patronized “Dwight” as a political thinker because he seemed to wax hot and turn cold with alarming and unpredictable frequency. Virtually all his colleagues were much steadier and more sober in their political commitments.
The photo originally appeared in Columbia Today under the title “Anarchist Dwight Macdonald.” The larger, official Columbia University commencement was relocated for security reasons to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The so-called countercommencement occurred on June 4, 1968.
Courtesy: Columbia College Today
Both his admirers and his detractors today should understand all this about the dazzling, dappled, sometimes darkish rainbow of selves that populated Macdonald’s conflicted inner life. The whole man possessed and often gloried in his apparent contradictions, for he “contained multitudes,” in Whitman’s phrase, that included both the bracing cultural critiques and the sometimes ill-considered ideological enthusiasms. The latter ought not to obscure the former. However we assess the FBI’s surveillance of him, that fact is vital in coming to terms with Macdonald himself.
Nor should Macdonald’s sad end invalidate his three decades of outspoken, often solitary protest as an eloquent dissident voice writing “against the American grain” (in his 1962 essay collection of that title).64 His years as a one-man magazine staff in the mid- to late 1940s, when he edited politics, shine forth as a radiant example of how an intellectual both becomes a national resource and may serve as moral conscience and voice in the wilderness. Present-day readers and writers need to keep alive the unbowed critical spirit and lonely intellectual courage, notwithstanding his sometimes unfortunate political judgment and misplaced social idealism, that Dwight Macdonald exemplified at his best.
And his best—in his politics and his politics, as he both lived it and wrote it—was very good indeed. It remains a summons and inspiration for concerned citizens today.