In the autumn of 2000, I was visiting the United States and watched the televised debates with keen interest. Of the four men—two presidential candidates and two running mates—the one I really took to was Dick Cheney. Maybe the competition wasn’t so strong, what with the inarticulate George W. Bush, the well-meaning but wooden Al Gore and the smirking Joe Lieberman. By contrast, Mr. Cheney seemed relaxed, bien dans sa peau, with a faraway smile playing on his lips as if to say, You mean you’ve just discovered that America is a plutocracy? Tell me about it!

What a long time eight years can seem: We have since been disabused of many illusions. It’s easy (and quite right) to mock those who actually believed the transparently specious things Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and—please don’t forget—Tony Blair said to justify their needless and illegal invasion of Iraq. But how many of us honestly foresaw the moral as well as political disasters that would befall the American republic in consequence of the "war on terror" and the Iraq war?

Who really envisaged another war, on the Constitution, due process and the rule of law? When Mr. Bush said on Oct. 11, 2000, in one of those debates, "I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way, so should you.’ … I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations," were we really supposed to guess that "our values" would come to mean torture and murder?

We know now, and we know more about Mr. Cheney. He’s the central figure in The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s riveting and shocking new book, and not the least of the themes to emerge from it is that we’ve witnessed something new in American history: the imperial vice presidency. Bush sycophants have given up trying to persuade us that W.’s folksy manner conceals a sharp mind and forceful personality. To borrow a line a Tory politician once used of a colleague, behind that bumbling buffoonish exterior there lurks a bumbling buffoonish interior.

But Mr. Cheney is a very different matter: hard, smart, ruthless, driven, a man who for decades, as Ms. Mayer says, has been "secretly practicing for doomsday." Once upon a time, this was to take the form of nuclear war, but his zealotry adapted itself to the "war on terror," with the help of such colleagues as David Addington, a formidable ultraconservative lawyer. ("No one stood to his right.") He shares the obsession of Mr. Cheney and his fellow "Vulcans," or conservative nationalists, about the "erosion of presidential power and authority" since the disasters of Watergate and Vietnam—an erosion they were determined to undo.

At other times, that might have been almost a matter for academic legal debate; in the circumstances following Sept. 11, restoring presidential power meant that "we’ll have to work sort of the dark side," in Mr. Cheney’s words that give Ms. Mayer her title. Legality, custom and even humanity were discarded, while Congress, the media and the public were all for the moment silent, in what might be called a state of shock and awe.

To begin with, Ms. Mayer shows, not for the first time but in dismaying detail, what a catastrophic failure Sept. 11 was on the part of the intelligence services. There may have been an element of overcompensation in the way that the C.I.A. subsequently adopted what not long before would have been unthinkable means. Criticism of the C.I.A. and those means was brushed aside by the White House, with Mr. Bush saying, "We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man [George Tenet] alone," and Mr. Cheney brutally threatening to portray Congressional Democrats as weaklings or cowards if they stood in his way.

Within weeks of Sept. 11, Cofer Black of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center had proposed the use of death squads for deliberate assassination, something Congress had specifically outlawed years earlier. But now Congress was inert and punch-drunk, as would be shown by the dismal manner in which it authorized the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force," thereby abdicating its fundamental constitutional right to declare war.

Even the most cringingly flag-waving congressmen would maybe have thought twice if they’d known just what was happening. Administration lawyers were privately arguing that statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention and surveillance without warrant could be set aside.

Before long, in a fine display of task-sharing and globalization, interrogation was being outsourced: The Egyptians and Syrians could be relied on to use methods from which even the much admired Jack Bauer might have shrunk. Forgetting namby-pamby ethical questions (and they surely did), what the vice president and his cabal forgot was the old and well-established principle, known to so many intelligence services, that information extracted under duress is of dubious or no value. As grim cases described here show, men will say anything just to stop the pain.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and at the same time The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post published an earlier secret memo from senior administration officials authorizing the use of any torture short of "near-death," Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were outraged, although one feels they might have concentrated a little harder a little earlier on what was afoot. Even then, "neither had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies." Mr. Addington for his part was also incensed—because the scandal might mean the "torture memo" would have to be withdrawn.

A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION NEEDS to be made. In war, people are murdered and atrocities are committed on all sides. During World War II, Allied soldiers sometimes killed prisoners. Norman Lewis, the great English travel writer, described in his enthralling book Naples ’44 how he’d seen a British army officer savagely beat an Italian civilian he was questioning before telling his sergeant to take the man out and shoot him; and in that same campaign, French colonial troops regularly practiced gang rape (an untold story of the war until recently).

But these things did not in themselves mean that the war was wrong—and they were certainly not winked at by the Allied governments of the time, still less formally approved. What’s truly unprecedented is that Bush-era criminality—what Americans would without doubt call war crimes if they were the work of any other country—was institutionalized, and at the highest level: "Bush also knew about, and approved of, White House meetings in which his top cabinet members were briefed by the C.I.A. on its plans to use specific ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques." Don’t forget that Verschärfte Vernehmung ("sharpened or enhanced interrogation") was the exact phrase the Gestapo used for its own methods.

Back in October 2000, Mr. Bush said of his opponent, Mr. Gore, "I’m not exactly sure where the vice president’s coming from, but I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, ‘We do it this way, so should you.’" We have since learned where Mr. Bush’s own vice president was coming from. Have Americans fully realized the extent
of the damage done to their values, how ugly their country has come to seem and how immensely difficult it will be for the next president to make good that damage?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus), The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane) and, most recently, Yo, Blair! (Politico’s). He can be reached at books@observer.com.

THE BLAIR YEARS: THE ALASTAIR CAMPBELL DIARIES
By Alastair Campbell
Alfred A. Knopf, 794 pages, $35

By now we surely all know that Senator Joseph McCarthy was quite right: He just spoke 50 years too soon. His words about “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men” gave a remarkably good description of the way the Iraq war was hatched and launched by the Bush administration, with considerable help from Tony Blair.

And from Alastair Campbell: As Mr. Blair’s press secretary, spin doctor and consigliere from 1994 to 2003 (the Karl Rove of the Blair government), Mr. Campbell was a key player in the “New Labour project,” standing hatchet-faced at his capo’s side while Mr. Blair won the first two of his three general elections. Mr. Campbell had a more important role than all but a few others in weaving the web of misrepresentation and deceit on which we were taken to war.

Once Tony Blair had promised George Bush that he would support an invasion, this had to be justified, and from the summer of 2002 to the following March, Mr. Campbell worked tirelessly to this end, concocting the specious “dossier” which claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed a lethal armory ready for use within 45 minutes. Above all he will be remembered for the first months of 2003. In February he prepared the still more infamous “dodgy dossier” about W.M.D., supposedly hot intelligence but in reality cobbled together by Mr. Campbell and his fellow conspirators at Downing Street from any sources they could find on the Internet, including out-of-date academic writings which were cut-and-pasted, typos and all.

When the invasion took place and no W.M.D. were found, Andrew Gilligan of the B.B.C. said matter-of-factly that the government had “sexed up” the intelligence, as indeed it had. At this point Mr. Campbell (who has been described as the most pointlessly combative person in existence) picked an epic fight with the B.B.C., a story not at all fully or candidly covered in The Blair Years, the diaries Mr. Campbell has now published.

To tell it as briefly as possible, Mr. Campbell determined to “fuck Gilligan,” as he characteristically put it. This involved “outing” or exposing one of the reporter’s sources, the distinguished W.M.D. authority David Kelly, who was hounded to his suicide. A hearing was held by Lord Hutton, an honest but obtuse judge, whose report seemingly exonerated Mr. Campbell. The chairman and the director general of the B.B.C. resigned, Mr. Campbell preened himself before leaving his job—and yet polls showed that the British people had decided the B.B.C. was right and the Blair junta wrong, which was of course the case. Oh, and have I mentioned what happened in Iraq?

IT WAS LONG KNOWN THAT Alastair Campbell was keeping a diary; he used to boast to friends that it would make him more money than a best-selling thriller, and he has been paid a reputed $3 million for the book. When General George C. Marshall retired (the great Chief of Staff in World War II, Secretary of State, and Defense Secretary, he who inspired McCarthy’s premature words), a New York publisher offered him an advance of $1 million for his memoirs, an unheard-of figure more than 50 years ago. But he courteously declined, saying that it would be making a private profit from public service. We have put away such namby-pamby notions, or, it would seem, any idea that a prime minister should have stopped his press aide keeping a secret record of confidential conversations with government colleagues and foreign rulers for subsequent and lucrative publication.

If nothing else, then, The Blair Years ought to be a useful historical record, and it does have some interest, if not of the kind the writer intends. Mr. Campbell admits that he has not only shortened the original but heavily censored it to remove most of the content about the bitter feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer for 10 years and now Mr. Blair’s successor, because “I have no desire to make it harder for anyone, let alone Gordon.” Since that feud was the central theme of the past 10 years, these diaries have been shorn of a large part of their value.

But there is more to it. During the Hutton hearings, passages from Mr. Campbell’s diaries were produced in evidence, in the abbreviated, almost shorthand form in which he kept them, which is markedly different from the form in which they have now been “written up” for publication. That must raise questions about authenticity, questions raised in other ways also.

He wrote in November 1994 that “I loved these chats with Robin [Cook, who would be Mr. Blair’s first Foreign Secretary, who resigned in protest at the Iraq war, and who died suddenly two years ago] because he managed to combine innocence, wit and political dexterity.” Then in May 1995, Mr. Campbell is smitten by Princess Diana (one of the comic subtexts is that he thinks she found him attractive, when she was obviously just fluttering her eyelashes as she did at every man): “drop-dead gorgeous, in a way that the millions of photos didn’t quite get ... there was something about her eyes that went beyond radiance.” My emphasis—but why the past tense? Neither Cook nor Diana was dead at the time these entries were supposedly written, so one must infer that they have been doctored—sexed up, one might say—with the same careless clumsiness that Mr. Campbell showed in another context: The author of the dodgy dossiers has now given us his dodgy diaries.

In other ways their value is diminished. The great diarists, from Pepys on, have lived through events worth recording and met people worth knowing, but they evinced personal qualities—self-awareness and self-honesty—which Mr. Campbell entirely lacks. His unconsciousness is in fact so complete as to be almost autistic. What the excellent Catherine Bennett of the Guardian has called “this monumentally lowering book” might be a psychiatric case study. These are the diaries of an acute manic-depressive, and of a deeply troubled personality.

See the passage in April 2002 when Mr. Campbell accompanied Mr. Blair to Crawford to visit President Bush. The vital importance of that Texas meeting was that it was there, we can now be quite sure, that Mr. Blair committed British troops to an invasion of Iraq, although he pretended otherwise for almost a year and has not admitted—cannot admit—the truth to this day. But all Mr. Campbell records is an exchange with Mr. Bush. “He asked me why I wasn’t drinking and I said I was a recovering drunk. Me too, he said.” They compared notes, and Mr. Campbell (who later, with Mr. Blair, “reckoned Bush had been quite a lad in his youth, both on the booze and birds front”) explained that he’d suffered a severe breakdown in 1986.

Some of his old Fleet Street colleagues preferred him on the bottle, however violent he sometimes was, and his conduct throughout his Downing Street years displayed in extreme degree the classic dry-drunk’s hysterical aggression. One symptom was the Tourette’s cascade of obscenities that peppered his speech, and now laces his diaries: “I said to TB if she fucked him around too much, he should just kick her out”; “Fuck knows where these things came from”; “it was an immediate fucking nightmare”; “I had fucked up”; and so on, and on. The profanity is not only wearisome but plainly neurotic.

But his unconsciousness relates to deeds as well as words. Throughout the book runs a sparring match between Mr. Campbell and Peter Mandelson, his rival for Mr. Blair’s affections as intimate confidant. Mr. Mandelson was ejected from the Blair cabinet twice, in December 1998 with justice, and then in January 2001, after he had returned as Northern Ireland Secretary, most unjustly, simply because Mr. Campbell thought his head was needed to propitiate the media, and never mind the rights and wrongs. This was something a few journalists perceived at the time. “I was appalled at Robert Harris going on TV effectively saying I had pushed him out,” Mr. Campbell screeches—this after three pages in which he has described doing just that.

Here’s one of the book’s rare points of historical interest. Mr. Campbell’s account of the Northern Ireland negotiations, still seen by some as Mr. Blair’s triumph, confirms what could then be guessed inferentially, that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the leaders of the I.R.A. and its political front, Sinn Fein, ran rings around Mr. Blair: The fewer concessions they made, the more he made in return. The one person inside the Blair junta who resented this was Mandelson, who felt that Mr. Blair “was too prone to buying the line from Adams.” Just how far that was connected with Mr. Mandelson’s framing-up and firing is a truly important question for historians.

It’s also of interest to be shown (or, once again, to have confirmed) just how close the relationship was between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch, once described by another Downing Street flak as the 24th member of the Blair cabinet.

Above all, the book demonstrates the sheer baseness and cheapness of the regime that Mr. Campbell served. Over the years, some critics said that the Blair junta was obsessed with presentation to the exclusion of policy, was trivial and trashy in its obsessions, a glitzy package with nothing inside. Anyone who doubted the truth of those charges can now find them justified page by excruciating page. Polemical denunciations have been written about Mr. Blair and his government; as the author of one of them, I can only say that The Blair Years is by far the most damaging book about Tony Blair yet published—and the one real value of this book may be to disabuse those Americans who fail to see that he comes out of Iraq worse than Mr. Bush rather than better, or who still have any illusions about him at all.

Just before leaving office Mr. Blair showed his unique mixture of chutzpah and cognitive dissonance when he denounced the “feral” media. This theme is echoed by Mr. Campbell, ranting and raging obscenely at a press for which he once worked and then spent years trying to control. There’s a hilarious moment when “I had an interesting chat with Tina and Harry Evans … about how awful the modern press was,” and another, at the height of the Gilligan-Kelly affair, when “TB and I agreed that the media were a real democratic problem.”

They could not have been more right, but the real “problem” of the press, on both sides of the Atlantic, was its shameful credulity about the way we were taken to war, and its failure to expose the falsehoods we were peddled. That’s the lesson to be drawn from this dismal and utterly depressing document.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus), The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane) and, most recently, Yo, Blair! (Politico’s).

Always “Izzy” to those who knew him, he was born Isador Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907, a child of the great immigration from the shtetl. In 1938, he changed his name to the snappier version by which he became famous. Maybe this reviewer should be gratified that he once wrote as “Geoffrey Stone,” though one can only share Ms. MacPherson’s relief that he didn’t formally adopt “Geoffrey Duprion” as his name. The change to Stone was for convenience rather than to conceal his origins, which would have been absurd: “Good God, I look like a Jewish bullfrog,” he said while watching himself on television.

Whatever else in Izzy’s blood, there was surely printer’s ink. He produced his first newspaper at 14, quoting from Antigone and cheering Gandhi. By the time he reached the University of Pennsylvania, he was already moonlighting many hours a day at a local paper’s office, and he soon dropped out of college. In the 1930’s, he worked at the Philadelphia Record as an editorial writer before moving to New York and the Post, then to Washington as correspondent for The Nation, and he spent the rest of his life in the capital.

He was always a passionate man of the left, and thereby hang several problems for his biographer. An ardent New Dealer and Popular Fronter in the 1930’s, he worked in the 1940’s for PM, the New York newspaper that lasted less than the duration of that decade, and he supported Henry Wallace in his Presidential campaign in 1948. Both paper and campaign were infested by open and covert Communists.

One newspaper after another folded until, having written a cranky book about the Korean War that put the blame on South Korea, Stone began his own newssheet and found his destiny. From an initial 5,000 subscribers in 1953, I.F. Stone’s Weekly reached 70,000 before his health forced him to cease publication in 1971, by which time he was writing longer essays elsewhere, notably for The New York Review of Books.

He might have inspired an outstanding biography, but this is not it. All Governments Lie! is, to put it very gently, less than neatly constructed or elegantly written. Ms. MacPherson forgets two basic principles: The reader does not want to know everything the author knows, and general history should not be written under the guise of biography. Very many pages are devoted to historical background that could have been dealt with much more succinctly.

A number of curious stylistic tics have infected American writing. There’s the Missing Article (“biographer Ron Steel”; “journalist Richard Rovere”), and there’s the Needless Inversion (“recalled Madeline Amgott”; “a watershed tragedy for Stone was the Spanish Civil war”). On occasion the two are combined (“wrote author James Wechsler”). And while she supposes that “flaunted” means “flouted,” Ms. MacPherson has an unhappy penchant for fine writing: “the whipped-cream emptiness of the twenties”; “His heart heavy, Stone wept at war’s end”; “the continuing train wreck of Nazism seemed unstoppable.” (Doesn’t a train stop when it’s wrecked?) One chapter ends portentously, “Stone’s personal future was as uncertain as that of the world,” and then another, “Stone’s future seemed as chilly as that cold November night.” But it’s a labor of love, so let it pass.

Was Izzy a nice guy? When I met him in Washington toward the end of his life, he seemed the epitome of charm, but colleagues had earlier found him cantankerous, humorless and, if they were women, sexist. Maybe the best verdict is his own: As a kid he was “a cocky son-of-a-bitch”—and he remained that in some measure all his life.

Was he a Communist? The accusation has been raised on the right, during his lifetime by James Wechsler, and since by Ann Coulter (what a babe) among others, who now flourish—flaunt? flout?—the Venona transcripts of Soviet intelligence traffic, in which Stone appears to be mentioned as an “agent of influence.”

His biographer cannot get this right. She thrashes about in a tizzy, protesting too much and muddying the waters. She admits in a strangulated way that Stone “waffled” about Soviet Russia (though that would be because of “his faith in socialism and the antifascist front”). As well as reheating endless stale old excuses, she cooks up some of her own: “One reason for resisting criticisms of Russia back then was because the often inaccurate and antirevolutionary American conservative press bred a sense of mistrust.” This might be thought disingenuous or—as I suspect much more likely—the work of an author out of her depth and unfamiliar with the complexities and nuances of the period, although she goes beyond naïveté when she says angrily about Venona that “hoarding these files did a disservice to justice and to history.”

Although Stone met people from the Russian embassy who doubtless exaggerated his importance, he was not, as far as one can judge, a Soviet agent or even, in any serious sense, a Marxist. But for far too long he was certainly one of those who, in Dwight Macdonald’s phrase, thought that Communism was no worse than a bad cold, and the most damning evidence comes from Stone himself. He admitted later that he’d been a fellow traveler, but even his condemnations of Russia were expressed foolishly. To say in 1958, “It is easier for a critic of capitalism and the cold war to live in this country than for a critic of communism to live in Russia,” is a little like saying 20 years earlier that it was easier to be a Jewish leftist in America than in Germany. None of that meant that he was a security risk: At the height of the Cold War, the F.B.I. devoted thousands of man-hours, and large quantities of the taxpayers’ money, to trailing Stone, and this book is another reminder that, as a threat to American liberty and democracy, Joseph McCarthy was trivial compared with J. Edgar Hoover.

Was I.F. Stone a great journalist? I think he was, in more ways than one. He was the best kind of squirrel-reporter. With characteristic élan, Ms. MacPherson says of Ralph Ingersoll, the rich left-winger who published PM, “He fished with Hemingway. Dined with presidents.” Stone did neither. He didn’t even drink with Congressmen, and although he had no need to refuse the “access” he was never offered, he understood the dangers of being spoon-fed by politicians or officials.

As a colleague said, Stone got his scoops in the library. He knew the great secret that there are no secrets, and that the most revealing or even devastating information about any government can usually be found if you know where to look, often in its own publications. In the great years of the Weekly, the grist to Stone’s mill was the vast quantities of clippings and documents he silted away and pored over, all despite his appalling eyesight.

He was also an excellent writer, and it’s a pleasure to turn to The Best of I.F. Stone, which ranges from fine libertarian philippics to vivid reporting on the first United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. If the question of Communism brought out the worst in Stone, the question of Zionism brought out the best. He cried out on behalf of the doomed Jews of Europe during their torment, and he traveled “Underground to Palestine” with some of the remnant.

But he understood as early as 1945 that the Palestinian Arabs “are also human beings and … also have historic rights here,” an insight which eludes some to this day. And it’s nearly 40 years since he wrote, “To denuclearize the Middle East, to defuse it, will require some kind of neutralization. Otherwise the Arab-Israeli conflict may some day set off a wider final solution.”

If that seems chillingly prescient, look at Izzy Stone on Vietnam. He saw through the use made of the Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext for war—the W.M.D. of the time—and there are other eerie echoes besides. Most comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq are inapt or misleading, but here is Stone in May 1967: The United States can win the war “if it is prepared to put in a million men, or more, and then to slug it out patiently year after year until the guerillas are worn down. It can win if it deliberately de-escalates the firepower and meets the guerillas on their own terms, in close combat, instead of alienating the entire population with indiscriminate artillery and airpower.” A pity that The Best of I.F. Stone doesn’t appear to have been on President Bush’s summer reading list.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English author and journalist whose books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus) and, most recently, The Strange Death of Tory England (Gardners).

Always “Izzy” to those who knew him, he was born Isador Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907, a child of the great immigration from the shtetl. In 1938, he changed his name to the snappier version by which he became famous. Maybe this reviewer should be gratified that he once wrote as “Geoffrey Stone,” though one can only share Ms. MacPherson’s relief that he didn’t formally adopt “Geoffrey Duprion” as his name. The change to Stone was for convenience rather than to conceal his origins, which would have been absurd: “Good God, I look like a Jewish bullfrog,” he said while watching himself on television.

Whatever else in Izzy’s blood, there was surely printer’s ink. He produced his first newspaper at 14, quoting from Antigone and cheering Gandhi. By the time he reached the University of Pennsylvania, he was already moonlighting many hours a day at a local paper’s office, and he soon dropped out of college. In the 1930’s, he worked at the Philadelphia Record as an editorial writer before moving to New York and the Post, then to Washington as correspondent for The Nation, and he spent the rest of his life in the capital.

He was always a passionate man of the left, and thereby hang several problems for his biographer. An ardent New Dealer and Popular Fronter in the 1930’s, he worked in the 1940’s for PM, the New York newspaper that lasted less than the duration of that decade, and he supported Henry Wallace in his Presidential campaign in 1948. Both paper and campaign were infested by open and covert Communists.

One newspaper after another folded until, having written a cranky book about the Korean War that put the blame on South Korea, Stone began his own newssheet and found his destiny. From an initial 5,000 subscribers in 1953, I.F. Stone’s Weekly reached 70,000 before his health forced him to cease publication in 1971, by which time he was writing longer essays elsewhere, notably for The New York Review of Books.

He might have inspired an outstanding biography, but this is not it. All Governments Lie! is, to put it very gently, less than neatly constructed or elegantly written. Ms. MacPherson forgets two basic principles: The reader does not want to know everything the author knows, and general history should not be written under the guise of biography. Very many pages are devoted to historical background that could have been dealt with much more succinctly.

A number of curious stylistic tics have infected American writing. There’s the Missing Article (“biographer Ron Steel”; “journalist Richard Rovere”), and there’s the Needless Inversion (“recalled Madeline Amgott”; “a watershed tragedy for Stone was the Spanish Civil war”). On occasion the two are combined (“wrote author James Wechsler”). And while she supposes that “flaunted” means “flouted,” Ms. MacPherson has an unhappy penchant for fine writing: “the whipped-cream emptiness of the twenties”; “His heart heavy, Stone wept at war’s end”; “the continuing train wreck of Nazism seemed unstoppable.” (Doesn’t a train stop when it’s wrecked?) One chapter ends portentously, “Stone’s personal future was as uncertain as that of the world,” and then another, “Stone’s future seemed as chilly as that cold November night.” But it’s a labor of love, so let it pass.

Was Izzy a nice guy? When I met him in Washington toward the end of his life, he seemed the epitome of charm, but colleagues had earlier found him cantankerous, humorless and, if they were women, sexist. Maybe the best verdict is his own: As a kid he was “a cocky son-of-a-bitch”—and he remained that in some measure all his life.

Was he a Communist? The accusation has been raised on the right, during his lifetime by James Wechsler, and since by Ann Coulter (what a babe) among others, who now flourish—flaunt? flout?—the Venona transcripts of Soviet intelligence traffic, in which Stone appears to be mentioned as an “agent of influence.”

His biographer cannot get this right. She thrashes about in a tizzy, protesting too much and muddying the waters. She admits in a strangulated way that Stone “waffled” about Soviet Russia (though that would be because of “his faith in socialism and the antifascist front”). As well as reheating endless stale old excuses, she cooks up some of her own: “One reason for resisting criticisms of Russia back then was because the often inaccurate and antirevolutionary American conservative press bred a sense of mistrust.” This might be thought disingenuous or—as I suspect much more likely—the work of an author out of her depth and unfamiliar with the complexities and nuances of the period, although she goes beyond naïveté when she says angrily about Venona that “hoarding these files did a disservice to justice and to history.”

Although Stone met people from the Russian embassy who doubtless exaggerated his importance, he was not, as far as one can judge, a Soviet agent or even, in any serious sense, a Marxist. But for far too long he was certainly one of those who, in Dwight Macdonald’s phrase, thought that Communism was no worse than a bad cold, and the most damning evidence comes from Stone himself. He admitted later that he’d been a fellow traveler, but even his condemnations of Russia were expressed foolishly. To say in 1958, “It is easier for a critic of capitalism and the cold war to live in this country than for a critic of communism to live in Russia,” is a little like saying 20 years earlier that it was easier to be a Jewish leftist in America than in Germany. None of that meant that he was a security risk: At the height of the Cold War, the F.B.I. devoted thousands of man-hours, and large quantities of the taxpayers’ money, to trailing Stone, and this book is another reminder that, as a threat to American liberty and democracy, Joseph McCarthy was trivial compared with J. Edgar Hoover.

Was I.F. Stone a great journalist? I think he was, in more ways than one. He was the best kind of squirrel-reporter. With characteristic élan, Ms. MacPherson says of Ralph Ingersoll, the rich left-winger who published PM, “He fished with Hemingway. Dined with presidents.” Stone did neither. He didn’t even drink with Congressmen, and although he had no need to refuse the “access” he was never offered, he understood the dangers of being spoon-fed by politicians or officials.

As a colleague said, Stone got his scoops in the library. He knew the great secret that there are no secrets, and that the most revealing or even devastating information about any government can usually be found if you know where to look, often in its own publications. In the great years of the Weekly, the grist to Stone’s mill was the vast quantities of clippings and documents he silted away and pored over, all despite his appalling eyesight.

He was also an excellent writer, and it’s a pleasure to turn to The Best of I.F. Stone, which ranges from fine libertarian philippics to vivid reporting on the first United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. If the question of Communism brought out the worst in Stone, the question of Zionism brought out the best. He cried out on behalf of the doomed Jews of Europe during their torment, and he traveled “Underground to Palestine” with some of the remnant.

But he understood as early as 1945 that the Palestinian Arabs “are also human beings and … also have historic rights here,” an insight which eludes some to this day. And it’s nearly 40 years since he wrote, “To denuclearize the Middle East, to defuse it, will require some kind of neutralization. Otherwise the Arab-Israeli conflict may some day set off a wider final solution.”

If that seems chillingly prescient, look at Izzy Stone on Vietnam. He saw through the use made of the Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext for war—the W.M.D. of the time—and there are other eerie echoes besides. Most comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq are inapt or misleading, but here is Stone in May 1967: The United States can win the war “ if it is prepared to put in a million men, or more, and then to slug it out patiently year after year until the guerillas are worn down. It can win if it deliberately de-escalates the firepower and meets the guerillas on their own terms, in close combat, instead of alienating the entire population with indiscriminate artillery and airpower.” A pity that The Best of I.F. Stone doesn’t appear to have been on President Bush’s summer reading list.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English author and journalist whose books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus) and, most recently, The Strange Death of Tory England (Gardners).

A great journalist, Macdonald never wrote for daily newspapers and took a faintly sarcastic attitude toward The New York Times: For him and his comrades on the revolutionary left in the 1930’s and 40’s, The Times was “what Aristotle was to the mediaeval scholastics, a revered authority, even though Pagan.” Instead, Macdonald spent his life writing for magazines. He quite rightly thought that imposed brevity was the bane of papers and magazines (worse now than then). He was not a reporter but an essayist, who could develop an argument at length, and his life can be charted by the very disparate series of magazines he worked for, all but one in his hometown.

It was very much old New York that he came from, the son of a cultivated, well-to-do family, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. Macdonald remembered his school—his description of his time there has strong echoes of the account of their schooldays by English contemporaries like Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh—but ancien régime Yale left him completely untouched. When he graduated in 1928, he unenthusiastically joined Macy’s at $30 a week, left after the briefest experience of retailing and was offered a job on Fortune.

That lugubriously glossy monthly was launched by Henry Luce of Time “to celebrate the ‘saga’ of American business,” and appeared shortly after the Wall Street collapse of 1929, when many people would have given up, Macdonald observed, “but Luce had the Stalingrad spirit and persisted.” So did Macdonald, staying with Fortune until 1936 and learning how to write. But his work made him increasingly skeptical about the American capitalist system he saw at close quarters, and like so many others he moved leftward, until his life was changed by the Moscow trials.

It was very much to the credit of the American left that the trials had a much greater impact in New York than in England and France. Macdonald may have been an extreme case, and even he was amazed by “the speed with which I evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist,” a speed which some saw as indicating an open mind, “others as evidence of levity.”

In the 1930’s, New York was the most interesting part of Soviet Russia, it’s been said, since it was the only place where the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism could be played out in the open without one side simply killing the other. Macdonald joined Philip Rahv and William Phillips in resuscitating Partisan Review, formerly a Communist organ, now to become one of the great little magazines of the century, publishing T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and André Gide as well as half the best American writers of the age. The PR crowd shaded into the revolutionary-socialist movement, and from 1938 Macdonald was an active supporter, then member, of the Socialist Workers Party, the tiny but influential Trotskyist party that was something like a New York sect or cult. He even had the temerity to take issue with the Old Man far away in Mexico and, in return, received a magisterial rebuke from Trotsky not long before Stalin’s hit man murdered him.

But Macdonald wasn’t really cut out for far-left sectarian politics, partly because he had too much sense of the ridiculous. One of my favorite passages describes the Trotskyist split over the so-called Winter War of 1939-40, when Stalin invaded Finland. One faction, led by Max Shachtman and passionately endorsed by Macdonald, opposed the invasion, invoking the ideological point that Russia was now “state capitalist” and altogether no good for anything; the other, led by James P. Cannon (and Trotsky himself), supported it, because Russia was a “decayed workers’ state” bringing socialism—albeit decayed—to the Finns, whether they wanted it or not. The dispute was entirely abstract and without any practical meaning whatever, Macdonald later pointed out. His own faction did not go off to Finland to fight for Baron Mannerheim, and “the Cannonites didn’t volunteer for the Red Army (which would have shot them).”

In more than one way, Macdonald was an odd man out among the New York intellectuals. That venerable phrase contained an invisible adjective—“Jewish”—and Macdonald’s position as token gentile was often uneasy. As a young man, he had been capable of the odious anti-Semitism of his age and class, and throughout his life he was at the least what could be called Jew-conscious—literally so in the sense that he could detect the numbers of Jews in an audience of fellow radicals, or describe a demonstration in London to Mary McCarthy as including “a contingent of Jewish youth, their faces vivid with race.” He was also out of step as one of the first to say that the Palestinians had suffered an injustice with the creation of Israel, and he defended his friend Hannah Arendt in the controversy about her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. (Here I think he was mistaken: The trouble with Arendt, in that book and elsewhere, is that she’s clever and erudite, but her heart’s in the wrong place.)

So it wasn’t surprising that Macdonald’s opposition to World War II separated him from the PR crowd, for whom Hitler’s reign of murderous persecution had an obvious personal resonance. In early 1944, he began his own magazine called, simply, Politics. It lasted until 1949, and it was wonderful. To this day, it enjoys a subterranean reputation among those of us too young to have read it at the time: Two years ago, when Hendrik Hertzberg published an anthology of his own work, he called it Politics in homage. Macdonald himself never wrote a full-length book, but in 1957 he published a collection of his work, mostly from Politics, called Memoirs of a Revolutionist (a title he regretted), and anyone who has never read it should borrow or steal a copy.

The writer he best compares with is George Orwell, and there’s a touching story: The two never met, but Macdonald published Orwell in Politics and they became good pen-friends. Plenty of others appeared in Politics—Bruno Bettelheim, Victor Serge, Simone Weil—but it was ultimately an expression of one man’s personality, at an extraordinary and terrible moment in history, with the war, Stalin’s tyranny, the death camps, the atomic bomb. No one else wrote about these things and “the responsibility of peoples” as well as Macdonald, and no one grasped better the way that those events had destroyed the basic optimism on which progressive politics had rested since the Enlightenment, the belief that all that was needed was material progress and human mastery of the environment: “The environment was controlled at Maidanek. It was the human beings who ran amok.”

Even at that grim time, Macdonald was a very funny writer. Read him on “My favorite general” (that is, George S. Patton, unlike one or two other generals who had “developed a sly ability to simulate human beings”), or the Soviet ruler’s way of saying everything three times: “On the evidence of Stalin’s barbarous oratorical style alone, one could deduce the bureaucratic inhumanity and the primitiveness of modern Soviet society.” And he could direct his wit on either side politically, at the “comrades” of the Communist Party and his sometime Trotskyist companions or, a little later, at the youthful career of William F. Buckley Jr.

Of late, Mr. Buckley has been much celebrated, what with his 80th birthday and the 50th of the National Review. As an antidote, try Macdonald on the “very argumentative and very ambitious” Bill Buckley, whose book defending Joseph McCarthy was “written in an elegantly pedantic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men’s room.” (Mr. Buckley’s first critics, by the way, included Peter Viereck, McGeorge Bundy and August Heckscher, whom Macdonald called “three leading spokesmen for the neoconservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals.” Does any language maven know an earlier sighting of that potent word than 1952?)

Wonderful as it was, Politics was financially and personally exhausting, and lasted little more than five years. If the 1940’s had meant Partisan Review and Politics, the 1950’s meant two other magazines for Macdonald, The New Yorker and Encounter, neither a wholly happy episode. Macdonald spent a merry year in London editing Encounter, a political-literary magazine—and a very good one, on the whole—which had developed out of the conflict between Communists and liberal anti-Communists in the postwar decades.

A Congress for Cultural Freedom held its first meeting in Berlin in 1950, and was soon acting as a channel for funds to magazines like Preuves in France, the Monat in Germany and Encounter. By the time Macdonald went to London, rumors were already circulating about the ultimate source of the Congress’ money, which was of course not some obscure, disinterested angel but—for all that Melvin Lasky, the kingpin of the operation, repeatedly denied such a link—the C.I.A.

For years, Macdonald shut his ears to those rumors, except to write in 1955 to Stephen Spender, another editor on the magazine, that “I know very little of what the Congress has been up to,” but that its supposed hands-off policy “sounds positively idyllic,” as it no doubt did. By 1962, when rumor was louder still, Macdonald wrote again with a forlorn “Say it ain’t so, Stephen,” and not long after that the story finally broke into the open with irrefutable evidence of the connection, when Macdonald indignantly paraded himself as an “unwitty CIA agent” and an innocent victim.

Just why he comes out so badly in this story should be spelled out, since it isn’t the usual anti-anti-Communist contempt for any liberal opponents of Stalinism. The best verdict on the affair was given by the English philosopher A.J. Ayer, who was not himself a card-carrying member of the “Anti-Communist Left,” and who was hostile to the militant zeal of Arthur Koestler as well as initially antipathetic to Lasky. (I myself did like Mel, though recognizing that this was an acquired taste.) Ayer nevertheless attended that first meeting in Berlin, wrote for Encounter, and years later said that he had been in no way shocked by Lasky’s denial of a C.I.A. connection, “as I did not see how he could possibly expect anyone to take it seriously; I still do not understand how it could have deceived anyone who had anything to do with the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” In any case, Ayer added, there were surely “many worse uses to which the CIA might and indeed did apply its funds.” The words “I still do not understand” were an obvious rebuke to Macdonald, who had quite enough experience of the financial woes of little-magazine publishing and might have asked himself just where the fat salary and expense account were coming from.

Although his relationship with The New Yorker was a little less fraught, it wasn’t really satisfactory. Baiting The New Yorker had long been a favorite sport of the New York intelligentsia. In his famous 1939 essay for Partisan Review, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg called The New Yorker “fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade,” and Macdonald wrote his own attack. Then, in 1946, he said (apropos of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” essay) that “I don’t like the New Yorker’s suave, toned-down underplayed kind of naturalism”; in 1948, he compared Luce of Time and Harold Ross of The New Yorker, who each had an original journalistic idea “which they have slowly developed into big-circulation magazines of the appropriate mediocrity”; and in 1952, he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. It’s half touching and half sad to see him writing from West 43rd Street to a friend, “Pretty impressive this letterhead, eh?”—without any evident irony. “Marvelous—so quiet and businesslike, fluorescent lights, free paper & pencils, phone …. ”

Over 10 years, he wrote some very good things for the magazine, as well as some quite ordinary things. Macdonald had now turned away from politics for literature, or culture-criticism (for want of another name), and his targets included what was not yet called dumbing-down, in the shape of banal new translations of the Bible, the latest edition of Webster’s Dictionary, or Dr. Mortimer J. Adler’s “Great Books,” as well as empty pretentiousness in the form of James Gould Cozzens’ ludicrously overblown novel By Love Possessed and Colin Wilson’s alleged philosophical treatise The Outsider, both published to a critical acclaim that now seems quite inexplicable.

He was also elaborating his thesis of “Masscult and Midcult,” the one being industrialized popular culture for the masses, the other the genteel middlebrow kitsch that “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them,” in the manner of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

But there was a twist to that story too. The essay was originally commissioned in 1958 by Life as part of an attempt to strike some serious cultural attitudes, along with contributions from Randall Jarrell and Clement Greenberg. All went well, except that Macdonald, while pouring scorn not only on The Saturday Evening Post but The Atlantic Monthly as soggy products of Midcult, made an exception for The New Yorker, “a Midcult magazine but one with a difference.” It might be edited to a formula, “but the formula reflects the taste of the editors and not their fear of the readers.” He was most indignant when the editors at Life thought that he was pulling his punches, though that’s very much what it looks like. After an impasse was reached, the essay appeared in the dear old Partisan Review.

All his life Macdonald had difficulty writing, and eventually found that he couldn’t produce for The New Yorker any more. He was maybe manic-depressive and suffered from writer’s block, or perhaps he just needed a deadline: In the 1960’s, he wrote fluently enough about politics and movies for Esquire (scintillatingly as well as fluently in the case of his film criticism), and he later had a peripatetic life teaching conscientiously on one campus or another as his health declined. I met him just once, in 1981, when I sought him out to write about him for The Spectator. In the 1950’s, he’d moved to The New Yorker, moved from one marriage to another, and moved from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, where I found him being looked after by Gloria, his second wife (his first wife, Nancy, who died not many years ago, was a lifelong left-wing activist and the unsung heroine of Politics). Dwight was genial but wheezy, and looked older than his 75 years. He died in December 1982.

Writing about his friend James Agee not long after Agee’s death at 45, Macdonald described him “talking passionately, brilliantly, but too much, drinking too much, smoking too much, reading aloud too much, making love too much, and in general cultivating just about the worst set of work habits in Greenwich Village.” Although he wasn’t quite as self-destructive as Agee (that would have been difficult), Macdonald was a heavy drinker and smoker all his life, who did not take good, or indeed any, care of himself.

Reading between the lines of Michael Wreszin’s biography, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (1994), or Macdonald’s own published letters, it’s easy to see that he could be argumentative and cantankerous even when sober, quarrelsome and offensive when not (“Was horrified to learn from Gloria how badly I had behaved,” says one letter to a friend). But it wasn’t just bad habits: He was gnawed at by a sense of missed opportunity. Macdonald didn’t “sell out” when he moved to the big-market, big-bucks magazine world, and anyway, he had a living to earn and a family to support like the rest of us.

All the same, there’s nothing more poignant than when he said once, “I have the impression I’m better known for Politics than for my articles in The New Yorker, whose circulation is roughly seventy times greater.” This was curious but not necessarily surprising, he added, since a little magazine is much more intensively read and circulated than the big commercial magazines, as “a more individual expression and so appealing to other individuals.” And for just that reason, he still speaks to his devotees.

He isn’t strictly out of print (if Amazon is to be believed), but he cries out for proper reissue. An academic publisher should bring out all of Politics in facsimile. And as a belated centennial tribute, shouldn’t there be a Dwight Macdonald Reader?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English author and journalist whose books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus) and, most recently, The Strange Death of Tory England (Gardners).

A great journalist, Macdonald never wrote for daily newspapers and took a faintly sarcastic attitude toward The New York Times: For him and his comrades on the revolutionary left in the 1930’s and 40’s, The Times was “what Aristotle was to the mediaeval scholastics, a revered authority, even though Pagan.” Instead, Macdonald spent his life writing for magazines. He quite rightly thought that imposed brevity was the bane of papers and magazines (worse now than then). He was not a reporter but an essayist, who could develop an argument at length, and his life can be charted by the very disparate series of magazines he worked for, all but one in his hometown.

It was very much old New York that he came from, the son of a cultivated, well-to-do family, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. Macdonald remembered his school—his description of his time there has strong echoes of the account of their schooldays by English contemporaries like Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh—but ancien régime Yale left him completely untouched. When he graduated in 1928, he unenthusiastically joined Macy’s at $30 a week, left after the briefest experience of retailing and was offered a job on Fortune.

That lugubriously glossy monthly was launched by Henry Luce of Time “to celebrate the ‘saga’ of American business,” and appeared shortly after the Wall Street collapse of 1929, when many people would have given up, Macdonald observed, “but Luce had the Stalingrad spirit and persisted.” So did Macdonald, staying with Fortune until 1936 and learning how to write. But his work made him increasingly skeptical about the American capitalist system he saw at close quarters, and like so many others he moved leftward, until his life was changed by the Moscow trials.

It was very much to the credit of the American left that the trials had a much greater impact in New York than in England and France. Macdonald may have been an extreme case, and even he was amazed by “the speed with which I evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist,” a speed which some saw as indicating an open mind, “others as evidence of levity.”

In the 1930’s, New York was the most interesting part of Soviet Russia, it’s been said, since it was the only place where the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism could be played out in the open without one side simply killing the other. Macdonald joined Philip Rahv and William Phillips in resuscitating Partisan Review, formerly a Communist organ, now to become one of the great little magazines of the century, publishing T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and André Gide as well as half the best American writers of the age. The PR crowd shaded into the revolutionary-socialist movement, and from 1938 Macdonald was an active supporter, then member, of the Socialist Workers Party, the tiny but influential Trotskyist party that was something like a New York sect or cult. He even had the temerity to take issue with the Old Man far away in Mexico and, in return, received a magisterial rebuke from Trotsky not long before Stalin’s hit man murdered him.

But Macdonald wasn’t really cut out for far-left sectarian politics, partly because he had too much sense of the ridiculous. One of my favorite passages describes the Trotskyist split over the so-called Winter War of 1939-40, when Stalin invaded Finland. One faction, led by Max Shachtman and passionately endorsed by Macdonald, opposed the invasion, invoking the ideological point that Russia was now “state capitalist” and altogether no good for anything; the other, led by James P. Cannon (and Trotsky himself), supported it, because Russia was a “decayed workers’ state” bringing socialism—albeit decayed—to the Finns, whether they wanted it or not. The dispute was entirely abstract and without any practical meaning whatever, Macdonald later pointed out. His own faction did not go off to Finland to fight for Baron Mannerheim, and “the Cannonites didn’t volunteer for the Red Army (which would have shot them).”

In more than one way, Macdonald was an odd man out among the New York intellectuals. That venerable phrase contained an invisible adjective—“Jewish”—and Macdonald’s position as token gentile was often uneasy. As a young man, he had been capable of the odious anti-Semitism of his age and class, and throughout his life he was at the least what could be called Jew-conscious—literally so in the sense that he could detect the numbers of Jews in an audience of fellow radicals, or describe a demonstration in London to Mary McCarthy as including “a contingent of Jewish youth, their faces vivid with race.” He was also out of step as one of the first to say that the Palestinians had suffered an injustice with the creation of Israel, and he defended his friend Hannah Arendt in the controversy about her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. (Here I think he was mistaken: The trouble with Arendt, in that book and elsewhere, is that she’s clever and erudite, but her heart’s in the wrong place.)

So it wasn’t surprising that Macdonald’s opposition to World War II separated him from the PR crowd, for whom Hitler’s reign of murderous persecution had an obvious personal resonance. In early 1944, he began his own magazine called, simply, Politics. It lasted until 1949, and it was wonderful. To this day, it enjoys a subterranean reputation among those of us too young to have read it at the time: Two years ago, when Hendrik Hertzberg published an anthology of his own work, he called it Politics in homage. Macdonald himself never wrote a full-length book, but in 1957 he published a collection of his work, mostly from Politics, called Memoirs of a Revolutionist (a title he regretted), and anyone who has never read it should borrow or steal a copy.

The writer he best compares with is George Orwell, and there’s a touching story: The two never met, but Macdonald published Orwell in Politics and they became good pen-friends. Plenty of others appeared in Politics—Bruno Bettelheim, Victor Serge, Simone Weil—but it was ultimately an expression of one man’s personality, at an extraordinary and terrible moment in history, with the war, Stalin’s tyranny, the death camps, the atomic bomb. No one else wrote about these things and “the responsibility of peoples” as well as Macdonald, and no one grasped better the way that those events had destroyed the basic optimism on which progressive politics had rested since the Enlightenment, the belief that all that was needed was material progress and human mastery of the environment: “The environment was controlled at Maidanek. It was the human beings who ran amok.”

Even at that grim time, Macdonald was a very funny writer. Read him on “My favorite general” (that is, George S. Patton, unlike one or two other generals who had “developed a sly ability to simulate human beings”), or the Soviet ruler’s way of saying everything three times: “On the evidence of Stalin’s barbarous oratorical style alone, one could deduce the bureaucratic inhumanity and the primitiveness of modern Soviet society.” And he could direct his wit on either side politically, at the “comrades” of the Communist Party and his sometime Trotskyist companions or, a little later, at the youthful career of William F. Buckley Jr.

Of late, Mr. Buckley has been much celebrated, what with his 80th birthday and the 50th of the National Review. As an antidote, try Macdonald on the “very argumentative and very ambitious” Bill Buckley, whose book defending Joseph McCarthy was “written in an elegantly pedantic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men’s room.” (Mr. Buckley’s first critics, by the way, included Peter Viereck, McGeorge Bundy and August Heckscher, whom Macdonald called “three leading spokesmen for the neoconservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals.” Does any language maven know an earlier sighting of that potent word than 1952?)

Wonderful as it was, Politics was financially and personally exhausting, and lasted little more than five years. If the 1940’s had meant Partisan Review and Politics, the 1950’s meant two other magazines for Macdonald, The New Yorker and Encounter, neither a wholly happy episode. Macdonald spent a merry year in London editing Encounter, a political-literary magazine—and a very good one, on the whole—which had developed out of the conflict between Communists and liberal anti-Communists in the postwar decades.

A Congress for Cultural Freedom held its first meeting in Berlin in 1950, and was soon acting as a channel for funds to magazines like Preuves in France, the Monat in Germany and Encounter. By the time Macdonald went to London, rumors were already circulating about the ultimate source of the Congress’ money, which was of course not some obscure, disinterested angel but—for all that Melvin Lasky, the kingpin of the operation, repeatedly denied such a link—the C.I.A.

For years, Macdonald shut his ears to those rumors, except to write in 1955 to Stephen Spender, another editor on the magazine, that “I know very little of what the Congress has been up to,” but that its supposed hands-off policy “sounds positively idyllic,” as it no doubt did. By 1962, when rumor was louder still, Macdonald wrote again with a forlorn “Say it ain’t so, Stephen,” and not long after that the story finally broke into the open with irrefutable evidence of the connection, when Macdonald indignantly paraded himself as an “unwitty CIA agent” and an innocent victim.

Just why he comes out so badly in this story should be spelled out, since it isn’t the usual anti-anti-Communist contempt for any liberal opponents of Stalinism. The best verdict on the affair was given by the English philosopher A.J. Ayer, who was not himself a card-carrying member of the “Anti-Communist Left,” and who was hostile to the militant zeal of Arthur Koestler as well as initially antipathetic to Lasky. (I myself did like Mel, though recognizing that this was an acquired taste.) Ayer nevertheless attended that first meeting in Berlin, wrote for Encounter, and years later said that he had been in no way shocked by Lasky’s denial of a C.I.A. connection, “as I did not see how he could possibly expect anyone to take it seriously; I still do not understand how it could have deceived anyone who had anything to do with the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” In any case, Ayer added, there were surely “many worse uses to which the CIA might and indeed did apply its funds.” The words “I still do not understand” were an obvious rebuke to Macdonald, who had quite enough experience of the financial woes of little-magazine publishing and might have asked himself just where the fat salary and expense account were coming from.

Although his relationship with The New Yorker was a little less fraught, it wasn’t really satisfactory. Baiting The New Yorker had long been a favorite sport of the New York intelligentsia. In his famous 1939 essay for Partisan Review, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg called The New Yorker “fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade,” and Macdonald wrote his own attack. Then, in 1946, he said (apropos of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” essay) that “I don’t like the New Yorker’s suave, toned-down underplayed kind of naturalism”; in 1948, he compared Luce of Time and Harold Ross of The New Yorker, who each had an original journalistic idea “which they have slowly developed into big-circulation magazines of the appropriate mediocrity”; and in 1952, he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. It’s half touching and half sad to see him writing from West 43rd Street to a friend, “Pretty impressive this letterhead, eh?”—without any evident irony. “Marvelous—so quiet and businesslike, fluorescent lights, free paper & pencils, phone …. ”

Over 10 years, he wrote some very good things for the magazine, as well as some quite ordinary things. Macdonald had now turned away from politics for literature, or culture-criticism (for want of another name), and his targets included what was not yet called dumbing-down, in the shape of banal new translations of the Bible, the latest edition of Webster’s Dictionary, or Dr. Mortimer J. Adler’s “Great Books,” as well as empty pretentiousness in the form of James Gould Cozzens’ ludicrously overblown novel By Love Possessed and Colin Wilson’s alleged philosophical treatise The Outsider, both published to a critical acclaim that now seems quite inexplicable.

He was also elaborating his thesis of “Masscult and Midcult,” the one being industrialized popular culture for the masses, the other the genteel middlebrow kitsch that “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them,” in the manner of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

But there was a twist to that story too. The essay was originally commissioned in 1958 by Life as part of an attempt to strike some serious cultural attitudes, along with contributions from Randall Jarrell and Clement Greenberg. All went well, except that Macdonald, while pouring scorn not only on The Saturday Evening Post but The Atlantic Monthly as soggy products of Midcult, made an exception for The New Yorker, “a Midcult magazine but one with a difference.” It might be edited to a formula, “but the formula reflects the taste of the editors and not their fear of the readers.” He was most indignant when the editors at Life thought that he was pulling his punches, though that’s very much what it looks like. After an impasse was reached, the essay appeared in the dear old Partisan Review.

All his life Macdonald had difficulty writing, and eventually found that he couldn’t produce for The New Yorker any more. He was maybe manic-depressive and suffered from writer’s block, or perhaps he just needed a deadline: In the 1960’s, he wrote fluently enough about politics and movies for Esquire (scintillatingly as well as fluently in the case of his film criticism), and he later had a peripatetic life teaching conscientiously on one campus or another as his health declined. I met him just once, in 1981, when I sought him out to write about him for The Spectator. In the 1950’s, he’d moved to The New Yorker, moved from one marriage to another, and moved from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, where I found him being looked after by Gloria, his second wife (his first wife, Nancy, who died not many years ago, was a lifelong left-wing activist and the unsung heroine of Politics). Dwight was genial but wheezy, and looked older than his 75 years. He died in December 1982.

Writing about his friend James Agee not long after Agee’s death at 45, Macdonald described him “talking passionately, brilliantly, but too much, drinking too much, smoking too much, reading aloud too much, making love too much, and in general cultivating just about the worst set of work habits in Greenwich Village.” Although he wasn’t quite as self-destructive as Agee (that would have been difficult), Macdonald was a heavy drinker and smoker all his life, who did not take good, or indeed any, care of himself.

Reading between the lines of Michael Wreszin’s biography, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (1994), or Macdonald’s own published letters, it’s easy to see that he could be argumentative and cantankerous even when sober, quarrelsome and offensive when not (“Was horrified to learn from Gloria how badly I had behaved,” says one letter to a friend). But it wasn’t just bad habits: He was gnawed at by a sense of missed opportunity. Macdonald didn’t “sell out” when he moved to the big-market, big-bucks magazine world, and anyway, he had a living to earn and a family to support like the rest of us.

All the same, there’s nothing more poignant than when he said once, “I have the impression I’m better known for Politics than for my articles in The New Yorker, whose circulation is roughly seventy times greater.” This was curious but not necessarily surprising, he added, since a little magazine is much more intensively read and circulated than the big commercial magazines, as “a more individual expression and so appealing to other individuals.” And for just that reason, he still speaks to his devotees.

He isn’t strictly out of print (if Amazon is to be believed), but he cries out for proper reissue. An academic publisher should bring out all of Politics in facsimile. And as a belated centennial tribute, shouldn’t there be a Dwight Macdonald Reader?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English author and journalist whose books include The Controversy of Zion (Perseus) and, most recently, The Strange Death of Tory England (Gardners).