Like William F. Buckley, Jr., Dwight Macdonald attended Yale and the men shared a common concern regarding the state of popular culture and the dumbing down of American education and letters. But Macdonald considered National Review glib, non-traditional and anti-intellectual, and he clashed with Buckley over the Vietnam War and the role of civil disobedience.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective

When William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review arrived on the scene in 1950s, the liberal community was taken aback. All across the liberal watchtower there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. Among the critics who would launch salvos at Buckley and his brand of conservatism were the renowned liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Fischer, editor of Harper's magazine, Peter Viereck, considered a leading conservative thinker, New York columnist Murray Kempton, McGeorge Bundy and Dwight Macdonald, an icon of American letters.

The criticism was not unexpected. As Buckley observed in the inaugural issue of National Review:

Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

Among the left/liberal perspective, no one came with a greater reputation than Macdonald, who had been engaged in ideological combat for decades. He would, because of his biting satirical style, be compared to Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. Paul Goodman, a former ideological colleague, would refer to him as "our best journalist;" a compliment that Macdonald, who saw himself as a man of intellect and letters, rejected. Norman Mailer would call him in the 1960s the nation's greatest critic (but then Mailer would call himself the nation's greatest novelist).

Macdonald certainly had the resume to justify such accolades. He had been one of the early editors of the highly regarded Partisan Review, before breaking with the editors in the 1940s over political and temperamental differences. He would write or had written for most of the nation's top journals, including Time, Fortune, the New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, The Reporter, The Progressive, Esquire, and Commentary. In the 1940s, his ideological restlessness prompted him to start his own journal of opinion, Politics, around which he had gathered writers such as C. Wright Mills, Goodman, Bruno Bettelheim, Clement Greenberg and Daniel Bell. Through it all, not unlike Irving Howe of Dissent magazine, Macdonald sought to rescue socialism from the Stalinists.

Macdonald sought to tie his intellectual pursuits to political action and this exacerbated rifts between him and Phillip Rahv and William Phillips at PR and later Lionel Trilling. Fine writing, he would argue, is not enough – one must put words into action through protest and political organization. Yet, ironically, his most controversial stance involved his indifference about World War II. He and other writers at Politics would argue that the war was a clash of imperial powers. The objective of the Left, they suggested, should be to salvage socialism out of the ashes of the war. This perspective led to disagreements with both the Partisan Review editors and Sidney Hook, one of the great socialist theoreticians of the time.

Socially, Macdonald also was a presence. He counted among his colleagues and friends Mary McCarthy, who had been married to Edmund Wilson and was a close confidant of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who would achieve fame with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism and her coverage of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, during which she coined the famous phrase, "the banality of evil." The Trillings, Mailer, Podhoretz – he ran with the literati of the New York scene throughout his years as an active writer.

As Macdonald moved among and against the great and near great in the left/liberal intellectual community for decades, he argued with them about socialism, Stalinism and anti-Stalinism, pacifism, communism, Hitler, anti anti-communism – indeed, the only thing that seemed to unite them was a mutual disdain for the conservative enterprise as it took shape under Buckley's direction. Macdonald, however, was perhaps the most difficult to pin down, ideologically speaking. Podhoretz, in his memoir Breaking Ranks, would write that Macdonald: "had been a Trotskyist in the thirties, a pacifist in the forties, nonpolitical in the fifties, and now announced himself an anarchist for the sixties." His biographer, Michael Wreszin, suggested that Macdonald:

. . . always had a strong conservative streak, from his earliest thoughts on politics and social and cultural issues. His anarchical anti-authoritarianism was not compatible with disciplined collectivism. He called himself a "conservative anarchist," and many radicals recognize the phrase as redundant. He argued that he was a democrat politically and a conservative culturally. No one had more contempt for popular culture. He stood for standards as determined by members of an educated elite like himself. [NB: As if to underscore these conflicts in Macdonald's thought, Wreszin entitled his biography A Rebel in Defense of Tradition.]

It is not surprising then that Macdonald – among all these intellectuals – took a sustained interest in Buckley and the causes he sought to champion. The reasons for this stem in part from common history. Both attended Yale where Macdonald, some years before Buckley, had been a celebrated student of letters. Buckley likewise became a campus sensation when he took the helm of the Yale Daily News and made a habit of routinely tweaking the liberal Yale establishment. These acts of defiance appealed to Macdonald's iconoclastic temperament, irrespective of his hostility to Buckley's views. In the early 1950s, he would be invited on several occasions to Buckley's home for dinner and sailing, invitations Macdonald gladly accepted.

Macdonald and Buckley also shared a common concern about the state of popular culture and the dumbing down of American education and letters. When Buckley, with the help of Willmoore Kendall, developed his complaints about Yale into a full-length book, God and Man at Yale (GAMAY), Macdonald took notice and reviewed it for The Reporter.

In that review, Macdonald recounted how Buckley, at a farewell dinner for retiring Yale president Charles Seymour, stood before the presidents of major Ivy League schools and lectured Seymour on his failure to ensure that Christian precepts and free market ideas got an adequate hearing in the university curriculum. These remarks, delivered to a shaken audience, formed the foundation of GAMAY, which drew the fire of liberals across the spectrum. McGeorge Bundy, a Yale alumnus, wrote what became Yale's frontline defense in a lengthy review published in The Atlantic.  (Bundy and his brother William would, of course, achieve their greatest fame as key architects of the Vietnam War, their role exhaustively documented in David Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest.)

Other publications that criticized GAMAY included the Saturday Review, The New Republic, the Catholic Worker and Commonweal. Time, Life and Newsweek all noted the book's publication with varying degrees of interest. Macdonald was amused by the reaction to the book, which sold 12,000 copies in the first month and demonstrated – he argued — that anti-liberal polemics were in vogue. His best line on the controversy Buckley liked enough to quote in a new introduction when GAMAY was republished in 1977. Macdonald had written that the Yale establishment responded to GAMAY with "all the grace of an elephant cornered by a mouse." He continued:

Though many of Buckley's specific charges are exaggerated, distorted or just not true, he is clearly right when he points out that Yale has changed a lot since the eighteenth century, and that its teaching and textbooks do not indoctrinate the students with a faith in either Christianity or free-market capitalism. All this means, of course, is that Yale is a large American university, that America in 1952 is not very religious or free-enterprising and that Yale reflects the predominant culture of the nation it serves.
– The Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 322.

In arguing that the themes of GAMAY were irrelevant, MacDonald underscored Buckley's concern about the indifference of the Yale administration and Board to the issues he raised. This indifference was shared by the academic community across the nation, underscored by Trilling's claim in 1949 that liberalism so dominated the political and cultural scene that there were no conservative ideas in general circulation. This was Buckley's point, and precisely why he wrote GAMAY and then founded National Review, to stand "athwart" these secular and collectivist currents and to redirect the debate toward the ideas on which, in Buckley's judgment, the nation was founded.

Macdonald chastised the Yale community for its response. Instead of simply dismissing Buckley's arguments as irrelevant, the university establishment reacted with hostility, shock and defensiveness. "It must be admitted that Buckley's medieval lance struck Yale officialdom in the most vulnerable joint in its armor: the gap between ideology and practice," Macdonald wrote.

In short, Macdonald continued, Yale "officialdom" talked like Buckley, but behaved like Macdonald. Yet, because the Yale power structure feared that Buckley's assault would harm fundraising, it denied and counterattacked rather than acknowledge that times had changed, and Mr. Buckley, alas, had failed to keep up with the times. Macdonald failed to follow his own advice, however. Not content to give GAMAY a dismissive review, he felt the need to discredit Buckley in the process. The question is why? After all, Buckley was still a non-entity nationally speaking. Was Macdonald concerned that Buckley represented a threat to the liberal and left domination of American ideas? Macdonald made a point of noting that Buckley came from a wealthy, dynamic Catholic family. It could not be ignored that he counted John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, Kendall, John Chamberlain and Albert Jay Nock at least partially in his corner. He brought to bear as well a persona of confidence and style beyond his years, and he would work for a short time for the American Mercury, the publication founded by H. L. Mencken. Clearly, Macdonald perceived in Buckley a threat to the radicalism he had cultivated for decades. He sought to put Buckley on notice.

Bill Buckley combines opportunism and conviction in a bewildering way. He has the outward and visible signs of a campus radical, with the inward and spiritual qualities of the radical's wealthy grandfather. Earnest-eyed, grim lipped, lanky and ascetic, he is passionate about first principles, articulate to an almost frightening degree, and would obviously rather argue than eat.

To have the world's most renowned intellectuals pay this much attention to a young man in his mid-20s announced Buckley as a rising superstar in the world of ideas and letters, and it surely encouraged Buckley, not that he needed much encouragement, that he was more than able to take on the best the Left could muster. All of this heartened conservatives and anti-communists, who began to see in Buckley a leader around whom they could muster an offensive against New Deal liberalism, radical collectivism and communism.

Not even the negative reaction to his association with Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Senator who had alienated the liberal establishment with his indiscriminate attacks on communists, real or alleged, gave Buckley pause. He co-authored with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and his Enemies, in which the authors, while acknowledging some missteps on the Senator's part, insisted that communist infiltration of the government posed a serious threat to national security. This not only did not amuse Macdonald, who despised McCarthy, it horrified him. Buckley and Bozell, he wrote,

have just published . . . a defense of the most unscrupulous demagogue in American public life today. If it is ingenuous, it is absurd, and if it is disingenuous, it is – at least in intention – vicious. It is written in an elegantly academic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings.
– The Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p 326.

He also managed a clever line on the book, comparing it to "a brief by Cadwalader, Wickerham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men's room."

Years later, even as McCarthy became the poster boy for all that is bad in American politics, Buckley would argue that McCarthy's critics were as indiscriminate in their hysterical reactions to the Senator as McCarthy was in making reckless charges. McCarthy, Buckley conceded, proved more adept at mobilizing his enemies than in making clear the threat posed by communists determined to shape American foreign policy for the benefit of the Soviet Union; the threat was real nonetheless.

In 1956, after watching Buckley and National Review stake their claim as the keepers of conservatism and culture, Macdonald, with his vast knowledge of other ideological enterprises, responded negatively in Commentary magazine. He reviewed the first 10 issues of NR and concluded that:

We have long needed a good conservative magazine. (We have also long needed a good liberal magazine.) This is not it, any more than its predecessor, the LaFollette-Chamberlain Freeman — which deployed much the same forces — was. And for the same reasons: because it is neither good nor conservative.

Macdonald considered NR glib, non-traditional and anti-intellectual. He complained that he had not heard of many of the key people gathered around the enterprise and that the publication was juvenile in its humor and unconvincing in its polemics. He had little good to say about anything associated with NR, though he nodded approvingly to Russell Kirk and John Chamberlain for removing themselves from the masthead. As for the young Buckley and the other editors, Macdonald did his best to shoot them out of the saddle.

Buckley is a debater — his mind is quick, clear, plausible, and shallow and — he would rather argue than eat, a trait I find endearing. Had he been born a generation earlier, he would have been making the cafeterias of 14th Street ring with Marxian dialectics. He is a lively and engaging fellow, and would be an excellent journalist if he had a little more humor, common sense, and intellectual curiosity; also if he knew how to write. The tongue is his instrument of expression, not the typewriter. This is unfortunate since Buckley is NR's editor-in-chief as well as its publisher. There are five other editors: James Burnham, a spectacular backslider from Trotskyism who signalized his departure from the movement in 1940 by publishing The Managerial Revolution and whose intellectual horizon has steadily narrowed to a kind of anti-Communism as sterile and doctrinaire as the ideology he fights; Willmoore Kendall, a wild Yale don of extreme, eccentric, and very abstract views who can get a discussion into the shouting stage faster than anybody I have ever known . . .

And so on. This blend of gossip, commentary and literary critique was the style of the time, at least among those who had once orbited the Partisan Review, and it is found not only in Macdonald's work but in the work of a wide range of the elite literati of the period: McCarthy, Podhoretz, Mailer and others. 

It must be acknowledged, however, that Macdonald's objections to NR's political slant did shed light on the fractures within the conservative consensus. Buckley, after all, was trying to bring together three wings of an ideological movement that disagreed on tone and emphasis. The traditionalists, represented by Kirk, were not enthusiastic capitalists. Kirk made a critical distinction between free enterprise and capitalism. The anti-communists included a disparate group of free-thinking intellectuals more energized by what they opposed perhaps than what they sought to affirm. And then there were the free marketers, whose embrace of economics as a lynch-pin of conservatism, struck the traditionalists as indifferent to the transcendent order so eloquently described by Kirk.

These differences were serious. Max Eastman left National Review because of its embrace of a religious perspective, though Buckley, writing to Eastman, would argue that nothing NR advocated politically or culturally stood in opposition to Eastman's great concerns. Whittaker Chambers, a dear friend of Buckley's, would warn him to steer clear of McCarthy and found Kirk irrelevant. He would eventually distance himself from the magazine. He was more comfortable with mainstream Republicans and Nixon than the editorial board at NR.

Macdonald argued that NR was an anti-liberal publication, not a conservative one. As a proponent of high culture who was deeply suspicious of popular culture (as demonstrated by his harsh review of Mortimer Adler's "great books" enterprise), Macdonald sympathized with Kirk's appeal to "the permanent things" but he found it difficult to countenance NR's anti-New Deal agenda and its strident attacks against socialism.  Macdonald could not accept leaving critical value judgments to an undiscriminating free market.

Around the same time, Murray Kempton, another liberal icon, slammed National Review in The Progressive, suggesting that the magazine suffered from many flaws, most notably being a "national bore." Kempton lamented that "it is saddest of all to read 500-odd pages of commentary on American life and find that so little happened with any juice and blood in it . . . but persons possessed by ideology are simply uninterested in that sort of thing; to them there are only ideas and no conflicts of the heart." (The Progressive, July 1956, p.14)

Buckley's response underscored why he would emerge as the critical conservative voice for the next 30 years. Despite his young age, far from being chagrined by the criticism, he was energized. He dealt with the critics in an NR essay published in August 1956 under the headline: "Reflections on the Failure of National Review to live up to Liberal Expectations."

Buckley expended most of his firepower on the two great voices of liberalism, Kempton and Macdonald. (And interestingly both men would praise Buckley for one reason or another as time went on.) They were tough on NR and Buckley in turn was tough on them. He returned fire with a blend of psychological and political analysis well beyond what even a precocious 30-year-old might muster. (Only Garry Wills, perhaps, brought a similar talent to bear at such a young age, which probably explains why Buckley personally lamented losing Wills to the Left in the late 1960s.) Buckley kept the discourse at a high level and mainly let the one-sided treatment by the critics speak for itself. Kempton, he argued, was a man of great talent who wrote for the New York Post, a newspaper hardly known for its journalistic decorum. Buckley suggested that Kempton lift his gaze to the millions living behind the Iron Curtain rather than acting as an executioner of conservatives.

He began his critique of Macdonald thus:

Anybody ambitious to please Dwight Macdonald had better be prepared to devote full time to it, given the fact that one cannot count on pleasing him tomorrow by adhering to the position that pleases him today.

Buckley called Macdonald the "Tommy Manville" of American politics. Manville, for those who don't know (I didn't), set the Guinness Book of World Records for marriages. Buckley's point, of course, was that Macdonald changed political loyalties as frequently as Manville changed wives. As Buckley crossed swords with Macdonald, he demonstrated a remarkable capacity, also evident in Chesterton, to boil complex ideas and personalities down to their essence. This is clear in his treatment of Macdonald, for Buckley's views would anticipate criticism from others that included Mary McCarthy, Sidney Hook and Podhoretz, each of whom were themselves a formidable presence in American letters and political thought.

Wrote Buckley of Macdonald:

But after a while he leaves the impression less of independence than of perverseness, and at that point his aimlessness combined with his dogmatism begin to grate hard. A humbler – a more realistic man — would have taken stock of his temperament and made the necessary adjustments. But vanity did Dwight Macdonald in . . . as the years went by, the disparity between his very prodigious self esteem and the esteem in which the world holds him became painfully evident to him, whereupon he turned to a sort of wisecracking misanthropy, to tireless denigration, allowing himself, in many of his writings, to be bitterly resentful of anyone else's peace of mind, and cruelly reproachful.  It is painfully clear why he indulges with unique constancy his fetishistic devotion to the cause of pacifism. It is for him a psychic necessity. Dwight Macdonald who is against suffering is, himself, often brutal.

Buckley dispensed with Macdonald's claim that he had not been able to recognize many of the names associated with National Review by ticking off the credentials of a half-dozen of those men (a list that included Richard Weaver, F.A. Voigt, Wilhelm Roepke, Frank Chodorov and Medford Evans). He observed that Macdonald was either being disingenuous or displaying his ignorance of conservative intellectual culture.

Of these men, Dwight Macdonald has never heard and, characteristically the fact that he has never heard of them means they are "obscure." Now one can lead a normal and ordered life in ignorance of the existence of any or all of these men. But one hesitates, under the circumstances, to pass oneself off as an informed critic. Rip van Winkle still had a dance or two in him when he awoke from his slumbers, but he did not offer his services as an historian for the preceding 20 years.

Buckley concluded by observing that the criticism from all three of these titans of letters should have come as no surprise and he essentially dismissed them as part of a liberal establishment that considered all conservatives diseased and ignorant.

National Review is neither supine nor irrelevant. It does not consult Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to determine the limits of tolerable conservative behavior, nor does it subsist on mimeographed cliches describing The Plot to Destroy America. It has gathered together men of competence and sanity who have, quietly and with precision, gone to work on the problems of the day and turned over many stones, to expose much cant and ugliness and intellectual corruption.

As for the criticism, so be it. "The magazine suffers from many imperfections, which we hope, little by little, to move in on. We shall continue to be grateful for counsel from our allies. Liberals, however, should submit their recommendations in a self-addressed, stamped envelope."

Macdonald would circle back to Buckley on several occasions, in one instance writing a laudatory note about an article he had read by Buckley and saying something nice about a recent issue of NR. When Buckley responded by asking Macdonald to apologize for his previous harsh review, Macdonald called Buckley's response "pompous and priggish." Anyone familiar with Buckley's humor might guess that this note was written with a twinkle and a chuckle, but Macdonald took it as an ungracious insult from a brash, cocky kid. And it must be conceded that on rare occasion Buckley's pride could get the better of him. (I refer, for example, to an overly concerned letter written to the New York Review of Books after John Gregory Dunne's negative review of Overdrive.)

Even so, Macdonald's note failed the test of maturity and patience.

You damned whippersnapper . . . you impertinent pipsqueak, what the hell should I apologize for.  I gave your magazine hell, and it deserved it. You then wrote a silly, top lofty, would-be venomous attack on me (which I did read at the time – you sent it to me don't you remember), which I felt I didn't deserve, but for which I bore you no grudge. I certainly haven't been waiting for an "apology." You apparently have. Sorry to disappoint you.

He went on to lecture Buckley about the unkind world in which they lived, and that he must think himself a "dime-store Pope" running his own magazine.  He insulted him a few more times and then lamented "and you used to be fun to argue with." (A Moral Temper, The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, pages 265-266).

One is not quite sure what to make of this letter, written in 1958. For all his grace in befriending those with whom he disagreed, Buckley had a gift for getting under the skin of the Left. One has to assume that they either greatly envied him or he greatly concerned them or both. He was wealthy, attractive, and brilliant on his feet and with a pen, and he was barely thirty-years-old when Macdonald unleashed this broadside.  For thinkers who worked a lifetime to achieve fame and a bit of security, it had to gall that Buckley had it all instantaneously and seemingly with so little effort. He also was a bit cheeky in those early years and his note to Macdonald, a man of great literary reputation, must have felt like a slap returned for a handshake. I have unearthed no record of how he responded to Macdonald's angry letter.

Whatever the hard feelings that passed between them over these clashes or their differing views of McCarthy, the two of them would continue to engage. By 1967, Macdonald had emerged as a leading liberal voice against the Vietnam War and his opposition to the draft had been well documented. He accepted an invitation to attend an arts festival at the White House only to solicit signatures for an anti-war statement from the guests, which many of those attending found rude. He also had taken up the cause of civil disobedience, which, of course, Buckley opposed as an exercise that undermined civil society. When Buckley wrote a column inviting Macdonald, Dr. Spock and other war protesters to demonstrate their commitment to their ideas by appearing at the offices of NR, where Buckley would provide a ready made situation (including young draft aged men they could try to subvert and an official of the Department of Justice, who would no doubt then enforce the law against such sedition), Macdonald fired back a response that appeared in the Village Voice.

Who appointed Buckley sheriff, he began, and why should he or any other war protester submit to Buckley's orchestration of events. Buckley's point that they were all bluff did not impress Macdonald, who observed that putting him or Dr. Spock on trial would be self-defeating for the government, whatever their alleged crimes.

I agree with Dr. Spock that the authorities have no ardent wish for such a trial. If they decide to risk it, there will be no need for "High Noon" melodramatics presided over by Sheriff Bill to give them evidence for an indictment. Nor will there have to be a rendezvous at the National Review if the want to arrest us. I'm in the Manhattan phone book and Dr. Spock can be found on the nearest picket line.
– A Moral Temper, pages 400-401.

Buckley then invited Macdonald to appear on his public affairs television show, Firing Line, which was still in its infancy. The debate was entitled "How to Protest," but it dealt mainly with the legitimacy of civil disobedience as a tool to oppose the Vietnam War. Buckley spent much of the first half hour trying to pin down Macdonald on the inconsistency of his position, suggesting that those who would advocate violating the law bear the burden of explaining crimes committed by less reasonable men equally committed to their cause, say Lee Harvey Oswald. Macdonald responded that he opposed violence in any circumstances. When Buckley asked, then, how he had made common cause with Noam Chomsky, who was advocating acts of violence against American troops in Vietnam, Macdonald professed ignorance and claimed he would oppose these "Abraham Lincoln" brigades. They then got into an exchange that underscored their differences.

Buckley: Do you have any sort of rule of thumb as to how long it's proper to hurl your insults at a visiting speaker?

Macdonald: Oh, yes, about 30 seconds I'd say, or 45 seconds.

Buckley: Is this subject to change?

Macdonald: Change without notice . . .

Buckley: After Mr. Johnson aggravates you some more. Surely one of the objections to civil disobedience is that it does breed violence, that is to say, if people assume the power to refuse to participate in majority decisions, you get chaos. You get all those right-wing governments and despots and so on.

Macdonald: No, you have to have people who refuse to take the majority decision on certain issues. If you didn't you simply have a majoritarian form of government which is not really my idea of democracy. (sic) Minority has rights, too.

Buckley: Well, I agree, and they are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but the Bill of Rights does not guarantee the right to civil disobedience.

The debate then moved into the Vietnam war (which we will discuss at more length in the essay on Noam Chomsky). When Macdonald argued that the United States was responsible for most of the violence in Vietnam, he and Buckley sparred about the numbers. This led to the following exchange:

Macdonald: In other words, in one year, and these are just admitted, there's no way of really telling how many, because you know how they tell? They bomb a Vietnam village and they count all the corpses, of course, and these are members of the Viet Cong.

Buckley: How many people were killed by violence, say, in Red China or in Columbia or in Africa or the Soviet Union? You don't have those statistics do you?

Buckley made the point that the United States was engaged in an attempt to defend South Vietnam from the sorts of violence that had led to millions of deaths in other communists countries, but Macdonald did not see a connection. They then discussed Macdonald's trip to the White House, where he asked those in attendance to declare their opposition to President Johnson's policies in Vietnam. Macdonald claimed that he did not disrupt the event and when asked by Buckley if he thought it okay to treat the host in this manner, Macdonald quipped that Johnson was not all that hospitable. At one point Buckley is asked what he considered the legitimate avenues of protest:

Buckley: Arguing with Mr. Macdonald about it. Writing, speaking, the same kind of thing Mr. Macdonald has done for years. If I felt that I could no longer identify myself, i.e. that I refuse to subscribe and participate in a community that took such steps that I disapprove of I would do what I very much congratulate a certain number of American youth for doing, which is expatriate myself – go live in Canada or Cuba.

Macdonald: Well, that's the same thing as burning a draft card, isn't it? It's evading the draft.

Buckley: No, sir, it's not the same thing at all. If you burn the draft card and stay in the U.S. you're still using the resources of the U.S. that are awarded to citizens.

Macdonald: What resources are you using?

Buckley: The police, fire department.

Macdonald: The police are hardly on your side.

Buckley: They're supposed to be on the side of the law.

The debate went on this way, with much back and forth about whether the United States has or does not have the right to intervene in certain circumstances, with Buckley making the case that to support a government against totalitarianism is an act of friendship whereas Mr. Macdonald was making common cause with those who would allow nations and people to be enslaved. The issue was never resolved to anyone's satisfaction. But a few months later, in a letter to Martin Luther King, Macdonald acknowledged that he had a few interesting moments with Buckley.

I recently debated William F. Buckley, Jr. on this TV show, The Firing Line, on "How to Protest," and before I knew it, he was asking me: "Now, you say that you have come to feel strongly against Johnson's Vietnam policy that civil disobedience, breaking the law, is, for you, justified.  Well, then," with that serene Buckley smile, "Well, then, wouldn't you say that Lee Oswald may have such strong objections to President Kennedy's polices that he practiced civil disobedience by killing him, and that he was morally justified, according to your own logic?" It took a few minutes to get out that box.
– A Moral Temper, pages 391-392.

Of course, large issues were at stake beyond the method of protest or even the style of a given action. The Vietnam War had divided the nation sharply. Riots and protests were evident across the nation. The civil disobedience that had started with Martin Luther King had spread to include anti-war activities, open defiance of drug laws, and campus militants who were breaking into and occupying university administration buildings. In all of this Buckley saw a direct attack upon the civil institutions upon which government and rule of law depended. Meanwhile, Macdonald moved from cause to cause, ideological perspective to ideological perspective, without regard to previous positions or the impact on his reputation.  By the 1970s, exhausted by his hectic life of intellectual combat, he retreated to teach at a small college.

Who "won" these exchanges is impossible to gauge, all such questions being subjective. But perhaps, if we take Macdonald at his word, he might concede that Buckley fared pretty well. In his memoirs, Macdonald applauded Partisan Review for having survived for 23 years, a feat he called remarkable for such an enterprise. National Review, the magazine that Macdonald sought to slay in the cradle, recently celebrated its 50th year, having played a critical role in electing Ronald Reagan and reshaping American politics. Their anti-communist agenda was vindicated when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, a moral and political victory that liberated millions of people. The young man who founded the magazine, whose writing style Macdonald had ridiculed, is now celebrated as one of the great political stylists of the past half-century, not only on the right but even among the celebrated liberal/left.

Buckley resembled Macdonald in his effort to tie political action to ideas, and he emerged as a dominant intellectual and political force from the 1950s on. Not even Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer compared in terms of depth and breadth of their literary contributions in the political realm. In terms of influence on American political culture, it could be argued that Buckley single-handedly held his own against the all-star roster of the left/liberal establishment (though Buckley would concede on the cultural front that conservatives had at best fought the Left to a draw).

It is tempting to wonder how Macdonald, in the final decade of his life, greeted Buckley's emergence as a national icon. As Macdonald slipped into obscurity, so many of the intellectual causes he embraced discredited or forgotten, the young "whippersnapper" helped get a personal friend elected president. And, had he lived to see it, how would he have greeted the triumph of the Reagan/Buckley-inspired alliance over the Soviet empire, which Macdonald himself had opposed because of its betrayal of the socialist ideas he had embraced as a young intellectual?

While Buckley has been lauded for his good will, his devotion to family and his decency, Macdonald earned a reputation for treating people harshly, including his own spouses (he divorced his first wife). He imbibed to an extent (he was no fan of the Beats or the Hippies) the 1950s and 1960s counterculture lifestyle, only to find it unsatisfying. Would he have been bitter about all of this, his legendary indignation on display, or would he have been secretly pleased for his fellow Yale alumnus? Despite their differences, Macdonald admitted that he could not help liking Buckley; he might – just might given his propensity to change his mind – have conceded that Buckley and National Review wound up doing just fine.