Schlesinger and 'The Nation'

In the early 1980s The Nation invited the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who died February 28, to join a panel. Professor Schlesinger declined the invitation, saying he would have to be "a monumental masochist" to lend himself to a proceeding sponsored by The Nation, a magazine that had been attacking him in its pages for the past thirty years.

In his 1949 book The Vital Center, Schlesinger had described The Nation (along with The New Republic) as "a fellow traveler of the fellow traveler." As America's premier self-proclaimed liberal anti-Communist, although he continued to write book reviews for the magazine through 1950, he wanted nothing to do with the front half of The Nation, which he saw as an anti-anti-Communist magazine.

And for many years, although both the magazine and the professor were on the liberal side of the divide in American politics, the ill will was mutual.

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