Nancy Macdonald, editor of Politics, dies

The wife of Dwight Macdonald died Dec. 9, 1996, in Manhattan, N.Y. at the age of 86.

Dwight Macdonald, was the founding editor of Partisan Review in the 1930s, the founder of Politics in the 1940s, an antiwar and antimilitarist paper that was subsidized, among others, by Margaret De Silver, Carlo Tresca's widow.

Dwight Macdonald's political importance is underlined in Stephen J. Whitfield's A Critical American. The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Archon Books, 1984)

But Nancy Macdonald was also quite a figure in her own right. Her grandfather had been president of the New York Stock Exchange, she was educated in Vassar and, in the 30s, her home was a political and literary center.

She managed her husband's Politics in the 40s, and in the 1950s she had her own paper. She founded the Spanish Refugee Aid, an organization that provided help to the non-Communist exiles, with the support of friends like Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, James T. Farrell, Barbara Tuchman. The money for the refugees was distributed in France by Francine Faure, Albert Camus' wife and Pablo Cazals.

Mrs Macdonald was the author of Homage to the Spanish Exiles : Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1987) which was based on tape interviews.

An obituary appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Dec. 18, 1996, by Robert McG. Thomas Jr., of the New York Tlmes Service.