Max Palevsky , who died Wednesday at 85 at his Beverly Hills home, was, among much else, one of the first major donors (if not the first -- I leave it to Bob and Paul to sort this out) who provided the funds to get a fledgling magazine called The American Prospect up and running 20 years ago. But my own contacts with and knowledge of Max came as a campaign consultant for liberal causes and candidates decades ago in Los Angeles, where Max had already established his turf as one of the biggest, smartest, and most intellectually rigorous liberal funders in the nation. A gifted mathematician, Palevsky founded and built Scientific Data Systems, an early computer company, which he sold to Xerox in 1969 for a little less than a billion dollars -- real money in those days. (He later helped found Intel.) With the Vietnam War raging, he soon became involved in efforts to end it, and in 1971 and ’72, he plunged his resources into the underdog campaign of the most outspoken peace candidate in the...