Dorothy Healey Remembers

...that much of the Soviet peoples suffering was due to the "hostility I of the nonsocialist world," and that, t after the war, "life improved dramatically for most Soviet citizens...

...Of the anti-Stalinist left, many of whom are her current comrades in the DSA, she says that they "paved the way" for McCarthyism, although she acknowledges that not all liberals were willing to throw Communists "to the wolves...

...t C H ealey has left the party, but still accepts its worldview as the Ruth...

...One of these—indeed, a culture hero to the remnants of the once anti-Stalinist left—is Dorothy Ray Healey, a vivacious, dynamic, and charming young Communist of the 1930s who rose to the leadership of California's maverick branch in the forties and fifties...

...Healey, on the other hand, publicly said that the Soviet invasion "was a tragic necessity," in order to save socialism from CIA- and fascist-inspired forces...

...Central to this effort has been the historian Maurice Isserman, who writes in his introduction to this volume that "the American CP was shaped by the national environment in which it operated and the people who enlisted under these banners...

...Her arguments are unadulterated Stalinist apologies...

...Given such weak logic and embarrassing party-line rhetoric, is Healey important enough to discuss...

...That Stalin was the greatest leader on earth...

...This Communist, Kraditor points out, lived in a universe in which all tenets fit together to form an integrated worldview...

...But she does not see that Davis was only applying the lessons she learned in the Communist party, and that Davis, not - Healey, represents the real face of American Communism...

...In fact, during the pact years, the USSR was drained of the very products and materials needed for defense preparations...

...Healey holds the same position she did in 1939: that Stalin was protecting the best interests of his country against Western appeasers of fascism, gaining time to defeat Hitler...

...And even today, shecannot refrain from condemning Gates for "self-serving recklessness," for being a "supreme egoist," and for using the paper he edited to disseminate what Healey still views as anti-party ideas...

...Poor Healey...

...One wonders whether recent events have caused her to shed these remaining illusions, or whether she still feels that those bad East Europeans have mistakenly thrown out the socialist baby with the Communist bath-water...

...Since the elements all fit together, they are less vulnerable to the lessons of experience than are the beliefs 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 of people who judge issues one by one...

...Tell it to the average Soviet worker who f stands on line for toilet paper five j hours a day, fights in a department 1 store for the few remaining pairs of ill-fitting shoes, lives with three generations of family in a tiny apartment, and can look forward to an old age spent in dire poverty...

...This was reserved for party leaders such as Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, the fountainheads of all wisdom...

...She has merely shifted that faith to an undefinable "socialism" that she holds the party betrayed after 1968...

...That the Soviet Union led a the path to the future...

...Leonhard nails the lie that the pact was a means of buying time...

...Having left the ranks of the faithful in the 1970s, partially as a result of her opposition to the Soviet Ronald Radosh, co-author of The Rosenberg File, is a historian who writes frequently about Communism...

...She writes that those who saw life in the Soviet Union as a "dreary t totalitarian prison" were being de- j ceived...

...Indeed, Healey is a prototypical Communist, as described by Aileen S. Kraditor in her neglected masterpiece, Jimmy Higgins: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958 (Greenwood Press, 1988...

...When a program produces unintended consequences, ideologues rarely reconsider their theory but rather blame . . . something else that allows them to keep their faith in their ideology and its future validation...

...The new scholars argue that the Popular Front, which existed from 1935 to 1939, demonstrated that American Communists had a capacity for independent thinking, that they sought above all to adapt their radicalism to American political traditions and practice, giving only lip service to solidarity with the Soviet Union...

...Healey deserves credit for her work in the 1930s, when she bucked the violence of growers, vigilantes, and local police to organize Mexican and Okie migrant workers...

...Constantly, Healey tells us how she and her comrades were so busy with practice that they had no time for reading, thinking, or theory...

...That resurrection has centered on trying to disprove the thesis asserted by Draper and reiterated by Harvey Klehr, that "even at the price of virtually committing political suicide, American Communism would continue above all to serve the interests of Soviet Russia...

...That the United States was the evil power that stood in the way of t the world's people...

...By 1939, with the election of the leftist Culbert Olson as governor of California, and a lieutenant governor who was in Healey's words "close to the Party," unionism became legal in California's Imperial Valley, and Healey herself was appointed to a state agency protecting labor rights...

...letariat was wrong, to support dissolving the party in favor of a broad socialist organization, and to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary...

...Problems, yes, but to Healey the USSR still sets the agenda for the future...

...She calls it seeing socialism "from a limousine window," but is strangely silent about how, Fri ake her analysis of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...

...22.95 Ronald Radosh A s Theodore Draper has pointed out, the resurrection of the sordid past of the American Communist party has become an academic industry...

...She still sees herself as an organizer for socialism —this time outside the party that she holds is politically and intellectually bankrupt...

...one of J. Edgar Hoover's agents called her "one of the most capable, articulate and theoretically developed Communist Party members in Los Angeles...

...Healey also shows a remarkable inability to re-evaluate the anti-Communism of others...

...She writes about two trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s as part of a delegation of top American Communist leaders...

...1=1 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991...

...Classes in Marxism amounted to learning formulae by rote, and proving one's ability to defend the current party line...

...Healey cannot stomach those ex- t Communists who feel "bitterness" about their wasted years in the movement, and has only gratitude for gain- ( ing "knowledge that we never could have gotten in any other way...

...Her minor heresy is to argue that American Communists should not have translated Soviet diplomatic and strategic needs into political directives, thus downplaying their own opposition to Hitlerism...

...It was, of course, the sine qua non of the party to treat Stalin's goals as political directives...

...The "buying time" argument did not arise until Germany invaded the Soviet Union...

...Gates had the temerity to say that the concept of a dictatorship of the proTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 45 as she told me some years ago, she brought thousands of dollars back in a suitcase, with which the American party bought its new headquarters on West 23rd Street in New York City...

...That social- f ism was the inevitable hope of humani- t ty...

...Evidently, those who criticized the party for its politics and its ideology were also McCarthyite...

...Later, she would complain about the animosity with which her former comrades treated her...

...Even by the FBI's standards, Healey was unusual...

...How could one justify the pact and not treat British imperialism—rather than Nazism—as the main evil in the world of 1939...

...At the same time, she was proclaiming her allegiance to Joseph Stalin and the most brutal of totalitarian regimes abroad, and trying to inflict on her own country the principles and politics of the Soviet Union...

...When she moved to Washington, D.C., in the early eighties, her arrival was heralded by a full page in the Style section of the Washington Post...

...Healey is today perhaps the most celebrated and respected of the exCommunists...

...What knowledge...

...And he deduced "empirical" facts from his perception of "reality...

...Hence the growth of the "radicalism of nostalgia," as Draper calls it, which is nothing less than a "campaign for the rehabilitation of American Communism...

...She is hard on Angela Davis—whom she recruited to the party—for touring Eastern Europe in the 1960s and supporting the attacks on dissidents by the Czech Communist leadership...

...In reality, the delay was used more effectively for rearmament by Hitler than by Stalin...

...Healey fails to see that the pact was merely an agreement between two dictatorships to define their spheres of influence...

...Healey is today seen as the epitome of a "good" ex-Communist, yet, in her trajectory through the party, she was never a reformer—these were led by John Gates, the editor of the Daily Worker—but a party centrist who supported the lukewarm efforts at change led by Eugene Dennis, who capitulated to the hardliners immediately after the famed Khrushchev report on Stalin...

...She has obviously not read any of the new studies of the pact and of Soviet history—the work of Wolfgang Leonhard, for example...

...invasion of Czechoslovakia, Healey serves on the national leadership of the late Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America...

...Unfortunately—as long as major American intellectuals such as the distinguished historian and playwright Martin Bauml Duberman can call her one of America's "true heroes," and the popular feminist socialist writer Barbara Ehrenreich, Healey's DSA comrade, can call her "one of the American left's most brilliant and fearless women"—one has no other choice...

...Dorothy Healey still maintains the faith of the true believer...

...Her book was written before the current crackup of Communism...

...Indeed, although Isserman argues that Healey took the long road toward casting off "tradition's chains," her story shows that despite all her travails, she has learned little...