Radical Son

...When I finally met Horowitz I peppered him with questions about his past...

...he seemed not to want to talk too much about it...

...neighborhood children whose parents were not politically trustworthy were deemed inappropriate company...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW All's Left With the World Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey David Horowitz Free Press /464 pages /$27.50 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff About a dozen years ago I received a phone call out of the blue from someone who identified himself as David Horowitz...

...His parents were both schoolteachers active in the Communist party, and particularly in the New York teachers' union which the party controlled throughout the 1930's and much of the 1940's...

...The only minor fracture resulted from 64 February 1997 • The American Spectator...

...Both had had their ambitions thwarted, partly by the Great Depression yet perhaps just as much by a genuine sense of alienation from this country and its broader culture...

...From his line of questioning it was obvious that he was broadly supportive of the Reagan administration's efforts in that country, so much so in fact that I couldn't help asking: "This isn't the David Horowitz, surely...

...Horowitz recalls being brought up in a kind of political and cultural quarantine, "embattled, surrounded by enemies...

...The prospect of Horowitz, one of the founders of the New Left, author of Free World Colossus and Empire and Revolution, supporting our policies in Central America, at the very moment that most liberals, when not actively supporting Communist objectives there, were scuttling for cover—this, I say, bordered on the surreal...

...David Horowitz's political trajectory was determined at birth...

...And the article he was writing (with Peter Collier), "Lefties for Reagan," became the opening salvo of his new career as a neoconservative activist and intellectual...

...in that sense alone, this memoir is the political hook of this season, and many more to come...

...Readers who have never been involved MARK FALCOFF is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...There was an instant recognition by others who shared our values and political commitments, and an exaggerated estrangement on the part of those who did not...

...He wanted to check some details about the history of U.S...

...They were disinclined to pursue more lucrative and rewarding careers, choosing instead the one secure profession then available to Jews...

...Horowitz grew up a red diaper baby—not merely the child of Communists, but someone raised to be, if not precisely a Communist in his own right, then at least very much of the left, and the proSoviet, anti-American left at that...

...This memoir is a deeply troubling document for what it tells us about the damage that the sixties left—serious, violent, and destructive —has permanently inflicted upon our culture...

...Both were intense, committed partisans...

...But among this family, at least, no such conflict existed: the Horowitzes shared a coherent, if not precisely seamless, common culture...

...During the sixties and early seventies, American journalism harped on the generational conflict supposedly sundering American society...

...in the left will find this book an entirely new experience—like a roller coaster in hell from which the author has emerged scarred by the ride...

...This meant that even potential playmates had to be vetted...

...Radical Son is the most remarkable testament of its kind since Whittaker Chambers's Witness, a book which it resembles in more ways than one...

...each had made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union before marrying...

...Now, however, he has come forward with the whole story...

...Indeed it was...

...For the most part he was reticent or very telegraphic...

...involvement in Nicaragua...

...He was sent to the party-controlled Sunnyside Progressive School, and his childhood memories of his parents touch on cell-meetings, secret missions for the Party, and finally, in the late forties and early fifties, political martyrdom as the result of the Smith Act and other measures and activities which drove many Communists from positions of public responsibility and a few (though not his parents) to prison sentences...