David Horowitz's Radical Son

...His parents brought him up in a radical political culture devoted to ruthlessness and a famously flexible notion of truth, and, as the title of his book proclaims, he is, even today, in his days of gung-ho right-wing emotionalism, a Radical Son...

...and a dogmatist...

...PAUL BERMAN is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968...

...The ad did carry the publisher's logo, though...

...The feeling of belonging to a superior yet deeply hated and persecuted vanguard of mankind...

...You cannot draw a line between Horowitz's way-out politics and his reporting of events, and conclude that the former represents mere opinion but the latter bears a reliable relation to fact...

...They talked like thugs...

...the glamorous excitement of raffish success (as represented by certain famous intellectuals in Paris, and by certain famous movie personalities in California...

...They dressed like an old-fashioned European fascist movement...

...I was a Panther supporter myself because of that idea, back in 1969 and 1970, when I was in college...

...He became a simpleminded fanatic—the mirror image of his worst (and not his best) moments on the left...

...BUT WHAT a difference in how those two men responded to what they read...

...THE PARTY'S newspaper, the Black Panther, with its adulation of Huey Newton as the "Supreme Servant of the People" and its veiled calls to murder one or another Panther dissident, was nothing like what I had expected from having read about the Panthers in Ramparts and other places...

...One factor would appear to be a remarkable streak of naiveté in Horowitz's personality...

...his knife is out...

...my looks displease him...

...Horowitz misled the world about the Panthers in the late sixties and seventies, but his more recent portraits of them conform to what was said as early as 1978 by the reporter Kate Coleman, then by the reporter Edward J. Epstein, and finally, at full length, by Hugh Pearson in The Shadow of the Panther —all of which gives reason to conclude that Horowitz's more recent account of life and death among the Panthers is accurate enough, in its larger strokes...

...The newspaper exuded a spirit of pathological authoritarianism...

...I sent the publishers a letter of anguished complaint when I saw the amazing ad, and they wrote back very courteously, explaining that Horowitz composed his own ad copy and paid for the space himself...

...One part of the story is true...

...And among the people who continued to linger was David Horowitz, who was anything but a liberal...

...I think he is the sort of man who, when whim or political passion carries him away, which is most of the time, would be perfectly happy to damage the reputation of any hapless person who ventures across his path...

...I am aware that some people found the Panthers' scary quality thrilling...

...This was true of their son as well...

...Her own struggles against the Sandinistas kept strictly to a civic path...

...La Prensa was typical in this respect...

...But would the suspicion have been correct...

...He comments: Perhaps Berman would have learned something if he had come along...

...Hit men from party headquarters were always murdering one or another erring member...

...mainstream left and of Marxism, sometimes a little stridently, but usually in an intelligent vein (even if not everyone among the criticized has wanted to acknowledge the intelligence...

...But that was not his impulse...

...Paul Berman New York, NY Actually, the version of this letter that ran in the New Republic omitted the part about Horowitz's being a demented lunatic...

...I do remember him saying words to that effect...

...That strikes me as very interesting...

...In certain passages he makes clear that he and his fellow Red Diaper babies acted as a moreorless self-conscious Leninist vanguard, deceiving other members of the incipient New Left, the ones without communist backgrounds, into building up a movement that pretended to favor peace and a democratic radicalism but that actually intended to bring about a Marxist-Leninist revolution...

...Then he says that he got up from a table where we had been sitting and invited me to accompany him and Peter Collier and their group to the editorial office of La Prensa, the anti-Sandinista newspaper...

...policy, though, and the feeling about that policy among the anti-Sandinista politicians, activists, and journalists in Managua was duly ambiguous...

...There is something valuable in Horowitz's account of his life with the Panthers and the California left—in the record that he provides of Berkeley radicalism and Newton's personality and the Panther-ish tang of left-wing life during the later, mad days of the New Left...

...press during the 1980s, and the fullest exposition of the democratic revolution) and "Neckties and Mass Graves: In Nicaragua, the Real Revolution is Just Beginning...

...He entered student politics at Columbia and Berkeley in the later fifties and early sixties as an independent left-wing revolutionary, unaffiliated with any Leninist organization...

...All but a few of the contra leaders boycotted the historic election in 1990, on the ground that any election under Sandinista auspices could not be fair (which was Abrams's position, too, judging by a debate I had with him two months earlier...

...He promoted their Oakland enterprises...

...The new book, Radical Son, offers some additional details, especially about his personal life, and allows him to take pot shots at a long list of persons as shady as myself (Todd Gitlin...

...I can imagine that his parents were authentically naive about Stalin, though people must have been telling them for years not to be...

...The Panthers contained quite a few admirable and idealistic people around the country, who have demonstrated their qualities by going on to new lives, post-Panther, as political leaders and intellectuals...

...The idea of the Panthers was attractive to people on the radical left—the idea that you could read about in Ramparts magazine...

...imperialism, which came out in 1969...

...They felt that the American government, with its military fantasies, had undermined the civic struggle for democracy, which was the only struggle that mattered for Nicaragua's future...

...They did so because they understood, as Berman did not, that the only future Nicaragua could look forward to under Sanidinista rule was the dire poverty and gulag existence of eve ry other communist state...

...What people did want in Managua—a plain majority of people by the later eighties— was peace, prosperity, upward mobility, and democracy...

...Not so...

...And if these Panther leaders became famous as noble and heroic rebels, if millions of black people in America and all kinds of people around the world came to see the Oakland militants as viable and earnest leaders of an admirable American and third world radical protest movement—this was in some degree Horowitz's doing...

...So what can I do...

...The Panthers reached the height of their DISSENT / Winter 1998 119 national influence in the years around 1969, and thereafter went into a decline—partly because the party split between a Newton faction of violent gangsters and a Cleaver faction that was even worse, and partly because the FBI and local police departments launched a campaign of repression...

...In other passages, though, he describes himself as a New Left free-thinker, as someone who wanted to break with the rigidities and authoritarianism of the old communist tradition, and who was frustrated in his atttempt to do so by some of his very nasty authoritarianminded comrades in the Berkeley left during the sixties and seventies...

...Why did he do that...

...Kohl explained it to him...

...Informally, though, Horowitz kept up ties with other children of the Communist Party, and at Berkeley the network of these Red Diaper babies proved to be energetic and influential in helping to found the New Left...

...When Chamorro won anyway and became president, most of the contras went on opposing her, sometimes (not always) with good reason, because they continued to be oppressed and impoverished peasants, no matter who ruled Managua...

...His crusader spirit exalts him, and in his exalted state of mind he can't be bothered to get the little details right...

...Even today I still treasure my yellowed copy of that issue, with its inky headline eternally exulting, "The People Triumphed...

...Other people were honestly deceived about the Panthers, but Horowitz has only himself to blame...

...Hendrik Hertzberg...

...In my interpretation, a democratic revolution had been going on for a long while there and in large parts of Nicaragua—a revolution from below, intended to overthrow the dictatorships of the right and the left...

...And then the author and his publishers had the gall to purchase advertisements in several magazines,not just the New Republic, making it seem that I applaud the very book that hangs me from a lamppost...

...His book describes that role in a strikingly contradictory way...

...These two men, Glucksmann and Horowitz, have led parallel lives...

...Each man, Glucksmann and Horowitz, devoted several years to that milieu, and then each underwent a soul-wrenching trauma—in Horowitz's case, the murder of the book-keeper by his own admired allies in the Black Panther Party...

...I don't know what the Prensa people told Horowitz when he came to visit—he was Abrams's emissary, and they may have told him anything he wanted to hear...

...I can review the book...

...In any case, this particular murder shocked him out of his naivet...

...But the book says nothing significantly new about how his left-wing rancors metamorphosed into right-wing rancors...

...The ad promotes a book by someone called David Horowitz, on the topic of how Horowitz used to be a left-wing fanatic and then became a right-wing fanatic...

...The line of intellectual succession that led, in the literature of American anti-imperialism, from the 1960s left-wing writings of David Horowitz (with his Leninist sympathies and his Leninist interpretation of America as the seat of world evil) to the later graphomaniacal writings of Noam Chomsky (with his nominal anti-Leninism and his Leninist interpretation of America as the seat of world evil) shows the lack of progress...

...This is untrue...

...The contras were a brutal peasant army from the jungles and the mountains, and if they had ever marched into the capital, there would have been block-by-block scenes of indescribable bloodshed, and everyone knew it...

...He and a few other people at Ramparts helped create and popularize the Panther image...

...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was published just about then, in the middle seventies, and Horowitz tells us that he read it and was strongly affected...

...Robert Scheer...

...Horowitz still couldn't see it...

...Glucksmann reemerged from his study of Solzhenitsyn to write a serious analysis of leftism and the totalitarian mentality, then went on to produce a series of other books, critical of the...

...But he also tells a story about running into me in Managua in 1987, and—this does trouble me—his telling has about it an air of fact...

...He was a man with two doctrines, one for the public and for certain of his moods, the other for his sense of inner purpose and for a small number of comrades...

...The readers should consider the background to my letter...

...He recalls that we argued, and that he concluded by shouting, "For the sake of the poorest peasant in this Godforsaken country, I can't wait for the contras to march into this town and liberate it from these fucking Sandinistas...

...In my judgment, a worse book has never been written, and as for the author, he is a demented lunatic...

...The combination of ideas and attitudes was unstable...

...A friend of freedom...

...Christopher Hitchens...

...Its editor, Violeta Chamorro, was an elegant woman who would soon be the new president of Nicaragua, elected on the popular tide that drove the Sandinistas from power .. Here, as everywhere we went, all the factions of the political spectrum that wanted to see democracy returned to Nicaragua supported the contras...

...Momentarily I feel a sympathy for poor old Horowitz, a man with a book to sell...

...It might have made a difference if Horowitz, like Glucksmann in France, had written some serious studies of communism, in an effort to DISSENT / Winter 1998 121 explain reality to himself and to his own readers on the left...

...Some of the Prensa editors who remained in Managua during those difficult months when their newspaper was not allowed to publish felt pretty bitter about that...

...I happened to be in Managua reporting on the Sandinista People's Revolution for the Village Voice...

...His merry enraged enthusiasm for a military triumph in Managua back in 1987 was not just a momentary display of pique, in my estimation...

...and so forth...

...The contras themselves did not like Chamorro...

...I can raise the same questions in regard to what he remembers about me...

...and a Leninist...

...In a review of Radical Son in the New Leader, the historian David M. Oshinsky noted a number of Horowitz's errors—on the Alger Hiss affair and the history of Senator Joe McCarthy, not to mention the World Series of 1947— which, in Oshinsky's words, "raise questions about the way Horowitz remembers events...

...the habit of cleverly presenting himself as a far more moderate personality than he is...

...Now was his moment at Soldier of Fortune...

...They swaggered like thugs (although it's also true that, at demonstrations, the Panthers used to march in a snappy, dance-style picket line that suggested a better humor and an artistic touch...

...And at last a mood of self-reflection began to steal over him...

...It has been suggested to me that, in deleting that particular phrase from my carefully composed letter, the editors of the New Republic did me a favor...

...Some of those people fled into exile and joined the contras, in the hope that somehow America would make everything come out well...

...Horowitz and I ran into each other in the lobby of that seediest and most spy-infested of tropical grand hotels, Managua's Hotel Intercontinental...

...Other people stayed in Managua and kept up a strictly civil opposition and quietly fumed over America's unhelpful role...

...He raised money for the Panthers...

...Horowitz is a good example, perhaps the best of all examples, of the disastrous influence of American communism on the New Left...

...It was a historic moment—the ceremony to mark the reopening of La Prensa, which the Sandinista censorship had closed...

...And in both cases, then came the experience of reading Solzhenitsyn's fat astonishing volumes...

...And so, of course I went to see...

...The radical-democratic free-thinking side of his personality gave him his public appeal, which was great during the high tide of the New Left (that was what I had written in the Village Voice, and was quoted as saying in Horowitz's ad...

...It was the idea of a militant mixture of socialism and black nationalism, capable of addressing deep issues of economic inequality and exploitation and not just of racial discrimination, capable of joining together the struggle of America's blacks with the struggles of many other people in America and around the world...

...When I got back to New York I wrote a detailed account of the reopening for the Voice...

...The contra war in the 1980s was a battle of the countryside against the cities, and the contras' popularity, great in certain regions—much greater than I and many other journalists knew at the time—was concentrated in the faraway jungles and remote cow towns, not in the cities and especially not in Managua (which is why we journalists failed to see the popularity...

...Panther headquarters in Oakland ran a series of drug and prostitution rackets...

...A freethinker...

...That was the theme of my Village Voice journalism in articles like "Double Reality: People's Revolution versus Sandinista Revolution" (which was, I believe, the longest analysis of Nicaragua to appear anywhere in the U.S...

...Each became prominent as a radical journalist in the era of 1968...

...But Horowitz dropped his more thoughtful aspect altogether...

...But the Prensa editors were, in fact, split...

...the rage at his enemies...

...Kohl noticed that Newton was sniffing like a cocaine addict...

...and more...

...In his earlier book, Destructive Generation, he and Peter Collier made it seem as if they had actively approved of Panther murders, and that Horowitz bore a considerable responsibility for putting the book-keeper into danger...

...But the use of that quotation within the ad may leave an impression among readers that I have in some way endorsed Horowitz's book or its author...

...IN THE Bay Area he worked as an editor of Ramparts, the most important of the New Left magazines in the sixties and early seventies, and he did a great deal to promote the Black Panther Party, which had its national headquarters in Oakland...

...the dream of an all-cleansing, all-destroying civil war...

...the patient zeal for building up a large movement that is intended eventually to undo democracy, in the ordinary sense of the word...

...His mother and father left the Party in the mid-fifties, but like many people from that generation, they seem to have held on for some time to their Marxist-Leninist ideals and habits of mind...

...The Sandinista government had shut down La Prensa for the last fifteen months, and now it was about to reopen...

...Abrams's policy was to arrange a military victory for Nicaragua's contra insurgents over the Sandinista People's Army...

...Vast numbers of people were influenced by Solzhenitsyn in those years—in France, for instance...

...And I pulled away—as did a great many other puzzled soldiers of the movement, white and black...

...The Panthers themselves, whenever I saw them at meetings or demonstrations, were not very attractive...

...The reason that Nicaraguans elected Chamorro president in 1990 was precisely because she had always maintained a nonviolent and democratic attitude, had never gone into exile, had never endorsed a civil war...

...The letter sounds entirely moderate and incontestable in the version in which it ran, but otherwise might have aroused a suspicion that I had exaggerated, ever so slightly, Horowitz's flaws...

...In his new book Horowitz repeats a story that he has previously told about how the Rain120 DISSENT / Winter 1998 parts book-keeper, Betty Van Patter, was murdered by the Panthers...

...But mostly the Panther influence dwindled because it was never fated to do anything else...

...Each man was attracted to a dissident Marxism in the seventies, during his student days...

...the casual feeling about other people's lives...

...There was the case of André Glucksmann, the philosopher, who to my eyes offers a usefully instructive trans-Atlantic perspective on Horowitz...

...The American New Left never did come to a proper reckoning with communism and totalitarianism—or rather, came to a series of pseudo-reckonings that allowed the aging veterans of the left to mutter a few exculpatory phrases about libertarian ideals and to leave the rest of what they had previously thought unchanged...

...This, it seems to me, has been the greatest failure in Horowitz's life, and an unfortunate one for the many thousands of people on the American left who had been his readers...

...And then Horowitz adds, to boot, that I DISSENT / Winter 1998 123 was "finally uninterested" in the democratic revolution...

...but then, Horowitz has had an unstable career...

...Horowitz's most influential book during his left-wing period was a political tract called Empire and Revolution, in favor of third world guerrilla struggles against U.S...

...His judgments are not kind: I am a lousy guy, undeserving of a fellowship...

...From the point of view of the democratic revolution, the reopening of La Prensa was a crucial event...

...He was like his parents in that way, I think...

...And the Leninist side of his personality gave him his inner fervor and unbreakable sense of superiority...

...As for Violeta Chamorro, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, her relations with the contras were anything but simple...

...To the editor: I have noticed with astonishment and growing consternation that an ad invoking my entirely innocent name has run in your pages not once but twice in recent weeks...

...In his book Horowitz writes about many things, and one of them is me...

...He hobnobbed with Newton himself, at Newton's famously posh apartment...

...the contempt, above all, for liberalism and its wishy-washy ways—these were Horowitz's birthright, and he has clung to them faithfully...

...Glucksmann's most important early book was a philosophical treatise called Le discours de la guerre, in favor of the same struggles against the same imperialism, which came out in 1967...

...the desire for violent cataclysms...

...my main achievement in life is to have been unfair to David Horowitz in a review of an earlier book of his for the New Republic (the issue of April 24, 1989, for anyone who is interested...

...Somehow Horowitz had failed to see anything of the sort...

...Eldridge Cleaver was a rapist...

...That's what we authors have come to, in this age of penny-pinching publishers...

...Each of them was born into a Jewish current of the Communist Party—in France, in America—during the era of Hitler...

...But in its Oakland inner core, among the highest leaders, the Panther Party was a grisly group...

...Which didn't prevent Peter Collier from saying otherwise in the Weekly Standard or Horowitz from repeating the calumny in his book...

...He was a democratic rebel against the Old Left...

...A white cult of black primitivism surrounded the party, which in other circumstances would have been recognized as demeaning...

...I am made out to be a creep of the first order, not quite as horrible as Tom Hayden, but bad enough...

...In the new book, he insists that his responsibility was less direct— that he really had not noticed the scale of Panther violence and would not have approved of murder, had he known of it...

...I was part of the jostling crowd lining up for a copy of the first issue on that historic day...

...But everything he says has to be taken with a grain of salt...

...I belonged to a student group in New York that agitated and demonstrated and generally ran amok on behalf of any Panther who found himself in trouble with the police, which was a lot of Panthers...

...Huey Newton murdered at least two people, was a rapist, and a drug addict...

...Horowitz was there as a representative of Elliott Abrams, who in those days was President Reagan's assistant secretary of state...

...I am associated with a disreputable cash-cow journal called Dissent...

...The quotation, from an article of mine in the Village Voice many years ago, is accurate...

...Contra support was U.S...

...Naiveté is a scary quality, in politics...

...He is on a mission...

...in Glucksmann's case, the murder, in 1972, of Israel's athletes at the Munich Olympics by his admired allies in the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...I am quoted saying something-or-other about Horowitz...

...His youth in the Communist Party USA in Queens, New York, during the 1950s appears to have shaped him for life...

...COLLIER TOLD the same story about me in the Weekly Standard last year, except that he made even clearer the suggestion that I failed to witness the reopening of the newspaper...

...But what about his smaller strokes...

...I was mean to him on other occasions, too...

...The contradiction is telling, and I think that both versions accurately describe not just Horowitz but a number of people with his sort of background...

...Instead of plunging into identity politics or brown rice, like most other people on the radical left in the middle seventies, he deepened his Panther commitments...

...Horowitz the son was equally naive about the Panthers...

...The last Stalinist, in his fashion...

...But the more I agitated, the more I began towonder...

...I did indeed decline to travel the angry, tense streets of Sandinista Managua in the company of a wild-eyed emissary of the Reagan adminstration who was fond of shouting, "I can't wait for the contras to march into this town...

...Horowitz has told his life story before, first in a series of magazine articles (for example, in Soldier of Fortune, January 1987, which is an episode in his publishing career that he evidently wishes to suppress) and then in a book called Destructive Generation, which he wrote together with his long-time colleague Peter Collier...

...Like other American socialists who flocked to Nicaragua, Berman was finally uninterested in the democratic revolution that was taking place all around him...

...A certain kind of liberal continued to linger happily over the Panther cause for that reason, even when, by the early and mid-seventies, the tide on the radical left had drifted elsewhere...

...When the doughty editors succeeded in getting La Prensa reopened, they were seriously shorthanded as a result, which was infuriating to them...

...To be accurate, the publishers are not completely responsible...

...Some of his details are 118 DISSENT / Winter 1998 worth noting...

...To begin with: the claim that "all the factions" that favored democracy in Nicaragua in 1987 favored the contras...

...AGOOD MANY readers of Dissent subscribe to the New Republic, and those readers will thrill at the opportunity to discover anew the following letter-to-the-editor, which ran in the New Republic a few months ago...

...The Prensa staffers who did support the contras had mostly been lured out of Nicaragua by Abrams's State Department, which had put them to work on the contra radio station or had given them positions in the contra political structure, such as it was...

...Glucksmann became an intellectual leader of Paris Maosim, Horowitz an intellectual leader of California's pro-Panther left, and those two movements vibrated to the same tones—the cult of prisoners and of lumpenproletarian violence...

...So HOW reliable can Horowitz be on all kinds of other people who receive a much nastier treatment in his book than I do—how reliable on people who, not being journalists, can't point to back issues of newspapers like the Voice to show him up...

...Hugh Pearson, in his valuable book The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, puts some emphasis on a story that Horowitz has repeated in Radical Son—about how, as part of his Panther work, Horowitz brought the educator Herbert Kohl to meet Newton, with the hope of getting Kohl to back the Panthers' educational program...

...and of totalitarianism...

...I think he feels that a ruthless disregard for truth and facts is the practical way to proceed on all political questions, and there's no point in finicking about the details...

...But I failed to accept Horowitz's invitation...

...But large parts of everything else in Horowitz's paragraph are false, and, at risk of delighting the readers to excess with still more arcana of ten years ago, I would like to underline a few of those falsehoods—if only to correct a few popular American myths about 122 DISSENT / Winter 1998 Nicaragua's past and to beam a few more sunny rays on the dark theme of Horowitz's way with facts...