Letters
Editors: Speaking of the "gramophone mind." Is it really fair to present your readers with Paul Berman's previously published letter in the New Republic ("A Fanatic's Journey," Winter 1998) and...
...Berman wants to have it both ways...
...the granite strengthens their conviction...
...The Editors Reply: We're not surprised that readers of Dissent had these varied reactions to our new design (and there were many more...
...Herf mentions Ronald Radosh's book (written with Joyce Milton) on the Rosenbergs in the mid-1980s...
...Editors: Paul Berman's review of David Horowitz's Radical Son damages both his own and Dissent's reputation for civility and fairness...
...It is well worth the experience...
...The editor of Soldier of Fortune welcomed Horowitz's contribution to LETTERS that journal by writing, in the issue of January 1987 (I have preserved the issue—such are the fruits of undying rancor...
...And vengeance was mine...
...Following his review of Horowitz, Paul Berman stands in an undistinguished tradition of intellectuals who tried to delay the growth of our knowledge by attacking the messenger of bad news all the while claiming to be in favor of facing a difficult past...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly • Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Berman would have known this if he had read the book instead of the reviews...
...But Radosh made his most important contribution, in my judgment, much earlier, in the early seventies, when he promoted an idea of libertarian leftism...
...It's dirty (catering to the grunge movement...
...3. I was not a "representative of Elliott Abrams," or an "emissary" of Elliott Abrams, when Berman and I met in Nicaragua, as he suggests...
...In my review of Horowitz's Radical Son in Dissent just now, I was again happy to acknowledge a value in his account— though the value seems to me quite limited, due to Horowitz's indifference to accuracy...
...The memorial is original, warm, and effective...
...DAVID HOROWITZ Los Angeles, Calif...
...Designing Leftists Editors: The Winter issue of Dissent is not only the most attractive I have seen in a long time but also substantively the most interesting...
...Yet we also received privately expressed admiration and respect from leftist intellectuals and scholars who were able to accept the shattering of old myths without having their leftist or liberal convictions destroyed...
...In other words, my putative embrace of the politics of Soldier of Fortune provides, for Berman, a crucial revelation of my postradical politics...
...In turning against totalitarianism, the question was always, however: how exactly to do it...
...And I spent the rest of the 1970s and 1980s continuing to complain about Lenin and the communist political tradition, fervently and loudly if not always coherently or consistently, in the columns of the Village Voice, the New Republic, Mother Jones, and all kinds of minor and obscure journals...
...Congratulations on a beautiful redesign that makes Dissent much more inviting...
...Horowitz is the most prominent leftist who was close to the Panthers to have discussed in detail the crimes, including murder, which the Panthers were said to have committed, as well as the refusal of the New Left, black and white, to face the truth about these crimes...
...As Berman certainly knows, coming to terms with communism and totalitarianism was a central theme of the "Second Thoughts" conference that Horowitz and Peter Collier organized...
...Horowitz thinks that he has forsworn his old violent extremism, and his friends and admirers are thrilled at his transformation...
...The piece he is referring to was actually a "Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left" that I gave at a Berkeley "teach-in" on Nicaragua, which was held on April 4, 1986...
...Berman himself replied to it in the Village Voice in August 1986, six months before its appearance in Soldier of Fortune...
...It became more popular, too...
...It is the question of New Leftism and its response to totalitarianism— a still unresolved matter in many respects...
...CHARLES ROSSI Media, Pa...
...JEFFREY HERF Oxford, OH Editors: When a man begins his review of your life by calling you a "demented lunatic," as Paul Berman does in his bizarre comments on my autobiography, Radical Son, the expectation that he will misrepresent you in ways both small and large must be high...
...Berman did eventually come to the ceremony that re-opened La Prensa, but an hour late and after the speechmaking and tearful rendition of the national anthem were over (Berman was delayed by another, more pressing appointment with a leader of a socialist party that supported the Sandinista dictatorship, albeit deploring some of its methods...
...Should I have responded in some other way...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...In so doing, he offers a refreshing alternative to the self-congratulatory works about the sixties that have emerged from other leading figures of the sixties left...
...Mills questions the space of the memorial as being too great...
...But in the eighties Horowitz, too, together with his colleague Peter Collier, at last came out against communist ideas altogether...
...Horowitz did a very strange thing to me by purchasing advertisements that made me look like an endorser of his book...
...GEORGE SCIALABBA Cambridge, Mass...
...Horowitz says he was not sent to Sandinista Nicaragua by Elliott Abrams...
...The contretemps with Berman, and Berman's complaint about my reporting of the encounter, have already been answered by Peter Collier in the Weekly Standard...
...Editors: I just yesterday received the redesigned Winter '98 issue...
...On the other hand, he launches his ad hominem attack on Horowitz and ignores those of us who were in the New Left who have initiated the "proper reckoning" he claims to support...
...felt that Lenin's instruction to be dishonest was wrong...
...Jeffrey Herf upholds a philosophy of his own, which is not Horowitz's...
...As a librarian I find it often frustrating and interesting...
...There remains a great deal of archival research to be done regarding the issues raised by David Horowitz's book and the history of the New Left in general...
...It is regrettable that in light of these contributions, Berman does not acknowledge any American New Leftist intellectual and scholarly confrontation with communism and totalitarianism...
...He loved it, as we know from his years at Campobello...
...HARRY KAHN New York, N.Y...
...I have done so in political essays in Telos and Partisan Review, and in two books, one on the euromissile dispute, the second on political memory in the two Germanys...
...But the idea that I embraced the politics of Soldier of Fortune at that time, or any time, is absurd...
...Again, congrats on the new look, the old outlook, and the continued commitment...
...His reference to Horowitz as a "demented lunatic" is a reprehensible lowering of standards of political and intellectual debate...
...Perhaps if I had realized the uses to which future detractors might put this liberality, I would have been more selective...
...The sayings are easy to read...
...I have no quarrel with Berman's general evaluation of the mind of David Horowitz, but his own conclusions are indeed the product of the gramophone mind...
...I do not write this letter out of agreement with Horowitz's current political opinions, which he now describes as those of a Gingrich conservative...
...As I make explicit more than once, this very anti-Leninist rebellion is what defined my politics as a New Leftist in the sixties...
...Yet I detect in his letter a variation on that same bracing belief in the One True Line...
...I granted the rights, without exception, to every magazine (and textbook editor) who requested them...
...Yet when I met him personally in the context of the 1988 "Second Thoughts" conference, I was impressed with his intelligence and courage...
...To Letter Writers • We -welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...In short, it looks like all the other "'90s" consumer magazines desperate to be popular among the Gen-Xers and other society types (very unleftist...
...I came out with a paperback in 1972 called Quotations from the Anarchists (the very title of which took a swat at Mao), in which I complained, "Much of the Left still labors under a crude Leninist ideology and identifies revolution and the new society with the `Vanguard Party...
...In his willingness to adopt positions he knows will displease most people he knew from the sixties he has been provocative, but that is worlds apart from lunacy or dementia...
...I am aware that Fled similarly rethought his position...
...But if Horowitz says otherwise today, I won't argue with him...
...And the still water in the final section of the memorial may symbolize the end of World War II and the death of FDR...
...What would it look like—the story of the American New Left intellectuals who eventually did try to reckon with communism...
...This is not a logo for the ages...
...That comment is the mark of someone who has never held a dangerous job—never been a police officer, a firefighter, a soldier, or (if I may say so) a war correspondent, not even on an occasional basis...
...True, Horowitz is not one inclined to nuance and shades of gray, but he refrains from personal attacks...
...At the time, I had not even met Elliott Abrams...
...Instead he was sent by the United States Information Agency...
...As I was walking across the Triborough Bridge on my way to a Rosenberg demonstration, I was being instructed by a political mentor in the very Leninist doctrine to which Berman alludes, "that it was necessary to lie in order to advance the revolutionary cause...
...DEBORAH FALIK New York, N.Y...
...Horowitz's first article for SOF...
...A Monumental Mistake by Mills Editors: Nicolaus Mills's review of the FDR Memorial ("Monumental Correctness," Fall 1997) is too critical...
...In fact, the "moment at Soldier of Fortune" is a pure figment of Berman's imagination...
...Finally, the two errors (about Hiss-McCarthy and the World Series) that Berman cites from- David Oshinsky's New Leader review, were corrected in the galleys (from which Oshinsky wrote his favorable review), and did not appear in the published version of Radical Son...
...But is that true...
...The first stage in the American New Left's reckoning with communism, beginning in the late sixties and early seventies (and leavDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 123 LETTERS ing aside earlier precedents and older generations), came, exactly as in Europe, in the form of libertarian leftism...
...It may symbolize the rush of social reform so important in FDR's first two terms...
...In any case—enough...
...And what reading...
...On most issues, especially those regarding social and economic equality, my own views are probably closer to the editors of Dissent than to his...
...I made every effort in writing Radical Son, and in preparing both the hardcover and now the paperback versions, to be truthful to the facts as I know them...
...The use of rushing water is powerful and successful...
...Here is how Berman embellishes the "episode," in the course of adversely comparing my career to that of another second thoughter, Andre Glucksmann: "Now was [Horowitz's] moment at Soldier of Fortune...
...He became a simple-minded fanatic—the mirror image of his worst (and not his best) moments on the left...
...By suing him, for instance...
...Jeffrey Herf would like to see a discussion of how some of the New Left intellectuals in America evolved in an anticommunist direction...
...Paul Berman Replies: I called David Horowitz a nasty name...
...A writer of such impeccable ethical standards ought to know that it ain't kosher to review a book by an author the reviewer already detests...
...As Berman sums me up: "I think [Horowitz] feels that a ruthless disregard for truth and facts is the practical way to proceed on all political questions...
...And certainly the rest of your changes seem clean, unfettered, easily read, and generally successful...
...Allow me to add that the political half of my own writings from those long-ago years figured, in a modest young person's fashion, in that same effort to oppose communist tendencies on the New Left...
...Editors: You were right—the old logo is "clearly recognizable from across the street...
...Radosh's libertarianism of that era sometimes tilted a little shakily back toward the older traditions of a less commendable left...
...So Herf raises a legitimate issue, and such a history ought to be written...
...On the one hand he presents himself as willing to criticize communism and writes that "the American New Left never did come to a proper reckoning with communism and totalitarianism—or rather, came to a seDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 121 LETTERS ries of pseudo-reckonings that allowed 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...
...There is no giant statue of Roosevelt, which perhaps brings the viewer to the realization that Roosevelt did not want to be distant...
...That is why Herf feels entitled to read a haughty lecture about antitotalitarianism to those of us who came earlier to that particular battle and fought longer and in bigger arenas than he ever did...
...Michael Wreszin says that to review the book of someone you detest is not kosher...
...Surely I have the right to answer...
...He convinced himself that anything but the most right-wing of rightisms was no anticommunism at all...
...It seems everyone is busy changing names, layouts, typefaces, colors, etc...
...The statues of the bread line and the desperate man at the radio are of human proportions...
...Readers of Radical Son will know that my feelings are precisely the opposite...
...This issue is terrific...
...No other monument has tried to show a relationship to others the way the statues in this memorial do...
...I think the view of the New Left and of the left in general that he tends to present is not always fair...
...Yet it's true that Two Utopias doesn't tell the story of the American intellectuals, apart from the interesting case of Francis Fukuyama, and neither does my article on Horowitz, apart from discussing Horowitz himself...
...In fact, it is a theme that runs throughout my book...
...I was the source for Coleman's courageous article...
...After the Commentary article appeared, many journals, including the Utne Reader (a left-wing readers' digest) and Soldier of Fortune, requested reprint rights...
...My break with Lenin's duplicitous approach to politics was triggered by a sort of epiphany that occurred in 1953 and is described on page seventyeight of my text...
...We libertarian leftists were a tiny movement in those days, and Radosh was a pioneer, and what he did was brave...
...and not very readable...
...Horowitz...
...The same urgency not to evade or suppress the truth in the service of a political idea is what later caused me to risk my life, and lose most of my friends, because I told the truth about the Black Panthers (an action that Berman also distorts by falsely suggesting that Kate Coleman and others preceded me in exposing the Panthers' crimes, which, as he knows, is the opposite of what happened...
...I was all of fourteen at the time...
...Beneath the silly surface of this present debate, there is an important issue under discussion...
...One more thing...
...I didn't like the tone of Horowitz's "Second Thoughts" conference for that reason (though I know that some admirable and serious people attended...
...David Horowitz had always upheld a Leninist interpretation of world events (the passage in his letter denying his own Leninism should not be taken seriously, as you can see with a glance at his own book, for example, page 106, where he describes his New Left ambition to rescue communism from the Soviets...
...For this, however much one may agree or disagree with his political judgments, Horowitz deserves to be praised for his courage, and for his willingness to write critically of his own role...
...Yet Radosh followed his libertarian principles sufficiently in that period to write a vivid protest against Cuban totalitarianism...
...I stand corrected— and I point out that, in those years, Abrams was in charge of State Department policy on Nicaragua...
...2. Berman attaches great significance to an "article" of mine that appeared in Soldier of Fortune in 122 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 LETTERS January 1987, "an episode in his publishing career that [Horowitz] evidently wishes to suppress...
...In the future, any historian who aspires to write a fair account of these years must grapple with the issues Horowitz is raising...
...During that time I avoided joining any of the Leninist sects then proliferating in the movement...
...He has so frequently informed us of his courageous anti-Stalinism and the insidious corruption of all those who have not made their own hatred for the Soviet totalitarian more explicit that it sounds like the "music going down and around...
...I had better acknowledge one point where Horowitz must be right, and I must be wrong...
...It is also the case that the pages of Partisan Review and Telos from the 1970s and 1980s are filled with essays in which some of us who were in the New Left moved to our current liberalism through precisely that, in our view, "proper reckoning...
...It was in the spirit of revenge...
...He is the first to have drawn a connection between the Popular Front mentality of the Old Left ("no enemies on the left"), which led to leftist refusal to speak honestly about the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, and the New Left's refusal to speak honestly and publicly about crimes being committed by the Black Panther Party...
...Berman doesn't disappoint...
...One keeps hearing of the death of the cold war, but I guess we can count on the Paul Bermans and David Horowitzes to keep beating the dead horses...
...Welcome aboard, Mr...
...Horowitz also says that I present a misleading picture of his appearance in Soldier of Fortune magazine...
...I still live with an element of risk, far greater than Berman himself has ever experienced, as a result of this political choice...
...Erratum James B. Rule's Theory and Progress in Social Science was published by Cambridge University Press...
...Radosh and Milton's conclusions about the Rosenbergs won an endorsement from me in Vanity Fair...
...But Horowitz's book says all kinds of terrible things about me...
...126 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...As such, they immediately tell everyone what life was like in the Great Depression years...
...I think my conclusion that "Berman was finally uninterested in the democratic revolution that was taking place all around him" is fair on the evidence...
...Ronald Radosh's very important work on the Rosenberg trial shattered decades of denial regarding the reality of espionage...
...When Berman wrote about the event in the Village Voice, it was to pour scorn on those present as Americans and contra supporters...
...My book A Tale of Two Utopias goes on at length about New Leftism and communism and especially about the European New Left intellectuals and their turn against communism...
...The speech was reprinted (under that title) in Commentary in June 1986...
...Given his background, the editors feel his opinions are particularly poignant...
...The particular individuals in this debate have been arguing for too long, by about a dozen years...
...It takes time to enjoy this memorable memorial...
...Is it really fair to present your readers with Paul Berman's previously published letter in the New Republic ("A Fanatic's Journey," Winter 1998) and to suggest it is part of a mind-opening "vivisection" when it's just a return to the gramophone...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...To varying degrees all of us encountered leftist intolerance for our efforts...
...But he keeps hinting about a moral superiority that comes from physical danger—which makes me think that, on essential questions, Horowitz has changed not one whit...
...I was in Nicaragua with Peter Collier and Ronald Radosh on a trip sponsored by the United States Information Agency...
...Editors: I love the new design: it's hip, retro, and bourgeois in just the right proportions...
...As that research proceeds we will move beyond the battle of memoirs...
...With what set of ideas...
...I rebelled at this idea...
...Horowitz came to think that anticommunism required being a Reaganlike conservative—or something even further to the right...
...IvAN R. DEE Chicago, Ill...
...BUT—that logo is a disaster...
...My compliments to the designer and to the Foundation for a very clean, readable, attractive presentation...
...Finally, Roosevelt's well-known sayings are gracefully intertwined with both the water and the granite...
...I think it would look roughly like the story of their counterparts in Europe, except that intellectual developments on the American left have shown less brilliance and originality (I did make that point in my piece on Horowitz) and have had less influence...
...Among the people who gathered around Horowitz in the mid- and late-eighties, however, the tendency was to fight dogma with dogma...
...Horowitz boasts in his letter, at the bottom of his second paragraph, about his physical courage...
...With this issue, the logo size has been increased by 20 percent...
...His criticisms of others remain strictly on the level of disagreements about political judgments...
...Yet it is well used, and the public, as far as I can see, seems to enjoy walking through a memorial rather than looking at something distant and high above them...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...The roaring water of the memorial has an effect upon people...
...It is a sad day when a serious journal like Dissent, which has distinguished itself from the left's less appealing features, sinks to this level...
...The editor's hearty salute and his expectation of further articles are what led me to suppose that Horowitz's contribution to the journal of the armed American ultraright represented more than a passive agreement to reprint a single article...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...The argument against totalitarianism became less utopian, less abstract, more sophisticated, and more consistent during the eighties...
...It is the case that "the American New Left," if understood to refer to most of the former members of the sixties left, has not engaged in a "proper reckoning with communism and totalitarianism...
...How could we make a virtue of lying, and still advance the cause of truth...
...We hope our readers can find it from across the street, and will encourage their friends to look for it also...
...To avoid unnecessary tedium, and because my book is readily available, I will confine this reply to three points that illustrate his distortions: I. Berman portrays me as a Leninist, not only in my adolescence in the 1950s, but as a New Left activist in the 1960s, and even in conservative middle age after I have passed from being a "fanatic" of the left, in his view, to one of the right...
...One hopes that historians working on these matters will consult Horowitz's book, not as confirmed truth, but as a source of important hypotheses to be tested and questions to be further pursued...
...In addition, he was once the assistant secretary of the Navy...
...That was in a moment when New Leftism was still a mass movement and the cult of Ho, Mao, and Fidel was at its height...
...A number of other New Left libertarians complained in a similar vein—but, of course, we, the complainers, remained a hard-beset and unpopular minority, and not too many left-wingers rushed to our defense, and the circles of New Left anticommunism were small...
...One need not agree with all of Horowitz's judgments about events and people to recognize that Radical Son ought to be included in the canon of essential sixties memoirs...
...In my heart, I...
...Once again we are treated to his brilliant analysis of the Sandinista failures and the immense popularity of the contras...
...I have never objected across the board to every last thing written by the eighties authors whom Herf chooses to celebrate...
...I think they succeed and will grow in popularity as the years go by...
...Lest we forget, water was important to FDR...
...And naturally such a man has spent his career urging people less fortunate than he to pick up a gun—in his young days as a left-wing promoter of the Panthers, later on as a right-wing promoter of the contra war in Nicaragua...
...This is Mr...
...By the middle 124 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 eighties, he, too, finally began to play a part in the criticism of totalitarianism (though unlike everyone else who has been mentioned, Herf, so far as I have known, refrained from presenting his antitotalitarian convictions to any public larger than the intellectuals— he kept his head down by writing for the little magazines...
...When Horowitz and Collier finally gathered the courage to say something truthful about the Panthers (after having lied about them for many years), I accepted their belated reports, too, in the New Republic—even while I criticized the authors on other grounds...
...It's also clearly betDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 125 LETTERS ter than the new one...
...Naturally such a man is taken with his own bravery...
...Would the Rosenbergs lie about their innocence...
...Such name calling and ad hominem attacks have a long and sorry history on the left...
...MICHAEL WRESZIN New York, N.Y...
...I thought the spirit in which I did that was obvious...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
