Apologia Pro Vita Sua
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey By David Horowitz Free Press. 468pp. $27.50. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A Conspiracy So...
...At this point, he writes, "neither [Collier nor I] had systematically thought our way to a conservative position...
...Horowitz views Radical Son as a modem-day version of Whittaker Chambers' Witness...
...I lived in two worlds," Horowitz recalled...
...Having met the ruling class, Horowitz liked what he saw...
...There was no turning back...
...They're thugs," said a disgusted Dick Gregory...
...Horowitz describes his parents as dedicated teachers who did not use their classrooms for political purposes...
...I should have left them [earlier]," admits Horowitz...
...We could position ourselves as radical critics of American society without having to defend the crimes committed by the Soviet bloc...
...The description is at odds with almost every published account of the McCarthy era...
...In truth, McCarthy gave his Wheeling speech on February 9,1950, four months before the Communist invasion...
...He simply switched sides...
...But it was politics that still consumed him, politics he most craved...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy...
...In late 1973, Horowitz spoke at a convention in Washington, D.C...
...The good life beckoned, with a fine house and fancy cars...
...Hesburgh, a devoted civil libertarian, eyed him with contempt...
...Yet the bulk of Horowitz' recollection rings true to me—the son of New York City teachers, raised three subway stops from Sunnyside, in a time and a culture almost identical to the one he describes...
...John Wayne...
...Historians and journalists have long viewed the blacklist (in movies, education and elsewhere) as an American version of the Nuremberg Laws...
...Along the way, Horowitz clinked glasses with every Left-wing icon in Europe, from Jean-Paul Sartre ("an ugly little man") to Isaac Deutscher (a "stern" and "unforgiving" mentor) to R. D. Lang (the "existential psychiatrist" who believed that insane people were actually visionaries responding to an irrational world...
...As a graduate student he merged with other "red diaper babies" to form a radical nucleus in the San Francisco Bay area...
...In 1983, Horowitz and Collier published an article about the aids crisis in San Francisco that blamed gay leaders for obscuring "vital information about how the deadly disease is spread...
...Newton, El-dridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Bobby Seale—all had impressive rap sheets...
...The Kennedys did less well—there were many competitors—and The Fords was an Edsel on all counts...
...In the 1950s Horowitz' parents were fired from their longtime teaching positions in the New York public schools...
...Yet unlike his personal hero, William J. Bennett, he seems oblivious to the impactif any—that conservative thought and values have had upon his life...
...His reading of Solzhenitsyn, his disgust with black anti-Semitism, his fury over events in Nicaragua—all added momentum to his Rightward course...
...They had all been first generation Americans who had gone to work during the Depression and had gravitated to school teaching as a secure profession in uncertain times...
...Horowitz' recollections of the Alger Hiss case and the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy are also muddled...
...After their suspensions, they brought suit against the Board of Education [and eventually] received not only legal vindication, but all the pension money...
...What really made Ramparts'" reputation, though, was its promotion of the infant Black Panther Party...
...Horowitz returned to Berkeley in 1968 to work for Ramparts, a slick new radical magazine...
...The McCarthy years were often ugly, and the victims were real...
...Over the next decade, Horowitz and Peter Collier, another burned-out former radical, produced three books about great Amer-ican dynasties...
...Our attitude was more of a rejection of the postures we had taken in the past that had proven so empty and destructive...
...His mind is fixed upon the failures of the Left, not the glories of the Right...
...Now I had hit the ground hard, and had no idea how to get up...
...Horowitz was repeatedly threatened by the Panthers, and a close friend, he tells us, was killed by one of their crowd...
...There is, however, a ruthless sort of honesty to his portrayal of Mom and Dad...
...The New Left was a shambles, the revolution was dead...
...One issue featured the secret diaries of Che Guevara, approved by Castro himself...
...But there was a strain of loyalty in me, an inability to let go of something I had committed myself to, that held me back...
...As George Jackson put it: "Marxism is my hustle...
...Why explore some dusty archive when the "truth" was already known...
...Horowitz' memories are vivid, if not always correct...
...That surely was the case...
...The difference is that Chambers provides us with a firm moral and intellectual context for his political od-yssey from Marxism to conservatism, while Horowitz does not...
...that their premature retirement had previously cost...
...Horowitz writes about these troubles with enormous passion, and about his children with a father's doting love...
...Founded in 1966 by an Oakland street felon named Huey Newton, the Panthers provided a radical alternative to other black movements of that era...
...Radical Son is mostly about the political mistakes—or worseof those who opposed him, abused him, or failed to see his truths...
...Its simple thesis—that American capitalism was responsible for the Cold War, the arms race, and every other global crisis—was lifted largely from the work of pro-Soviet historians like D. F. Fleming...
...He took part in the first major student protests there—the nonviolent, headline-grabbing 1961 demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...One was filled with the currency of common culture ...The Lone Ranger...
...Moving restlessly among causes, he wrote books and articles about the evils of huac, the glories of Fidel Castro, and the need for worldwide Socialist revolution...
...A few writers—like Joan Didion—took issue with the line, and a few black activists also broke ranks...
...Even Khrushchev had done that...
...he notes, "we were pushing largely on open doors...
...Horowitz was raised in Sunnyside, Queens, a Left-wing oasis known as "the maternity ward of Greenwich Village...
...Horowitz learned to pick good targets...
...Meanwhile, the Panthers kept dealing and killing and shaking down the streets...
...Horowitz led the way with articles that praised Panther radicalism and community spirit...
...As he left the rostrum, he crossed paths with the next speaker, Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame...
...With the aid of Ramparts (especially Horowitz, Sol Stern and Peter Collier), the Panthers became a national sensation, a "genuine" grass-roots movement of the oppressed, determined to tear down the class and caste system that kept them in chains...
...That is not an isolated lapse...
...This may not make McCarthy any less cynical, but it does raise questions about the way Horowitz remembers events...
...Like all radicals," he writes, "I lived in some fundamental way in a castle in the air...
...Phrases like "'the Great Fear," and "the Reign of Terror" are still commonly used to define a political era in which no one was killed or tortured or sentenced without trial...
...For public consumption, Ramparts imposed a salary cap on everyone and held day-long meetings where the mail-room staff battled with the writers over everything from the cost of coffee to the content of articles...
...The Rockefellers sold briskly and received ex-cellent reviews...
...There are Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman and Sidney Blumen-thal, the liberal media and the Marxists in academia, and his father most of all...
...And we could express our moral outrage at Communist excesses...
...Who cared about footnotes when the black ghettos were exploding and thousands were dying in Vietnam...
...There followed a disastrous stint in London with the elderly (and perhaps senile) Bertrand Russell, who was organizing a "War Crimes Tribunal" to prosecute the United States for its involvement in Vietnam...
...In our attacks on the 'repressive' institutions of the university culture...
...Horowitz has led a car crash of a life, always certain of his course until the absolute moment of collision...
...Their vision of a Communist future was so strong, so all-consuming, that it justified any personal sacrifice, any imaginable crime...
...They were part of the purge that cost hundreds of teachers their jobs...
...Horowitz is today a conservative—a change made gradually, he insists, in the 1970s and '80s...
...This allows Horowitz to portray the Senator as "a latecomer to the anti-Communist cause" who fed off the blood of American GIs...
...One way was to write a bestseller...
...Howard Fast...
...The New Left had formed a similar frontier guard around the Panthers and their crimes...
...The 1960s were extremely kind to puffed-up oracles like Horowitz, whose faults became virtues in a world turned upside down...
...Their function," he says, "was to explain away Stalin's crimes, put obstacles in the path of those who resisted his policies, and discredit witnesses who testified against him...
...His affair with Abby Rockefellera source for his book on the family—helped destroy his marriage of 15 years...
...Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
...Bored with academic life, Horowitz left graduate school to become a professional radical...
...Most were Jewish...
...In 1984, Horowitz cast his first Republican ballot for Ronald Reagan...
...When political circumstances released them into the competitive arena of the prosperous Fifties, they were able to find far more lucrative and—in many cases—more fulfilling outlets for their abilities...
...What has not changed is his passion for politics, his demand for attention, his need to create enemies, to settle scores...
...We had the benefit of everybody's doubt...
...While no one would publicly say so," Horowitz declares, "it was the Panthers' violent image that provided their real attraction to the New Left...
...Their shrill wording—and the furious response over shadowed the fundamental truth of their thesis...
...The other] was lit by different stars...
...Joe DiMaggio...
...Horowitz is now a leading general in conservative culture wars against "political correctness...
...Both were deeply unhappy people, he notes, who vented their anger and passion through a political movement that promised justice and equality for all...
...This attitude did not change much in the coming years...
...My parents and their comrades were indeed conspirators," Horowitz writes...
...The Panthers came heavily armed, spouting Marx and Lenin, with a " 10-point program" that included freedom for all blacks in prison and the exemption of blacks from military service...
...Writing 30 years later, David Horowitz seems embarrassed by it all...
...His childhood friends were the sons and daughters of other CP members...
...many belonged to the pro-Communist Teachers Union...
...Horowitz left Ramparts in a huff, and his memoir contains some delicious parting shots...
...Yet another revealed top-secret intelligence information through the unsigned "memoir" of a disgruntled former government official...
...Horowitz never fully explains the motivation for these projects, except that the money was good and the partnership idea came from Collier...
...In tranquil times, The Free World Colossus would have been dismissed by graduate students as lightweight propaganda...
...It ends as it begins, with a list of enemies and grievances that rivals Richard Nixon's in bulk...
...Horowitz didn't argue...
...Unlike its bleak Left-wing competitors, Ramparts churned out news-breaking stories in glossy, four-color format...
...He recalls that McCarthy made his famous Wheeling speech on June 29, 1950—four days after South Korea was attacked...
...He helped organize a radical student newspaper that challenged the University of California's regulations concerning student curfews and "free speech" issues...
...If I had ideas like that, young man," he scowled, "I would jump off a bridge...
...They would have spied for the Soviet Union had they been asked to do so...
...He felt detached from the incendiary words he was mouthing...
...Horowitz spent most of the 1960s in Berkeley...
...He writes, for example, about that magical World Series moment in 1947 "when the Yankees' Bill Bevins broke up Ralph Branca's no-hitter in the sixth game...
...Branca will live in Dodger infamy for giving up the pennant-winning home run to the Giants' Bobby Thomson in 1951...
...Pete Seeger...
...While viewing their discharges as an odious extension of McCarthyism, he also insists that his parents—and others like them—landed on their feet...
...Instead of being grateful to a nation that had provided them with economic opportunity and refuge, they wanted to overthrow its governing institutions and replace them with a Soviet state...
...Actually, the top executives flew first-class and stayed at luxury hotels, while favored radicals, such as Tom Hayden and Susan Sontag, were paid huge sums for their pieces...
...The transformation began in 1979, with a piece he wrote for the Nation that portrayed the New Left as a carbon copy of the Old...
...Even his parents had quit the CP "in humiliation" after reading Nikita S. Khrushchev's 1956 report about the "crimes of Stalin") On the other hand, the excesses of McCarthyism had smeared the entire anti-Communist movement and made liberals wary of attacking their opponents on the Left...
...David Horowitz has traveled a long way on his political journey, but his tracks still form a circle leading home...
...The Panther episode marked a turning point in his political life...
...Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice " As a graduate student at Brandeis in the late 1960s, I read The Free World Colossus by David Horowitz, a self-important young radical of the New Left...
...His mother and father belonged to the Communist Party and worshiped the Soviet Union...
...As time passed, Ramparts' portrayal of the Panthers came to remind him of the lies his parents had read and accepted in the Daily Worker a generation before...
...In fact, as any good New Yorker will remember, that moment occurred when the Dodgers' Cookie Lava-getto broke up Bill Bevins' no-hitter in the fourth game...
...The book contained no primary research...
...There lies the thread of his fascinating story...
...The mix was perfect: Ramparts and Horowitz had a nose for self-promotion...
...and all refused to answer questions relating to their past or present membership in the Communist Party...
...Horowitz also discovered the glory of being a radical in the post-Stalin, post-McCarthy world...
...He brought the large crowd to its feet by charging that the war was less "a betrayal of the American tradition, than its fulfillment...
...Not surprisingly, the New Left viewed the Panthers as "primitive rebels" at war with a racist police state...
...Loyalty aside, the role of publicist for Newton and Cleaver contained an employment hazard that was difficult to ignore...
...In the spirit of egalitarianism he notes, the magazine made all decisions collectively...
...They rejected the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr., the racial separatism of Malcolm X, and the Afrocentrism of Ron Karenga and Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka...
...about the meaning of Vietnam...
...huac, a political dinosaur, had few coherent supporters, and the college administration had no stomach for a fight...
...His new autobiography, Radical Son, is offered as both an explanation and an apology for a generation in service of the Left...
...As members of a new radical generation, our political identity was virginal," Horowitz writes...
...He married and divorced twice more in quick succession...
...Horowitz couldn't abandon the arena...
...Hayden said he needed the money to buy gas masks for the Panthers...
...On the one hand, there was no need to defend the Soviet past...
...There is some truth to this, for both books are often riveting and elegantly phrased...
...Another contained Tom Hayden's rambling plans for the coming revolution...
...He went to a Communist summer camp, where the struggles of Henry Wallace and the "suffering of the Negro people" were common fare...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
