The Suppression of Ronald Radosh

...One of the members, Peter Hill, says, "The position we settled on-it was not entirely rational, I admit-was that if we were recruiting for a chaired position we would not have selected Radosh...

...Peter Collier is author of The Roosevelts: An American Saga...

...Radosh gave the talk he had given on other campuses-about the cultural meaning of the guilt of the Rosenbergs and other spies previously seen as blameless martyrs, and about the effect the recently released Venona papers revealing the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States would have on the study of postwar American history...

...He could have spared himself and Radosh a lot of pain by reading the unusual letter of recommendation from historian Martin Sklar...

...At meetings he attended of the Organization of American History he found that former friends would not talk to him unless they found themselves alone with him in an elevator...

...The Journal of American History now reads like Studies on the Left or Radical History Review did thirty years ago," says Radosh...

...Thus the hiring of a non-historian like Roger Wilkins to teach history creates no outcry...

...This would not have been a problem if it had been a foundation like Ford which never gets called 'left wing,' although it is," says one senior member of the department...

...As a teenager he had stood in Union Square during the tearful death watch for the Rosenbergs...

...But working in the radicalized, politically correct university of the 90s had come to feel like a death march...

...The innuendo was based on an incident that had occurred in the late 80s when Radosh applied for an advertised chair in American history at George Mason University...

...At the University of Wisconsin, Radosh served as secretary-treasurer of the Labor Youth League, a Communist front, and became a star student of William Appleman Williams, dean of America's revisionist historians...

...This profession is sick...

...This year he has already published a book on the Amerasia magazine spy case (reviewed in THE WEEKLY STANDARD's April 1 issue) and has another, on the fall of the Democratic party, coming out this summer...

...Another underlined the fact that Radosh had arrived at his current political position as a "Ben Wattenberg Democrat" after coming from an Old Left family, thus implying that Radosh's ideological journey had been a pilgrimage of betrayal...

...Although he did not teach with Radosh at CUNY or serve as chairman when he was there, Nasaw told his contact at GWU that he was "astounded that there was not an open search for the position" and opposed the hire on procedural grounds...

...One of these was Roger Wilkins himself...

...He retired from CUNY in 1992, worked briefly for American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker, and then got a three-year grant from the Olin Foundation...

...Another was David Nasaw, chairman of the graduate department in history at CUNY (and someone who willingly identifies himself as "a person of the Left...

...That looks like a political decision to me, not an academic one...

...I don't see any story here...

...Yet the sudden assertion of liberal principle creates cognitive dissonance because of the network of ideas that now define and dominate the intellectual output of the profession-that the personal is political...

...At about the same time he was insisting that his only objection to Radosh had to do with the chilling effect of hiring people without a full and open search, Foner committed what some might see as a Freudian slip when he stated publicly that Dinesh D'Souza's ideas were so reprehensible that he should not be allowed to speak at a Nation-National Review debate on affirmative action...

...Radosh's politics...

...There was also a desire on the part of some GWU historians to show Trachtenberg he couldn't impose a hire on them...

...And so Radosh-whose salary, you will recall, was already paid for-was rejected...

...foreign policy...

...He agitated against the war in Vietnam while writing articles for fringe journals like Studies on the Left and completing his first book on how conservatives in the labor movement had influenced U.S...

...Radosh's father ran for office in the Milliners Union under the aegis of the Communistcontrolled Trade Union Unity League...

...that all definitions are "contested...

...He was led to think that he was being seriously considered, only to be told at the last minute that he was "overquali-fied" and that Roger Wilkins, a gadfly who sat on the New York Times editorial board and had connections to the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies, had been selected instead...

...Columbia University history professor Eric Foner, who also got a call from Washington, insists that upholding the principle of "an open search for jobs" was also his reason for opposing Radosh...

...Wasn't the case still used by the government as an excuse for the repression of the American Left which followed...

...Radosh was already an important figure in the New Left when he secured a teaching post at City University of New York (CUNY) and became one of those scholar-activists who began their long march through the universities in the late 60s, remaking the profession as they went...

...The events that followed transform this story from an incident into a case study...

...He panned The Rosenberg File upon publication...

...I do have personal ideological arguments with Ron," he admits, "but I hope that these did not get in the way of my objectivity...

...and, ironically, given the direction of Radosh's future work, Michael and Robert Meeropol, the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...

...The George Washington University history department proceeded to do to Radosh exactly what Sklar described, and Trachtenberg and the department's chairman were powerless to keep it from happening...

...Wilkins complained about Radosh's comments in an article in the Nation, whereupon Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, no right-winger, defended Radosh on the grounds that his interpretation of events seemed reasonable enough in light of what had indeed happened...

...that objectivity is an illusion manipulated by partisans of the status quo...

...Blanche Wiesen Cook, a colleague at CUNY (and author of a recent biography attempting to out Eleanor Roosevelt as a lesbian) with whom Radosh had once co-edited a book of essays, gave an interview to the Guardian accusing him of betraying the profession...

...And historian Eugene Genovese, who like Radosh has come a long way in his intellectual journey, says, "What you have here are the same arguments that used to be used to keep blacks and women, and for that matter Marxists, out of the university...

...black Communist Angela Davis...

...But in the university, where criticisms of affirmative action-even those which don't use the term-are not taken lightly, the comments took on a different coloration...

...by friends and acquaintances of mine, who in a species of what I might most gently refer to as a 'left-wing McCarthyism,' have engaged in or lent themselves to what I and many of them have long fought against in defense of the integrity of the life of the mind and democratic values and practices...

...This appeal to protocol is made with such smug and implausible unanimity by the GWU historians, who are obviously desperate not to be accused of ideology, that it calls to mind the old punch-line: Ain't nobody here but us chickens, boss...

...If the Rosenbergs were guilty, said a third historian, so what...

...Faced with protracted conflict in his department, Berkowitz appointed a three-person committee to deal with the Radosh issue...

...Others drew what for them were the appropriate morals...

...He was disturbed enough to voice his concerns to the American tour guide who looked at him deeply for a moment and then said, "Ron, we have to understand the difference between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies...

...that power and ideology determine social outcomes...

...Some of his would-be colleagues angrily questioned the propriety of having someone on staff who was supported by a "right wing" foundation...

...Radosh had supplied references not only from Martin Sklar, but also from Herbert Parmet, Walter LaFeber, Arthur Schlesinger, and other eminent figures scarcely friendly to conservatives...

...Radosh's words were read aloud in meetings of the GWU history department and, as Berkowitz says, "caused much consternation...

...But after evaluating newly available materials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in the late 70s, Radosh was forced to conclude that Julius had certainly been guilty of spying for the Soviets and that Ethel had at least been his fellow traveler...

...In the mid-1980s he traveled to Central America and wrote articles for the New Republic and other magazines opposing Communist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...It is a profession, moreover, that apparently has no trouble with irregularities it likes...

...Radosh had no idea his appointment might be in trouble until a brief article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education at the beginning of May, quoting Berkowitz to the effect that faculty members "oppose Mr...

...In late April, history department chairman Edward Berkowitz talked to Radosh and arranged for him to give a colloquy as a way of meeting his fellow faculty...

...of attacks against Ron...

...At a raucous debate on the Rosenbergs at New York's Town Hall, he was stigmatized as a traitor and compared to the contemptible snitches who fed lies to the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...A movement figure like Julian Bond has appointments at two universities...

...has recently criticized the book again in his introduction to a new edition of We Are Your Sons, the pro-Rosenberg account of the spy case by the Meeropol brothers...

...Trachtenberg, the president of George Washington University, immediately recommended Radosh to his history department...

...I could understand if it had been another historian who got the chair," Radosh later said of the incident during an interview in Continuity magazine, "but they gave [it] to a radical black journalist...

...Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute thought that the relatively mediocre George Washington University history department might benefit from having someone of Radosh's stature and brought him together with Trachtenberg...

...The questions that followed were encoded with decorous hostility...

...But he didn't step over his personal Rubicon until ten years later when he published The Rosenberg File with co-author Joyce Milton...

...He published a widely read piece in the New Criterion on the Spanish Civil War (as much a hot-button topic on the left as the Rosenbergs) in which he concluded that a victory by the International Brigades would not have saved Spanish democracy but would have converted the country into a People's Republic under Soviet control...

...He had been cheered when the defense of the couple's innocence, the chief cause of the Communist-party ghetto in the 50s, was taken up by the New Left, which romanticized the Rosenbergs even before it fully rediscovered them and transformed them into a Holy Couple who had undergone a public burning to atone for America's Cold War sins...

...The Rosenberg File was named one of the ten best books of 1983 by the New York Times, but for Radosh it marked his expulsion from the Garden of the Left...

...Worst of all for his enemies on the left, Radosh did all this work while ostentatiously maintaining his identity as a Democrat and a member of quasi-socialist organizations such as the editorial board of Dissent magazine...

...They're dead wrong about Radosh and I told them so, but I'm not the chairman of the history department...

...GWU historian Cynthia Harrison, one of those who opposed Radosh, asks, "What's the story...

...After Radosh was rejected, GWU president Trachtenberg tried to put the best face on the decision: "I give them opportunities...

...But their opinions seemed to weigh less than those of others contacted by GWU faculty members who were known to have Radosh on their enemies lists...

...The Suppression of Ronald Radosh By Peter Collier When he heard Ronald Radosh was looking for a place to teach for a year and would bring with him a salary fully paid by a John M. Olin Foundation grant, Stephen Trachtenberg thought he had stumbled onto one of those "win-win" situations college administrators dream of...

...one historian asked...

...Says Eric Foner, "The principle of open competition for jobs has got to be paramount in a free intellectual atmosphere...

...Wasn't Radosh actually a "public intellectual" rather than an academic historian per se...

...And sometime Stalinist Angela Davis now holds the prestigious Presidential Chair at the University of California...

...The irony is that Radosh would seem to have been inoculated against left-wing McCarthyism by birth and upbringing...

...Radosh himself grew up spending summers at what he now calls "commie camp" in the Catskills and attended Manhattan's Elisabeth Irwin High School (the "Little Red School House for Little Reds") along with others who would figure in the 1960s Left: Cathy Boudin, later of the Weather Underground...

...Radosh plunged ahead in his own personal revisionism...

...Radosh experienced a metaphysical lurch in 1973 during a radical junket to Cuba when his little group of revolutionary tourists was taken to one of Castro's mental hospitals and saw one ward filled with patients who had been recently lobotomized...

...After praising Radosh as a distinguished scholar and teacher, Sklar warned: "May I briefly add here that I am aware...

...Nobody laughed when Radosh tried to deflect this question with a bon mot- "These people were not Left, they were East...

...The Continuity interview caused a minor tempest...

...Like his colleagues, Hill insists the rejection of Radosh was based on procedure, not politics...

...Yet Foner, a scholar of 19th-century American history whose Communist-party upbringing was roughly similar to Radosh's, has been a determined if episodic critic of Radosh...

...He wasn't qualified...

...and has had an acerbic exchange with Radosh over the significance of the Venona papers in the New York Post...

...And Radosh was further damaged when it was implied that in addition to the "conservative" positions he had taken in his work as a "public intellectual," he might have been guilty of "racism" at one point along the way...

...Last year Radosh traveled from his home outside Washington to New York every week to teach at Adelphi University on Long Island, but as that school became besieged with problems, he looked for some place closer to teach...

...They're allowed to be wrong...