Commie Dearest

...The time, in other words, was never right...

...Harrington said he didn't want to offend pro-Soviet types in his socialist organization and refused to help...

...Seeger was an early idol: Radosh wanted to be a folksinger and banjo picker like him...

...What's wrong with what they did...

...Khrushchev had detailed Stalin's crimes in his famous speech that year, triggering a mass exodus from the American Communist party...

...And for the Stalinist Left, the honest response came from a lawyer, who slammed his fist on his desk and bellowed: "Of course they were guilty...

...subculture of upper Manhattan's Washington Heights, "progressive" high school, Communist summer camp, and on to college at the University of Wisconsin, where he became a founder of the New Left...

...But what were those weapons in ; the service of...

...Radosh's readers will quickly see what he confesses it took him years to see: The line that ties it all together, from the old Communist party to the more confrontational New Left, is hatred of the United States...

...But you can't quote me...

...Through his baptism under fire, he became a conscientious historian and, in a post-moral politics, an uncommonly honest man...

...My public position is that the Rosenbergs were innocent...

...Those who told the truth," he writes, "became the victims of an unprecedented smear attack, one that sought to rescue the myth by blaming the messengers who brought bad news about it...

...It is the double standard of the Left that begins at last to undermine Radosh's belief...

...In the early 1980s he began to write his book about the Rosenbergs and discovered irrefutable evidence of their guilt, though he had previously been a passionate believer in their innocence...

...Visiting Havana General Psychiatric Hospital in Cuba, Radosh notices the glazed and drugged-out expressions on the faces of the patients...

...Songs were weapons, Seeger often ; said...

...The Left "always looked the other way...

...Once all of Radosh's myths had fallen apart—Stalin, Spain, the Rosenbergs, Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador—nothing remained...

...In Commies, he lays out his life in the Left from that beginning: the Jewish-Communist David Evanier is the author of Red Love, a novel of the Rosenberg case, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story...

...Later appearances are made by every famous figure of the New Left, from Michael Lerner to David Dallinger to Bianca Jagger (who keeps buttoning and unbuttoning her blouse when Radosh interviews her in Nicaragua...

...There are captivating stories here...

...Publication of The Rosenberg File, which he coauthored with Joyce Milton, elicited a hailstorm of condemnation from the old and new Left...

...If the Right did wrong, it was unforgivable...

...Indeed, a leitmotif of Commies is the double standard applied to the struggle for sunny tomorrows...

...and three, due to pressure from the Right—all at the same time...

...Radosh was the prototypical red-diaper baby...

...At Communist summer camp, Seeger would sing "Good-night Irene" and "Kisses Sweeter ; Than Wine" at breakfast: The camaraderie one felt in sitting j with friends and singing the beautiful : words and melodies produced a belief that all would be good in the world...

...The doctor in charge boasts, "We are proud that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobot-omized than any other mental hospital in the world...

...No longer starry-eyed, i Radosh writes that Seeger's "peace" ; songs materialized during the Hitler- ; Stalin pact and became war songs after the Soviet Union was invaded...

...Throughout his memoir, Radosh lets his now anti-Communist head prevail, while not denying the murmurs of his old Communist heart in dealing with the sweet idiocy and childlike innocence of his springtime for Stalin...

...He writes elegiacally of Pete Seeger concerts and campfire sing-alongs and, more comically, of a trip his high-school class took to a Pennsylvania coal mine...

...He came to understand, with Arthur Koestler, that "clinging to the last shred of the torn illusion is typical of the intellectual cowardice that prevails on the Left...

...The affluent students, dressed in carefully chosen proletarian garb, travel down a mine shaft to serenade (under the hand-waving direction of their choral director) a ; bunch of grizzled, bemused coal min- i ers...

...If the Left tortured and maimed and killed, it was, one, untrue...

...Writing about the Rosenbergs was the catalyst for Radosh's long journey away from the Left and toward the real world...

...The students sing progressive odes ; boo-hooing their oppressed state, "Dark As a Dungeon" and "Which ; Side Are You On...

...He has a picture of himself in 1939, bundled in a stroller for the annual May Day parade sponsored by the Communist party...

...The ultimate answer of the Left to his questioning of every horror was the same: moral abdication...

...Anti-Americanism, the Left's most precious heirloom from the Vietnam War, "had to be preserved at all costs...

...BY DAVID EVANIER In Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, Ronald Radosh has written a sweet-tempered, thoughtful, mordantly funny account of his reluctant and protracted farewell to the Left— a movement that provided him with girls, pot, LSD, folk songs, identity, and a hell of a good time...

...Radosh translates...

...Every Stalinist icon is here, including party historian Herbert Aptheker, with his blazing red hair and blazing eyes...

...On the same trip he sees the incarceration of homosexuals as mental patients and infuriates his comrades by writing about it...

...Wrested by the Rosenberg case out of his protracted innocence, Radosh experienced an unfolding of his personality...

...You may be right about what you say about the Sandinistas," a comrade told him, "but while they are under attack by the American empire, we have a responsibility to extend our solidarity to them...

...At first Radosh moved effortlessly from the old Stalinist Left to the New Left—SDS, the antiwar movement, Cuba, Nicaragua—without any sense of inner crisis...

...He also discovered that for most of the Left, it wasn't even a question of the Rosenbergs' innocence: "I always knew they were guilty," Michael Harrington told him when Radosh solicited his support...

...Seeger woke us early in the morning, singing the old holler "Wake Up Jacob," with its line "sun's ; abreakin', peas in the pot and hoe-cakes bakin'," as he proceeded to grill bacon and eggs for us on the campfire : he had built...

...As the old heroes and models of anti-Americanism proved unworthy, there were always new ones to replace them: Castro instead of Stalin, Nicaragua instead of the Soviet Union...

...Even ! later, the harshest words Seeger had for ; Stalin was that he was a "hard driver" ; and that the Stalin era contained an "awful lot of rough stuff...

...He was pummeled badly...

...Radosh joined just as everyone was leaving...

...The only law [it] obeyed was Don't Look Back— for if it did, the only accomplishments it would see were famine, gulags, and mass death...

...Seeger com- i posed a song about the Nazi camp at Treblinka, but would never pen a sin- ; gle line about the Soviet Gulag...

...Most significantly, the reaction to The Rosenberg File made him move on "to consider the ultimate heresy: Perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else...

...In a hilarious scene, Radosh is accused of white chauvinism and expelled from the Jefferson School by Aptheker for having a "chocolate baby" candy bar in his class...

...Irving Howe, once an outspoken anti-Communist, was even more succinct: "I can't get involved with that," he said and walked away...

...Radosh is shocked, but one of his comrades explains harshly, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist loboto-mies and socialist lobotomies...

...two, understandable...

...If I were in their place, I would have done the same thing...

...By 1956 the body counts of the murdered under "Socialism" were horrifying...

...At the same moment that he was branded an apostate, a sellout, a coward, and a creep, he was actually acquiring his maturity...