Table

of Contents

Title Page
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction

PART I - Reflections From My Life

Chapter 1 - Left Illusions

Chapter 2 - Why I Am No Longer a Leftist
Chapter 3 - Reality and Dream
Chapter 4 - My Conservatism
Chapter 5 - Black Murder Inc.
Chapter 6 - Treason of the Heart
Chapter 7 - A Political Romance
Chapter 8 - Reflections on the Road Taken and Not
Chapter 9 - Letter to the Past
Chapter 10 - Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home
Chapter 11 - The End of Time
Chapter 12 - Getting This Conservative Wrong
Chapter 13 - What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion
Chapter 14 - Something We Did
Chapter 15 - Who I Am
Chapter 16 - Peter and Me

PART II - Reflections on the Left

Chapter 1 - Goodbye to All That
Chapter 2 - My Vietnam Lessons
Chapter 3 - Semper Fidel
Chapter 4 - A Decade Overrated and Unmourned
Chapter 5 - Keepers of the Flame
Chapter 6 - Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem & Mine
Chapter 7 - Political Cross-Dresser: Michael Lind Perpetrates a Hoax
Chapter 8 - Still Lying After All These Years
Chapter 9 - Repressed Memory Syndrome
Chapter 10 - Fidel, Pinochet & Me
Chapter 11 - Marginalizing Conservative Ideas
Chapter 12 - Can There Be a Decent Left?
Chapter 13 - The Left and the Constitution
Chapter 14 - Neo-Communism
Chapter 15 - Neo-Communism II
Chapter 16 - Neo-Communism III
Chapter 17 - Discover the Networks
Chapter 18 - Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat

PART III - Slander As Political Discourse

Chapter 1 - Paul Berman’s Demented Lunacy

Chapter 2 - In Defense of Matt Drudge
Chapter 3 - Target of a Witch-Hunt
Chapter 4 - The Serial Distortions of Sid Vicious
Chapter 5 - The Surreal World of the Progressive Left

PART IV - Two Talks on Autobiographical Themes

Chapter 1 - Plus Ça Change: Fifty Years Gone By

Chapter 2 - Reflections of a Diaspora Jew on Zionism, Israel and America

Copyright Page
 Acknowledgments

The essays and articles in The Black Book of the American Left and the project
itself would not have been possible without the David Horowitz Freedom Center
and the dedicated individuals who staff it. Foremost among these are Mike
Finch, who is the operating head of the Center, its fundraiser, and an informed
counselor in all we do, and Peter Collier who has been my literary collaborator
and friend for nearly fifty years. Mike Bauer gathered and helped to edit all the
articles contained in these volumes, and John Perazzo and Elizabeth Ruiz helped
with the research on many of them. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the love and
support of my wife April through the years of writing and editing these volumes,
and to thank her for being there for me.
Preface to

The Black Book of the American Left

The idea for these volumes came about as the result of a self-inventory
undertaken to map the development of my political views over the last thirty
years. This inquiry involved a survey of all the articles and essays I had written
as a conservative—since the day Peter Collier and I published a cover story in
the Washington Post Magazine announcing our “second thoughts” about the left
and our departure from its ranks. These writings, which were assembled with the
indispensable help of Mike Bauer, added up to more than 690 articles and
essays, and a million and a half words. Some were lengthy considerations of
“big” issues, others reactions to current events, and some were polemical
responses to political opponents. But when I had looked over this body of work,
I realized that virtually everything I had written was really about one subject: the
American left.
The ancient Greek poet Archilochus was the author of a philosophical
fragment that became the focus of a famous essay by the writer Isaiah Berlin,
which he called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” In his fragment Archilochus
observed, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
For whatever reason, in the many years I have been a writer I have never been a
fox. It is true that my subjects have been varied, and I have even authored two
volumes of philosophical reflections about mortality and life. But the primary
focus of my work—even of those thoughts on mortality and existence—has
remained one big thing: the nature, deeds and fortunes of the political left.
The first part of my life was spent as a member of the “New Left” and its
Communist predecessor, in which my family had roots. After the consequences
of those commitments became clear to me in the mid-1970s, I came to know the
left as an adversary; and if sheer volume were the measure, as its principal
intellectual antagonist. Some have seen an obsession in my efforts to define the
left and analyze what it intends. In a sense that is true; I had left the left, but the
left had not left me. For better or worse, I have been condemned to spend the rest
of my days attempting to understand how it pursues the agendas from which I
have separated myself, and why.
 When I was beginning this quest nearly three decades ago, I paid a visit to the
New York intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, who had had his own second
thoughts a decade earlier, though not from so radical a vantage as mine.
Podhoretz asked me why I was spending my time worrying about an isolated
community on the fringes of politics. I should focus, he said, on liberals not
leftists. This advice reflected what seemed an accurate description of the
political landscape at the time. Many would have seconded his judgment when
the walls of Communism came tumbling down shortly thereafter. But the
progressive faith is just that, a faith, and despite the exceptions of individual
cases no fact on the ground will dispel it.
When Podhoretz and I met, progressives and radicals had already escaped the
political ghettos to which my parents’ generation had been reasonably confined.
The massive defeat they suffered in the fall of the Marxist states they helped
create had the ironic, unforeseen effect of freeing them from the burden of
defending them. This allowed them in the next decade to emerge as a major
force in American life. In the wake of the Communist collapse, this left has
become a very big thing—so big that by 2008 it was the dominant force in
America’s academic and media cultures, had elected an American president, and
was in a position to shape America’s future. Because of its post-Communist
metastasis, what Norman Podhoretz once saw as a parochial interest in a fringe
cause has become an effort to understand the dominant development in
America’s political culture over the last fifty years. That is the subject of these
volumes.
The essays contained herein describe the left as I have known it; first from the
inside as one of its “theorists,” and then as a nemesis confronting it with the real-
world consequences of its actions. In all these writings I was driven by two
urgencies: a desire to persuade those still on the left of the destructive
consequences of the ideas and causes they promoted; and second, the frustration
I experienced with those conservatives who failed to understand the malignancy
of the forces mobilized against them. Most conservatives habitually referred to
leftists who were determined enemies of America’s social contract as “liberals.”
In calling them liberals, conservatives failed to appreciate the Marxist
foundations and religious dimensions of the radical faith or the hatreds it
inspired. And they failed to appreciate the left’s brutal imposture in stealing the
identity of the intellectually pragmatic, patriotic, anti-totalitarian “Cold War
liberals” whose influence in American political life they began killing off in
1972 with the McGovern coup inside the Democratic Party.1
When this syllabus of my conservative writings was finally assembled and I
had read their contents through, I realized that even though they would take up
multiple volumes they added up to a single book, which my colleague Peter
Collier quickly christened the “The Black Book of the American Left” (a
flattering allusion to The Black Book of Communism, the authoritative 1997
work by several European academics outlining the terror and catastrophe created
by communist states.) Contained in these volumes is a diary, written over more
than half a century, that describes one man’s encounters with a movement
which, in the words of its most prominent figure, Barack Obama, is seeking to
“fundamentally” transform the United States of America. The diary records the
progress of that transformation, documenting the changes of a shape-shifting
movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its abiding identity
and mission, which, as these pages will make clear, is ultimately one of
destruction.
It is almost a certainty that no other “book” will be written like this one, since
it can only have been the work of someone born into the left and condemned
Ahab-like to pursue it in an attempt to comprehend it. Yet this is not so much a
project of monomania, as my adversaries will undoubtedly suggest, but of
discovery; an attempt not only to understand a movement, but to explore its roots
in individual lives, including my own. While I hope this book may be useful to
those fighting to defend individual freedom and free markets, I do not deceive
myself into believing that I have finally set the harpoon into the leviathan, a feat
that is ultimately not possible. Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith,
which meets the same eternal human needs traditional faiths do, and for that
reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a
Gnosticism that can only be held at bay, never finally beaten back to earth.
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 1

My Life and Times

The essay sincluded in this, the first of nine volumes on the American left—a
tenth will feature a comprehensive bibliography and index—are shaped by a
biographical perspective, drawn directly from my life-experiences in that left.2
They contain reflections first on the political path my life took, and then on the
course pursued by others who shared that path but did not have second thoughts
that prompted them to leave it.
Because the left is a religious movement that engages an individual identity at
the deepest levels, there can never be a separation between the personal and the
political. Members of the faith know very well the implications of doubt: to
leave the progressive faith is to invite expulsion from its utopia and the
fellowship of its community, and forever after to be shunned as a person morally
unfit for decent company. This is a daunting prospect that discourages
challenges to its orthodoxy and keeps its adherents in line. This reality makes the
narrative of one who departed its ranks not only a deeply personal document but
also a political text.
 Part I

In December 1974, my life was forever altered when members of the Black
Panther Party murdered a bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter whom I had
recruited to keep accounts for a Panther school I had helped to create. The
tragedy threw me into a personal crisis, creating an ideological turmoil that was
compounded five months later by the bloodbath in Southeast Asia following the
Communist victory in Vietnam. The state of distress into which I was thrown by
these events was such that for more than a decade I did not engage in any
political activities. During this period I took time to reflect on the beliefs that
had guided me and then betrayed me, and I tried to figure out how I was going to
function without them. In 1979, I had dinner in Berkeley with the leftwing
author E. L. Doctorow, whose novel about the Rosenbergs had referenced one of
my books. I told him of my concerns about the left, and he suggested I write
them up for The Nation on whose board he sat. The result was an article I called
“Left Illusions,” which The Nation retitled “A Radical’s Disenchantment.” It put
my doubts before a community with whom I still identified but was getting
ready to leave, though I was still reluctant to concede that, even to myself.
My formal departure came in 1985 with the publication of our divorce-notice
in The Washington Post. The following year I wrote “Why I Am No Longer a
Leftist,” a more personal explanation of the events behind my turn. It was
published in another progressive venue, The Village Voice, and is included as the
second chapter in this volume. The decision to write the article was a particularly
difficult one because it was the first public statement I had made about the
murder. In publishing it I was concerned first of all about the safety of my family
since the killers were still at large (as they are today). The fear was great enough
that I did not name the individuals I believed responsible. This was something I
would eventually do seven years later in a lengthy autobiographical article
“Black Murder, Inc.,” which is included as chapter five in the present text.
My intention in publishing “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist” in a leftwing
paper like the Voice was to encourage its readers to have second thoughts and to
warn them about the dangers of failing to have them. What I elicited instead was
an anathema upon myself—an excommunication from the progressive
community. The anathema was pronounced in the form of an article that
appeared in the same paper shortly afterward called, “The Intellectual Life and
the Renegade Horowitz.” It made clear that my words were not going to be taken
as an attempt to retrieve a bitterly earned truth about what we leftists had done,
but as the betrayal of a noble cause by a person who had gone over to the dark
side. The author was the socialist writer Paul Berman; he began by praising me
as an intellectual leader among New Leftists in the Sixties and concluded by
damning me as one who now consorted with monsters, in particular with a
homicidal member of the Nicaraguan contras whose nom de guerre was Suicida.
This was, in point of fact, an individual I had never heard of, and whom the
contras themselves had executed for his crimes, which were indeed heinous.
This kind of reckless assault on my character was to prove typical of the left’s
responses to my work in years to come.
A year after the Voice article appeared, Peter Collier and I organized a
“Second Thoughts Conference” in Washington to which we invited others who
had taken steps along the path we had chosen. Two years later we held another
Second Thoughts event in Cracow, Poland, just months before the collapse of
the Communist regime. The speech I gave, “Reality and Dream,” whose text is
included as chapter three in this volume, was an effort to tell my story and
summarize the case against socialism for an audience whose members were still
prisoners of the Soviet occupation.
While focusing on the left, I also felt the need to define the new
“conservative” outlook at which I had arrived. The article “My Conservatism” is
a statement of the views I had developed, along with the reasons I did not regard
this new perspective as parallel to the one I had abandoned but different in its
very nature. I addressed the same subject in The Politics of Bad Faith, which
was published in 1998, and which contains the fullest statement of the rationale
for my political change.
The event that forced me to look at the reality of what I and my comrades had
done is the subject of the memoir “Black Murder, Inc.” At the time the crime
was committed, the Black Panther Party was regarded as a progressive vanguard
and its leader Huey Newton was being compared in The New York Times to
Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. Even today, in respected academic texts
like Henry Louis Gates’s African American National Biography, the Party is
portrayed as a noble vanguard, victimized by a racist government. This is a
reflection not of the facts but of the way the left dominates and has corrupted the
academic culture—the subject of the sixth volume of The American Left, titled
The Left in the University.
After the publication of the Post and Village Voice articles, liberal venues
were for all intents and purposes closed to me as a “renegade” from their ranks.
“Black Murder, Inc.” first appeared in a publication that Peter Collier and I had
created, called Heterodoxy. We published it on the front page with a “Wanted”
poster of Elaine Brown, the Panther most directly responsible for the murder,
although I have no doubt that it was Huey Newton who ordered the execution
from his exile in Cuba.3 One of the most unpleasant responses of the left to the
article was to attempt to place the blame for Betty’s death on me. “Letter to the
Past” is my reply to one of these accusations made by a lifelong friend of mine
who had remained on the left and was obviously a friend no more. Our exchange
reflects the raw emotions I felt at the time.
In retrospect, it is clear to me that the failure of the political culture and major
media to take note of the Panthers’ crimes and be horrified by them, indeed the
support the perpetrators received from the progressive ranks, was a small but
ominous sign of the profound change that the Sixties left had worked on the
American political landscape. The resurfacing in the 1990s of a violent radical
like Weatherman leader Bill Ayers as the intimate political ally of a future
American president is a parallel phenomenon. It indicates just how far the
influence of the left has reached.4
Progressives are necessarily forced to choose between the future they desire
and the reality they inhabit. The primary moral obligation of a revolutionary is to
destroy the existing social and political framework in order to prepare the
revolutionary future; and radicals perceive America as the principal defender of
the capitalism they hate all over the world. Consequently, a radical politics
generally leads to uncertain loyalties to country and community. Yet leftists have
succeeded in making the issue of their loyalties the most taboo of political
subjects, deploying blanket charges of “McCarthyism” and “witch-hunt” as a
way of silencing their critics. As someone who experienced the conflict between
principles and country directly, I have inevitably made them a focus of my work.
“Treason of the Heart,” an article written to promote my autobiography Radical
Son, includes the accounts of three episodes, described in the book, which
dramatize this conflict.5
Having rejected the left, I quickly discovered that the political center where I
expected to find a home had vanished, while outlets for my work that I had
expected to be available had shut their doors to me. “A Political Romance” was
written at the request of an editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine, who
wanted a piece for the weekly “Lives” feature located at the back of the issue. I
undertook the assignment as a challenge; another attempt to sum up in succinct
fashion the hard lessons I had learned. But when I submitted the article, the
editor rejected it by saying that it wasn’t the “type” of piece The Times had in
mind for the feature.
I was skeptical of this explanation, and suspected that what the editor really
didn’t like about the article was its political conclusion rejecting the left. This
was borne out a few weeks later when the “Lives” page featured another piece,
which was also about the left and was written as though it had been
commissioned in reply to mine. The author was a leftist who admitted to some
second thoughts about what she and her comrades had done in the Sixties but, in
contrast to me, resolved not to abandon what she still regarded as a noble cause.
This episode provided a particularly dispiriting indication of the media
environment in which I was now operating. Despite my quarantine as a
conservative, I was still interested in engaging younger leftists, hoping I might
help them avoid the painful lessons I had been forced to learn. “Think Twice” is
an open letter to young people who protested against an American response to
9/11 within two weeks of the attacks.
Almost a decade after publishing Radical Son, I again turned inward in a
series of books that I regard as my best writing. They include The End of Time
and A Point in Time, along with the memoir I wrote about my daughter Sarah, A
Cracking of the Heart. Those reflections articulated the themes that have
animated my life’s work. The “End of Time” in this volume is a presentation I
made to promote the book. It consists of excerpted passages interspersed with
commentary, and provides a glimpse of how I came to connect the personal with
the political in the autumn of my career. “What My Daughter Taught Me”
describes the dialogue I had with Sarah before her untimely death about the way
in which human beings might make the world “a better place.” My daughter
Sarah was a compassionate soul and our discussions were the kind of dialogue I
missed on the infrequent occasions when liberals bothered to address my work.
The most unpleasant aspect of my political odyssey has been the relentless,
often malicious distortion of the positions I have taken by those who disagree
with my political conclusions. Three of the last four articles in Part I deal with
this phenomenon. The first, “Getting This Conservative Wrong,” is my response
to an academic historian named Kevin Mattson, who profiled me in a book
called Rebels All! as the exemplar of a “post-modern conservatism,” ascribing to
me views I simply did not hold. This was typical of the responses to my work by
critics from the left who rarely engaged my ideas in an intellectual manner but
picked at them hoping to find ways to discredit their bearer. The only real
interest they showed in my work, or that of other conservatives, was to make it a
symbol of something to despise and suppress. “Something We Did” is my
response to a caricature of me in an Off-Broadway play about the Weathermen
terrorists called Something You Did. The intention of the play was to exculpate
the guilty and indict those who attempted to hold them accountable. Like Kevin
Mattson, the playwright had no interest in defending, let alone correcting, his
distorted views when I confronted him with the facts.
Another example of this syndrome is described in “Who I Am,” which is my
response to a cover story that appeared in The Tablet, an online magazine for
Jewish progressives. The Tablet’s editors had assigned a very young leftist the
task of doing my portrait. The piece he finally produced, “David Horowitz Is
Homeless,” was an attempt to portray me as a hapless figure whose fortunes
were declining as he approached the end of his life, where he found himself lost
between the warring camps of left and right, unable to find a home in either.
“Who I Am” is my attempt to put the facts back in place. The Tablet declined to
publish it, but this self-portrait provides a reasonable facsimile of my state of
being in what was then my seventy-third year.
Peter Collier has been my friend for fifty years. He was my collaborator at
Ramparts and in the launching of my literary career with three dynastic
biographies we coauthored about the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford familes—
all New York Times best-sellers, The Kennedys reaching the top of that list. Peter
was also my confidant and partner in the joint transition we made from left to
right, organizing the “Second Thoughts” conference with me, coauthoring our
démarche in The Washington Post and co-writing Destructive Generation, which
we published in 1989. Peter has also been my collaborator in guiding the David
Horowitz Freedom Center, although he took a ten-year hiatus to create
Encounter Books, an independent publishing company. During that time, he
continued to edit our magazine, Heterodoxy. “Peter and Me,” an introduction I
wrote to a talk he gave at the Center’s Wednesday Morning Club about his
biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, is my tribute to a valued friend and colleague
and the impact he has had on me.
 Part II

The essays that make up the second part of this volume begin with “Goodbye to
All That,” our swansong to the left. The article was published by The
Washington Post under the title “Lefties for Reagan” and was our formal
“coming-out” as conservatives, although it was based on second thoughts that
had been gestating since the mid-Seventies.
The next two essays, “My Vietnam Lessons” and “Semper Fidel,” belong to
this genre, and are attempts I made to confront our radical cohort with the harsh
realities of what we had actually done. Vietnam was the defining issue of our
generation but the events that unfolded proved that those of us who were active
in the anti-war movement had been wrong on every critical point, and that our
actions had tragic consequences for the people we claimed to be defending. My
decision to vote for Ronald Reagan and join the conservative cause was also
inspired by events in Nicaragua where Castro Marxists had seized power
through a political coup. “Semper Fidel,” originally titled “A Speech to My
Former Comrades on the Left,” was about those events. It was given at a
conference organized by Berkeley radicals who probably didn’t realize what
they were in for, and who shut off my microphone before I could finish.
Following the appearance of our Post article, Peter and I were repeatedly
forced to defend our conservative views. “Keepers of the Flame” is one of these
defenses, written following our return from a trip to Nicaragua and in response
to a review of Destructive Generation that appeared in The New Republic. The
essay reflects our continuing effort to understand what had happened to us—not
only why we weren’t welcomed into what we thought would be the political
center, but also why our anti-Communist politics were treated with such hostility
by the liberal press. The review that provoked our response was written by Paul
Berman who insinuated that the sins we described in Destructive Generation
were basically our own, and did not reflect the general behaviors or attitudes of
the left.
This attempt to revise the past was a common tack of the leftists we now
faced. In “Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem and Mine,” I drew on my
personal experiences to expose the misrepresentations in the memoir this
Watergate reporter had written about his Communist childhood. The article has
even more resonance today than it did when I wrote it because it describes, from
the inside, the milieu in which the 44th president of the United States also grew
up, along with his chief advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett.6
A series of attacks on the political right by the writer Michael Lind provided
me with an opportunity to describe what a political conversion actually entails
and also to correct the distorted picture of the right that was becoming
commonplace among its leftist opponents. I responded to Lind’s defamation of
conservatives in an article called “Political Cross-Dresser.”
Time and again as I attempted to describe my experiences as a radical, I
encountered the resistance put up by leftists to any candor on the subject, their
inability to face up to the past, and their penchant for rewriting it instead. “Still
Lying After All These Years” and “Repressed Memory Syndrome” are efforts to
address this resistance to historical truth. I am not referring here to differences in
interpretation of what happened, but to the deliberate suppression of facts or
inversion of facts in the service of a political cause.
The article “Fidel, Pinochet and Me” is another attempt to confront my former
comrades with the results to which our political advocacies had led. In this
article, I compare the achievements of Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom
progressives loathed, to those of Cuba’s dictator Castro, whom they adored and
whose excesses they excused. Comparing those histories provided a measure of
progressives’ disconnect from reality in the service of a destructive illusion, and
of their blindness to the human consequences of their ideas and actions. Shortly
after publishing the article, I found myself on a radio show with Christopher
Hitchens who at the time was one of the radical harassers of the terminally-ill
Pinochet, calling for his arrest and extradition for crimes he had committed as
Chile’s dictator decades before. When I pointed out that Pinochet’s dictatorship
was no worse for Chileans than Castro’s was for Cubans, and arguably a lot
better, Christopher burst out on air: “How dare you, how dare you!” I was taken
aback by this fervor but replied in as amicable a tone as I could muster:
“Christopher, aren’t we getting a little old for ‘how-dare-yous’?” This was the
first time Christopher and I had spoken in nearly twenty years and it was to his
credit that the next time we did we became friends.7
It was a continuing source of fascination to me that progressives, who had
been so demonstrably on the wrong side of history during the Cold War, were
able to maintain their air of superiority when it was over, while simultaneously
marginalizing conservatives in the academic and literary cultures they
dominated. The essay “Marginalizing Conservative Ideas” is another facet of my
ongoing effort to identify the differences between the two perspectives that lead
to such different outcomes.
In the two articles “Can There Be A Decent Left” and “The Left and the
Constitution,” I analyze the nature of the left by engaging the ideas of two of its
more intellectually interesting figures, Michael Walzer and Hendrik Hertzberg.
Regrettably, neither one responded to these overtures, a not uncommon
occurrence. The nature of the left is also the subject of the three essays on “Neo-
Communism,” which were written after the onset of the Iraq War—an American
intervention vigorously opposed by almost the entire progressive spectrum, with
notable but rare exceptions such as Hitchens and Paul Berman. (The latter was
steadily moving from his earlier positions and was no longer an antagonist of
mine.) That war proved to be a defining political crossroads, and I used the
occasion to articulate my understanding of what the “post-Communist” left
shared with its Communist precursors. The continuities of the left by now had
become a central theme of my work.
“Neo-Communism,” a term I chose to characterize the left, failed to catch on,
as I had suspected it would. This was a credit to leftists’ success in embargoing
attempts to link them to their Communist predecessors by associating their
critics with problematic figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy. The very use of
the word “communist” is taken to be evidence of “McCarthyism.” But the effect
of accepting the preferred euphemisms, such as “progressive” and “liberal” (a
term applied by The New York Times even to card-carrying Communists like
Angela Davis) has had the dual effect of obscuring their agendas and burying the
lessons of their past. The second volume of this series, Progressives, returns to
these issues.
The chapter “Discover The Networks” is the defense of an online
encyclopedia of the left I created by that name, and a further attempt of mine to
provide a taxonomy of the species.8 “Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat” is
a further explication of this database, and thus another inquiry into the nature of
the faith.
 Part III

The essays in this section, “Slander as a Political Discourse,” address several
attempts to distort the facts of my life in order to discredit my ideas and
neutralize my criticisms of the left and its deeds. It includes an exchange
provoked by Sidney Blumenthal’s libel suit against Matt Drudge, which throws
light on the techniques leftists employ to defame and then quarantine critics, and
reflects the particularly low state of political discourse at the time. I knew John
Judis, the author of one of these attacks, when he was an editor of Socialist
Revolution. Later he became an editor of The New Republic, and was able to
write a fairly objective biography of William F. Buckley. The fact that he would
advocate a boycott of the magazine Peter and I published is just one indication of
the determination of progressives to create a wall of silence around our work and
prevent us from reaching the next generation with what we had learned.
 Part IV

This volume concludes with the texts of two talks I gave on autobiographical
themes. The first was given over the fierce objections of my leftwing classmates
to my 50th class reunion at Columbia College. In it I attempted to weigh the
changes that had taken place over the course of the half-century since we had
graduated, and explain the conservative viewpoint to an audience that remained
steeped in the presumptions of a progressive culture. The second is a speech I
gave at the annual dinner of the Zionist Organization of America, which
provided me an opportunity to reflect on my identity as a Jew, my attitudes
towards Israel and America, and to the war against them.
 PART I

Reflections From My Life

1

Left Illusions

For most of my adult and professional life, I regarded myself as a man of the
left. The identification was stronger than just politics. Ever since marching in my
first May Day parade down New York’s Eighth Avenue 30 years ago, I had
looked on myself as a soldier in an international class-struggle that would one
day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war. It was a
romantic conception to be sure, but then revolution as conceived in the Marxist
and socialist canons is a romantic conception; it promises the fulfillment of
hopes that are as old as mankind; it posits a break with the whole burdened
progress of human history—freedom from the chains that have bound master
and slave, lord and peasant, capitalist and proletariat from time immemorial.

This article was published in the December 8, 1979 issue of The Nation as
“A Radical’s Disenchantment”—a title provided by the editors. It turned
out to be my farewell to the left. (See Radical Son, pp. 305–7.)

Not long after the end of the Vietnam War, I found myself unable to maintain
any longer the necessary belief in the Marxist promise. Along with many other
veterans of the 1960s struggles, I ceased to be politically active. It was a
characteristic and somewhat unique feature of our radical generation, as distinct
from previous ones, that we did not then join the conservative forces of the
status quo. Instead, politics itself became suspect. We turned inward—not, I
would say, out of narcissism but out of a recognition in some ways threatening
to our radical ideas that failure (like success) is never a matter merely of “the
objective circumstances” but has a root in the acting self.
Few of us, I think, felt at ease with the political limbo in which we found
ourselves. It was as though the radicalism we shared was in some deep, perhaps
unanalyzable sense a matter of character rather than of commitment. It was as
though giving up the vision of fundamental change meant giving up the better
part of oneself. So we continued to feel a connection to the left that was
something more than sentimental, while our sense of loss led to conflicts whose
appearance was sometimes less than fraternal. Such feelings, I believe, were an
unspoken but significant element in the controversy over Joan Baez’s open letter
to the Vietnamese, and in the Ronald Radosh-Sol Stern article on the Rosenbergs
in The New Republic.9
Antonio Gramsci once described the revolutionary temperament as a
pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. For the veterans of my
radical generation, the balance was tipped when we sustained what seemed like
irreparable damage to our sense of historical possibility. It was not even so much
the feeling that the left would not be able to change society; it was rather the
sense that, in crucial ways, the left could not change itself.
Above all, the left seems trapped in its romantic vision. In spite of the defeats
to its radical expectations, it is unable to summon the dispassion to look at itself
critically. Despite the disasters of 20th-century revolutions, the viability of the
revolutionary goals remains largely unexamined and unquestioned. Even worse,
radical commitments to justice and other social values continue to be dominated
by a moral and political double standard. The left’s indignation seems
exclusively reserved for outrages that confirm the Marxist diagnosis of capitalist
society. Thus there is protest against murder and repression in Nicaragua but not
Cambodia, in Chile but not Tibet, South Africa but not Uganda, Israel but not
Libya or Iraq. Political support is mustered for oppressed minorities in Western
countries but not in Russia or the People’s Republic of China, while a Third
World country that declares itself “Marxist” puts itself—by the very act—
beyond reproach. In the same vein, almost any “liberation movement” is
embraced as just that, though it may be as unmistakably atavistic and clerically
fascist on first sight as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s in Iran.10
This moral and political myopia is compounded by the left’s inability to
accept responsibility for its own acts and commitments. Unpalatable results like
the outcome of the Revolution in Russia are regarded as “irrelevant”—and
dismissed—as though the left in America and elsewhere played no role in them,
and as though they have had no impact on the world the left set out to change. Or
they are analyzed as anomalies—and dismissed—as though there were in fact a
standard of achieved revolution by which the left could have confidence in its
program and in its understanding of the historical process.
Recently the shock of events in Indochina—mass murder committed by
Cambodia’s Communists, the invasion and unacknowledged occupation of
Cambodia by Vietnam, the invasion of Vietnam by China—has produced new
and promising responses among radicals still committed to the socialist cause.11
Paul Sweezy, the dean of America’s independent Marxists, wrote in Monthly
Review this June of “a deep crisis in Marxian theory” because not one of the
existing “socialist” societies behaves the way Marx and “most Marxists . . . until
quite recently . . . thought they would.” Classes haven’t been eliminated; nor, he
observes, is there any visible intention to eliminate them. The state, far from
disappearing, has grown more powerful, and Marxist regimes “go to war not
only in self-defense but to impose their will on other countries—even ones that
are also assumed to be socialist.”
The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily
grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had
illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or
visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral
courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.12 Yet in a manner
that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its
political stance, Chomsky refuses to devote his tenacious intelligence to a
systematic scrutiny of “socialist” regimes or even anti-Western regimes of the
Third World.
Thus, in a passage from his new book Language and Responsibility, Chomsky
criticizes the absence of socialist journalists in the mass media and comments:
“In a sense, we have over here the ‘mirror image’ of the Soviet Union, where all
the people who write in Pravda represent the position they call ‘socialism’—in
fact, a certain variety of highly authoritarian state socialism.” Chomsky
attributes this conformity to “ideological homogeneity” among the U.S.
intelligentsia and to the fact that the mass media are capitalist institutions.
Chomsky then offers examples of press conformity in connection with the
Vietnam War and concludes: “It is notable that despite the extensive and well-
known record of Government lies during the period of the Vietnam War, the
press, with fair consistency, remained remarkably obedient, and quite willing to
accept the Government’s assumptions, framework of thinking, and interpretation
of what was happening.”
The questions I find myself asking, when I read these words just now, are: By
what standard does Chomsky judge the obedience of the American press
remarkable? Is there a national press that is not obedient in the sense described?
Does Chomsky mean that the American press was remarkably more obedient to
its government during the Vietnam War than other national presses would have
been in similar circumstances? Looking back at those events from the present
historical juncture, one would be inclined to say exactly the reverse. Not only
did the American press provide much of the documentation on which the antiwar
movement’s indictment of the American war effort was based—including the
My Lai atrocities—but in defiance of its government and at the risk of
prosecution for espionage and treason, it published the classified documents
known as the “Pentagon Papers,” which provided a good deal of the tangible
record of official lies to which Chomsky refers.13
This is not to say that Chomsky’s characterization of press subservience is
wrong but rather to put the criticism in perspective. Within the framework of
ideological conformity and institutional obedience that Chomsky rightly
deplores, a body of dissent developed during the 1960s which has continued to
influence the conduct of America foreign policy and the structure of
international relations in the present decade. Who would have thought ten years
ago that the anti-American revolution in Iran, the linchpin of America’s imperial
interests in the Middle East, would not trigger an immediate American military
intervention? Who would have believed that the 25,000 military “advisors” in
Africa’s civil conflicts in the 1970s would be Cubans rather than Americans?
Consider, too, for a moment, Chomsky’s misleading comparison of the Soviet
and American presses as “mirror images.” In fact, the ignorance imposed on the
Soviet public by government-controlled media and official censorship is mind-
boggling by Western standards. At a bare minimum, the information necessary
to carry on a public debate over government policies in areas such as foreign
policy and defense is not available to the Soviet citizen (who would be forbidden
to use it, if it were). Censorship is carried to such an extreme that the Soviet
citizen may be uninformed about such noncontroversial threats to his wellbeing
as natural disasters, man-made catastrophes or even military provocations by the
United States. When Washington mined Haiphong Harbor and dared Russian
vessels to challenge the blockade, a crisis—compared at the time to the 1962
confrontation over Cuban missiles—ensued. For twenty days during this crisis,
the Soviet people were not informed that the mining had taken place. (The
purpose of the blackout was to allow the Soviet leadership to capitulate to the
American threat without domestic consequences.)
Why bring this up? Why dwell on the negative features of the Soviet system
(or of other Communist states) which in any case are widely reported in the
American media? What is the relevance? These are questions the apologists of
the left raise when they are confronted by the Soviet case. Unfortunately, the
consequences of ignoring the flaws of practical Communism are far-ranging and
real. To begin with, the credibility of the left’s critique is gravely undermined.
Chomsky’s article is a good example. The American press does not look
inordinately servile when compared with its real-world counterparts—and
especially its socialist opposites. Only when measured against its own standards
and the ideals of a democratic society does it seem so. Yet it is Chomsky who
raises the Soviet comparison, precisely because the United States and the Soviet
Union are in an adversary relationship—a political fact of prime importance that
the left often prefers to ignore, when it suits their purposes—and he does so in a
misleading way. The result is that his argument is vitiated, or at least seriously
weakened, for anyone who has not internalized the special expectations of the
left that a future socialist press would be really independent, critical and
accurate.
Latent in Chomsky’s critique is a comforting illusion: namely, that the left’s
failure to sustain itself as a political force with a radical alternative social vision
is due to the absence of socialist journalists in the capitalist media, rather than to
its own deficiencies—the failure of the left’s ideals in practice; its moral
inconsistency; its inability to formulate and fight for realistic programs; in short,
the fact that it cannot command moral and political authority among its
constituencies.
The blind-spot toward the Soviet Union provides a good instance of the left’s
lack of political realism. The Soviet Union is one of the two predominant
military powers in the world. That alone makes it a crucial subject of any
contemporary political analysis that claims to be comprehensive. Radicals often
seem to think that Western policy can be explained independently of Soviet
behavior by reference to the imperatives of the system, the requirements of the
“disaccumulation crisis,” etc. This was always a weakness in the radical
perspective; but now, as a result of the continuing development of Soviet power
in the last decade, it has passed a critical point and has become crippling.
During the 1950s, and even in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was significantly
weaker militarily than the United States. The celebrated “missile gap” was all on
the other side. Hence, whatever Soviet intentions, Washington’s influence on the
dynamics of the arms race and the cold war was preponderant. This is no longer
the case. The Soviet Union has now achieved nuclear parity with the United
States for the first time since the onset of the atomic era. This profoundly affects,
among other things, the Soviet ability to intervene in political and military
conflicts outside its borders. The political pendulum has also swung in its favor.
In an earlier day, John Foster Dulles used to attack the nonaligned states for
“immoral” neutrality. At the recent conference of nonaligned countries in
Havana, the policy of Washington’s representatives was to keep the participants
neutral (i.e. not aligned with the Soviet bloc).
These changes and the trend they represent make a realistic analysis of Soviet
policies crucial for any political movement. Yet in a special issue of The Nation
concerned with the problem of military interventions (June 9), only one of ten
articles was even partially devoted to the Soviet Union.14 That article, by
Michael Klare, employed a comparative analysis of U.S. and Soviet military
forces to discount the impression that the Soviet Union is now or intends to
become an interventionist power.
Klare achieved this feat in two ways: by defining “interventionist forces” in
such a restrictive manner as to exclude the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
and the occupation forces it maintains there; and by describing Soviet
intervention in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as “aid” to “beleaguered
allies”—in short, by taking a page from the apologists for American
intervention. When Klare was compelled under his own ground-rules to admit
that some Soviet missions had the look of interventionist forces, he quickly
denied the implication, saying, “. . . but it is important to remember that the units
involved are seen by Moscow as being ‘on loan’ from their normal, defensive
mission, and so would be recalled the moment they were needed at home.” So,
presumably, would the U.S. “advisers” that began America’s involvement in
Vietnam, if they had been needed at home.
Failure to appreciate the world role of a major power—the depressing history
of leftist apologias for that power aside—would be serious enough. But the
Soviet Union, despite all the qualifying circumstances of its origins and
development, is the country in which the revolutionary socialist solution—state
ownership of the means of production—has been tested and found wanting. For
this reason, far more than for the others, it requires radical attention. The point
was forcefully made a few years ago by the Polish philosopher Leszek
Kolakowski:

Why the problems of the real and the only existing Communism, which
Leftist ideologies put aside so easily (“all right, this was done in
exceptional circumstances, we won’t imitate these patterns, we will do it
better” etc.), are crucial for socialist thought is because the experiences of
the “new alternative society” have shown very convincingly that the only
universal medicine these people have for social evils—state ownership of
the means of production—is not only perfectly compatible with all disasters
of the capitalist world, with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery,
economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but that it adds to
them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic
incentives and, above all, the unrestricted role of the omnipotent
bureaucracy, a concentration of power never known before in human
history.

Can the left take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures,
the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals? Can it begin to shed the
arrogant cloak of self-righteousness that elevates it above its own history and
makes it impervious to the lessons of experience?
In a previous essay, Kolakowski wrote that the left was defined by its
“negation” of existing social reality. But not only this: “It is also defined by the
direction of this negation, in fact by the nature of its utopia.” Today, the left’s
utopia itself is in question. That is the real meaning of the crisis of Marxism.
Paradoxically, the way for the left to begin to regain its utopia, to fashion a new,
more adequate vision of radical commitment and radical change, is to take a
firmer grip on the ground under its feet.
2

Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

My life as aleftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years
old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a
murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an
end. My parents had joined the Communist Party along with many other
idealistic Americans in the 1930s, before I was born. Just as today’s leftists
believe that the seeds of justice have been planted by the Marxist Sandinistas in
Nicaragua, my parents and their radical friends saw them blooming in Soviet
Russia, which many of them visited during Stalin’s purges. Not even the
testimony of a Bolshevik legend like the exiled Trotsky could persuade them that
they were deceived about the “new society” they thought they saw under
construction in the socialist state. Confident that their own ideals were pure, my
parents and their political friends dismissed Trotsky and others whose
experience had caused them to know better, smearing them as “counter-
revolutionaries,” “anti-Soviets” and “renegades.”

*This article appeared in The Village Voice, September 30, 1986.

Twenty years later, when my parents had reached middle age, their arrogance
betrayed them and took away their self-respect. In 1956 power shifted in the
Kremlin, and my parents along with the rest of the progressive left discovered
that the socialist future they had served all their lives was a monstrous lie. They
had thought they were fighting for social justice, for the powerless and the poor.
But in reality they had served a gang of cynical despots who had slaughtered
more peasants, caused more hunger and human misery, and killed more leftists
like themselves than all the capitalist governments since the beginning of time.
After Stalin’s death, it was the confrontation with this reality, and not Senator
Joe McCarthy’s famous crusade, which demoralized and destroyed the old
Communist guard in America. I was seventeen at the time, and at the funeral of
the Old Left I swore to myself I would not repeat my parents’ fate. I would never
be loyal to a movement based on a lie or be complicit in political crimes; I would
never support a cause that required the suppression of its own truths, whether by
self-censorship or firing squads or political smears. But my youth prevented me
from comprehending what the catastrophe had revealed. I continued to believe in
the fantasy of the socialist future. When a New Left began to emerge a few years
later, I was ready to believe that it was a fresh beginning and eager to assist at its
birth.
For a long time I was able to keep the promises I had made. As an activist and
writer in the movement of the Sixties, I never endorsed what I knew to be a lie or
concealed what I knew to be a crime. I never stigmatized a dissenting view as
morally beyond the pale. At the same time, however, I closed my eyes to
evidence that would have shown me the left had not really changed at all. Like
the rest of my radical comrades, I welcomed Castro’s triumph in Cuba, which he
proclaimed a revolution of “bread without terror” and “neither red nor black but
Cuban olive green.” When Castro established his own dictatorship and gulag and
joined the Soviet axis, I too blamed his dereliction on the anti-Communist
phobia of the United States, and I averted my eyes from the truth.
A decade later, when the Vietnam War came to an end, there was a massive
exodus from the New Left by those who had joined its ranks to avoid military
service. I stayed. I had never been eligible for the draft and had joined the
movement in order to serve the progressive ideal.
In 1974 I began a new project with the Black Panther Party, which the New
Left had identified in the Sixties as the “vanguard of the revolution.” I raised the
funds to create a “Community Learning Center” for the Panthers in the heart of
the East Oakland ghetto. The Center provided schooling and free meals to 150
children, and community services to an even larger number of adults. The
following year the woman I had hired as a bookkeeper for the Center was
kidnapped, sexually tormented, and then brutally murdered by my Black Panther
comrades.
When I first discovered what had happened, I was paralyzed with fear, a fear
that grew as I learned about other murders and violent crimes the Panthers had
committed—all without retribution from the law. At the time, the left saw the
Panthers as a persecuted vanguard, victimized by racist police because of their
role in the liberation struggle. The Panthers’ leader had found refuge from
several criminal indictments in Castro’s Cuba; the Party’s spokesmen appeared
regularly at progressive rallies to agitate against capitalist “repression” at home.
In the eyes of the left, the Panthers were what they always had been: an
embodiment of the progressive idea. To defend them against the “fascist” attacks
of the police was a radical’s first responsibility and task.
In reality the Panthers were a criminal gang that preyed on the black ghetto
itself. With the weapons they had justified as necessary for “self-defense”
against “racist authority,” they pursued various avenues of criminal violence
which included extortion, drug-trafficking and murder. Not all the murders they
committed had a monetary rationale. Some were merely gratuitous, as when they
killed a leader of the Black Students Union at Grove Street College in Oakland
because he had inadvertently insulted one of their enforcers. The Oakland police
were aware of the Panthers’ criminal activities; but were rendered powerless to
stop them by the nationwide network of liberal and radical Panther supporters
who sprang to their defense.
With community fronts like the school I had created, with lobbyists in the
state house and activists in the streets, with million-dollar defense funds and
high-powered attorneys, with civil liberties organizations ready with lawsuits
and witnesses ready to perjure themselves, the New Left provided the Panthers
with an Achilles Shield that protected them from the law. All the celebrated
“Cointelpro” programs of the Nixon White House and the anti-subversive
campaigns of the FBI, all the alleged wiretaps and infiltrations of the Panther
organization, could not provide the means to sustain a single legal conviction
against the Panthers for their crimes, or prevent the 20 or more murders they
committed, including that of the woman I had hired. During a decade of radical
protest as reckless in its charges as it was indiscriminate in its targets, the left
had made civil authority in America so weak that the law could not punish
ordinary criminal acts when committed by its progressive vanguard.
Because of what I knew, I myself now lived in fear of the Panther terror. In
my fear, it became impossible for me not to connect these events with the
nightmares of the radical past. Just as Stalin had used the idealism and loyalty of
my parents’ generation to commit his crimes in the Thirties, so the Panthers had
used my generation’s idealism in the Sixties. My political odyssey had come full
circle. When I was beginning, I had promised myself that I would never be silent
when confronted by such misdeeds; that I would fight within the left for the
same justice as the left demanded of the world outside. But now I discovered
that I could not keep my promise and remain a part of the movement I had
served. Because a progressive vanguard had committed the crime, my duty as a
progressive was to defend the criminal. As a result, the left suddenly became a
hostile terrain for me. I had already been threatened by the Panthers to keep
silent about what I knew. The facts I knew would not be conclusive evidence in
a court of law; but they posed a threat to the Panthers’ political shield. If their
criminal acts were exposed to the left, the Panthers might lose their protection
and support.
But even if I told what I knew, the Panthers might have little to fear. The
whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual
truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a
truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was
damaging to the progressive cause.
At the murdered woman’s funeral, I had approached her daughter, who was 18
and a radical like me. On the way to the graveside, I told her that I was
convinced the Panthers had killed her mother. The daughter’s grief for her
mother was great, but so was the solidarity she felt for black people who were
oppressed and for their revolutionary vanguard. When later she was asked
publicly about the tragedy, she said that as far as she was concerned the Panthers
were above suspicion. To suggest the contrary was racist.15
What the daughter of the murdered woman did was “politically correct.” I
knew at the time that if I were to step forward and publicly accuse the Panthers
of the crime, I would be denounced by my own community in the name of the
values we shared. All my previous life of dedication and commitment to the
radical cause overnight would count for nothing. My own comrades would
stigmatize me as a “racist,” shun me as a “renegade” and expel me from their
ranks.
My dedication to the progressive cause had made me self-righteous and
arrogant and blind. Now a cruel and irreversible crime had humbled me and
restored my sight. I had started out with others of my generation confident that
we were wiser than our parents and would avoid their radical fate. But all our
wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to the generation that
had been silent during the years of Stalin’s slaughters. The Stalinists and the
Panthers may have operated on stages vastly different in scale, but ultimately
their achievements were the same. Stalin and the Panthers were ruthless
exploiters of the radical dream; just like our forbears, my comrades and I were
credulous idealists who had served a criminal lie.
Through this microcosm I saw what I had failed to see 18 years before, at the
time of “de-Stalinization,” when the New Left was born. The problem of the left
was not Stalin or “Stalinism.” The problem was the left itself.
Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small, its leaders were able to
rob and kill without incurring the penalty of law. They were able to do so
because the left had made the Panthers a law unto themselves—the same way
the left had made Stalin a law unto himself—the same way the left makes Fidel
Castro and the Sandinista comandantes laws unto themselves.
By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields
them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary
justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation,
the left creates a new world of oppression.
The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the
best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the left because of
the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.
3

Reality and Dream

I was born fifty years ago in 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This
is my first trip to your country, and it has been inspiring to me to see that
although you have been occupied for half a century you have not been defeated.
The members of my family were socialists for more than a hundred years, first
in Moravia and the Ukraine, then in New York and Berkeley; first as socialists;
then as Communists; and then as New-Left Marxists. My grandparents came to
New York to escape persecution as Jews in the Pale of Settlement. My
grandfather was a tailor. He lived with other Jews in poverty on the Lower East
Side and earned three dollars a week. He was so poor that sometimes he had to
sleep under his sewing-machine in the factory where he worked. Compared to
czarist Russia from which he had fled, America was a new world. He was still
poor, but he had arrived in a land of opportunities provided by its free-market
economy and political democracy; a land where people could grow rich beyond
their wildest dreams.

This is from a talk delivered at the Second Thoughts Conference in

Krakow, Poland, May 4–7, 1989, just before Poland became free.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=21734

That was my grandfather’s reality. Like many others who arrived in America,
my grandfather also had a dream. His dream, however, was not a dream of
riches. It was a dream he shared with other members of the international left: the
dream of a socialist future, a world of planned economy and economic equality,
of material abundance and social justice. In 1917, my grandfather thought he
saw his dream become reality in Bolshevik Russia. By this time he also had a
son. Like the children of other immigrant families, his son studied and worked
hard to take advantage of the opportunities provided by America’s freedom. He
became a high-school teacher and married a colleague and also had a son.
By this time my father was no longer poor like his father but middle-class. He
and my mother could afford culture, travel, an automobile, and a grand piano. In
1949, with their schoolteachers’ salaries, they bought a six-room house on credit
for $18,000. In 1986, when my father died, the house belonged to him as his
property. It was worth $200,000. That was my father’s reality: riches and
freedom beyond his father’s wildest dreams.
But like his father, my father had his heart set on a dream beyond the freedom
and wealth that America had made possible for him. Just as his father had been a
socialist, my father was a Communist. He supported the “social experiment” that
Lenin and Stalin had begun in Soviet Russia. All his life he dreamed the
Communist future, and he transmitted that dream to his son.
In 1956, events occurred in Moscow and in Eastern Europe that almost made
me give up the dream I had inherited as a birthright. In 1956 the head of the
Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his secret speech on the
crimes of Stalin and thus drew aside a veil that had concealed from the faithful
the grim reality of the socialist future. Soviet tanks thundered across the border
to crush the brave forces of the Hungarian revolution and to discourage the
hopeful beginnings of the Polish October.
Instead of being awakened by these events, I joined a new generation that
hoped to revive the humanist spirit of the dream itself. I was inspired to join the
New Left by a Polish Marxist named Isaac Deutscher, who was my teacher. It
was Deutscher who devised the theory out of which we hoped to revive the
socialist dream.
According to Deutscher, the Stalinist state that had murdered millions and
erected an edifice of totalitarian lies was a deformation of the socialist ideal that
socialists themselves would overcome. The socialist revolution had taken place
in the backward environment of czarist Russia. Stalinism was a form of
“primitive socialist accumulation” produced by the cultural backwardness of that
environment and the political necessities of building an industrial economic
base.
In 1956, when Khrushchev launched the process of de-Stalinization,
Deutscher saw it as a prelude to the humanist future of which we all had
dreamed. The socialist “economic base”—infinitely superior in rationality and
productive potential to its capitalist competitor—had already been created.
Socialist accumulation had been completed; the socialist superstructure would
follow in due course. Socialist abundance would produce socialist democracy.
When we heard words like these, New Leftists all over the world became new
believers in the socialist cause. Stalinism had been terrible, but the terror was
over. The socialist economic base had been built in Russia. To complete the
dream, all that was required was political democracy. In the New Left in the
Sixties, we had a saying: “The first socialist revolution will take place in the
Soviet Union.” Some leftists are still saying it today.
For 17 years, I waited in vain for the democratic revolution to come to Soviet
Russia to complete the socialist dream. But it did not come. Oh, there was a
spring in Prague. But Soviet tanks again rolled across the border to crush it. Five
years later, another Polish Marxist—now ex-Marxist—stepped forward to
explain why socialism would never be realized except in a totalitarian state. In
1956, Leszek Kolakowski had been a leader of the Polish October. In 1968,
Kolakowski had been a defender of the Prague spring. Now, in 1973, at a
conference in England, he summed up a hundred years of critiques of socialism
that history had repeatedly confirmed. The effort to transform natural
inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal
inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity
could only lead to the totalitarian state.
Deutscher had been wrong. There would never be a socialist political
democracy erected on a socialist economic base. Socialism was an impossible—
and therefore destructive—dream.
But if Kolakowski was right, the future of peoples who lived under socialism
was dark indeed. The totalitarian empire could not reform, but it could expand.
Aided by dreamers all over the world, the expansion of that empire seemed
likely, even inevitable—until now, the era of glasnost. Now, instead of a
continuing expansion, we see Communism everywhere in retreat. Now its
believers are fewer and fewer, and the terrain itself is beginning to shrink. Who
among us expected this? A year and a half ago, I participated in an international
panel in Paris that discussed the question: Is Communism reversible? No
member of the panel thought it was. This year, if a similar panel were held, the
question would be: Can Communism save itself? Who would be so bold to say
that it can?
Why were we so wrong? Because all of us, Kolakowski included, had our
roots in the intellectual traditions of the socialist left. Experience had taught us
all to be anti-Communist, but our critique of socialism was based on political
theory and political considerations. We knew that totalitarianism was evil, but
we thought that socialism worked. We were wrong. It does not work.
While we were wrong, others all along had been right. All those years, outside
the socialist tradition, there had been voices crying in the wilderness saying that
not only would socialism bring tyranny and suffering, it would not work.
Seventy-seven years ago, five years after the Bolshevik triumph, Ludwig von
Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us.
Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning
a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of
rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-
motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to
produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but for society as a
whole.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and the other liberal theorists of a
free-market economy who warned of this outcome are the true prophets of the
reality we see before us—of socialist bankruptcy and Communist retreat.
Glastnostian democracy has not completed and cannot complete the socialist
dream; it can only expose this dream as a nightmare from which Communism
cannot wake up. The only way to wake up is to give up the dream. In 1989,
according to Soviet economists, the average Soviet citizen had a daily ration of
meat that was smaller than the daily intake of the average Russian in 1913 under
the czar. Socialism makes men poor beyond their wildest dreams. The average
Polish citizen is poorer today, in 1989, than my poor grandfather was in America
fifty years ago, when I was born.
The law of socialist economy is this: from each according to his exploitability,
to the nomenklatura according to its greed. Not only does the socialist economy
not produce wealth at the rate a free economy does; the socialist economy
consumes wealth. It consumes the natural wealth of the nation and also the
wealth it accumulated in the past. Every Communist revolution begins as a rape
of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past. Every Communist
Party is the colonizer of its own country, and the Soviet empire is the colonizer
of them all. That is the law of socialist distribution: from each nation according
to its exploitability, to the empire according to its greed.
But a system that lives by cannibalism, which consumes more wealth than it
produces, is sooner or later destined to die. And that is what is happening before
our eyes.
For myself, the family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no
longer a dream of the revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But
for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is still happening. My
dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday soon you will wake up
from your nightmare, and be free.
4

My Conservatism

I was recently invited to address the question “Are We Conservatives?” before
an audience at the Heritage Foundation. The very posing of the question tells us
something about contemporary conservatism. I could no more have put the
question “Are We Progressives?” to a comparable gathering of the left than I
could ask a crowd of citizens “Are we Americans?” To raise such an issue to
those audiences would be to question an identity and the foundations of a faith.
Conservatism, then, is not an ideology in the sense that liberalism is, or the
various forms of radicalism are. It is not an “identity politics” whose primary
concern is to situate its adherents in the camp of moral humanity and thus to
confer on them the stamp of History’s approval. Conservatism does not have a
party line. It is possible for conservatives to question virtually any position held
by other conservatives including, evidently, the notion that they are
conservatives at all, without risking excommunication, expulsion, or even a
raised eyebrow.

This was published in Heterodoxy magazine, January 1993.

Conservatives do sometimes claim religious principles as the basis for their
convictions. But it is not a religious commitment that makes them conservatives.
There are radicals and liberals who have similar commitments and make similar
claims. What makes an outlook “conservative’ is that it is rooted in an attitude
about the past rather than in expectations of the future. The first principles of
conservatism are propositions about human nature and the way human beings
behave in a social context; about limits, and what limits make possible. This
practicality, this attention to experience, to workable arrangements, explains why
the conservative community can be liberal and tolerant toward its members in
ways that the progressive left cannot.
In contrast to the conservative outlook, liberal and radical ideologies are about
the future, about desired outcomes. The first principles of the left are the
principles of politically constructing a “better world.” Throughout the modern
era, the progressive future has been premised on a social contract that would
make all of society’s members equal—or at least provide them with equal
starting-points.
Since ideologies of the left are commitments to an imagined future, to
question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you
for or against the equality of human beings? To dissent from the progressive
viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but an unwillingness to
embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to will the imperfections and
injustices of the present order. In the current cant of the left, it is to be “racist,
sexist, classist,” a defender of the status quo.
That is why not only radicals, but even those who call themselves liberals, are
instinctively intolerant towards the conservative position. For progressives, the
future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a
moral choice. To achieve the socially just future requires only that enough
people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives
to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing
their opponents as morally repulsive reactionaries, unworthy of the community
of other human beings.
While the politics of the left is derived from assumptions about the future, its
partisans are careful to construct a view of history that validates their claims:
history as a narrative of progressively expanding human rights. Thus the
revolutions of the 18th century institutionalized civil rights of free speech and
religion, and a government of laws for white property-holding males. The 19th
century extended the rights of suffrage and the political base of freedom, ending
slavery and establishing the equality of individual males as participants in the
political process. The 20th century’s task, and now the task of the 21st is to
extend the same rights to women and other minorities, while adding social and
economic rights to education, health-care, material wellbeing, and equality. This
is the revolution for “social justice,” which, of course, is the socialist revolution
that has failed, but that the left will not give up.
Modern, or post-modern, or better still post-Communist conservatism begins
with the recognition that this agenda and the progressive paradigm that
underpins it are bankrupt. They have been definitively refuted by the
catastrophes of Marxism, which demonstrate that the quest for social justice,
pressed to its logical conclusion, leads inexorably to the totalitarian result. The
reason is this: to propose a solution that is utopian, in other words impossible, is
to propose a solution that requires coercion and requires absolute coercion. Who
wills the end wills the means.
Post-Communist conservatism, then, begins with the principle that is written
in the blood of these social experiments. “It is just not true,” as Hayek wrote in
The Constitution of Liberty, “that human beings are born equal; . . . if we treat
them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position; . . . [thus] the
only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.
Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different
but in conflict with each other.” (my emphasis)
In other words, the rights historically claimed by the left are self-contradicting
and self-defeating. The regime of social justice, of which the left dreams, is a
regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom. It is not a question
of choosing the right (while avoiding the wrong) political means in order to
achieve the desired ends. The means are contained in the ends. The leftist
revolution must crush freedom in order to achieve the social justice that it seeks.
It is therefore unable to achieve even that justice. This is the totalitarian circle
that cannot be squared. Socialism is not bread without freedom, as some
maintain; it is neither freedom nor bread. The shades of the victims, in the
endless cemetery of 20th-century revolutions, cry out from their still-fresh
graves: the liberated future is a destructive illusion. To heed this cry is the
beginning of a conservative point of view.
The conservative vision does not exclude compromise; nor should it condemn
every attempt, however moderate, to square the circle of political liberty and
social welfare. A conservative view does not require that all aspects of the
welfare state be rejected in favor of free-market principles. After all,
conservatives are (or should be) the first to recognize the intractable nature of
the human condition. The perfectly free society is as untenable as the perfectly
just society, and for the same reason. We would have to rip out our all-too-
human hearts in order to achieve it.
The Hayekian paradox—the point from which contemporary conservatism
begins—is an understanding shared by the architects of the American republic. It
is no accident, as Marxists would say, that Federalist #10 describes the
Constitutional arrangement as a design to thwart the projects of the left—“a rage
for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or
for any other improper or wicked project.” A conservative is thus a conserver of
the framework of the American Constitution.
But are we really conservatives? Well, yes and no. The principles of the
American founding are, of course, those of classical liberalism. The fathers of
modern conservatism—Locke, Burke, Madison—were classical liberals, anti-
Tory architects and defenders of the great liberal revolutions of their time. But
while modern radicals have failed in their efforts to expropriate the means of
material production, they have succeeded in appropriating enough of the means
of cultural production to hijack the term “liberal” for their own anti-liberal
agenda, and to keep it there.
The radical wolves in sheep’s clothing fall into two categories. First are the
Crypto-Marxists, calling themselves radical feminists, post-structuralists, post-
modernists, or merely progressives, whose agendas remain totalitarian. Then
come the Fellow-Travelling Liberals, who acknowledge the bankruptcy of
socialism and make a grudging commitment to free markets, but who still do not
want to give up the agenda of “social justice”—the idea that government can
arrive at a standard of what is just, and that the state can implement such a
standard without destroying economic and political freedom.
The liberal ascendancy that dominates the current horizon is a popular front of
these two groups. Their victories are visible all around us. Under the banner of
expanding rights, they have transformed the idea of America from a covenant to
secure liberties to a claim for entitlements. They have expanded the powers of
the state and constricted the realm of freedom. They have eroded the private
economy and stifled individual initiative. Through race-based legislation and the
concept of group rights, they have subverted the neutrality of the law and the
very idea of a national identity.
So ingrained have the premises of the Old Left become in their new “liberal”
clothing that in post-Cold War America, conservatives are now the
counterculture. That is why we must think in other-than-conservative terms
when confronting the challenges that face us. We must think of ourselves as
heirs to Locke and Burke and Madison, who faced a similar challenge from the
leftists of their time. And with them we must proclaim:

We are the revolutionaries demanding a universalist standard of one right,

one law, one nation for all;
We are the champions of tolerance, the opponents of group privilege, and
of communal division;
We are the proponents of a common ground that is color-blind, gender-
equitable and ethnically inclusive—a government of laws that is neutral
between its citizens, and limited in scope;
We are the advocates of society as against the state, the seekers of a
dramatic reduction in the burdens of taxation, and of redress from the
injustices of government intervention;
We are the defenders of free markets against the destructive claims of the
socialist agenda; and
We are the conservers of the Constitutional covenant against the forces
of modern tyranny and the totalitarian state.

5

Black Murder Inc.

A book arrived this month that sent a chill into my marrow. The author’s face on
the dust jacket was different from the one I remembered. Its hair was cropped in
a severe feminist do, its skin pulled tight from an apparent lift, its eyes
artificially lit to give off a benign sparkle. But I could still see the menace I
knew so well underneath. It was a holograph of the darkest period in my life.
I first met her in June 1974, in a dorm room at Mills College, an elite private
school for women in Oakland. The meeting had been arranged by Huey Newton,
leader of the Black Panther Party and icon of the New Left. For almost a year
before that I had been working with Newton, developing a school complex in the
East Oakland ghetto. I had named it the Oakland Community Learning Center
and was the head of its Planning Committee.
The unusual venue of my first meeting with Elaine Brown was the result of
the Panthers’ odd disciplinary notions. They were actually Huey’s notions
because (as I came to understand later) the Party was an absolutist state where
the leader’s word was law. Huey had sentenced Elaine to Mills as a kind of exile
and house arrest. “I sent her to Mills,” he explained to me, “because she hates it
there.”16

This article was published in Heterodoxy Magazine, March 1993

Elaine was a strikingly attractive woman, light-skinned like Huey, but with a
more fluid verbal style that developed an edge when she was angry. I had been
warned by my friends in the Party that she was also crazy and dangerous. A
festering inner rage erupted constantly and without warning wherever she went.
At such times, the edge in her voice would grow steel-hard and could slice a
target like a machete.
I will never forget standing next to Elaine, as I did months later in growing
horror, as she threatened KQED-TV host Bill Schechner over the telephone. “I
will kill you motherfucker,” she promised him in her machete voice, if he went
through with plans to interview the former Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale.
Seale had gone into hiding after Huey expelled him from the Party in August. As
I learned long afterwards, Seale had been whipped—literally—and then
personally sodomized by Huey with such violence that he had to have his anus
surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of
the Panthers. A Party member told me later, “You have to understand, it had
nothing to do with sex. It was about power.” But in the Panther world, as I also
came to learn, nothing was about anything except power.
That day at Mills, however, Elaine used her verbal facility as an instrument of
seduction, softening me with stories of her rough youth in the North Philly
ghetto and her double life at the Philadelphia conservatory of music. Her
narrative dramatized the wounding personal dilemmas imposed by racial and
class injustice, inevitably winning my sympathy and support.
Elaine had the two characteristics necessary for Panther leadership. She could
move easily in the elegant outer world of the Party’s wealthy liberal supporters,
but she could also function in the violent world of the street gang, which was the
Party’s internal milieu. Elaine was being punished in her Mills exile by Huey,
because even by his standards her temper was explosive and therefore a liability.
Within three months of our meeting, however, his own out-of-control behavior,
had forced him to make her supreme.
The summer of 1974 was disastrous for Newton. Reports had appeared in the
press placing him at the scene of a drive-by shooting at an “after hours” club. He
was indicted for pistol-whipping a middle-aged black tailor named Preston
Callins with a .357 magnum, for brawling with two police officers in an Oakland
bar, and for murdering a 17-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Smith. When the
day arrived for his arraignment in this last matter, Huey failed to show. Assisted
by the Panthers’ Hollywood patrons, he had fled to Cuba.
With Huey gone, Elaine took the reins of the Party. I was already shaken by
Huey’s flight and by the dark ambiguities that preceded it. As a “politically
conscious” radical, however, I understood the racist character of the media and
the repressive forces that wanted to see the Panthers destroyed. I did not believe,
therefore, all the charges against Huey. Although disturbed by them, I was
unable to draw the obvious conclusion and leave.
My involvement with the Black Panther Party had begun in early 1973. I had
gone to Los Angeles with Peter Collier to raise money for Ramparts, the flagship
magazine of the New Left, which he and I co-edited. One of our marks was Bert
Schneider, the producer of Easy Rider, the breakthrough film of the Sixties,
which had brought the counter-cultural rebellion into the American mainstream.
Schneider gave Ramparts $5,000, and then turned around and asked us to meet
his friend Huey Newton.
At the time, Newton was engaged in a life and death feud with Black Panther
Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver had fled to Algiers after a shoot-out with Bay Area
police. (Eldridge has since admitted that he ambushed them). Schneider wanted
us to take Eldridge’s name off the Ramparts masthead where he was still listed
as “International Editor.”
Huey’s attraction to the Left had always been his persona as “Minister of
Defense” of the Black Panther Party, his challenge to revolutionary wannabees
to live up to their rhetoric and “pick up the gun.” Huey had done just that in his
own celebrated confrontation with the law that had left Officer John Frey dead
with a bullet wound in his back. Everybody in the Left seemed to believe that
Huey had killed Frey, but we wanted to believe as well that Huey—as a victim
of racism—was also innocent. Peter’s and my engagement with the Panthers was
more social than political, since Ramparts had helped the Party become a
national franchise. I was put off by their military style, but now a change in the
times prompted the two of us, and especially me, to be interested in the meeting.
By the early 70s, it was clear that the Movement had flamed out. As soon as
Nixon signaled the end of the military draft, the anti-war demonstrations stopped
and the protestors disappeared, marooning hardcore activists like myself. I felt a
need to do something to fill the vacancy. Huey Newton was really alone among
Movement figures in recognizing the change in the zeitgeist and making the
most of it. In a dramatic announcement, he declared the time had come to “put
away the gun” and, instead, to “serve the people,” which seemed sensible
enough to me.
Our meeting took place in Huey’s penthouse eyrie, 25 floors above Lake
Oakland. In its intra-party polemics, the Eldridge faction had condemned Huey
for “selling out the armed struggle,” and made much of Huey’s lavish lifestyle.
But the apartment itself was sparely furnished and I was ready to accept
Schneider’s explanation that it was necessary for “security.” (A TV screen
allowed Huey to view entrants to the building, 25 floors below). Not only J.
Edgar Hoover’s infamous agents but also the disgruntled Cleaver elements might
very well want to see Huey dead. There had been several killings already. One of
Huey’s East Coast loyalists, Sam Napier, had been shot and doused with
gasoline, and set on fire.
Somehow, because of Huey’s sober pronouncements and his apparent victory
in the intra-party struggle I regarded this reality as part of the past, and no longer
threatening. Unlike Elaine, Huey was able to keep his street passions in check in
the presence of white intellectuals he intended to make use of. In all the time I
worked with him, I never saw him abuse another individual, verbally or
otherwise. I never saw him angry or heard him utter a threat. I never saw a gun
drawn. When I opposed him on important political issues, as I did at our very
first meeting, I found him respectful of my differences, a seduction I could not
resist. (My partner, Peter, was more cautious and politically aloof and, as events
were to prove, wiser than I.)
After the meeting, I offered to help Huey with the Party’s community projects
and to raise money for the Panther school. Huey wanted to buy a Baptist church
facility in the East Oakland ghetto with an auditorium, cafeteria and 35
classrooms. In the next months, I raised more than $100,000 to purchase the
buildings on 61 st Avenue and East 14th Street. The $63,000 down payment was
the largest check I had ever seen, let alone signed. The new Oakland Community
Learning Center was administered by a Planning Committee, which was
composed of Panthers whom Huey had specially selected to work with me.
Neither Bobby Seale, nor Elaine Brown, nor any other Panther leaders were
among them.
The Learning Center began with more than 100 Panther children. Its
instruction was enriched by educationalists like Herbert Kohl whom I brought in
to help. I took Kohl to see Huey in the penthouse eyrie, but the meeting went
badly. Within days, Huey’s spies had reported that Kohl (who was street smart
in ways I was not) was telling people that Huey was using cocaine. When I
confronted Herb, he said: “He’s sniffing. He was sniffing when we were up
there.”
I had not been part of the Sixties drug culture and was so unfamiliar with
cocaine at that time, that I had no idea whether Kohl was right. Huey’s runny
nose, his ability to stay alert despite the fifth of Courvoisier he daily consumed,
the sleepless nights at Schneider’s Beverly Hills home where once Bert and his
girlfriend Candice Bergen had gone to bed Huey talked endlessly to me about
politics and the millions of dollars the Party had squandered on bail—all these
were tell-tale signs I could not read. I assumed the innocent possibility that Huey
was “sniffing” because he had a cold, which is what I told Kohl, who probably
thought I was shining him on. After the incident, Huey banished Kohl from the
penthouse, but let him continue to help on the Learning Center.
The Center was operated by a front I had created called the Educational
Opportunities Corporation, a California tax-exempt 501(c)(3). It was imperative
—or so I thought—to keep the books of the school in order and to file
appropriate tax reports so that hostile authorities would not be given a pretext to
shut us down. This proved to be only another aspect of my politically induced
innocence. Long after I had gone, too, I watched the Center operate illegally,
without filing proper tax reports, while Huey and Elaine were diverting large
sums of money (received as government grants) to themselves and their gunmen
to keep them in fancy cars and clothes and, when necessary, out of jail. Unable
to conceive such a possibility for a Party all leftists knew was targeted for
destruction by J. Edgar Hoover, I engaged the services of our bookkeeper at
Ramparts, Betty Van Patter, to keep the Learning Center accounts.
Virtually my entire relationship with Huey and the Party was through the
activities of the school. In the months following the purchase of the building on
East 14th, it became apparent to me that things were not proceeding as planned.
In particular, it was still exclusively a Party operation. I had never been
enthusiastic about the Party as such, which seemed to me merely an ideological
sect whose time had passed. I had conveyed these views to Huey at the outset of
our relationship and he had pretended to agree. He had even promised that if we
purchased the facility and built an educational center, it would gradually be
turned over to the East Oakland community and not become just another Party
institution.
Six months had gone by, however, and there were only Panthers in
attendance. The impoverished black community around the school remained
aloof, as did the black intellectuals like Berkeley sociology professor Troy
Duster, whom I periodically approached to help out with the operation, and who
would come up to the penthouse to see Huey, but afterwards never follow
through or come back. Adding to my dismay was the fact that the school head,
Brenda Bay, had been replaced by Ericka Huggins, a prominent Party figure and
in my view an individual who was mentally unbalanced. (It did not improve my
dim view of Ericka, when I saw her punish a child by commanding the 9 year
old to write 1,000 times, “I am privileged to attend the Black Panther Party’s
Learning Center because ...”) My concerns about the school came to a head on
May 19, 1974, which was Malcolm X’s birthday.
A “Malcolm X Day” celebration was held in the school auditorium, which I
attended. One after another, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and other Panthers
mounted the podium to proclaim the Party as “the only true continuator of the
legacy of Malcolm.” Looking around at the familiar faces of the Panthers in the
hall, I felt depressed and even betrayed. Huey had assured me that the Center
would not become the power base for a sect, and had even excluded Bobby and
Elaine from its operation to make me a believer. And yet now I could see that’s
all that it was.
At the next Planning Committee meeting in Huey’s apartment, I braced
myself and launched into a passionate complaint. On a day that all black
Oakland should have been at the Center, I said, the occasion had been turned
into a sectarian promotion for the Black Panther Party. My outburst was met by
a tense silence from the others at the table. But Huey seemed unfazed and even
to lend some support to what I had said. This duplicitous impression of yielding
was almost a performance art with him.
Elaine had a similar talent for seduction when it fitted her agenda. In our first
encounter at Mills, she had strategically brought the Malcolm X incident into our
conversation. In her most disarming manner, she related how, after the meeting,
Ericka Huggins had reported to her and other members of the Party that, “David
Horowitz said that the Malcolm X Day celebration was too black.”
It was a shrewd gambit, reminding me of my precarious position in the
Panther environment, while at the same time making her appear as a friend and
potential protector. She had her reasons to ingratiate herself with me then,
because she knew that somehow I had Huey’s ear, and she wanted desperately to
end her exile. A month later, Huey kicked Bobby out of the Party and her wish
was granted. She became the new Party chairman. A month after that, Huey was
gone to Cuba.
When Huey left, all the Panthers whom Huey had assigned to work with me—
all the members of the Planning Committee except Ericka—fled too. They left,
suddenly, without warning, in the middle of the night. A week earlier, which was
the last time I saw them, they had worried about Elaine’s new ascendance. When
I asked why they were afraid of Elaine, they said, “She’s crazy.” Now they had
disappeared, and I had no way of contacting them to question them further.
Although I had been warned about Elaine’s dark side, at this point I had only
seen benign aspects myself. Now, as she took charge of the Party, she revealed
another dimension of her personality that was even more attractive.
Where Huey had pretty much ignored the Learning Center after its creation,
Elaine threw herself into its every detail, from curriculum to hygiene. She
ordered it scrubbed from top to bottom, got proper supplies for the children, and
made the Center’s needs a visible priority. Soon, the first real community event
was held on its premises. It was a teen dance attended by 500 youths from the
neighborhood. I could not have asked for a more concrete sign that things were
going to be different. And these efforts were ongoing. Eventually Elaine would
recruit Oakland dignitaries to the board of the Center, like Mayor Lionel Wilson
and Robert Shetterly the president and chairman of the Oakland Council for
Economic Development. How could I not support her efforts in behalf of a
project that had seemed so worthy and to which I had dedicated so much effort?
There were other seductive aspects to her leadership as well. The Black
Panther Party—the most male dominated organization of the Left—was
suddenly being led by an articulate, take-charge woman. And not just one
woman. Elaine’s right and left hands in the Party organization—Joan Kelley and
Phyllis Jackson—were also female, as was its treasurer Gwen Goodloe.17 With
Huey gone under a dark cloud, Elaine and the Center were facing formidable
obstacles. My social and racial privilege always afforded me a way out of these
difficulties (as my leftist conscience was constantly reproving me). How could I
face myself, if I abandoned their ship now?
So I stayed. And when the Party’s treasurer, Gwen Goodloe, fled a week later,
and Elaine became desperate over who would manage its finances, I suggested a
solution. Betty Van Patter, who was already doing the books for the Learning
Center, might be of help in handling the general accounts. This was to be my last
act of assistance to the Party. The crises of the fall had piled on one another in
such swift succession, that I was unable to assess the toll they were taking. But
in November, an event occurred that pushed me over the edge.
There had been a second teen dance, and this time there was a shooting. A
Panther named Deacon was dead. His assailant, a black youth of 16, was in the
county hospital. When I phoned Elaine to ask what had happened, she exploded
in the kind of violent outpouring I was now becoming used to, blaming the
disaster on “the police and the CIA.” This stock paranoia was really all I needed
to hear to tell me things were not what they had seemed and were terribly wrong.
(Years later, I learned from Panthers who had fled and were now in contact with
me that the shooting had been over drugs, which the Party was dealing from the
school.)
When I walked into the school auditorium where Deacon lay in state (there is
really no other term for the scene in front of me), I suddenly saw the real Party to
which I had closed my eyes to for so long. Of course, the children were there, as
were their parents and teachers, but dominating them and everything else
physically and symbolically was the honor guard of Panther soldiers in black
berets, shotguns alarmingly on display. Added to this spectacle, mingling with
the mourners, there were the unmistakable gangster types, whose presence had
suddenly become apparent to me after Elaine took over the Party: “Big Bob,”
Perkins, Aaron, Ricardo, Larry. They were fitted in shades and Bogarts and
pinstripe suits, as though waiting for action on the set of a B crime movie. In
their menacing faces there was no reflection of political complexity such as
Huey was so adept at projecting, or of the benevolent community efforts like the
breakfast for children programs that the Center provided.
Underneath all the political rhetoric and social uplift, I suddenly realized was
the stark reality of the gang. I remember a voice silently beating my head, as I
sat there during the service, tears streaming down my face: “What are you doing
here, David?” it screamed at me. It was my turn to flee.
Betty did not attend the funeral, and if she had would not have been able to
see what I saw. Moreover, she and I had never had the kind of relationship that
inspired confidences between us. As my employee, she never really approved of
the way Peter and I ran Ramparts. For whatever reasons—perhaps a streak of
feminist militancy—she didn’t trust me.
Just as a precaution, I had warned Betty even before Deacon’s funeral not to
get involved in any part of the Party or its functioning that she didn’t feel
comfortable with. But Betty kept her own counsel. In one of our few phone
conversations, I mentioned the shooting at the dance. She did not take my
remark further.
Later it became obvious that I hadn’t really known Betty. I had counted to
some extent on her middle class scruples to keep her from any danger zones she
encountered in Panther territory. But this too was an illusion. She had passions
that prompted her to want a deeper involvement in what she also perceived as
their struggle against oppression.
There was another reason I did not express my growing fears to Betty. The
more fear I had the more I realized that it would not be okay for me to voice
such criticism, having been so close to the operation. To badmouth the Party
would be tantamount to treason. I had a wife and four children, who lived in
neighboring Berkeley, and I would not be able to protect them or myself from
Elaine’s wrath.
There were other considerations in my silence, too. What I had seen at the
funeral, what I knew from hearsay and from the press were only blips on a radar
screen that was highly personal, dependent on my own experience to read. I had
begun to know the Panther reality, at least enough to have a healthy fear of
Elaine. But how could I convey this knowledge to someone who had not been
privy to the same things I had? How could I do it in such a way that they would
believe me and not endanger me? Before fleeing, my Panther friends had tried to
warn me about Huey through similar signs, and I had failed to understand. My
ignorance was dangerous to them and to myself. Finally, only the police had
ever accused the Panthers of actual crimes. Everyone I knew and respected on
the left—and beyond the left—regarded the police allegations against the
Panthers as malicious libels by a racist power structure bent on holding down
and eliminating militant black leadership. It was one of the most powerful liberal
myths of the times.
One Friday night, a month or so after Deacon’s funeral, a black man walked
into the Berkeley Square, a neighborhood bar that Betty frequented, and handed
her a note. Betty, who seemed to know the messenger, read the note and left
shortly afterwards. She was never seen alive again.
On the following Monday, I received an anxious phone call from Tammy Van
Patter, Betty’s 18-year-old daughter, who had also worked for me at Ramparts.
She told me her mother was missing and asked for my help. I phoned Elaine, but
got Joan Kelley instead. Joan told me that Elaine had had a fight with Betty on
Thursday and fired her. (Later, Elaine lied to investigating police, telling them
she had fired Betty the previous Friday and hadn’t seen her for a week before
she disappeared.)
When Elaine returned my call, she immediately launched into a tirade against
Betty, calling her an “idiot” who believed in astrology, and who “wanted to
know too much.” She said that Betty was employed by a bookkeeping firm with
offices in the Philippines, and was probably working for the C.I.A. Then Elaine
turned on me for recommending that Betty be hired in the first place. She noted
that I was “bawling” at Deacon’s funeral and had not “come around for a long
time.” Perhaps I was scared by the dangers the Party faced, she suggested. Then
she asked why was I so concerned about this white woman who was crazy, when
all those brothers had been gunned down by the police? White people didn’t
seem to care that much when it was black people dying. I didn’t answer her
back.
A week later, when Betty still had not turned up, I called Elaine one more
time, and was subjected to another torrent of abuse culminating in a threat only
thinly veiled: “If you were run over by a car or something, David, I would be
very upset, because people would say I did it.”
I was visited in my home by the Berkeley police. They told me they were
convinced the Panthers had taken Betty hostage and had probably already killed
her. From her daughter Tammy I learned that the very small circle of Betty’s
friends and acquaintances had all been questioned since her disappearance, and
none had seen her for some time. She had left her credit cards and birth control
pills at home, and thus could not have been going on an unexpected trip when
she left the Berkeley Square with the mysterious messenger. Just to the
rendezvous to which she had been summoned.
Betty was found on January 13, 1975, five weeks after she had disappeared,
when her water-logged body washed up on the western shore of San Francisco
Bay. Her head had been bashed in by a blunt instrument and police estimated
that she had been in the water for seventeen days. She was 42 years old.
By this time, everything I knew about Betty’s disappearance led to the
conclusion that the Panthers had killed her. Everything I knew about the Party
and the way it worked led me to believe that Elaine Brown had given the order
to have her killed. Betty’s murder shattered my life and changed it forever. But
even as I sank into a long period of depression and remorse, Elaine’s star began
to rise in Oakland’s political firmament. A white woman who worked for the
Black Panther Party had been murdered, but—despite our rhetoric about police
conspiracies and racist oppression—there seemed to be no consequences for
Elaine or her Party.
The press made nothing of it. When Peter Collier approached Marilyn Baker,
a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for Channel 5 with the story, she said she
“wouldn’t touch it unless a black reporter did it first.” No black reporter did.
Betty’s friends in the Bay Area progressive community, who generally were
alert to every injustice, even in lands so remote they could not locate them on a
map, kept their silence about this one in their own backyard. Peter also went to
the police who told him: “You guys have been cutting our balls off for the last
ten years. You destroy the police and then you expect them to solve the murders
of your friends.”
While the investigation of Betty’s death continued, Elaine ran for the Oakland
City Council and garnered 44 percent of the vote. The following year, under her
leadership, the Party provided the political machine that elected Oakland’s first
black mayor, Lionel Wilson. Elaine herself secured the endorsement of
Governor Jerry Brown and was a Jerry Brown delegate to the Democratic
Convention in 1976. (Before making his run, Brown phoned Elaine to find out
what kind of support the Party could provide him.) Tony Cline, a Panther lawyer
and confidante of Elaine, was also a college roommate of the Governor and
became a member of his cabinet. Using her leverage in Sacramento, Elaine was
able to get approval for an extension of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, which had
been blocked by environmentalists. On the basis of this achievement, she began
negotiations with the head of Oakland’s Council for Economic Development to
control 10,000 new city jobs that the freeway would create.
In all these successes, the Learning Center was her showpiece. Capitalizing on
liberal concerns for Oakland’s inner city poor, she obtained contributions and
grants for the school, and bought herself a red Mercedes. The Party’s political
influence climbed to its zenith. It was an all-American nightmare.
While Elaine’s power grew to alarming proportions, I intensified my private
investigations into the Panther reality that had previously eluded me. I had to
confront my blindness and understand the events that had led to such an
irreversible crossroads in my life, and ended Betty’s. I interrogated everyone I
could trust who had been around the Panthers about the dark side of their
operations, seeking answers to the questions of Betty’s death.
I discovered the existence of the Panther “Squad”—an enforcer group that
Huey had organized inside the Party to maintain discipline and carry out
criminal activities in the East Oakland community. 18 I learned of beatings,
arson, extortion and murders. The Learning Center itself had been used as the
pretext for a shakedown operation of after-hours clubs which were required to
“donate” weekly sums and whose owners were gunned down when they refused.
I learned about the personalities in the Squad, and about their involvement in
Betty’s murder. One of them, Robert Heard, was known as “Big Bob” because
he was 6’8” and weighed 400 pounds.19 Big Bob told friends, whom I talked to,
that the Squad had killed Betty and more than a dozen other people, in the brief
period between 1972 and 1976. The other victims were all black, and included
the Vice President of the Black Student Union at Grove Street College, whose
misfortune was to have inadvertently insulted a member of the Squad.
Betty’s children commissioned Hal Lipset, a private eye with connections to
the Left (and to the Panthers themselves who had employed him during Huey’s
trials) to investigate the case. Lipset confirmed the police conclusion that the
Panthers had killed Betty. They also tried to get the case against the Panthers
reopened, but without success.
In the summer of 1977, unable to stomach exile any longer, Huey suddenly
returned from Cuba. He was given a welcome by the local Left, culminating in a
ceremony and “citizenship award” presented by Democratic Assemblyman Tom
Bates, husband of Berkeley’s radical mayor, Loni Hancock.
Not everyone was ready to turn a blind eye to the Panther reality. The minute
Huey stepped off the plane, Alameda Country prosecutors began preparing to try
him for the murder of Kathleen Smith, the 17-year-old prostitute he had killed
three years earlier.
Huey made preparations too. One day before the preliminary trial hearings
were to begin in Oakland, Squad member Flores Forbes and another Panther
gunmen tried to break into a house in the nearby city of Richmond, where they
expected to find the prosecution’s eye-witness, Crystal Gray, and assassinate
her.20 But it was the wrong door, since Gray lived in an apartment in the back.
The owner of the front apartment, a black bookkeeper, picked up her .38 and
fired at the intruders. A gun battle ensued in which Forbes inadvertently killed
his partner. Forbes was also wounded.
Forbes fled the scene to seek the assistance of another Panther, named Nelson
Malloy, who was not a Squad member and had only just joined the Party.
Fearing that the innocent Malloy might link him to the assassination attempt,
Huey ordered a hit team to follow Malloy and Forbes to Las Vegas, where they
had fled. The assassins found them and shot Malloy in the head and buried him
in a shallow roadside grave in the Nevada desert. Miraculously he was
discovered by tourists who heard his moans and rescued him, although he
remained paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.
 Shortly after the Richmond incident, Elaine herself was gone. The Squad
members had never really accommodated themselves to being ruled by a
woman. When Huey returned, tensions between Elaine and the Squad reached a
head, and Huey came down on the side of his gunmen. Elaine left for Los
Angeles, never to return.
The botched assassination attempt on the prosecution witness, together with
the headlines about Malloy’s burial in the desert, destroyed the alliances that
Elaine had so carefully built. Lionel Wilson, and the head of Clorox along with
the other Oakland dignitaries resigned from the Learning Center board. With its
power diminished and its sinister reality in part revealed, the Panther Party had
been de-clawed. I began to breathe more easily.
But I was still unable to write or make public what I had come to know about
the Party and its role in Betty’s murder. I had given some of the information to
radical journalist Kate Coleman who wrote a courageous story for the magazine
New Times. It was called “The Party’s Over” and it helped speed the Panther
decline. But I could not be a witness myself. I was no longer worried about
being denounced as a racist or government agent by my friends on the Left if I
accused the Panthers of murdering Betty. During the five years since Betty’s
death, my politics had begun to change. But there remained a residue of physical
fear. Huey was alive in Oakland, and armed, and obviously crazy, and
dangerous. I now realized how powerless the law in fact was. Huey seemed
untouchable. He had managed to beat his murder rap with the help of testimony
by friends ready to perjure themselves for the cause. The pistol-whipping case
had been dropped, too. After being threatened and bribed, the tailor Preston
Callins retracted his charges. For me, caution seemed to be the prudent course.
Then, in 1980, an event took place that provided me with an occasion to
relieve myself of a portion of my burden. It provided a story that was parallel in
many respects to what I had been through. It would afford me the opportunity to
speak about things that had been unspeakable until now. In May 1980, Fay
Stender, an attorney who had defended Black Panther George Jackson, took her
own life in Hong Kong. She had withdrawn to this remote city away from family
and friends, in order to kill herself after a member of Jackson’s prison gang had
shot and paralyzed her the year before. She had stayed alive just long enough to
act as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of her assailant.
Peter Collier and I wrote her story, calling it “Requiem for A Radical.”21 In it,
we recounted the details of her life and death, and were able to lift a part of the
veil that had obscured the criminal underside of the Black Panther Party. We
described the army of thugs that had been trained in the Santa Cruz Mountains to
free Jackson from his San Quentin cell. We described the killing fields in those
same mountains where the Panthers had buried the corpses of Fred Bennett and
others who had violated their Party codes. We were also able to write honestly
about Jackson himself, whom the Left had made into a romantic legend and
who, like Huey, was a criminal psychopath. Obscured by the love letters Jackson
had written in the book Soledad Brother, which Fay Stender had edited, was the
murderer who had boasted of killing a dozen men in prison and whose
revolutionary plan was to poison the water system of Chicago where he had
grown up.
When our story appeared in New West magazine, I learned through mutual
friends that Bert Schneider, Huey’s Hollywood patron, was unhappy with the
account Peter and I had written. Although I sensed that Bert was aware of the
Party’s criminal activities, including Betty’s murder, I was not as afraid of him
as I was of Huey, and I decided to go and see him. I did so on a principle taken
from the Godfather movies, that you should get near to your enemies and find
out what they have in mind for you. The Fay Stender story was not a direct hit
on Huey or Bert and their reactions might tell me something I needed to know.
Perhaps the past was not as alive for them as I imagined. Perhaps I did not have
so much to fear.
Bert had an estate on a hill above Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. I called
my name through the security gate and was admitted into the main house. Bert
appeared, wearing a bathrobe, and in a quiet rage. He was angrier than I had ever
seen him. “You endangered my life,” he hissed at me.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. He directed me to a
passage in our Fay Stender article about Jackson’s attempted escape from San
Quentin prison (an episode in which the Panther and his comrades slit the throats
of three prison guards they had tied up, before Jackson himself was killed): “The
abortive escape left a thicket of unanswered questions behind. . . . Had Jackson
been set up? If so, was it by the Cleaver faction of the Black Panther Party? Or
by Newton, fearful of Jackson’s charismatic competition?”
Joe Durden Smith’s book Who Killed George Jackson? had described Bert as
being in close contact with Huey during the escape attempt. Perhaps he was
referring to that. Even so, I still could not understand why Bert was so agitated. I
was already focusing, however, on something else Bert had said that had far
greater significance for me. In defending his reaction to the article he had
admitted, “Huey isn’t as angry as I am.” It was the opening I was looking for. I
told him I would like to see Huey, and a lunch was arranged.
When I arrived at Norman’s, the North Berkeley restaurant that Huey had
chosen, he was already there, sunk into one of the vinyl divans, his eyes liverish
and his skin pallid, drunker than I had ever seen him. He was so drunk, in fact,
that when the lunch was over he asked me to drive him back to the two-story
house that Bert had bought for him in the Oakland Hills, and left his own car
outside the restaurant. When we arrived, he invited me in. I was a little nervous
about accepting but decided to go anyway. The decor—piled carpets, leather
couches and glass-topped end tables—was familiar. Only the African decorative
masks that had been mounted on the beige walls seemed a new touch.
As we settled ourselves in Huey’s living room, the conversation we had begun
at lunch continued. Huey told me about a project he had dreamed up to produce
Porgy and Bess as a musical set in contemporary Harlem, starring Stevie
Wonder and Mick Jagger. It was a bizarre idea but not out of character for Huey,
whose final fight with Bobby Seale had begun with a quarrel over who should
play the lead role in a film Huey wanted to make. Huey even showed me the
treatment he had prepared in Braille for Stevie Wonder, while complaining that
the people around the singer had badmouthed him and killed the deal. When he
said this, his face contorted in a grimace that was truly demonic.
Then, just as suddenly, he relaxed and fell into a distant silence. After a
minute, he looked directly at me and said: “Elaine killed Betty.” And then, just
as abruptly, he added a caveat whose cynical bravado was also typical, as though
he was teaching me, once again, how the world really worked: “But if you write
that, I’ll deny it.” Until that moment I had thought Elaine was solely responsible
for the order to kill Betty. But now I realized that Huey had collaborated with
her and probably given the order himself. It was the accusation against Elaine
that provided the clue. He might have said, “David, I’m sorry about Betty. It
should never have happened, but I was in Cuba and couldn’t stop it.” But he
didn’t. He chose instead to point a finger at Elaine, as the one alone responsible.
It had a false ring. It was uncharacteristically disloyal. Why point the finger at
anyone, unless he wanted to deflect attention from himself? I went home and
contacted several ex-Panthers, who were living on the East Coast. I asked them
how Elaine, as a woman, had been able to run the Party and control the Squad.
The answer was the same in each case: Elaine had not really run the Party while
Huey was in Cuba. Huey had run it. He was in daily contact with Elaine by
phone. The Squad stayed loyal to Elaine out of fear of Huey. The same sources
told me that the fate of Betty had been debated for a week. Elaine had provided
Huey with the reasons for killing Betty; Huey had made the final decision.
In 1989, fourteen years after Betty disappeared, Huey was gunned down by a
drug dealer he had burned. It was a few blocks away from where Huey had
killed the 17-year-old prostitute Kathleen Smith. It might have been poetic, but it
was not justice. He should have died sooner; he should have suffered more. On
the other hand, if I had learned anything through all this, it was not to expect
justice in this world, and to be grateful for that which did occur, however belated
and insufficient.
Huey’s death allowed Peter and me to write his story and to describe the
Panther reality I had uncovered. (We called it “Baddest” and published it as a
new chapter in the paperback edition of our book Destructive Generation.) By
now, we had become identified with the political right (although “libertarian
irregulars” might better describe our second thoughts). What we wrote about the
Panthers’ crimes, therefore, was either dismissed or simply ignored by an
intellectual culture that was dominated by the left. Even though Huey’s final
days had tainted the Panthers’ legacy, their glories were still fondly recalled in
all the Sixties nostalgia that continued to appear on public television, in the
historical monographs of politically correct academics and even in the pages of
the popular press. The Panther crime wave was of no importance to anyone
outside the small circle of their abandoned victims.
Then, in an irony of fate, Elaine Brown emerged from obscurity early this
year to reopen the vexed questions of the Panther legacy. She had been living in
a kind of semi-retirement with a wealthy French industrialist in Paris. Now she
was back in America seeking to capitalize on the collective failure of memory
with a self-promoting autobiography called A Taste of Power. It was published
by a major New York publisher, with all the fanfare of a major New York
offering.
With her usual adroitness, Elaine had managed to sugarcoat her career as a
political gangster by presenting herself as a feminist heroine and victim. “What
Elaine Brown writes is so astonishing,” croons novelist Alice Walker from the
dust jacket of the book, “at times it is even difficult to believe she survived it.
And yet she did, bringing us that amazing light of the black woman’s magical
resilience, in the gloominess of our bitter despair.” “A stunning picture of a
black woman’s coming of age in America,” concurs the Kirkus Reviews. “Put it
on the shelf beside The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” To the Los Angeles
Times’ Carolyn See, it is “beautiful, touching, ... astonishing. . . . Movie makers,
where are you?” (In fact, Suzanne DePasse, producer of Lonesome Dove, who
appears to have been the guiding spirit behind the book is planning a major
motion picture of Elaine’s life.22) Time magazine’s review invokes Che
Guevara’s claim that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love,”
and comments: “In the end, Brown discovers, love is the most demanding
political act of all.”
A full-spread New York Times Magazine profile of Elaine (“A Black Panther’s
Long Journey”), treated her as a new feminist heroine and prompted View and
Style sections of newspapers in major cities across the nation to follow suit.
Elaine, who reportedly received a $450,000 advance from Pantheon Books, has
been touring the book circuit, doing radio and television shows from coast to
coast, including a segment of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, where she
appeared on a panel chaired by Charlayne Hunter Gault as an authority on black
America. (“I hate this country,” she later told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a
point at which you’re black in this country, poor, a woman, and you realize how
powerless you are.” In contrast, Elaine once told me privately: “The poorest
black in Oakland is richer than 90 percent of the world’s population.”) At
Cody’s Books in Berkeley, two hundred radical nostalgists came to hear her,
flanked by her “bodyguard,” Huey’s old gunman, Flores Forbes, who had served
his four years on a second degree murder charge for the Richmond killing and
was now prospering in his new career as an urban planner.
I read Elaine’s book. Jaded though I am, I was still amazed by its reception.
The only accurate review seemed to come from the Bloods and Crips who
flocked as fans to her Los Angeles appearance, recognizing that she was a
gangster like them. A Taste of Power is, in its bloody prose, and despite the
falsehoods designed to protect the guilty, the self-revelation of a sociopath, of
the Elaine I had come to know.
“I felt justified in trying to slap the life out of her,”—this is the way Elaine
introduces an incident in which she attempted to retrieve some poems from a
radical lawyer named Elaine Wenders. The poems had been written by Johnny
Spain, a Panther who participated in George Jackson’s murderous attempt to
escape from San Quentin. Elaine describes how she entered Wenders’ office,
flanked by Joan Kelley and another female lieutenant, slapped Wenders’ face
and proceeded to tear the room apart, emptying desk-drawers and files onto the
floor, slapping the terrified and now weeping lawyer again, and finally issuing
an ultimatum: “I gave her twenty-four hours to deliver the poems to me, lest her
office be blown off the map.”
Because Wenders worked in the office of Charles Garry, Huey’s personal
attorney, Elaine’s thuggery produced some mild repercussions. She was called to
the penthouse for a “reprimand” by Huey, who laughingly told her she was a
“terrorist.” The reprimand apparently still stings and Elaine even now feels
compelled to justify the violence that others seemed to consider merely
impolitic: “It is impossible to summarize the biological response to an act of will
in a life of submission. It would be to capture the deliciousness of chocolate, the
arousing aroma of a man or a perfume, the feel of water to the dry throat. What I
had begun to experience was the sensation of personal freedom, like the tremor
before orgasm. The Black Panther Party had awakened that thirst in me. And it
had given me the power to satisfy it.”
 The thirst for violence is a prominent feature of this self-portrait : “It is a
sensuous thing to know that at one’s will an enemy can be struck down,” Elaine
continues. In another passage she provides one of many instances in her book of
this pleasure. Here, it is a revenge exacted, after she becomes head of the Party,
on a former Panther lover named Steve, who had beaten her years before. Steve
is lured to a meeting where he finds himself looking down the barrel of a
shotgun. While Elaine’s enforcer, Larry Henson, holds Steve at gunpoint, Elaine
unleashes four members of the Squad, including the 400 pound Robert Heard, on
her victim: “Four men were upon him now . . . Steve struggled for survival under
the many feet stomping him. . . . Their punishment became unmerciful. When he
tried to protect his body by taking the fetal position, his head became the object
of their feet. The floor was rumbling, as though a platoon of pneumatic drills
were breaking through its foundation. Blood was everywhere. Steve’s face
disappeared.”
The taste for violence is as pervasive in Elaine’s account, as is the appetite to
justify it in the name of the revolutionary cause. She describes the scene in
Huey’s apartment just after he had pistol-whipped the middle-aged black tailor
Preston Callins with a .357 Magnum. (Callins required brain surgery to repair
the damage): “Callins’s blood now stained the penthouse ceilings and carpets
and walls and plants, and [Huey’s wife’s] clothes, even the fluffy blue-and-white
towels in the bathroom.” This is Elaine’s reaction to the scene: “While I noted
Huey’s irreverent attitude about the whole affair, it occurred to me how little I,
too, actually cared about Callins. He was neither a man nor a victim to me. I had
come to believe everything would balance out in the revolutionary end. I also
knew that being concerned about Callins was too costly, particularly in terms of
my position in the Party. Yes, I thought, f—k Callins.”
Elaine deals with Betty’s murder in these pages, too. “I had fired Betty Van
Patter shortly after hiring her. She had come to work for the Party at the behest
of David Horowitz, who had been editor of Ramparts magazine and a onetime
close friend of Eldridge Cleaver. He was also nominally on the board of our
school. . . . She was having trouble finding work because of her arrest record. . .
.” This is false on every significant count. Betty had no arrest record that Elaine
or I knew about. I was one of three legal incorporators of the Learning Center
and, as I have already described, the head of its Planning Committee not
“nominally on the board.” Finally, I had met Eldridge Cleaver only once, in my
capacity as a fledgling editor at Ramparts. (Elaine’s purpose in establishing this
particular falsehood is clearly to link Betty to a possible plot: “I began
wondering where Betty Van Patter might have really come from. . . . I began re-
evaluating Horowitz and his old Eldridge alliance. . .”).
 Elaine continues: “Immediately Betty began asking Norma, and every other
Panther with whom she had contact, about the sources of our cash, or the exact
nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books
and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations.”
She continued. “I knew that I had made a mistake in hiring her. . . . Moreover, I
had learned after hiring her that Betty’s arrest record was a prison record—on
charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position
in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring
into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least,
an asset. I fired Betty without notice.”
Betty had no prison record for drug trafficking or anything else.
“While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter,” Elaine
concludes, “I had fired her, not killed her.”
Yet, the very structure of Elaine’s defense is self-incriminating. The accurate
recollections that Betty, who was indeed scrupulous, had made normal
bookkeeping inquiries that Elaine found suspicious and dangerous, provides a
plausible motive to silence her. The assertions that Betty was a criminal,
possibly involved in a Cleaver plot, are false and can only be intended to indict
the victim. Why deflect guilt to the victim or anyone else, unless one is guilty
oneself?
Violence was not restricted to the Panthers’ dealings with their enemies, but
was an integral part of the Party’s internal life as well. In what must be one of
the sickest aspects of the entire Panther story, this party of liberators enforced
discipline on the black “brothers and sisters” inside the organization with
bullwhips, the very symbol of the slave past. In a scene that combines both the
absurdity and pathology of the Party’s daily routine, Elaine describes her own
punishment under the Panther lash. She is ordered to strip to the waist by
Chairman Bobby Seale and then subjected to ten strokes because she had missed
an editorial deadline on the Black Panther newspaper.
A Taste of Power inadvertently provides another service by describing how
the Panthers originally grew out of criminal street gangs, and how the gang
mentality remained the core of the Party’s sense of itself even during the heyday
of its political glory. Elaine writes with authority, having come into the Party
through the Slausons, a forerunner of the Bloods and the Crips. The Slausons
were enrolled en masse in the Party in 1967 by their leader, gangster Al
“Bunchy” Carter, the so-called “Mayor of Watts.” Carter’s enforcer, Frank
Diggs, is one of Elaine’s first Party heroes: “Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was
reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing
Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges.” Captain Franco
describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins his revolutionary philosophy: “Other
than making love to a Sister, downing a pig is the greatest feeling in the world.
Have you ever seen a pig shot with a .45 automatic, Sister Elaine?...Well, it’s a
magnificent sight.” To Elaine, then a newly initiated Panther, this is
revolutionary truth: “In time, I began to see the dark reality of the revolution
according to Franco, the revolution that was not some mystical battle of glory in
some distant land of time. At the deepest level, there was blood, nothing but
blood, unsanitized by political polemic. That was where Franco worked, in the
vanguard of the vanguard . . .” The vanguard of the vanguard.
The Panthers were—just as the police and other Panther detractors said at the
time—a criminal army led by gangsters and murderers at war with society and
with its thin blue line of civic protectors. When Elaine took over the Party, even
she was “stunned by the magnitude of the party’s weaponry. . . . There were
literally thousands of weapons. There were large numbers of AR-18 short
automatic rifles,. 308 scoped rifles, 30-30 Winchesters, .375 magnum and other
big-game rifles, .30 caliber Garands, M-15s and M-16s and other assorted
automatic and semi-automatic rifles, Thompson submachine guns, M-59 Santa
Fe Troopers, Boys .55 caliber anti-tank guns, M-60 fully automatic machine
guns, innumerable shotguns, and M-79 grenade launchers. . . . There were
caches of crossbows and arrows, grenades and miscellaneous explosive materials
and devices.”
I remember vividly an episode in the mid-70s, when one of the Panther arms
caches, a house on 29th Street in East Oakland, was raided by the police and
1,000 weapons including machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank guns
were uncovered. Party attorney Charles Garry held a press conference at which
he claimed that the weapons were planted by the police and that the 29th Street
house was a dormitory for teachers at the Panther school (which it also, in fact,
was, as well as a dormitory for children in the Panther school). Then Garry
denounced the police raid as just one more repressive act in the ongoing
government conspiracy to discredit the Panthers and destroy militant black
leadership.
Of course, all right thinking progressives rallied to the Panthers’ support. And
right thinking progressives are still rallying. How to explain the spectacle
attending the reception of Elaine’s book? After all, this is not pre-glasnost
Russia, where crimes were made to disappear into a politically controlled void.
The story of the Panthers’ crimes is—thanks to our efforts—now not unknown.
But it is either uninteresting or unbelievable to a progressive culture that still
regards white racism as the primary cause of all ills in black America, and
militant thugs like the Panthers as mere victims of political repression.
 The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American Left is
something the Left really doesn’t want to know or think about. Such knowledge
would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs. It would
undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial starting point of a
progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on which the attitude depends.
In the last two decades, for example, a vast literature has been produced on the
“repression of the Panthers” by the FBI The “Cointelpro” program to destabilize
militant organizations and J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous memo about the dangers
of a “black messiah” are more familiar to today’s college students probably than
the operations of the KGB or the text of Magna Carta. In A Taste of Power,
Elaine Brown constantly invokes the FBI specter (as she did while leader of the
Party) to justify Panther outrages and make them “understandable” as the hyper-
reflexes of a necessary paranoia, produced by the pervasive government threat.
A variation of this myth is the basic underpinning of the radical mind-set. Like
Oliver Stone’s fantasies of a military-industrial conspiracy behind the murder of
J.F.K., it justifies the radical’s limitless rage against America itself.
On the other hand, even in left-approved accounts, like William O’Reilly’s
Racial Matters, the actual “Cointelpro” program, never amounted to much more
than a series of inept attempts to discredit and divide the Panthers by writing
forged letters in their leaders’ names. (According to O’Reilly’s documents, FBI
agents even suspended their campaign when they realized how murderous the
Panthers actually were, and that their own intelligence pranks might cause real
deaths.) Familiarity with the Panthers’ reality, suggests a far different question
from the only one that progressives have asked—Why so much surveillance of
the Panthers?—namely: Why so little? Why had the FBI failed to apprehend the
guilty not only in Betty’s murder but in more than a dozen others? Why were the
Panthers able to operate for so long as a criminal gang with a military arsenal,
endangering the citizens of major American cities? How could they commit so
many crimes—including extortion, arson and murder—without being brought to
the bar of justice?
The best review of Elaine’s book and the best epitaph for her Party are
provided ironically by Elaine herself. In the wake of the brutal and senseless
whipping of Bobby Seale by a leader insane with drugs and political adulation,
and a coterie too drugged with power themselves to resist, she reflects: “Faith
was all there was. If I did not believe in the ultimate rightness of our goals and
our party, then what we did, what Huey was doing, what he was, what I was,
was horrible.
6

Treason of the Heart

In 1965, I was twenty-six and living in London when The Free World Colossus,
a book I had written holding the United States responsible for the Cold War, was
published. At about that time I received a phone call from a man with a thick
Russian accent who said he was with the Novosti Press Agency and wanted to
have lunch. I remember clearly that his first name was Lev because I
immediately associated it with Trotsky. Later on, after the experience was over, I
learned that Lev was the third man in the Soviet embassy, a post usually
reserved for officers of the KGB.
Lev wore the badly-tailored black suits favored by Soviet officials and was a
man of medium height with thin white hair and a pasty Slavic complexion. In the
course of our relationship, he insisted always on calling me from a pay-phone, a
precaution I accepted as natural. This was not because I presumed from the
outset that he was a spy, but because it was normal in the left to assume that
phones were tapped and that “sensitive” political matters should be discussed in
person. The fact that Lev was a Soviet official merely made the discretion seem
particularly prudent.
Our meetings took place in London’s more expensive restaurants, like
Prunier’s, where I first sampled Coquilles St. Jacques and other elegant cuisines
courtesy of the Soviet Union. My reaction to this treatment was a mixture of
enjoyment—I could not

This is from an article based on my autobiography Radical Son, published

in Heterodoxy, January 1997.

myself afford such extravagances—and guilt. In my private thoughts I

deplored the way the Soviet government was ready to squander wealth that
properly belonged to Soviet workers on such luxuries, but it seemed rude to
bring up such matters to my host, nor did I want to lose an opportunity to present
my views to an influential Soviet official. My host routinely ordered a bottle of
wine, which I did not hold well, so that by the middle of the meal I was always a
little tipsy,
The topics of our discussions were wide-ranging and I did most of the talking.
I took it as my mission to convert Lev to New Left ways of thinking. I advised
him that it was important to publish Trotsky’s writings in the Soviet Union and
tried to persuade him that it was counter-productive to incarcerate dissidents in
psychiatric institutions, the current Soviet practice. Repressive methods may
have been necessary, I suggested, during the period of “primitive accumulation”
when the Soviet Union was catching up with the industrial powers. But now that
Russia was a superpower, the controls could be relaxed.
The focus of our discussions often shifted to the subject of Bertrand Russell,
for whom I was working at that time, and his secretary, Ralph Schoenman. Lev
wanted to know the answer to the question on everyone’s mind. How influential
was Schoenman in shaping the philosopher’s political stands? Russell had made
some public statements the Russians didn’t like. Did they reflect his views or
Ralph’s? Later, I discussed these conversations with Ralph and he gave me some
background to Lev’s curiosity. The Johnson administration had recently begun
bombing military targets in North Vietnam. At Ralph’s prompting, Russell
issued a public appeal to Moscow to supply MiG’s to the North Vietnamese so
they could shoot down the American planes. The Soviet consul general had
summoned Ralph to a meeting. After explaining to him that sending Russian
planes would mean war with the United States, the consul warned: “Mr.
Schoenman, people who advocate World War III are either crazy or working for
the CIA, and they get into trouble.”
When Lev was not asking me questions about Russell and Schoenman, I
lectured him on how the Soviet future could be reshaped. He didn’t try to
discourage me from the belief that I was making an impression. At the end of the
second or third session he gave me a Parker fountain pen. It was still in the store
box and wasn’t wrapped like a present. I didn’t know how to refuse it without
insulting him. The next time we had lunch it was raining and I was wearing my
trench coat. As we walked into the street at the end of the meal, he stuffed a
thick white envelope into my left pocket.
I knew instinctively what it was, but was so frightened that I didn’t dare
remove it until I reached home. Without taking off my coat, I went into the
bedroom and closed the door, laying the envelope out on the bed. Inside, there
were 150 one-dollar bills. I was not so much surprised as dumbfounded. How
could these people be so stupid in their own interest and so reckless with mine?
The Free World Colossus was the first leftwing history of the Cold War that
could not be tainted as the work of a Soviet apologist. It had taken me years to
develop this perspective, which promised to be far more effective in persuading
readers that America was responsible for the Cold War and far more valuable to
the Soviets, if they wanted to look at it that way, than any information I might be
able to obtain as an intelligence asset. Yet they thought nothing of putting my
work in jeopardy by attempting to recruit me as an agent. The thought enraged
me.
I returned the envelope at our next meeting and told him never to give me
another. He was disappointed but not discouraged, especially since I agreed to
go on with our lunches. But a few sessions later it became apparent that my
rejection of the money had prompted a more drastic test. When we left the
restaurant, he brought up my job as an instructor in a University of Maryland
course at the American army base outside of London, and asked me if I would be
willing to obtain information about NATO for him. We were standing in the
middle of the street, but I screamed at him: “You’re crazy. I’m not going to spy
for you or anyone else. Get the f—k away from me and don’t ever contact me
again.” I walked away and never saw him again.
I was not the only radical courted by Lev. I had seen him with a Marxist
economics tutor at the London School of Economics. I had discussed him in a
veiled manner with the editor of the leftwing magazine Views, who had also
been having lunches with him. Members of the New Left Review crowd knew
him, as did activists I recognized from the Labour Party left. How many had
failed to reject him as I did? How many had become suppliers of information to
the KGB?
After my stint in London, I returned to the United States to join Ramparts
magazine. Beginning in 1966, a series of sensational Ramparts stories drew a
national spotlight to the magazine and expanded its circulation to 100,000
readers, making it the largest publication of the left. The stories featured the CIA
and its global intrigues. The first had come to Ramparts courtesy of an obscure
assistant professor of economics at Michigan State, named Stanley Sheinbaum,
who had participated in a CIA-funded program to train police in South Vietnam.
Sheinbaum’s story provided a politically explosive link between the campus and
the war. When a student came to Ramparts with information that the CIA was
funneling secret funds to the National Student Association, a further connection
was established. This scoop led to revelations about the Congress for Cultural
Freedom and other liberal institutions that had been created to oppose the
Communist offensive. In the hands of Ramparts’ editors, a moral equivalence
between Russia’s police state and America’s democracy was established. In the
absence of similar stories about KGB operations among the organizations of the
left or of links between the antiwar movement and the Communist forces in
Vietnam, the Ramparts articles seemed to confirm the New Left view of the
world.
One of the writers who worked on these stories was Sol Stern, whom I had
met and gotten to know in Berkeley. In 1968 Ramparts sent Sol to Bratislava,
along with Tom Hayden and an SDS delegation, to meet Madame Binh and
other leaders of the National Liberation Front. For the radicals attending, this
was not just a fact-finding mission. The organizers allowed Sol to be present
only after Ramparts agreed that he would not report on the “sensitive” political
discussions taking place. Long afterwards, Sol told me what these were: “The
SDS’ers held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their
psychological warfare campaign against the United States.” According to Sol,
Hayden was particularly vocal in making suggestions on how to sabotage the
American war effort. He also tried to get the group to endorse publicly the
Communist line on the war, but Sol and the sociologist Christopher Jencks, who
was also present, objected and Hayden’s proposal was voted down.
Their dissent had consequences. Following the Bratislava meeting, members
of the group were scheduled to go to North Vietnam. Hayden had already been
there, publicly proclaiming that he had seen “rice-roots democracy” at work. As
a consequence, he enjoyed the confidence of the Communist rulers and had
become one of their gatekeepers, screening American radicals for his hosts. To
punish Sol and Jencks, Hayden saw to it they were denied permission to go on
with the others to Hanoi.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar contacts and arrangements were
made with the Communist enemy during the Sixties and after. Yet only a
handful of New Leftists have ever written or talked about them. Few had the
high-level contacts of Hayden, and only one, Carl Oglesby, was able to tell his
story and remain a leftist in good standing. Others, like Phillip Abbott Luce and
Larry Grathwohl, made their revelations as “renegades” and were attacked as
“government agents,” a stigma that warned others not to follow their example.
Even after the collapse of Communism made its evils difficult to ignore, the
cover-up by veterans of the New Left continued. Memoirs and historical
monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical
protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed
impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes
pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations
of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-
from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged. The effect is to make the
FBI’s surveillance gratuitous and malign at the same time.
In the summer of 1972 Hayden paid a visit to the Ramparts offices. He told us
he had been to Paris to meet with the National Liberation Front and
representatives from Hanoi. He wanted us to publish an article he intended to
write on the military situation. It was to be called “The Prospects of the
Vietnamese Offensive” and was a detailed account of the battlefront in Vietnam
and the political situation in America. In our office, he dictated all 13,000 words
of the article into a tape-recorder in one sitting, while only referring to some
notes he had brought with him. It was an impressive demonstration. The article
concluded: “Vietnam, country of countless My Lais will be liberated. May we
speed the time.”
I knew that Hayden’s article was Communist war propaganda. Peace
negotiations had begun in Paris and the terms of any treaty would be critical to
the war aims of both combatants. If the situation could be stabilized to preserve
the regime in the South, the United States would prevail in the war. If conditions
facilitated a Communist “liberation,” the other side would win.
The Nixon administration wanted a truce signed before the November
election. It had launched a dramatic gambit to pressure the Communists into a
stabilizing peace. After more than two decades of quarantine, Nixon had
recognized the Communist regime in China and, accompanied by his advisor
Henry Kissinger, had made visits to Moscow and Peking. They hoped to
persuade the Communist rulers to pressure Hanoi into a settlement on
unfavorable terms. Hanoi responded with its own strategy, which was to launch
an offensive in South Vietnam to alter the facts on the ground. The role of
Hayden and other New Left radicals was to intensify the divisions in America,
behind enemy lines.
I listened to Hayden’s request to publish his propaganda piece with an anxious
feeling. This was a “gut-check” present whenever Hayden asked for a political
favor. One time he had summoned me to his Bateman Street house. When I got
there, he asked me if I would hide a Black Panther in the shack behind my
house. It occurred to me that the Panther, whose name was “Deacon” and who
was later killed in a drug-related incident, might be wanted for an actual crime.
But I ignored the thought for the same reason that everyone on the left ignored
the crimes that leftists committed—the Panthers were a vanguard of the
progressive future and were under attack. Equally important was my desire to
impress Hayden with the fact that I was not just an intel1ectual but ready to put
myself on the line when the need was there. Like other radicals I wanted to be
regarded as an authentic revolutionary when the occasion presented itself.
The same consideration underlay my readiness to serve Hayden’s purposes in
placing his revolutionary propaganda before a large audience. Because I had
acquired a reputation for being critical of the Communists, I even emphasized
the gesture I was making. I told him I admired the way he was willing to offer
his pen in the service of the Communists, because it would also serve the
Vietnamese people. I did not really believe the Communists had the interests of
the Vietnamese people at heart but I believed that the American “imperialists”
had to be defeated. At the same time, I stressed to Hayden that my own task was
one of remaining independent of any party line. Hayden eyed me with a cynical
squint. I felt I had to warn him—since he was working directly with the
Communists—that I was going to write an article in the same issue that would be
critical of Hanoi’s Communist allies in Moscow and Peking. By welcoming
Nixon to their capitals, the Russians and Chinese were playing into his hands.
Hayden refused to admit that there might be any conflict of interest between the
Communist forces. Whether he actually believed this or was just playing the role
he had assigned himself as a spokesman for Hanoi, I didn’t know and never
found out.
My piece, much shorter than Hayden’s, was called “Nixon’s Vietnam
Strategy: How It Was Launched with the Aid of Brezhnev and Mao and How the
Vietnamese Intend to Defeat It.” The Los Angeles Times ran a long article on its
editorial page attacking what I wrote under the heading, “Bloodthirsty New Left
Wants The War to Continue.” One reader wrote a letter to the editor saying that
an NBC reporter, also named David Horowitz, should be fired for expressing
such views.
Neither my piece nor Hayden’s was the most explosive feature of the August
1972 issue of Ramparts, however. That honor belonged to an unsigned article by
a man who called himself Winslow Peck. It was titled “U.S. Electronic
Espionage: A Memoir” and, as we soon discovered, publishing it would violate a
section of the Espionage Act of 1918.
The article had literally come over the transom of our Berkeley office. It was
passed on to me as Ramparts’ expert on national-security subjects. At first I
dismissed it as the work of a crank. The author claimed to know about top-secret
military intelligence matters and included capitalized words like COMINT,
ELINT, RADINT and SWAMP. I had no way of assessing those claims and was
inclined to discard the manuscript without further thought. But before doing so I
gave it to Bob Fitch, a writer we had hired after another staffer, Jan Austin, had
left our staff to become a full-time member of the Red Family.
After reading the article, Fitch came back looking pale and frightened. It
turned out that he was an ex-military man and had served as an intelligence
operative in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a
result of his training, he recognized secret military codes in the text of the article
—codes that he was under oath never to repeat. If we printed them, he said, we
would all go to jail. Unfortunately for our country this turned out not to be the
case. Once Fitch had authenticated the document, we arranged a meeting with
Peck at a local Berkeley IHOP. We learned that Peck had been employed by a
top-secret branch of intelligence called the National Security Agency, which
encompassed 80 percent of U.S. intelligence but was unknown at the time. How
unknown was indicated by an anecdote Peck told us. He was present at a
briefing session with Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1967 when Humphrey
“asked a couple of pretty dumb questions that showed he didn’t have the
foggiest notion of what NSA was and what it did.”
Peck’s most sensational claim was that the NSA had cracked the Soviet
intelligence code. That meant U.S. intelligence could read Soviet electronic
communications at will:

As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, we know the whereabouts at any

given time of all its aircraft, exclusive of small private planes, and its naval
forces, including its missile-firing submarines. We know where their
submarines are, what every one of their VIP’s is doing and, generally their
capabilities and the disposition of all their forces.

Peck himself was stationed at a base in Turkey and had listened to the last
conversation between Soviet Premier Kosygin and a Soviet cosmonaut who had
burned up in space. He also claimed to have intercepted and read the message to
the front from Israeli headquarters in Tel Aviv recalling General Moshe Dayan
during the 1967 war.
I was struck by what I thought were the momentous ramifications of Peck’s
disclosures. If we knew where every Soviet missile and tank was, there could be
no surprise attacks or false “missile gaps” based on erroneous estimates, such as
had underwritten Kennedy’s arms-buildup in the Sixties. To print Peck’s article
would strike a blow against the war machine. It would promote peace on all
sides—or so I deluded myself into thinking. In fact, as I realized after we had
published Peck’s story and the deed was done, what we had done was to expose
the most carefully-guarded intelligence information of all: the knowledge that
we had penetrated the Soviet code. Agents were killed to prevent the other side
from knowing what their own side knew.
When I realized what we had done, I was beset with uncertainty and self-
doubt. There was no one-time breaking of a code. The other side would always
respond by creating a new one. By revealing to the Soviets that their security had
been breached, we had merely alerted them that they needed to replace their
code. Even if I had understood this, I might still have agreed to print his story
anyway. My responsibility as a “revolutionary” was to hurt the United States.
The overriding justification was one that weighed heavily on al1 the political
decisions I made as a member of my radical generation. It was important that
America should lose the Vietnam war. I did not believe that an NLF victory
would mean “rice-roots” democracy, as Hayden had written. But I was
convinced that America’s loss would be Vietnam’s gain. An American defeat
would weaken oppression everywhere. Or so I believed.
When we told Fitch that we were going to run Peck’s article, he panicked. We
would all be tried for treason and go to jail, he whined. We brushed his fears
aside, practically laughing in his face. Where was his revolutionary spine?
Where was his commitment to the cause? When we refused to reconsider our
decision, Fitch announced he was quitting the magazine. He was not about to go
down in flames with us. We enjoyed seeing this rhetorical maximalist exposed
as a coward, but his departure caused an internal lurch nonetheless. What if he
was right? We had families. Were we ready to jeopardize their futures even for a
grand gesture like this? We began to sense that we might be out of our depths.
Taking a step back, we decided to defer a final decision to publish the article
until we could consult a lawyer. I thought of contacting the defense team for
Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon official who was then on trial in Los
Angeles for leaking a classified report on American policy in Vietnam. We had
just completed a Ramparts cover-feature on his case. I put in a call to Harvard
law professor Charles Nesson, a member of the Ellsberg team. After I had
outlined the situation, Nesson explained the law. Technically, he said, we would
be violating the Espionage Act. But the act had been written in a peculiar way to
apply to classified papers removed from government offices or material copied
from government files. The government was able to indict Ellsberg because he
had xeroxed actual papers. Therefore, Nesson explained, it was important for us
not to acknowledge that any papers existed. If we took his advice, Nesson said,
we might get away with publishing the article because to make its case in a court
of law, the government would have to establish that we had indeed damaged
national security. To do so it would be necessary to reveal more than the
government might want the other side to know. In fact, the legal process would
certainly force more information to light than the government would want
anybody to have. On balance, there was a good chance that we would not be
prosecuted.
I had just been given advice by a famous constitutional law professor on how
to commit treason and get away with it.
We published the article and it became a journalistic coup, getting front-page
coverage by The New York Times. But the Times story was disappointing
because it did not even mention my notion that the NSA’s technology made
surprise attacks impossible. Instead, it focused on the more pertinent question of
whether Peck’s claim—that American agents had broken the Soviet code—was
accurate. The Times story quoted experts to the effect that it was not. The Times
account also revealed that the name of the man we knew as Winslow Peck was
actually Perry Fellwock, a fact that could only have been learned from
intelligence sources. After the Times story appeared, we held a press conference
in the Ramparts offices which was attended by an impressive media cohort. We
decided that one particular reporter was the CIA “plant” because he kept asking
us whether we had any written documents. We held to the strategy that Nesson
had devised and said there were none.
Thinking about these events, I have asked myself in retrospect whether there
was any practical difference between my actions and those of radicals like Tom
Hayden, who self-consciously served the Communist rulers in Vietnam. When
Hayden and Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam and urged American troops to
defect, it made me as uncomfortable as had Ralph Schoenman’s broadcasts over
Radio Hanoi during my days with Bertrand Russell. Remembering my parents’
experience as members of the American Communist Party, when they were
forced to become apologists for murder, I had long ago resolved that I would
never commit myself to any regime or party that did not reflect my own political
values. Yet war does not leave room for fine discriminations or intermediate
stands. Looking back at what I actually did, my “critical independence” seems to
me now a distinction without much of a practical difference. The same can be
said for all those antiwar demonstrators who might have been critical of
Communism but were willing to march behind slogans that called for the
withdrawal of American troops, a policy that could only result in a Communist
victory. They did not see Communism as a superior way of life the way Hayden
did. But in regarding it as the lesser of two evils, they helped the enemy to win
all the same.
As soon as the Communists did win, in April 1975, there were reports of a
bloodbath in Indochina. The Khmer Rouge had swept across Cambodia leaving
killing-fields in their wake. In Vietnam there were reports of a hundred thousand
summary executions, a million and a half refugees and more than a million
people imprisoned in “reeducation camps” and gulags in the South. These events
produced a shock of recognition in some quarters of the left. Joan Baez took out
a full-page ad in The New York Times to make an “Appeal to the Conscience of
North Vietnam.” She enlisted a number of former antiwar activists to sign the
appeal. As soon as the statement appeared Baez was attacked by Tom Hayden
and Jane Fonda as a tool of the CIA.23 A counter-ad was organized by Cora
Weiss, who had traveled with Fonda to Hanoi and collaborated with the regime
in its torture of American POW’s. The Weiss ad praised the Communists for
their moderation in administering the peace.
In 1973 Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated a peace treaty that was designed
to keep the South Vietnamese regime in place and remove America’s military
presence. I knew that the outcome was not going to be the “liberation” we had
promised. But with American forces out of the picture, I saw no compelling
reason to remain politically in the fray. Hayden and others like him did. After the
anti-draft movement had disintegrated in 1970, Hayden and Fonda organized an
“Indochina Peace Campaign” to cut off remaining American support for the
regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. For the next few years, the campaign
worked tirelessly to ensure the victory of the North Vietnamese Communists and
the Khmer Rouge. Accompanied by a camera team, Hayden and Fonda traveled
to Hanoi and then to the NLF-controlled zones in South Vietnam to make a
propaganda film. It was called Introduction to the Enemy and attempted to
persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create a new “liberated”
society in the South, where equality and social justice awaited its inhabitants if
only America would cut off support for the Saigon regime.
Assisted by radical congressmen like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden
set up a caucus in the Capitol building where he lectured congressional staffers
on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well,
lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. When Nixon
resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists
needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a
new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that
Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and
the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that
followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been
killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.
It was the bloodbath that our opponents, the anti-Communist defenders of
America’s role in Southeast Asia, had predicted. But for the left there would be
no looking back. Baez’s appeal proved to be the farthest it was possible for them
to go, which was not very far. The appeal did not begin to suggest that antiwar
activists needed to reassess the role they had played in making these tragedies
inevitable. Ironically, it was Hayden who eventually came closest to such self-
recognition: “What continues to batter my sense of morality and judgment,” he
wrote in Reunion, “is that I could not even imagine that the worst stereotype of
revolutionary madness was becoming a reality. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
became the Stalins and Hitlers of my lifetime, killing hundreds of thousands of
people for being ‘educated’ or ‘urban,’ for attracting the paranoid attention of a
secret police who saw conspiracies behind every failure of the grand plan to be
achieved. Most Western estimates settle on 1.5 million killed.” But having
acknowledged those facts and his confusion over them, he could go no farther,
and had no genuine second thoughts. The terrible result, which he had worked so
hard to make possible, failed to prompt a reassessment of the people who had
predicted the bloodbath if the Communists were to win and whose anti-
Communist policies he had opposed: “None of this persuades me that Nixon and
Kissinger were right.”
Nixon and Kissinger were right, but the Democratic Party had been persuaded
by its left wing to abandon the Vietnamese to their fate. This prompted other
second thoughts about the way the left regarded America itself. As a student at
Columbia, I had read Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, which was inspired
by his countrymen’s conquest of the small island of Melos. Euripides had
intended for his play to arouse the moral sense of his fellow-Athenians about the
war they had conducted and the suffering they had inflicted. When the Athenians
saw Euripides’s play, they wept for the people of Melos. In the eyes of my
professor, Moses Hadas, this show of conscience was a tribute to Athenian
civilization. How much greater, I thought, was the civilized response of
America’s democracy to the tragedy in Vietnam. I could not think of another
historical instance where a nation had retreated from a field of battle it had
dominated, because the conscience of its people had been touched. And yet,
America had withdrawn for precisely that reason. The left believed that
American policy was controlled by giant corporations, and that the war was
being prosecuted for their imperial interests, which they would not relinquish.
But the left had been proven wrong about this too. American democracy was not
the “sham” we had said it was. When the American people turned against the
war, there was no greater power to make it continue.
7

A Political Romance

When I was a college literature student in the 1950s, my Shakespeare professor
drew our attention to the way the poet turned to romance as he grew older,
writing symbolic pastorals devoted to themes of redemption. According to my
professor, this was a natural human progression, and he cited examples from
other writers to prove his point. Youth is characterized by a hunger for
information, he told us; age distills what it knows in parables, and returns to
archetypal myths.
When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the most famous of his late romances
and the very last of his plays, he was actually only forty-seven, more than a
decade younger than I am now. Moreover, I have found my own experience to
be exactly the opposite of what he predicted. Growing up in a progressive
household, I found myself enveloped in the vapors of a romantic myth not unlike
that of Shakespeare’s pastorals or the fairy tales that had been read to me as a
child. In the radical romance of our political lives, the world was said to have
begun in innocence but to have fallen afterwards under an evil spell, afflicting
the lives of all with great suffering and injustice. According to our myth,
however, a happy ending beckoned. Through the efforts of progressives like us,
the spell would one day be lifted and mankind freed from its trials. In this
liberated future, social justice would be established, peace would reign and
harmony prevail. Men and women would be utterly transformed.

This was printed as the epilogue to my 1999 book, Hating Whitey and
Other Progressive Causes.

Being at the center of a heroic myth inspired passions that informed my
youthful passage and guided me to the middle of my adult life. But then I was
confronted by a reality so inescapable and harsh that it shattered the romance for
good. A friend was brutally murdered by my political comrades, members of the
very vanguard that had been appointed to redeem us all. Worse, since individuals
may err, the deed was covered up by the vanguard itself, which hoped in so
doing to preserve the faith.
If this personal tragedy had remained isolated perhaps the romance itself
could have survived. But the murder of my friend was reflected and amplified in
numerous others, most notably the slaughter of millions of poor peasants in
Southeast Asia by the liberation fronts, the angels of progress whom my
comrades and I had aided and defended. There was no happy ending. The
injustice of the new orders was even greater than what had existed before. In
retrospect it was apparent to me that most of the violence in my lifetime had
been directed by utopians like myself against those who would not go along with
their impossible dreams. “Idealism kills,” the philosopher Nietzsche had warned
before all this bloodshed began. But nobody listened.
As a result of my experience, I developed, in age, an aversion to romantic
myths. What I experienced instead was a hunger for information—for the facts
that would reveal to me the truth about the years I was a member of a heroic
vanguard. The fall of the Communist empire and the opening of its secrets fed
this passion. Preserved in the decoded Venona communications between Soviet
agents in America and their contacts in the Kremlin is the record of the truths we
had denied, and whose denial made our romance possible. The truths revealed
that we were just what our enemies had always said we were. There were spies
among us, and we were agents for a tainted cause. All of us had treason in our
hearts in the name of a future that would never come.
In the battle of good and evil that formed the core of our romantic myth, we
had enlisted—Old and New Left alike—on the wrong side of the historical
conflict. We had set out as the proud harbingers of a progressive future. But
what we had actually created were realities far worse than those we were seeking
to escape. The enemies we scorned—patriots defending America—turned out to
be the protectors of what was decent and pragmatically good, who had saved us
from being consumed by our crimes.
It became clear to me that the world was not going to be changed into
anything very different or better from what it had been. On this earth there
would be no kingdom of freedom where swords would be turned into plowshares
and lions would lie down with lambs. It should have been obvious when I began.
Many things change, but people do not. Otherwise how could Shakespeare, or
writers more ancient, capture in their creations a reality that we recognize, and
that still moves us today?
These revelations of experience had a humbling effect. They took my
attention away from the noble fantasies that had enveloped me and forced me to
focus on my ordinary existence; to see how common it was; how un-heroic,
ordinary and unredeemed. The revelations that shattered my faith allowed me,
for the first time, to look at my mortality, at the fact that I was not going to be
born again in a brave New World. That I was going to die like everyone else,
and be forgotten.
And that is when I realized what our romance was about. It was not about a
future that was socially just, or about a world redeemed. It was about averting
our eyes from this ordinary fact. Our romance was a shield protecting us from
the terror of our common human fate. And that was why we clung to our dream
so fiercely, despite all the evidence that it had failed. That was why we
continued to believe, despite everything we knew. For who would want to
confront the terror of ordinary existence without some sustaining faith, unless
forced to do so by circumstances beyond their control? Who would want to hear
the voice of a future that was only calling them to oblivion?
And that is when I also realized that our progressive romance would go on.
Some, like myself, might wake from its vapors under blows that caused great
personal pain. But there would always be others, and in far greater number, who
would not. A century of broken dreams and the slaughters they spawned would,
in the end, teach nothing to those who had no reason to hear. Least of all would
it cure them of their hunger for a romance that is really a desire not to know who
we are.
8

Reflections on the Road Taken and Not

The other day I received an email from a stranger posing two questions that have
been on my mind for some time, which made his message seemed uncannily
personal. “I was curious,” the writer said, “if you have ever looked at your
political ‘apostasy’ and wondered whether, if circumstances had been different
—if you had not been involved with the Panthers or if your friend had not been
murdered by them—you would still be a Marxist today. Was your apostasy a
result of an inexorable intellectual development, or were you forced into your
second thoughts?”
In one form or another, that is a question just about everyone gets around to
asking. If circumstances had been different, would my life have turned out
differently? It is a question as old as philosophy—the puzzle of determinism and
free will. Not everyone, of course, experiences such a dramatic turning-point in
life as I did 25 years ago when the Black Panthers murdered Betty Van Patter.
But we all can identify choices or decisions that changed our lives, moments
when we suddenly set out on a new course. Each time those kinds of changes
occur, they raise the question: Are they essential to our being, or only secondary
to who and what we are?

This article was published on October 25, 1999,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24339;
http://www.salon.com/1999/10/25/reflections/

In my case, I simply don’t know whether the intensity of my ideological
transformation would have been the same had it not been provoked by an act of
criminal brutality committed by my political allies and friends. But I am
confident that the change would have come in any case. I have many friends and
acquaintances who had similar “second thoughts” in which they found
themselves rejecting the ideas and understandings that had motivated them when
they were young; and I have no reason to suppose it would have been different
for me. In fact, one of the first pieces I wrote about the incident that changed my
political life was an article called “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist,” which
appeared in 1986 in The Village Voice. It drew explicit parallels between the
crime the Panthers had committed and the much larger, more famous crimes that
the broader left had committed—crimes that had caused people like me to
reconsider our beliefs.
As a leftist I had developed habits of mind that caused me to look at “classes”
rather than individuals, at social structures and general paradigms rather than at
particular events or individual personalities that could be dismissed as incidental
or unique. This way of looking at things led me to analyze events with an eye as
to whether they were broadly characteristic or merely contingent, and to do so
before I would consider allowing the lessons I drew from them to affect my
outlook as a whole. I made such an analysis in the article I wrote for The Village
Voice, as in my memoir, Radical Son.
The impact of these events in my case was dramatic. Nobody who knew me
then and knows me now has failed to notice the differences in my life and
attitudes. The trauma of this murder and the betrayal it represented had a
profound effect on me, and made me a different person than I otherwise might
have been. It was the pain that caused me to change. Every day, after Betty’s
murder, the pain spoke to me: “You cannot stay in this place. If you don’t move,
you will die.” It is fear that normally keeps us in our personal grooves. But now I
was caught between the fear of moving and the greater one of not moving. It was
pain that inspired me to overcome inertia in order to escape what I felt was a
spiritual death.
A second question raised in that email was unexpected, and even more
perplexing than the first. “Do you ever feel that you are wasting your breath? Do
you think that truth will ever matter? No matter what you prove or disprove, in
the end the truth will remain in the shadows of what people want to hear and
want to believe.”
I agree with the observation more than I would like to. It is the human wish to
be told lies that keeps us as primitive morally and socially as we are. But stoic
realism is, after all, what being a conservative is about. It is about accepting the
absolute limits that life places on human hope. One could define the viewpoint
of the left as just the opposite. It is an obstinate, compulsive, destructive belief in
the fantasy of change, in the hope of a human redemption.
I have watched my friends on the left, whose ideas created an empire of
inhumanity, survive the catastrophe of their schemes and go on to unexpected
triumphs by turning their backs on the ashes of their ideological defeats. Forced
to witness the collapse of everything they had once dreamed of and worked to
achieve, they have emerged unchastened and unchanged in pursuit of the same
destructive illusions. And they have been rewarded for their misdeeds with a
cultural cachet and unprecedented influence in the country most responsible for
the worldwide defeat of their misguided schemes.
I cannot explain this dystopian paradox except by agreeing with my
interlocutor that politics is indeed irrational; and that socialism is a wish that
runs as deep as any religious faith. I do not know that the truth must necessarily
remain in the shadows, as he writes. But I am persuaded that a lie grounded in
human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.
9

Letter to the Past

Twenty-five years ago, on this date exactly, my friend Betty Van Patter
disappeared from the Berkeley Square, a local tavern on University Avenue, and
was never seen alive again. Six months earlier I had recruited Betty to keep the
books of the Educational Opportunities Corporation, an entity I had created to
run a school for the children of the Black Panther Party. By the time the police
fished her battered body out of San Francisco Bay, I knew that she had been
killed by the Panthers themselves.
At the time, the Panthers were still being defended by writers like Murray
Kempton and Garry Wills in the pages of The New York Times, and by the
governor of California, Jerry Brown. Indeed, the governor was a confidant of
Elaine Brown, who had hired Betty and whom Huey Newton had appointed to
stand in for him as the Panthers’ leader when he fled to Cuba. At the time of
Betty’s death, Elaine was riding a wave of public approval. She was running for
the Oakland City Council and had just secured a $250,000 grant from the Nixon
Administration under a federal juvenile delinquency program. J. Anthony Kline,
the consigliere to whom she had turned when the Party’s enforcers got in trouble
with the law, was about to be appointed to Governor Brown’s cabinet (and is
today a justice on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco).

This article was published on Tuesday, December 14, 1999,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24348

In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently
discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of
conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While
these criminal activities were taking place, they enjoyed the support of the
American left, the Democratic Party, the Bay Area Trades Union Council, and
even the Oakland business establishment. The head of the Clorox Corporation,
Oakland’s largest company, sat on the board of the Educational Opportunities
Corporation I had created and whose books Betty had kept.
 On a far smaller scale the Panther killings were an American version of the
“Katyn massacre,” the infamous murder of Polish officers carried out on Stalin’s
orders that the left had denied and concealed for decades, until the opening of
the Soviet archives settled the dispute for good. The totalitarian nature of the
Soviet state made it relatively simple to understand how the information that
would settle the case could be kept hidden for years. It was much harder for me
to understand why in democratic America the Panthers should be able to get
away with these murders, and why the nation’s press should turn such a blind
eye to a group that law enforcement had made an object of its attentions.
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single
organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders,
even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the
entire liberal establishment, including the First Lady and the Assistant Attorney
General in charge of civil rights for the Clinton Administration. Both Hillary
Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by
organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the University and stop the trial
of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named
Alex Rackley. This silence is even more puzzling since, despite a blackout by
national media, the details of the story have managed to trickle out over the
years. This has been the result of efforts by myself and my colleague Peter
Collier, by radical journalists Kate Coleman and Hugh Pearson and one or two
others, including most particularly David Talbot and David Weir, the editor and
managing editor of Salon magazine.
Because of our efforts, informed citizens are at least aware of these murders.
On the other hand, unlike in the Soviet Union, where testimonies emerged as
soon as the regime was toppled and the threat of retaliation gone, few additional
witnesses have come forward to add to our knowledge about these American
crimes. There are hundreds if not thousands of veterans of the Sixties who have
some knowledge of the deeds but who have remained silent and complicit for 25
years. These include notable figures like Tom Hayden and journalists like the
Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer—both of whom promoted the
Panthers as revolutionary heroes at the time, and who have failed to correct that
impression ever since. But it also includes many lesser figures who worked day
in and day out to facilitate the Panthers’ rise to power and to cover up their
crimes along the way. Evidently they have remained convinced that even though
the crimes were committed, they somehow weren’t. Or perhaps that if they were
indeed committed, the crimes were and are no responsibility of theirs.
I am constantly asked by people who have read my autobiography Radical
Son, or who have heard me talk about these events, how it is that my former
comrades on the left can remain so stubbornly devoted to experiments that have
failed, to doctrines that are false, to causes that are demonstrably wrong-headed
and evil. Recently—on November 20, to be precise—an answer to these
questions came from out of the blue, in a letter written by an old friend—Art
Goldberg, a radical journalist who was deeply involved in the activities of the
Panthers and their deceptions, and who remains a faithful keeper of the
progressive flame today.
I had not heard from Art in fifteen years. We had grown up on the same block
in Sunnyside, Long Island, a neighborhood of Queens that had been colonized
by the Communist Party to which both our parents belonged. Because Art was a
few years older than I, we weren’t that close as children but became friends after
college, when we found ourselves together in Berkeley as members of the
nascent New Left. Art became a writer for the Berkeley Barb and other
Movement papers and made himself particularly serviceable to the Black
Panther Party. Toward the end of the Sixties Peter Collier and I were editing
Ramparts, the most successful and well-heeled journalistic institution of the left.
Because Art was an old friend of mine, we took him under our wing and gave
him writing jobs that supplemented his income, while Peter devoted
considerable time and effort to rewriting Art’s pieces to meet the literary
standards of a national magazine, which were somewhat more demanding than
those of an underground paper like the Berkeley Barb.
So valuable was Art’s propaganda to the Panthers that eventually Huey
Newton assigned him to write the official biography of Charles Garry, the
lawyer who defended Newton against charges that he had murdered a young
policeman named John Frey. Newton had committed the murder, but in Art’s
account, as in all the writings of New Leftists at the time, Huey was presented as
the innocent victim of a racist conspiracy by the state.
Art and another friend named Marty Kenner were the New Leftists closest to
the Panthers of anyone I knew. Marty, a stockbroker who had organized the
famous Leonard Bernstein party that Tom Wolfe satirized in Radical Chic, was
working virtually full-time as Huey Newton’s personal emissary and financial
guru. In the Sixties I had kept my distance from the Party because I was
frightened by their gun-toting style and hectoring posture. As the Seventies
began, however, Newton announced that it was “time to put away the gun,” and
I became involved with the school-project I have already mentioned. At first I
had intended just to raise the money for the school, but when Marty Kenner
withdrew unexpectedly, telling me he was “burned out,” I was left with the task
of organizing the school myself. It was as a result of this responsibility that I
recruited Betty Van Patter to keep its books.
 I had not seen or heard from Art Goldberg or Marty Kenner for 15 years when
I received Art’s letter. On reflection it seems obvious what provoked the
communication. I had just published a book called Hating Whitey and Other
Progressive Causes, one of whose chapters was a memoir of Betty’s death,
called “Black Murder, Inc.”24 Obviously this chapter was what prompted him to
contact me. In addition to Art’s denial in the letter that he was political anymore,
what I found most interesting was the fact that though I had written hundreds of
pages on the details of Betty’s murder, my sense of responsibility and guilt over
what happened, and the devastating impact on myself and my family, Art
seemed unaware of any of it.

November 19, 1999

Dear David,
Every so often I hear about something you’ve written that pisses somebody
off, but I don’t much care because I have pretty much retired from politics.
One thing I have been meaning to tell you for years, however, concerns the
death of Betty Van Patter, the Ramparts bookkeeper. In my mind, you are
the person responsible for her death. [Emphasis in original] Sending her in
to audit the Panther’s books at that particular time was tantamount to
dressing her in a Ku Klux Klan white sheet and sending her up to 125th
Street in Harlem or to West Oakland.
I distinctly remember warning you to be careful about getting too
involved with the Panthers because things were getting pretty crazy at the
time you jumped in. I had pulled back, Marty Kenner had pulled back and
so had Stew Albert. Had you asked Stew or myself, we would have urged
you not to send Betty into the school under the circumstances in which you
did. . . . The fact that you let Betty deal with them directly was incredibly
naïve on your part, and shows you had no idea of what was going on with
the Panthers at that time. If you had asked Stew, myself or Marty, we could
have told you. . . . Kenner, after all, knew a lot about the Panther finances,
as he was a major fundraiser. Nothing happened to him. . . .
The problem was that you were inexperienced and naïve and Betty Van
Patter got killed because of it. That’s why, whenever anyone brings up
Betty’s death, after you’ve written about it or alluded to it, I always say, “It
was really Horowitz’s fault. He set her up.” As I said, it was like putting her
in a white sheet and sending her up to Harlem.
Just wanted to let you know what I’ve been thinking.
Peace,
Art

Here is the answer I sent back:

December 12, 1999

Dear Art,
Unlike you I don’t pretend to have “retired from politics,” and unlike you I
try not to lie to myself. Having become a conservative, I am prepared for
how pathetic, vicious and disloyal some human beings can be, and how
sublimely unaware of the disgusting image they present to others even as
they preen their moral selves for their own approval. As a result, your letter
does not really surprise me.
The fact that you should have spent ten seconds carrying around your
insipid thoughts about Betty’s death is laughable. Nonetheless, I thank you
for revealing how ignorant you are about yourself and your friends, and
how you are still wallowing in the evil that once engulfed us all.
Marty Kenner, my possible savior. If only I had thought of that! It was
Marty, of course, who left the Panther school project in my hands—and
without bothering to say why. The same Marty was so far from thinking the
thugs he was among were bad guys that ten years later he attended the great
Huey P. Newton’s funeral as a fan, and then played the role of behind-the-
scenes sponsor of Panther Field Marshal David Hilliard’s self-glorifying
book just before he became president of the Dr. Huey P. Newton
Foundation, and resident tour guide of historic Panther sites. Stupid me!
Why didn’t I think of asking Marty for help?
“Nothing happened” to Marty, as you put it—nobody raped and tortured
him and then bashed his head in (as I would phrase the same)—because his
nose was so far up Huey’s behind right to the end that he couldn’t get his
tongue loose to annoy them, even if it had occurred to him to do so.
Give this, at least, to Betty. She wasn’t killed because she was white or
stupid. She was killed because she had the integrity and the grit to talk
back. She wasn’t spineless, the way you and your friends are. She was
killed because she wasn’t a feckless servant of rapists and murderers like
you and Marty were then and apparently still are now.
And Stew Albert!!! How could I have overlooked good old Stew when I
was in need of advice? Stew Albert, the yippee genius who wrote a letter to
Ramparts calling me a police agent because in an editorial I had condemned
the Symbionese Liberation Army’s assassination of a black father of three
children, whose only crime was to have been a superintendent of schools.25
According to Stew, my editorial gave a “green light” to law enforcement to
 carry out the richly deserved execution of Stew’s beloved SLA fruitcakes!
With stand up talent like this, Art, you should really go on Leno.
I see you are still crusading for social justice—going around telling
anyone who has read my latest feeble attempt to right this historical record
and show the world what we did, that “It was really Horowitz’s fault. He set
her up.” Don’t worry, my friend. I’m not going to return the favor and say
you did it and I didn’t. Of course, you did write all those rave notices and
cover-ups, encouraging others to help feed the Panthers’ criminal appetites
(or has age affected your memory of this?). But I’m still not going to tell
people it was your fault that I got involved with the Panthers or recruited
Betty, or even that you kept your mouth shut all the time I was down in
Oakland putting my life and hers in danger.
Of course, you’ve already prepared your alibi. You told me “things were
getting pretty crazy at the time.” What was I supposed to make of that?
“Crazy” could mean that the police were after them, that some of them were
agents or that these pressures were creating internal conflicts I had to look
out for. DID YOU TELL ME THAT HUEY NEWTON WAS A F—ING
MURDERER AND MIGHT KILL ME?!!! Of course you didn’t. In fact,
everything you had written or said to me about Huey Newton told me
exactly the opposite. And that is all that you’ve ever written to anyone or
said to me about Huey and his progressive gang to this day.
But I still won’t point my finger at you now, or blame you for what I did
then. I won’t do that because that’s how I fell into this mess in the first
place. By blaming others for what I did or did not do, blaming them for my
own malaise. And that’s what your self-serving politics is finally about, Art
—yours and Marty’s and Stew’s. It’s about putting responsibility where it
doesn’t belong. It’s about blaming everyone but yourselves. It’s about
getting others to blame anybody besides themselves for who and what they
are.
I’m glad you wrote this letter. It makes all the pain, and all the wounds
inflicted on me by you and your comrades since then, seem worth it.
Because it shows me what wretched human beings I was involved with
when I was one of you, a member of the progressive vanguard and at war
with the “enemies of the people.”
Your letter shows me that in all these years you haven’t changed a bit.
But I have, and it’s the only thing in this that I’m not sorry about.
The “Peace” benediction at the end of your letter was a really nice touch.
David

10

Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home

I am a former antiwar activist who helped organize the first campus
demonstration against the war in Vietnam at the University of California,
Berkeley in 1962. I appeal to all those young people, who participated in
“antiwar” demonstrations on 150 college campuses this week, to think again and
not join an antiwar effort against America’s coming battle with international
terrorism.
The hindsight of history has shown that our efforts in the 1960s to end the war
in Vietnam had two practical effects. The first was to prolong the war itself.
Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has
affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the
battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to win
the war for them. The Vietcong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were
destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most of the casualties in
the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the hope
that Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to
win it. This is what happened. The blood of hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, is on the hands of the antiwar
activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the Communists.

This article was published on Thursday, September 27, 2001,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24224

The second effect of the war was to surrender South Vietnam to the forces of
Communism. This resulted in the imposition of a monstrous police-state, the
murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese, the
incarceration in “reeducation camps” of hundreds of thousands more, and a
quarter-century of abject poverty imposed by crackpot Marxist economic plans,
which continue to this day. This too is the responsibility of the so-called antiwar
movement of the 1960s.
I say “so-called” because while many Americans were sincerely troubled by
America’s war effort, the organizers of this movement were Marxists and
radicals who supported a Communist victory and an American defeat. Today the
same people and their youthful followers are organizing the campus
demonstrations to protest America’s effort to defend its citizens against the
forces of international terrorism and anti-American hatred which are responsible
for the September attacks.
I know, better than most, the importance of protecting freedom of speech and
the right of citizens to dissent. I also know, better than most, that there is a
difference between honest dissent and malevolent hate, between criticism of
national policy and sabotage of the nation’s defenses. In the 1960s and 1970s,
the tolerance of anti-American hatred was so high that the line between dissent
and treason was eventually erased. Along with thousands of other New Leftists, I
was one who crossed the line between dissent and treason. (I have written an
account of these matters in my autobiography, Radical Son). I did so for what I
thought were the noblest of reasons: to advance the cause of social justice and
peace. I have lived to see how wrong I was and how much damage we did,
especially to those whose cause we claimed to embrace, the peasants of
Indochina who suffered grievously from our support of the Communist enemy. I
came to see how precious are the freedoms and opportunities afforded by
America to the poorest and most humble of its citizens, and how rare its virtues
are in the world at large.
If I have one regret from my radical years, it is that this country was too
tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within. If patriotic Americans had been
more vigilant in the defense of their country, if they had called things by their
right names, if they had confronted us with the seriousness of our attacks, they
might have caught the attention of those of us who were well-meaning but
utterly misguided. And they might have stopped us in our tracks.
This appeal is for those of you who are out there today attacking your country,
full of your own self-righteousness, but who one day might also live to regret
what you have done.
11

The End of Time

I have just published a new book, The End of Time, which is different from my
other books. In the first place its subject is different, although I have written a
memoir, Radical Son, and this is something of a memoir as well. In the second
place its authorial voice is different. I have been engaged in the political wars for
so long that people perceive me as someone perpetually in combat. Like most
perceptions this is only partially correct. I actually have a soft side, and a
reflective one. This is a book of lessons about life from one man’s perspective.
Life. I didn’t see it coming. That is a theme of this book. In fact none of us
sees it coming when we start on our journeys. That is one of the paradoxes of
our existence. We are all so different and unique. And yet in several crucial ways
we are the same. And this is one of them: None of us sees life coming. Or as the
Christian testament puts it: We see now through a glass darkly, not face to face.
My book is a kind of letter to the young, about what I have seen, about what
to expect. And it is a consolation for the old, in the sense that it is about what all
of us go through.

This is a text of a talk I gave on the publication of The End of Time, a

memoir and reflection. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?
ArtId=8545

More than three hundred years ago a great scientist, a Catholic philosopher
and poet of the soul named Blaise Pascal outlined our predicament. When he
died at the youthful age of thirty-nine, Pascal left a collection of notes that he
had stitched together with needle and thread and which were published after his
death. Known as the Pensées, they have become a classic of Western thought.
This is the fragment numbered 205:

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity

before and after, . . . engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I
am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at
 being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than
there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here?”

For mortals like us there is no answer. In the words of St. John: “Believers
and non-believers stand in the same darkness. Neither sees God.”
Pascal was one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. He looked into
the eye of the universe and could not find an answer. Without a Creator to make
sense of it, he wrote, a human life is “intolerable.”
What then are we to do? Pascal’s answer to this question was his famous
“Wager.” Pascal was a physical scientist and also a mathematician who
pioneered in the field of probability theory, devising formulas to calculate the
odds of winning at games of chance.
Look on life, he said, as a game of chance. If you wager that there is a God
who will make sense of all this, who will give meaning to our lives, who will
provide us with a home in this infinite expanse of unexplored space, then there
are two possibilities: If there is God, you win. If there is no God then you have
lost nothing by wagering that He exists. Therefore wager that there is a God, and
that life has meaning.
I am an agnostic. I do not know if there is a God or not. But I have lived my
life as if what I do has meaning, and therefore I have, in a way, taken Pascal’s
advice.
As an agnostic I have also seen that there are ways of believing and of
demanding meanings from life that are destructive and that are the source of
great human suffering and grief.
Part of my book is about death and how death affects the lives we live. We
live a great deal of our lives in denial of our end, as though we will go on
forever. At least young people do. When you get to my age, you can see the
horizon coming. Or rather, you can’t avoid seeing the horizon coming.
This denial, and its impact on the purposes to which we devote ourselves,
informs the title of my book, The End of Time. This title has two meanings. First,
our time has an end; and second, knowledge of this fact should shape our ends.
In my book I refer to a story by Saul Bellow that provides an image for this
denial. “When there is too much going on,” Bellow writes, “more than you can
bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that
your life is going round and round like a turntable.”
Bellow doesn’t say whether this is a turntable like the ones you find in
playgrounds, or a turntable like those on which we used to play our music on
vinyl records. Which are gone now like so much else.
Perhaps the denial Bellow is referring to is larger than the moment itself.
Perhaps he is hinting that the music of your days can lull you into an illusion that
the present will go on and on, and will never go anywhere else. Or perhaps, more
simply, that your life is in motion when you think you are just standing still.
That is, until something happens. Until you get clobbered by events and wake
up to the fact that the stillness is an illusion. That everything is changing about
you, and that one day it will come to an end.
Bellow’s own clobbering was the death of his mother from cancer when he
was 17.
On the day this story takes place the young Bellow, who works for a local
florist, is sent to deliver flowers to the funeral of a 15-year-old girl. Disoriented
by the experience he goes to his uncle’s office for comfort. But his uncle isn’t in,
and while the young man is in the building he encounters a sexual mystery-
woman. The woman lures him to an apartment where she induces him to undress
and then steals his money and clothes.
The humiliated youngster is forced to return home in a dress he has found in
her closet. As he approaches his house, he fears his father’s wrath. But then he
remembers what’s on his turntable. His mother is dying.
Ironically, remembering this produces in him immediate feelings of relief. He
realizes that if his father is angry when he enters the door, it will mean his
mother is still alive.
This is how Bellow describes the experience of his mother’s death: “One day
you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat and even, was in
fact a whirlpool, a vortex.”
The vortex of his mother’s death sucked some part of Saul Bellow beneath the
surface and it never came back. “My life was never the same after my mother
died,” Bellow said long after the event. In the story, he wrote: “I knew she was
dying, and didn’t allow myself to think about it—there’s your turntable.”
There are all kinds of turntables that draw us into life and lead us to think it
will go on without end.
When I was in my fifties I fell in love with a younger woman, who came to
me as an unexpected blessing in middle-age. Her name is April and this romance
which blossomed into marriage became for me a new lease on life.
I bought a new house for us. It was perched like an eyrie on the palisades
overlooking the Pacific. Because it cost more than my previous house I applied
for a new insurance policy that would cover the mortgage for my wife in the
event of my death.
I had to take a series of medical tests to qualify for the insurance. When they
were completed the company told me my application was rejected because I had
a PSA of 6.0. PSA is an acronym for prostate specific antigen. It is a number that
can indicate the presence of a prostate cancer, so common in men that it is
almost a feature of age.
I didn’t believe the test result. I had just had a checkup a few months earlier
and my PSA was only 4. How could it have gone up so fast? Moreover, friends
of mine had PSA’s of 9 and no cancer. I demanded another test which came back
with a similar score.
I still was unconvinced. You could call this my turntable. I had as soon
expected to get cancer in this life as to go on a voyage to the moon. I called my
doctor and he ordered a biopsy for me. The biopsy showed that I did have a
prostate cancer.
Obviously I hadn’t paid much attention to things like cancer or to my body for
that matter. Some of us are obsessed with our bodies and their care and feeding.
Others live in their heads and consider time spent on their bodies as frivolous.
It’s funny how we all have these gravities of our being that determine who and
what we are in such fundamental ways, yet hardly think about them or how we
came to have them in the first place.
Some of us are optimists and expect good things to happen to us and are
surprised when they don’t. Others are pessimists who expect the worst and are
pleasantly surprised when things turn out well. Obviously I was an optimist and
a cockeyed one at that.
Three weeks later, I went into the hospital and had my prostate removed. I
was lucky. I had a brilliant surgeon and with a little radiation afterward I was
cancer-free.
Day in and day out, during my illness, my wife prayed for me. She prayed for
my health and for my continued presence on this earth. Her brother Joe and his
wife Marta, who attended a Catholic church, organized 30 Hispanic men, women
and children, including my nieces, to pray for me too. There were others.
Every morning these relatives and strangers whispered my name in their
intimate conversations with God, and implored him to spare me. I was touched
and strengthened by their love and by their answered prayers. I had been saved
and was grateful for that. I would be able to share life with April again, to be
with my children and grandchildren, to rise in the morning and greet the sea.
Was God really behind this good fortune? Had he intervened to rescue an
agnostic soul as a reward to the believers? Thankful as I was for their concern, I
didn’t like to think so. For if he had saved me to answer their prayers then I
would also have to hold Him responsible for the others, the ones whose prayers
went unheard.
One of the patients who came regularly to the cancer ward at my appointed
time was a young woman who seemed to be in her twenties. She came in a
wheelchair accompanied by a sad woman who appeared to be her mother, and
who had pushed her to the clinic from one of the recesses of the vast hospital
complex we were part of.
She had barely begun life, but her eyes had already traveled to a distant space,
displaying a vacancy that could have been equally the result of medications or
resignation.
For her this life had become a waiting-room from which there was no exit. I
could not help thinking, each time I saw her, of the many lives I had been
privileged to live in my span, and of those she would not.
I was acutely conscious of the inhabitants of the cancer ward whose prospects
were worse than mine. Along with those who loved them they had endured
multiple operations, multiple setbacks, years of a crippled existence, and a fate
on hold.
“Life is a hospital,” the poet T.S. Eliot wrote. I could appreciate the
metaphorical truth in the image, but it still felt like a violence to the reality that
confronted me. Not all life’s hospitals were equal and not all God’s children
were saved.

I had my biopsy four years ago in September 2001, two days before 9/11.
Having spent the next four or five months in a battle for life, alongside others
some of whom would make it and some who would not, ever conscious of the
uncertainty of my fate, ever more conscious of the end of time, I was struck,
reading about the 9/11 attackers, when I came across the phrase, “Love death.”
It was a phrase that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the terrorists, had written
in his instructions to his team. “Prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”
How can one love death? That is the enigma at the heart of human history,
which is a narrative moved by war between tribes and nations. For how can men
go to war unless they love death, or have a cause that they love more than life
itself?
Lovers of jihad have such a cause. They believe they can redeem the world.
This faith is what gives their lives meaning, puts order in the universe and
restores justice to an unjust existence. By conquering the infidel world and
instituting the law of the Koran they believe they can make the world holy and
make it whole.
The world we live in—unjust, chaotic, suffused with suffering—is full of
earthly redeemers. They are both secular and religious. They are people who
cannot abide the life they have been given or who cannot wait to see if the end of
their time on this earth will bring them a better time in the next. They are
radicals who believe that without a divine intervention they can build a kingdom
of heaven in this life, on this earth.
To realize their mission, both secular and religious radicals divide the world
into two realms—the realm of those who are saved and the realm of those who
are damned; believers and infidels, oppressors and oppressed. Radicals are
permanently at war, their lives a perpetual jihad.
We all long for a judgment that will make the world right, for a God who will
reward virtue and punish the wicked. Every God of Love is also a God of
righteousness and death. And that is why the radical program of a redemption in
this world is such a destructive force.
I once shared this radical faith. Life was intolerable to me without a
redemptive hope. This quest for a world transformed brought tragedy to me as it
has brought tragedy to the lives of so many others. The 20th century is a
graveyard in which millions of corpses were sacrificed to the illusion of an
earthly salvation.
Whether they are secular or religious radicals, those who believe we can
become masters of our fate think they know more than Pascal.
But in their search for truth where do they imagine they have gone that he did
not go before them? In the end, their confidence is only a mask for the inevitable
defeat that is our common lot, an inverse mirror of their human need.
I understand Pascal’s religion. I understand his anxious bewilderment at a life
of no consequence. I understand his hope for a personal redemption and his
search for an answer. But I no longer understand the faith of radicals who think
they can change the world. I no longer share the belief that men by themselves,
without a divine hand, can transform the world we live in and create paradise on
earth.
Part of my book is a memoir, the story of how I met April, how she stood by
me in my illness and nursed me through, and how I began a new chapter in life. I
will not spoil the love story in this book by attempting to recount it here, but
when April and I had been together for ten years, she said this: “When you die, I
tell myself I’ll be seeing you spiritually some day again. I don’t know how I
would live with the thought of you gone if I didn’t believe that. I don’t know
how people who have no belief in God manage. It’s a sad way to carry your
heart through life.”
But she knew I did just that. She said, “You need to respect God more. He’s
been good to you. When you came out of the operating room you were so
handsome and your skin was magical, there was a glow on you. I knew that
someone, maybe your grandma or your mom, was looking out for you.” And
then she said, “You have a mission. Most people are like me and don’t. But you
have a mission. God is protecting you.”
 It is a privilege to be loved. It can almost make you a believer, even if
believing is not in you from the beginning. You give, and if you are lucky what
you give comes back, and it comes back in ways you would never have
imagined.
I could not so easily dismiss April’s idea of a grace unseen. I knew I had taken
risks that others prudently avoided, and had escaped unharmed. I had been felled
by a cancer and was still around to talk about it. But what was the mission that
might cause God to look out for me?
Why would the God of the Jews take a hand in the affairs of one of His
children in any case? The Biblical point was that God gave us free will to
determine our fates. Why would He intervene to change mine?
I had a mission once that tragedy altered and brought to an end. I had given up
this idea of an earthly redemption. I had come to see the very dream as a vortex
of destruction and had become an adversary of such illusions in others. That was
the mission April meant.
But while I took pleasure in her romantic notion I could not flatter myself to
think a providential eye was looking out for me. That was the very illusion I had
escaped. The personal dream of every radical is to be at the center of creation
and the renewal of the world. What I had learned in my life was that we were not
at the center of anything but our own insignificance. There was nothing
indispensable about us, about me, about anyone.
The wars of the social redeemers were as old as the Tower of Babel and
would go on forever. With or without me. The dreamers would go on building
towers to heaven, and just as inexorably they would come crashing to earth.
Some would take to heart the lessons of the Fall, but others would fail to notice
them or care.
Inspired by the dreamers who preceded them and innocent of their crimes, an
unending cycle of generations would repeat what they had done. The suffering
of the guilty and the innocent would continue without end, and nothing I could
do or say would alter it.
The summons I had answered was more modest by far. I was a witness. I
needed not to forget what I had learned through pain, and to pay my debt. I
needed to warn whom I could and to protect whom I might, even if it was only
one individual or two. If I had a mission to name, it was about wrestling with the
most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle
truth in the name of hope.
Here is why you cannot change the world: Because we—all six billion of us—
create it. We do so individually and relentlessly and in every generation. We
shape the world as monarchs in our own homes and masters of others in the
world beyond, when we cannot even master ourselves.
Every breeder of new generations is a stranger to his mate and a mystery to
himself. Every offspring is a self-creator who learns through rebellion and
surrender, through injury and error, and often not at all.
This is the root cause that makes us who and what we are—the good, the bad,
the demented, the wise, the benevolent and the brute. We are creatures blind and
ignorant, stumbling helplessly through a puff of time.
The future is a work of prejudice and malice inextricably bound with
generosity and hope. Its fate is unalterably out of our control. Insofar as this
work is manageable at all, it is carried out now and forever under the terrible
anarchy of freedom that God has imposed on his children and will not take back.
Created by us each day at odds with each other, and created over and over, the
world can never be made whole. It is irrevocably broken into billions of
fragments, into microscopic bits of human unhappiness and earthly frustration.
And no one can fix it.
Blaise Pascal was an agnostic of the intellect but a believer of the heart. He
recognized that his condition was hopeless: only a divinity could heal his
sickness and make him whole. Because science provided no answers to his
questions, he trusted in the God of Abraham to provide what no mortal can.
Pascal was a realist of faith. He drew a line between the sacred and the profane,
and respected the gulf that separates this world from the next. He did not
presume to achieve his own salvation in this world, or in anyone else’s.
Not so the redeemers. They cannot live with themselves or the fault in
creation, and therefore are at war with both. This makes them profoundly
unhappy people. Because they are miserable in their own lives they cannot abide
the happiness of others. To escape their suffering they seek Judgment, the
rectification that will take them home.
If they do not believe in a God, they summon other men to act as gods. If they
believe in God, they do not trust His justice but arrange their own. In either case,
the consequence of their passion is the same catastrophe. This is because the
devil they hate is in themselves and the sword of their vengeance is wielded by
inhabitants of the very hell they wish to escape.
There is no redemption in this life. Generation after generation, we transmit
our faults and pass on our sins. From parents to children, we create the world in
our own image. And no power can stop us. Every life is an injustice. And no one
can fix it. We are born and we die. If there is no God to rescue us, we are
nothing.
In my time, I have found a solace and consolation in the written word. The
universe I inhabit remains a mystery but I go on living and writing, nonetheless,
as though there were a reason for both. Almost every day I create an order on the
page, which reflects the order I see in the world. Whether it actually is an order
doesn’t matter as much as the fact that the quest moves me forward as though I
were headed somewhere, and rescues me from the despair that would overwhelm
me if I were not.
If I did not believe there was an order, I suppose I would not be able to pursue
one at all. The pursuit is my comfort and the order my personal line of faith.
They put oxygen into the air around me and allow me to breathe.
At the halfway mark of the last century, which to me does not seem so long
ago, the gifted American writer William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for
Literature—an award, like every other human vanity, bestowed on the
undeserving and the deserving alike.
Faulkner’s most famous novel, The Sound and the Fury, is a title he took from
Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. In pursuit of worldly gain, Macbeth betrays
every human value and relationship that is meaningful to him. In the process he
is stripped of all human companionship and respect, until he is only an empty
and embittered shell.
Having emptied his own life of its spiritual supports, he turns against life
itself. “It is a tale told by an idiot,” he proclaims, “full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.”
But when Faulkner mounted the podium in Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize, he
struck a very different note. The year was 1950, the dawn of the nuclear era.
Faulkner looked into the eye of its darkest prospect and declared, “I refuse to
accept this. I believe that . . . when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and
faded . . . in the last dying red evening . . . man will not merely endure; he will
prevail.”
Others criticized Faulkner’s pronouncement as mere bravado. What basis
could he have for such a claim? But this faith was not wisdom. It was the oxygen
he needed to breathe.
April and I acquired a little Mexican dog with black and white markings,
whose improbable name was Jacob and whose brain is smaller than my fist.
When Jacob wags his tail for joy he does not hide his pleasure as we, burdened
with consciousness, often do. Instead, his whole frame is swept into the
movement as though life had no reality but this. Jacob is one of the myriad
creatures on this earth, ridiculous and beautiful, whose origin is a mystery and
who do not worry the significance of who or why or what they are.
In the morning when I step out of my shower this little self comes to me
unbidden to lick the glistening drops from my feet. This is not a ritual of
submission; it does not have any meaning for him at all. It is merely his pleasure.
What is interesting is that I, a creature who lives by meanings, am also affected
by this action. When he does not come, I feel the absence and miss him.
This is a microcosm of all the visits and vacancies that bring misery and
happiness to our lives. We can embrace them or not. This choice, which we
freely make, determines whether life will hollow us out and embitter us or
provide us oxygen to breathe.
What is ahead of us? Like Pascal, we don’t know. “Believers and non-
believers stand in the same darkness. Neither sees God.”
Therefore like Pascal we should wager on life. We should bear ourselves in
this world as though we have seen God, be kind to each other, love wisely, and
give to our children what we would have wished for ourselves.
12

Getting This Conservative Wrong

In the introduction to Rebels All!, Kevin Mattson’s unconventional look at
conservatives, the historian acknowledges that conservative ideas need to be
taken seriously. This is a refreshing departure from the wish of most liberals and
all leftists that conservative ideas would disappear. It is also the reason I asked
Frontpage Magazine editor Jamie Glazov to interview Mattson and promote his
new book.1 Readers of Frontpage know that I have conducted a five-year
campaign to urge liberal-arts professors, most of whom are leftists, to assign
conservative texts in their courses so that there might actually be two sides to the
controversial issues they address. For my pains in conducting this effort to
support an intellectual dialogue, I have been rewarded with the epithets
“McCarthyite” and “chief organizer of the campus thought-police” by academic
leftists who want to teach their political prejudices as though they were scientific
facts.

This was published as “How Liberals Get Conservatives Wrong,” October

15, 2008, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?
ArtId=327081October13 , 2008,
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32665

Professor Mattson is unwilling to acknowledge his colleagues’ role in this
anti-intellectual assault. Instead he lays the blame for the lack of dialogue at the
door of conservatives and their “shrill rhetoric.” I suggest that he pay some
attention to his colleagues’ discourse when they pretend to deal with
conservative ideas. He might also pay more attention to what conservatives
actually do. This conservative magazine has invited numerous leftists like him to
come into its pages and promote their ideas and work; and we have treated them
respectfully when they do. There has been no reciprocity from the other side.
Speaking just from personal experience, I have written ten books in the last
decade, nine of which were dedicated to the analysis and refutation of leftwing
practices and ideas. Only one of those nine books—The Professors—was
reviewed or even discussed in the leftwing magazines for which Mattson writes
—and then it was hardly to engage my ideas. “Ignore This Book” was actually
the title of the review by Professor Cary Nelson that appeared in Academe, the
official publication of the American Association of University Professors of
which he is the head. Another leftwing “critic,” Professor Michael Bérubé, has
publicly explained that he only writes about my work to “ridicule” and
“discredit” it.26 In other words, to suppress rather than engage opposing ideas.
As a conservative, I am certainly not alone in having my work treated this way
by so-called intellectuals of the left.
As it happens, my name appears prominently in Kevin Mattson’s new book,
where I am described as an exemplar of “the postmodern conservative
intellectual” and a leader of the contemporary conservative movement. His
depiction of me and what I believe leaves much to be desired, and what follows
is my response to his portrayal. As a courtesy, our editors informed Professor
Mattson that I would be responding to his interview, once we had showcased his
book, and he graciously accepted our offer.27
Let me begin by noting what is valuable in the portrait of modern
conservatism to be found in Rebels All! Unlike most writers of the left, Kevin
Mattson notices that there is a rebel element to contemporary American
conservatism that distinguishes it from the status-quo Toryism of the past. Fifty-
five years after William Buckley’s protest against the liberal establishment at
Yale, and 45 years after the Goldwater revolt against the Republican Party’s
political establishment, Professor Mattson has finally recognized these facts and
attempted to make a thesis out of them. Unfortunately, in doing so, he regularly
confuses style with substance, tactics with strategy, and generally fails to take
conservative ideas seriously enough to understand them, or to make his book the
interesting and rewarding read it could have been.
The profile Mattson has drawn of me, in particular, is a caricature, not a
portrait. I do not subscribe to many of the views he attributes to me—
postmodernism being the most obvious—and he seems entirely ignorant of the
books I have written. This is no small fault in a historian. Disregarding all that I
have thought and stood for, Mattson describes me as an “anti-intellectual,” a
“relativist” and an “extremist”—a characterization which reflects on all
contemporary conservatives, of whom he regards me as an “exemplar.” But
contrary to Mattson, I am a defender of intellectual standards, an anti-relativist
and a supporter of moderation in intellectual enterprises. Each of the labels
Mattson ascribes to me, if correct, would render inexplicable my campaign for
intellectual standards in the university and my efforts in the pages of this
magazine to open a dialogue with dozens of intellectuals of the left. But they are
not correct. The books I have written, if he would read them, are sustained civil
arguments with leftist ideas and authors. They are hardly “anti-intellectual,” let
alone “extremist.” If he had cared to look, Mattson could have found on my
website archive tens of thousands of words I have written responding to leftist
attacks, and tens of thousands more defending intellectual standards and the
values and virtues of a liberal society, something he claims to cherish.
Because he has not read relevant texts I have written, Mattson picks up and
repeats canards from the left that I have been forced time and again to answer
and refute. Instead of taking on my arguments and trying to understand what I
believe, Mattson writes sentences that describe me as “fighting the culture wars
by writing numerous autobiographies about how he shed his sixties radicalism,
arguing that slavery benefited African-Americans [and] sponsoring a Student
Bill of Rights that would have state legislatures police classrooms for purported
liberal content”—to all of which I can only say: “Not true.” I wrote one
autobiography, and I have never argued that slavery benefited African-
Americans. If Mattson had only taken the time to read the little book I wrote
about my reparations campaign, Uncivil Wars, he would know this.28 Mattson’s
target of course is not just myself but all conservatives: “Horowitz’s move from
endorsing the Black Panther Party to saying that blacks should be grateful about
slavery because it brought them to America—that trajectory serves conservative
intellectuals well today.”
Of course, I have never said that blacks should be grateful about slavery.
What moron would? What I have said is that African-Americans should not turn
their backs on America because of slavery, given the benefits that America has
provided to blacks alive today who are more prosperous and free than the
inhabitants of any African nation whose ancestors were not brought in chains to
this country. This statement has been twisted by unscrupulous leftists into the
false claim Mattson repeats.
Most importantly, since it is a focal point of Mattson’s portrait, I have never
sponsored any bill calling for state legislatures to police classrooms over liberal
indoctrination or, for that matter, to monitor any kind of classroom content. On
the contrary, I have stressed and supported the independence of academic
institutions, and have never supported a legislative statute to enforce the
Academic Bill of Rights. I specifically opposed legislation in Arizona that would
have required professors to provide students with alternate texts if the ones they
were assigned “offended” them. I opposed such legislation—as I explained in a
published article available on my website—because this would take classroom
authority away from the teacher. Even though I have a public record of
defending the independence of the university and opposing a measure that would
have put students and professors on an equal footing, Mattson falsely describes
me as a “populist” fomenting the overthrow of faculty authority.
Mattson also writes, “[Horowitz] does not sound conservative when he talks
about defending right-wing students from leftwing bias.” It’s true, I wouldn’t
sound conservative if I had said that. But I didn’t say that. I never attack leftwing
“bias” because bias is another word for perspective and everybody has one. (I
have attacked leftwing ideas because they are wrong-headed. But that is
different from attempting to outlaw a political “bias.”) The academic campaign I
conducted is central to Mattson’s analysis. One might think, therefore, that the
one book Professor Mattson would have read is The Professors. One would be
wrong. In the introduction to The Professors I wrote: “This book is not intended
as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a
leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every
individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a
bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to
their points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom.” What could be
clearer? What could be more opposite to the view Mattson claims I hold?
Even if my words had not been so clear, my actions were. I defended Ward
Churchill’s right to hold reprehensible views and still be a professor. I defended
the appointment of leftwing law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of the
new law school at UC Irvine when the appointment was withdrawn by the
administration because prominent donors had complained about his political
opinions. I have defended leftwing students against conservative professors. Yet
Mattson ignores the clear public record of my words and deeds in order to
misrepresent them and attack me.
Mattson associates me, for example, with advocates of Intelligent Design
theory who want it included in the biology curriculum. I have publicly opposed
this. He refers to me as an anti-foundationalist, postmodern relativist, which I am
not. Mattson justifies this characterization with a single sentence from the
Academic Bill of Rights (the sentence actually written by Stephen Balch):
“Human knowledge is a never-ending pursuit of the truth [because] there is no
humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge . . .” But what
“post-modernist” would write that there is a “truth” that can be pursued in the
first place? The statement in the Academic Bill of Rights is a carefully-worded,
limited observation. It says that because no individual, faction, or party is in
possession of absolute truth it is important to hear more than one side of a
controversial issue. Who would object to this? Yet Mattson does.
 Like many leftists, Mattson makes a federal case out of a little essay I wrote
ten years ago called The Art of Political War.29 An excerpt from the essay
appears as the epigraph to his chapter on “PostModern Conservatism, the
Politics of Outrage and Mindset of War.” Mattson even exaggerates my role in
the conservative movement in order to make my essay seem more influential
than it was: “The 1960s had become a permanent fixture of Horowitz’s identity,
as it had for the country as a whole. Horowitz was the Sixties hipster marching
in line with the ‘Reagan Revolution,’ and he determined the future of the
conservative intellectual movement more than [Hilton] Kramer’s or [Irving]
Kristol’s anguished, highbrow concern.”
The fact is I wasn’t a “hipster” in the 1960s. I was a Marxist who didn’t
smoke dope, didn’t live in a commune, missed Woodstock, never went to a
Grateful Dead concert or the Fillmore, didn’t riot or throw stones at cops, and
lived in a nuclear family. Moreover, my little pamphlet on The Art of Political
War was not a working manual or political guide for intellectual conservatives or
for the conservative movement. It was very specifically and explicitly a guide
for conducting electoral campaigns before mass audiences where the contending
parties are limited to 30-second TV sound-bites.
I have been attacked on this front before by leftists who want to turn The Art
of Political War into a credo, which it is not. In fact, I devoted a whole chapter
of my book Indoctrination U to refuting this claim when it was the focus of an
attack by the Dean of the Faculty at Reed College. In responding to this attack I
wrote: “The ‘politics’ to which The Art of Political War is addressed is electoral
politics (or politics before masses), which would not include the controversies I
normally engage in as a public intellectual or in the many other books I have
written, or in the academic freedom campaign itself.” What could be clearer?
Unfortunately, Mattson hasn’t read this book either, though it is entirely about
the Academic Bill of Rights.
But he has read The Art of Political War, which makes the same point. Here is
a passage that Mattson elides from the very excerpt he uses as the epigraph to his
chapter: “You have only 30 seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to
develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in
the middle who are not paying much attention) wouldn’t get it. . . . Worse, while
you’ve been making your argument the other side has already painted you as a
mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the
pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you this way is going to listen to you in
any case. You’re politically dead.” This is quite obviously advice to Republicans
running for election, not conservative intellectuals engaged in intellectual
debates.
 Mattson’s book is an attempt to connect the conservatism of Buckley’s
generation with conservatism like mine. There are obvious connections between
the two but Mattson is ultimately so uninterested in conservative ideas that the
connections he makes are an impenetrable mosh. “Horowitz sees himself as a
rebel today as much as he was in the 1960s. And he shares the same enemy
conservatives chastised in the past—the ‘liberal establishment.’”
No, I don’t. The so-called “liberal establishment” today is a leftwing
establishment. Unlike Buckley, I identify with 50s liberals like John F. Kennedy,
whose politics in my view were identical to Ronald Reagan’s. My political
enemies today—Ward Churchill, bell hooks, Cornel West, Nicholas DeGenova,
the editors of The Nation—have views of capitalism that are identical to those of
the Cold War “progressives” who supported the Communist bloc and its cause.
They have absolutely nothing in common with JFK or the liberal establishment
at Yale in the 1950s whom William F. Buckley opposed. Mattson treats Buckley
as the avatar of the conservative rebellion, a view I share. But I have never
embraced a theocentric conservatism like that of Buckley, Russell Kirk and
Whittaker Chambers, who anchored their conservatism in a religious faith. I do
not. I am an agnostic. I have outlined my own conservative philosophy in The
Politics of Bad Faith—a book Mattson also has not read. My conservatism is an
effort to defend the principles of the American Founding. It is true that according
to the Founders we derive inalienable rights from a creator. I agree that rights
have to be derived from a source other than human will. If Mattson has another
way to ground inalienable rights without invoking a Creator, I am all ears, but
until then this agnostic will defer to the Founders.
Here is Mattson’s vision of the conservative movement as expressed in his
book and summed up in his Frontpage interview30:

Postmodern conservatism takes from Buckley’s model of the conservative

the stance of the rebel. . . . From the Sixties, postmodern conservatism takes
‘hipness’ and the ‘new sensibility.’ And then it bundles these things
together with an interest in the postmodern ideas of ‘diversity’ and ‘anti-
foundationalism.’ Consider the use of the term ‘diversity’ in the original
Academic Bill of Rights. The justification for ABOR also argued that ‘there
is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge.’
The argument is thus infused with postmodern theories about knowledge—
knowledge as contingent, grounded in language games, never foundational,
etc. But the conservative weds this postmodern outlook with a stance of war
—the ‘political war’ that Horowitz outlines in one of his more popular
books (popular among elected Republicans).

As I have just demonstrated this is a hodgepodge of misunderstood and
misrepresented ideas which could have been corrected if Professor Mattson had
done his homework, or picked up the phone and asked me what I meant.
13

What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion

President Barack Obama has been in office nearly one year, making it two since
my late daughter Sarah trudged through a freezing winter in Iowa to help him
win the nomination. According to a Gallup poll conducted on the anniversary of
the presidential vote, only 28 percent of Americans still believe that Mr. Obama
will be “able to heal political divisions in the country.” A year ago, 54 percent
felt he would be able to do so.
When I read those figures I can’t help thinking about Sarah. For the two of us
reflected the country’s political divisions in our own relationship—a case
familiar to many American families. As a conservative and an active participant
in political conflicts, I am acutely aware of how difficult it is, even with the best
intentions, to change the tone in the midst of debate, and how many otherwise
thoughtful people can be swept up in its passions.

This is a talk I gave on the publication of A Cracking of the Heart.

December 29, 2009,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574568361975770866.html
Reading it today, I think it suggests a greater distance between us than
actually was the case. We were never “estranged” in the sense in which that
term is normally used, and there was only one seriously painful episode,
which I have described in the book.

Despite our political differences—the painful distances and predictable
frustrations they created—Sarah and I ultimately came to the point where we
were able to avoid the rancors of these public imbroglios. By the time she was
overtaken by the medical complications deriving from a birth defect, which
made efforts like her Iowa campaign extraordinarily difficult, we were quite
close. Sarah and I were able to be respectful not only of the fact that we had such
differences, but of the reasons we had them. After her death in March 2008, I
decided to write a memoir of her remarkable life, and to include the story of our
estrangement and reunion in the hope it might be helpful to others facing similar
divisions. I called it A Cracking of the Heart.
My daughter was largely responsible for our reconciliation—although that
term somewhat exaggerates the estrangement. She wanted to change the world,
yet she knew this could only be accomplished one person at a time, and only by
respecting the dignity of others. Despite her physical disabilities, Sarah traveled
on buses and on foot across San Francisco, where she lived, to feed the
homeless. Even though she was a vegetarian herself, she learned to prepare meat
dishes for them because that was what they wanted. She stood vigil in bitter
winters at San Quentin prison whenever there was an execution. But she did not
think the criminals on behalf of whom she protested were innocent. Nor did she
think they should be released. Sarah just felt that it was bad for the nation’s soul
to take a life.
Over the years, I came to realize that while some of my daughter’s views were
different from mine, the values they reflected, and more importantly the
estimates of human character on which they were based, were not so different
that I could not recognize them. A particular bone of contention between us had
been over the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which means “repair of the world”
and is often wrongly conflated with the left’s quest for “social justice.” My life-
experience had led me to conclude that the idea of changing the world was not
only an impossible dream. It was the source of innumerable tragedies and of epic
miseries that human beings had inflicted on each other through the failed utopias
of Nazism and Communism. And so was the refusal to recognize it as such.
For more than a decade, Sarah and I argued across this gap with much
disappointment until I came to realize that I was missing a crucial element that
connected her view and mine. That realization was crystallized in an exchange
we had over a book I had written called The End of Time. In the book, I had
observed that while the prophets of all religions taught us to love each other as
we love ourselves and to think that “there but for the grace of God go I,” this
advice was ultimately imprudent. Is it wise, I had asked, “to put our trust in
strangers, or to love our enemies as ourselves? Would we advise our children to
do so?”
Then came a passage to which Sarah took great exception: “I cannot embrace
this radical faith. I feel no kinship with those who can cut short a human life
without remorse; or with terrorists who target the innocent; or with adults who
torment small children for the sexual thrill. I suspect no decent soul does either.”
Sarah took those words as an attack on the very rationale of her life, and
responded at first with anger. But she relented and then wrote me this: “My
objection is that you’re confusing compassion with gullibility. I do visit
prisoners and I think it matters to make that human connection. That doesn’t
mean I’d necessarily trust them with my purse. I wouldn’t let the State execute
them in my name either. I don’t think kinship with people who’ve crossed the
line blurs my own morality. In fact, it gives it more clarity. If you see someone
in the fullness of their humanity, you see how they are acting out their own
confusion and suffering. This does not justify hurtful or evil acts. It doesn’t even
always inspire forgiveness. But if you see someone this way, you respond more
in sadness than in anger. And that is simply a more excellent state of being.”
A more excellent state of being. My daughter had not only understood the
limits we face in trying to repair the world; she had taught me that compassion
like hers could be informed by a sense of those limits as well. “Even if you’ve
never had this experience,” she continued, “respect the experience of those who
have. I’m not talking about an idea either. This is a full-bodied understanding of
another person. This practice has in fact transformed all my relationships,
including ours by the way.”
14

Something We Did

Just before Labor Day this year, a theater review in The Washington Post alerted
me to the fact that someone had made me, or a fictional representation of me,
into a principal character in his play. Something You Did purports to be a drama
about the parole appeal of an actual person, Kathy Boudin, who forty years ago
was a member of two violent organizations and was directly involved in the
violent deaths of six human beings (although the play mentions only one).
Despite the fact that I myself was never the member of any violent group and
never so much as threw a rock in the Sixties, the playwright has cast my
character as the bad guy, complicit in her crime, and an embodiment of the
political forces that Boudin opposed at the time and that the playwright opposes
now.

This was published on October 4, 2010;

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/something-we-did-2/print/

The day after the Post review appeared, I received a confirming email from
my friend of nearly 60 years, Ron Radosh, who had just attended a performance
and who sent me a scanned copy of a statement by the playwright explaining his
play. In his note, the playwright identified me as the villain of his drama and said
he had chosen me because I had written what he called the most “corrosive”
attack on Kathy Boudin when she came up for parole; and also because I was “a
former radical turned outspoken neo-conservative.” It was, he said, his intention
to have his play make a statement about the present. Finally, he described the
play as asking and answering this question: “Whether the radical sins of the past
can be forgiven even as the reactionary sins of the present multiply.” With this
loaded question, there could be no suspense as to the answer. Boudin is to be
forgiven, because she has remained a radical and therefore her heart was and is
in the right place. Never mind that she caused the deaths of three innocent
people and left nine children fatherless. Whatever mistakes she committed, her
intention was to save the Vietnamese and other oppressed people from
conservatives like myself. Such was the thesis of the play.
A fiction based on reality can provide useful insights only if the structure of
the facts remains intact. Unfortunately, this playwright so distorted the facts as to
deprive his fiction of the ability to provide insights that are useful to an
understanding of what happened. To begin, allow me to clear up his malicious
claim that there is a moral parallel between Kathy Boudin’s criminal acts and
David Horowitz’s “contribution” to the death of Betty van Patter at the hands of
the Black Panthers. Kathy Boudin knowingly joined a radical group whose
purpose was to conduct an actual war inside the United States. The Weather
Underground set bombs, possibly murdered two police officers—there is a
continuing cold-case investigation into this—and inadvertently blew up three of
its own members when an anti-personnel device intended for others went off
prematurely. When the Underground disintegrated and most of its leaders
surfaced to return to civilian life, Kathy remained at war, joining a second
violent group with identical goals. As a member of the “May 19 Communist
Organization,” she participated in an armed robbery in Nyack, New York to
finance “the revolution.” In the course of the robbery, three officers were
murdered and nine children left fatherless.
There is no parallel between Kathy’s criminal career and what I did as a New
Left radical. I never broke a law or plotted to injure another human being.
Although I raised money for a Black Panther school and attempted to help the
Panthers develop a learning center, I never joined their organization or
advocated that others should. The money I raised was to purchase and build a
school. I became involved with the Panthers only after their leader, Huey
Newton, had publicly proclaimed that it was “time to put away the gun.” In those
days The New York Times was comparing Newton to Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther—literally. When I recommended Betty van Patter to the Panthers
as a bookkeeper, I accepted the left’s view of the Panthers as victims of white
racism and a noble force in the struggle for racial justice. I had no idea they were
capable of cold-blooded murder.
After Betty was murdered, I realized I should have read the signs and known
the dangers. I bore my responsibility for what had happened. Those recognitions
are what the conservative part of my life has been about. I wrote an extensive
memoir of those events in which I took full responsibility, in particular for not
knowing what I should have known.31 If Kathy Boudin had done the same—if
she had attempted to re-examine the premises that led her to commit her crimes
and had made a full accounting afterward—I would still have held her
accountable but would not have judged her as harshly as I have.
A crucial fact about me that the play ignores is that I did not need to become a
conservative to be critical of Kathy Boudin and the Weather Underground. Nor
was I alone in this. In 1971, when still a radical, I wrote a widely-read article in
Ramparts attacking the Weather Underground for its terrorist ideas and
practices. My article focused on the explosion of the bomb that Boudin’s
Weather Underground cell was planning to detonate in a terrorist act. Three
members of the cell were killed in that explosion, which destroyed the
Greenwich Village townhouse they had turned into their bomb-factory. Boudin
was in the townhouse at the time and survived. She then continued her chosen
path of radical violence.
The townhouse episode includes crucial facts that the playwright suppresses in
order to load his case for Boudin’s redemption. In the play, the Boudin character,
who is named Allison, claims that her terrorist acts were aimed at property, not
people. She is thus presented as someone innocent of the purposes for which the
bomb was to be used. In the play it is my character who persuades her to buy the
nails that turn the bomb into an anti-personnel weapon. The black policeman
who becomes the inadvertent victim of the bomb is killed by one of those nails.
In the play Allison’s innocence of the bomb’s malicious purpose is central to the
plot and to the playwright’s twofold plan: to create sympathy and forgiveness for
Allison/Kathy; and to indict my character, the neo-conservative, as the villain
instead.
In fact, however, Kathy Boudin and her comrades were deliberately building
an anti-personnel bomb filled with nails, intending to detonate it at a social
dance at Fort Dix. The dance would be attended by 18-year-old draftees and
their dates. The real Kathy Boudin was a calculating terrorist with no mercy for
those she regarded as her political enemies, even if they were innocent draftees.
My opposition to her parole, then and now, is because she committed heinous
acts and has refused to face up to them—not because she opposed the Vietnam
War.
The only article I ever wrote about her parole—which seems to have incensed
the playwright—opens with this sentence: “The separate reality of radicals,
which made them unable to comprehend their own deeds, was made vivid for me
in a New York Times story I read later, about the parole appeal of . . . Kathy
Boudin.”32 The author of Something You Did never sought to interview me to
find out what my real views were before defaming me in his play. He is a perfect
example of radicals who inhabit a separate reality—who are unable to
understand how others see them and therefore unable to understand themselves.
In Something You Did I am represented as a self-serving cynic and a
representative specimen of the system I once opposed. My character, “Gene,”
cuts million-dollar deals on the basis of his fame as a radical turncoat and
receives $50,000 speaking-fees to spread his noxious views. I wish. Perhaps the
playwright was thinking of Cornel West or Michael Moore. If they do command
such fees, it’s because they have had no second thoughts and because their talk
resonates with the prevailing views of the culturally-dominant left.
In addition to being materialistic and a narcissist, the character allegedly based
on me is portrayed as an embittered racist and a xenophobic Jew. In constructing
my character as that of a wealthy cynic the playwright chooses to confront a
radical cliché rather than the person who in his eyes was Boudin’s most
corrosive critic. As far as my attitudes toward money and non-Jews and blacks, I
am pretty much the same individual I was when I was on the left, though
hopefully wiser. I am still a missionary driven by certain ideals, rather than the
avaricious operator represented in the play. My conservative views are inspired
by what I see as the destructive ambitions and practices of the left, and their
negative impact on the very people—blacks, the poor, the Vietnamese—whom
radicals have claimed to support. Any honest reader of my work would know
that. A confrontation between a radical and a former radical who has had second
thoughts about the practical results of his commitments would have provided a
more interesting subject for this play than the progressive melodrama the
playwright has settled on
But melodrama it is, and therefore the conservative must be exposed not only
as an opponent of radical terrorists but as a racist; and since he is Jewish, a
tribalist—in short, a “reactionary.” In the play my character refers to the murder
of two civil rights workers in Mississippi while deliberately omitting the third,
James Chaney, because he was black. For this reactionary only Jews count.
Those who have followed my career and writings will know, on the other hand,
that I am more faithful to the civil-rights ideals of the Sixties, in which leftists
claim to believe, than the author of this play. In my autobiography Radical Son
the point I made about those issues, which the playwright grossly misrepresents,
is that Jewish radicals like Kathy Boudin feel superior to the groups they are
claiming to help, in this instance blacks, and so fail to understand them as
individuals. The terrorist act that provides the basis for this play was committed
by a group of violent black criminals whom Boudin mistook for black victims
and comrades.
The climax of the play is Allison’s parole-board appeal. She defends herself
by claiming that whatever she did and whatever mistakes she made were in
behalf of the Vietnamese and Cambodians, that the real criminals are the
Americans who supported the anti-Communist cause. In other words, there is
nothing she needs to regret about the political views that led her to commit her
heinous acts, and anyway the acts her adversaries committed were worse. There
are two problems with this attempted exculpation. The first is that Kathy Boudin
and the anti-war left really didn’t care that much about the Vietnamese and the
Cambodians. When America left Indo-China in 1975 and the Cambodians and
Vietnamese were being slaughtered by the Communists in one of the largest
genocides of the 20th century, there were no protests by the American left of
those atrocities—not by Kathy Boudin and not by her comrades-in-arms.
The second problem with Allison’s appeal is that the factual premise on which
it is based is a lie. Kathy Boudin was responsible for the death of a black
policeman, Waverly Brown—actually the first black policeman ever hired by the
Nyack police force. But the act that killed him was not and could not have been
a protest against the Vietnam War. Officer Brown was killed by Kathy Boudin
and her friends in 1981, eight years after American troops were withdrawn and
six after the last American officials had left Vietnam, and at a time when the
Communists were firmly in power.
This play is dishonest to its core. It misrepresents the reasons Kathy Boudin
committed her crime; it misrepresents the crime itself; it whitewashes her
culpability as a supporter of terrorist acts. Finally, on a personal note, it
misrepresents who I am and why I opposed her parole.
15

Who I Am

Last week an article appeared in the Jewish magazine Tablet, in which I am
portrayed as politically “homeless” and depressed, while the institutional base
from which I operate is described as long past its day. The article further alleges
that I have come to a point in my life where I feel my efforts as a conservative
have been “a waste.” All of these allegations are demonstrably false. They are
made by a writer who is a political leftist, tone-deaf and hostile to conservative
ideas. As it happens, within the past year I published a book called A Point in
Time, which is a summary of my views on life, of the battles I have waged, and
which is also the strongest possible affirmation of the philosophy that underlies
my conservative worldview. Far from being abandoned by other conservatives, I
have received the strongest possible endorsements from conservative reviewers
of this book, which Norman Podhoretz called “as moving as it is profound.”

This article was published on May 9, 2012;

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/who-i-am/print/

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is hardly past its peak. It is supported by
100,000 individual donors, which is more than three times the number of its
supporters ten years ago. Conservatives who have spoken at the Center’s events
include four contenders for this year’s Republican presidential nomination—
Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and Cain—former president George Bush, his
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his Attorney General John Ashcroft,
Senator Marco Rubio and his colleagues John McCain, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions
and Mitch McConnell, Speaker John Boehner, former Majority Leader, Tom
DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Victor
Davis Hanson. A recent pamphlet I wrote called Barack Obama’s Rules for
Revolution has sold half-a-million copies, with another two million distributed.
Notwithstanding Tablet’s description of the Center as a declining institution it
has doubled its revenues in the last ten years and its influence in the conservative
movement through its websites frontpagemag.com and discoverthenetworks. org
is greater than ever.
I obviously made a mistake in agreeing to be interviewed by someone who
misrepresented what I told him and ignored the evidence that contradicted his
distortions. For being so unguarded, I owe an apology to my friends and
supporters, several of whom expressed their dismay to me after reading the
article. It is partly their concern that has prompted me to set the record straight.
But in a perverse way I also appreciate the opportunity provided by the author of
this tedious piece of writing because he has caused me to look at how integral to
the conservative movement we at the David Horowitz Freedom Center are, and
how deeply we are indebted to it as well.
When I received Tablet’s request for an interview, I was inclined to say yes
because it came from a magazine with which I had a history, and which
occasionally published first-rate conservative writers like Bret Stephens and Lee
Smith. Tablet even published a defense of Nonie Darwish that I wrote when she
was attacked by one of their writers. Then I was disarmed by the author himself
who sent me an email about his intentions:
I am a leftist, though not a dogmatic one, and I usually don’t write directly
about politics. For The Nation, I write mostly for the Books and Arts
section, which isn’t nearly as ideologically-driven as the magazine’s
editorial page. . . . So, we may not find much common ground politically,
but that may make for a more stimulating piece. I’m less interested in
debating Islamo-fascism than exploring your work’s position at the
intersection of autobiography, politics, history, manners, and polemic. I
think I can do so fairly.

In the past, my work has been attacked by leftists who will take a phrase from
a fund-raising letter or a heated polemic and then omit its context or distort its
meaning to discredit my work. The prospect of a leftist writer distinguishing the
intellectual from the polemical in my work appeared to be an opportunity to
open a conversation in a medium like Tablet, which is something I had wanted
to do.
When the article “David Horowitz Is Homeless” appeared, it was obvious that
none of its author’s assurances was sincere. Here is an example of his interest in
literary styles rather than in scoring political points: “If what was once labeled
extremism is now mainstream GOP boilerplate, then Horowitz deserves at least
some of the credit.”
Not only was this a political attack, it was wildly inaccurate. The Republican
Party today finds itself defending policies that were once the province of liberal
Democrats like John F. Kennedy, specifically capital-gains tax cuts, balanced
books, strong defense budgets, color-blind racial standards and aggressively
anti-totalitarian foreign policies. Only an extremist of the left could so mislabel a
party that had just nominated a former Massachusetts governor as its presidential
candidate.
But the author wasn’t done. He also wanted to pin Republican “extremism” on
me, the man whom conservatives had allegedly abandoned: “In a widely
distributed 2000 pamphlet called ‘The Art of Political War,’ praised by Karl
Rove and endorsed by 35 state Republican party chairmen, Horowitz wrote: ‘In
political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy
the enemy’s fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats
as they would a debate with the Oxford Political Union, as though winning
depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the
audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely
different. . . . Politics is war. Don’t forget it.’ If you can remember a time when
conservative discourse sounded like an Oxford lecture hall, then you have a
sense of how far Horowitz has helped to steer this ship off course.” The missing
context here is that the little pamphlet I wrote twelve years ago argued that it is
Democrats—not Republicans—who have transformed the political arena into a
combat zone, and who conduct politics as war by other means.
Of course the claim that I am responsible for changing the entire tenor of the
Republicans’ political strategy belies the thesis of the article, which is that I am
“homeless.” On the other hand I did remark to the author that Republicans
haven’t really heeded the advice I gave in The Art of Political War. Thirty-five
state Republican Party chairmen did endorse the pamphlet, but none of them
acted on its recommendations. Republicans have come a long way since I wrote
it, thanks in the main to the emergence of the Tea Party. But they still have a
long way to go. So yes, I am not happy with the state of the Republican Party on
this score, but what conservative is? In the interview, I also said that the
Republican presidential debates had made me ill, but what conservative was
happy with the way the candidates tore into each other with ugly personal
attacks, or insisted on arguing about contraceptives and theology while
America’s Nero fiddled and the country burned?
Here is the way Tablet’s article describes my alleged decline and fall on the
right: “In his turn-of-the-21st-century heyday, shortly after publishing Hating
Whitey, an assault on affirmative action and race-based quotas—or ‘the anti-
white racism of the left’—that preceded his campaign against reparations for
slavery, Horowitz appeared on op-ed pages, talk radio, and television nearly
every day. (He even wrote a bi-weekly column33 for the liberal Salon.com.) But
in 2012, his books are not just ignored by the New York Times, but by the Weekly
Standard and National Review.”
Again the facts are different. Even in my “heyday,” I was never on television
or talk radio nearly every day and, except for my Salon adventure, I never
appeared regularly in any op-ed pages. Salon’s editors dropped me when they
decided to charge their readers for access, telling me that Salon’s leftwing
audience wouldn’t pay for a publication that had a column by me in it. My book
Hating Whitey did cost me my liberal New York publisher whose editor told me
that the Free Press would never publish a book with the title I asked for: “Hating
White People Is A Politically Correct Idea.” It is true that The New York Times
stopped reviewing my books when I became a conservative. But Tablet’s claim
that today my books are ignored by The Weekly Standard and National Review is
just false. My last two books, published in 2011, received laudatory reviews in
both magazines.
A half-truth lies behind the Tablet author’s fabrication. I did tell him that a
book I wrote with Ben Johnson, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals
Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9/11, was not reviewed
by the conservative press. This was especially troubling to me because its
subject was important and because 18 sitting Republican senators and
congressmen, including the ranking members of the armed services, intelligence
and foreign affairs committees recommended the book in a blurb on its cover. In
my view the conservative media may have avoided the book because the right is
generally shy of holding Democrats’ feet to the fire when it comes to issues of
patriotism, even though the Democrats’ disgraceful, not to say seditious behavior
during the Iraq War certainly merited such scrutiny.
A more significant falsehood purveyed in “David Horowitz Is Homeless” is
the insinuation that I look on the conservative half of my life as a “waste.” This
insidious suggestion goes to the heart of the author’s failure to perform on his
promise to “[explore] your work’s position at the intersection of autobiography,
politics, history, manners, and polemic.” And to do so fairly.
The cause of that failure is once again the author’s failure to respect
conservative ideas: “One need not subscribe to the lurid pamphlets sold by his
Freedom Center to get the sense that Horowitz has sacrificed his intellectual
capital to devote himself more fully to the movement,” he writes. That is pure
invention. The pamphlets I have written for the Center are indeed polemical, but
they are only “lurid” to someone so far to the left that he cannot handle their
insights. My essay, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, draws on a lifetime of
experience with the left. Yes, it is a pamphlet and a polemic, but that is only the
beginning of the story. Marx’s most famous pamphlet, to take one obvious
example, is an insidious and fallacious work, but it would never occur to the
Tablet author—or to anyone—to suggest that Marx sacrificed his intellectual
capital to write The Communist Manifesto just because it is a polemic.
There is another kind of intellectual work that I do, which has of late become
a preferred vocation of mine, and which is the source of the author’s final and
most egregious claim that I consider my conservative work a waste. In two small
volumes of which A Point in Time is one, I have attempted to summarize what I
have learned about life in my seventy-three years on this earth. I have pursued
this aspect of my work in between my political tasks. It is the failure to
appreciate the disparate nature of the two efforts—one reflective, the other active
—that has led the writer to his false conclusion. Here is the way the caricature
concludes: “‘I came out of the left through a lot of pain and a sense of enormous
waste,’ Horowitz said. ‘I was an emotional powder keg. I had gotten to age 35—
and I’m a very hard worker, and had written a lot—everything that I had done
was a waste.’ This is the part of the story when the apostate sees the light.
Horowitz isn’t sure he still does. ‘Now that I’m older, I see that it’s all a waste. I
gotta live with that.’”
In fact, I still see the same light I saw when I turned my back on the political
left and its malevolent agendas 30 years ago. The waste I experienced as an
advocate for a bad cause was a bitter one. I had invested my life in a cause that
was built on falsehoods and responsible for great evil. But the philosophical
conclusions I have come to in my later years are quite different from those
regrets. I am proud of what I have done for the conservative cause—for
individual liberty and economic freedom, and for the defense of our country. My
late-life conclusions are not those of an “apostate” and they are not about
politics. They are about life itself. They are a recognition that, in the end, we are
all going to disappear along with everything we have known. The entire world
we inhabited will vanish. That is the existential truth which is our burden, and
there is no way to escape it.
There are two principal ways that human beings deal with this truth, which is
the theme of A Point in Time. Since, for most of us, a life that is empty of
meaning is finally unlivable, we seek a redemption that will make our lives
meaningful. One way to do this is to put our fate in the hands of a Creator, who
will reveal its sense when our earthly journey is complete. Another is to invest
our lives in a movement that promises to redeem this world by instituting social
justice. The search for an earthly redemption is what the left is about, and it is
the source of the greatest evils of our time. That is what I have learned in my
life, and my radical detractors are incapable of understanding it.
16

Peter and Me

It is a real pleasure to be introducing my friend Peter Collier who has written a
wonderful book about a remarkable conservative which he has titled, Political
Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Introducing Peter is also a
challenge. It is not easy to present briefly someone who has been your closest
friend, political ally and working partner for 40 years, let alone do him justice.
So I concentrate on two gifts that Peter gave me which changed my life and
career, and whose virtues are also evident in his book.
I first encountered Peter—that is the right word—when I was a teaching
assistant in a Shakespeare course at the University of California, Berkeley. Peter
still remembers the date—it was April 1961. I had just handed back a paper I had
graded on Richard III when I saw out of the corner of my eye a student who was
coming at me as though he was going to hit me. This was my introduction to
Peter, who had missed a year of school—we are roughly the same age—and
wound up as my student.

This is the text of my introduction at a Wednesday Morning Club event on

August 14, 2012 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

The paper had a big “C” on it, actually a C+, and he was not happy. As it
happened, the plus reflected my own ambivalence about the grade I had given. It
was a very well-written paper and C papers are never well written. But I was less
interested in the writing than I was in the content, specifically the answer to the
question I had posed when I gave out the assignment, and which I felt his paper
had failed to address. Nonetheless, there was still that literary style that no C
student could produce.
To resolve my dilemma and defuse the situation, I suggested that he take his
paper to the other teaching assistant for a second opinion and another grade. He
took my offer and was given an A, which was a relief to both of us. He paid me
back seven years later by mocking what I thought was the high point of my
academic career, which was a dramatic lecture—Peter would say melodramatic
—on King Lear. At the Ramparts offices where we were working, Peter would
come around a corner and whine, “But I am bound upon a wheel of fire”—one
of Lear’s lines that I had favored in my lecture.
Peter was already an editor at Ramparts when I first arrived at its San
Francisco offices in 1968. Improbably, we became office allies and then friends.
Our relationship also picked up where we had left off. He became my critic and
what I will call my chastener, the more so it seemed the closer we became. And
close we did become, first as allies in a struggle to take control of Ramparts and
then to run it and keep it alive.
We were a yin and yang couple. Peter had had a harsh childhood that made
him skeptical about people, sometimes even cynical, and relentlessly realistic
about the consequences one’s actions might entail. Although we were both
leftists, Peter’s outlook was really conservative; he was what I would call an
organic conservative. He had that core penchant for pessimism that
conservatives do. He was always expecting things to turn out worse than they
usually did, and pleasantly surprised when they didn’t.
I was Peter’s opposite, an optimist and a natural-born believer. I had grown up
a sheltered child in a Marxist bubble, and was a dreamer of utopian dreams both
personal and global. At the same time my vision was of the tunnel variety; Peter
called it autistic. I rarely saw the ditches by the side of the road, while the
horizons I contemplated were always bright.
The source of my optimism, which veered on the cockeyed, was my mother
who protected and encouraged me. My father was the practical parent with his
eye on the ditches. I didn’t really appreciate him until I fell into one of those
ditches, as it happened a very deep one. In the course of my troubles I consulted
a therapist—in fact one whom Peter had recommended and about whom he
would write an arresting portrait, published in a collection of “great American
stories about therapy” titled On the Couch.
The therapist pointed out to me that my father had actually done me a favor by
being so critical, by pointing out that life does have its pitfalls—in effect by
being the one in the household with a conservative insight. The painful
circumstances into which I had fallen, and which culminated in the murder of an
innocent woman, now opened my eyes to the possibility that I might be wrong,
tragically wrong, in the way I approached the world outside me and understood
its actors. That was the conservative turning point in my life.
It also taught me to appreciate Peter, and what he has done for me over time.
Peter has always been the harshest of my critics among those who were not
motivated by politics to attack me. He was the critic therefore to whom I
listened. Peter is my reality-check. And that is his first gift to me.
 The second gift is reflected in that plus in the C+ I gave him when he was a
student at Berkeley. Peter was always the writer in our partnership. When I first
met him, I was a variation of the Jack Carson character in Arsenic and Old Lace,
the cop who wants to be a playwright and says, “I got great ideas but I can’t spell
’em.”
Because of my interest in the ruling class, and a famous office-memo I wrote
about the Rockefellers, Peter asked me to be his co-author on a biography of the
Rockefeller family. I was a Marxist; I had no interest in biography and no idea of
how to write one. But I said yes and the collaboration turned out to be a
transforming one for me. It was in the course of writing this book and two
subsequent biographies of American dynasties that Peter taught me what a
narrative was, and what writing was about.
The Rockefeller book became a New York Times best-seller, but the lessons I
had learned under Peter’s sometimes harsh tutelage, and the self-righteous pig-
headedness which was my radical birthright, led to a falling-out between us. We
didn’t speak for two years.
During this time I undertook an inventory of my failures both as an individual
and as a missionary. The introspection enabled to me for the first time to listen to
others, to appreciate that I might be wrong, and—more painful yet—culpable,
which included my relationship with Peter. It was I who finally picked up the
phone and called him. We met in a Berkeley coffee-shop and began catching up
on what each of us had been doing during the two-year gap, sharing our war
stories. And then, just as we were warming up to each other, Peter said from out
of the blue: “We’re mediocre.” I wanted to hit him.
Depressed as I was at this juncture of my life, my delusions of grandeur had
not entirely died. My optimism was in my DNA, which is why I needed a
reality-checker—why I needed Peter. Peter was still and would always remain
the yin in our couple, on the lookout for the downside before going forward.
He was and still is a beautiful writer. The biography he has written of Jeane
Kirkpatrick is the kind of book, sensitive to character, elegant of style,
appreciative of the trials of a human existence, that each of us would like to have
written about ourselves.
 PART II

Reflections on the Left

1

Goodbye to All That

(co-authored with Peter Collier)

When we tell our old radical friends that we voted for Ronald Reagan last
November, the response is usually one of annoyed incredulity. After making
sure that we are not putting them on, our old friends make nervous jokes about
Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly, about gods that have failed, about aging
yuppies ascending to consumer heaven in their BMWs. We remind them of an
old adage: “Anyone under 40 who isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone over 40
who is a socialist has no brain.”
Inevitably the talk becomes bitter. One old comrade, after a tirade in which
she had denounced us as reactionaries and crypto-fascists, finally sputtered:
“The worst thing is that you’ve turned your back on the Sixties!” That was
exactly right. Casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of finally
saying goodbye to all that—to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third-
Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical
and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to
mainstream politics.

*This article was published as “Lefties for Reagan” in a Sunday edition of

The Washington Post, March 17, 1985.

The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to
portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were
active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the
best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as
well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil-
rights and antiwar activists and ending as co-editors of the New Left magazine
Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast
slouching through America and also to urge it on through non-editorial activities
we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA
files we both accumulated. Like other radicals in those days, we were against
electoral politics, regarding voting as one of those charades used by the ruling
class to legitimate its power. We were even more against Reagan, then governor
of California, having been roughed up by his troopers during the People’s Park
demonstrations in Berkeley and tear-gassed by his National Guard helicopters
during the University of California’s Third World Liberation Front Strike. But
neither elections nor elected officials seemed particularly important compared
with the auguries of revolution the left saw everywhere by the end of the decade
—in the way the nefarious Richard Nixon was widening the war in Indochina; in
the unprovoked attacks by paramilitary police against the Black Panther Party; in
the formation of the Weather Underground, a group willing to pick up the gun or
the bomb. It was a time when the apocalypse struggling to be born seemed to
need only the slightest assist from the radical midwife.
When we were in the voting-booth this past November—in different precincts
but of the same mind—we both thought back to the day in 1969 when Tom
Hayden came by the office and, after getting a Ramparts donation to buy gas
masks and other combat issue for Black Panther “guerrillas,” announced
portentously: “Fascism is here, and we’re all going to be in jail by the end of the
year.” We agreed wholeheartedly with this apocalyptic vision and in fact had
just written in an editorial: “The system cannot be revitalized. It must be
overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary.”
Every thought and perception in those days was filtered through the dark and
distorting glass of the Vietnam War. The left was hooked on Vietnam. It was an
addictive drug whose rush was a potent mix of melodrama, self-importance and
moral rectitude. Vietnam was a universal solvent—the explanation for every evil
we saw and the justification for every excess we committed. Trashing the
windows of merchants on the main streets of America seemed warranted by the
notion that these petty-bourgeois shopkeepers were cogs in the system of
capitalist exploitation that was obliterating Vietnam. Fantasizing the death of
local cops seemed warranted by the role they played as an occupying army in
America’s black ghettos, those mini-Vietnams we yearned to see explode in
domestic wars of liberation. Vietnam caused us to acquire a new appreciation for
foreign tyrants like Kim Il Sung of North Korea.34 Vietnam also caused us to
support the domestic extortionism and violence of groups like the Black
Panthers, and to dismiss derisively Martin Luther King, Jr. as an “Uncle Tom.”
(The left has conveniently forgotten this fact now that it finds it expedient to
invoke King’s name and reputation to further its domestic politics.)
How naive was the New Left can be debated, but by the end of the 1960s we
were not political novices. We knew that bad news from Southeast Asia—the
reports of bogged-down campaigns and the weekly body-counts announced by
Walter Cronkite—was good for the radical agenda. The more repressive our
government in dealing with dissent at home, the more recruits for our cause and
the sooner the appearance of the revolutionary Armageddon.
Our assumption that Vietnam would be the political and moral fulcrum by
which we would tip this country toward revolution foresaw every possibility
except one: that the United States would pull out. Never had we thought that the
United States, the arch-imperial power, would of its own volition withdraw from
Indochina. This development violated a primary article of our hand-me-down
Marxism: that political action through normal channels could not alter the course
of the war. The system we had wanted to overthrow worked tardily and only at
great cost, but it worked.
When American troops finally came home, some of us took the occasion to
begin a long and painful reexamination of our political assumptions and beliefs.
Others did not. For the diehards, there was a post-Vietnam syndrome in its own
way as debilitating as that suffered by people who had fought there—a sense of
emptiness rather than exhilaration, a paradoxical desire to hold onto and breathe
life back into the experience that had been their high for so many years.
As the post-Vietnam decade progressed, the diehards on the left ignored
conclusions about the viability of democratic traditions that might have been
drawn from America’s exit from Vietnam and from the Watergate crisis that
followed it—a time when the man whose ambitions they had feared most was
removed from office by a constitutional process rather than by a coup. The only
lessons of Vietnam that seemed to interest the left were those that emphasized
the danger of American power abroad and the need to diminish it, a view that
was injected into the Democratic Party with the triumph of the McGovern wing.
The problem with this use of Vietnam as a moral text for American policy was
that the pages following the fall of Saigon had been whited out.
No lesson, for instance, was seen in Hanoi’s ruthless conquest of the South,
the establishment of a police-state in Saigon and the political oblivion of the
National Liberation Front, whose struggle we on the left had so passionately
supported. It was not that credible information was lacking. Jean Lacouture
wrote in 1976: “Never before have we had such proof of so many detained after
a war. Not in Moscow in 1917. Not in Madrid in 1939, not in Paris and Rome in
1944, nor in Havana in 1959. . . .” But this eminent French journalist, who had
been regarded as something of an oracle when he was reporting America’s
derelictions during the war, was now dismissed as a “sellout.”
In 1977, when some former antiwar activists signed an Appeal to the
Conscience of Vietnam because of the more than 200,000 prisoners languishing
in “reeducation centers” and a new round of self-immolations by Buddhist
monks, they were chastised by activist David Dellinger, Institute for Policy
Studies fellow Richard Barnet and other keepers of the flame in a New York
Times advertisement that said in part: “The present government of Vietnam
should be hailed for its moderation and for its extraordinary effort to achieve
reconciliation among all of its people.”
When tens of thousands of unreconciled “boat people” began to flee the
repression of their Communist rulers, Joan Baez and others who spoke out in
their behalf were attacked for breaking ranks with Hanoi.
Something might also have been learned from the fate of wretched Cambodia.
But leftists seemed so addicted to finding an American cause at the root of every
problem that they couldn’t recognize indigenous evils. As the Khmer Rouge
were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a
Cambodian liberation, “a new era of economic development and social justice.”
The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million
Cambodians.
Finally, Vietnam emerged as an imperialist power, taking control of Laos,
invading Cambodia and threatening Thailand. But in a recent editorial The
Nation explains that the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia “to stop the killing and
restore some semblance of civilized government to the devastated country.” This
bloody occupation, The Nation says, is actually a “rescue mission,” and what has
happened should not “obscure the responsibility of the United States for the
disasters in Indochina,” disasters that are being caused by our playing the “China
card” and refusing to normalize relations with Vietnam. These acts on the part of
the United States “make Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia unlikely;” only
the White House can “remove the pressures on Vietnam from all sides [that]
would bring peace to a ravaged land.” Such reasoning recalls the wonderful line
from the Costa-Gavras film Z: “Always blame the Americans. Even when you’re
wrong, you’re right.”
Another unacknowledged lesson from Indochina involves the way in which
Vietnam has become a satellite of the Soviet Union: paying for foreign aid by
sending labor-brigades to its benefactor. This development doesn’t mesh well
with the left’s ongoing romantic vision of Hanoi. It also threatens the left’s
obstinate refusal to admit that during the mid-70s—a time when American
democracy was trying to heal itself from the twin traumas of the war and
Watergate—the U.S.S.R. was demonstrating that totalitarianism abhors a
vacuum by moving into Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
Instead of reevaluating the Soviets because of change in what we used to call
“the objective conditions,” the left rationalizes Soviet aggression as the spasms
of a petrified bureaucracy whose policies are annoying mainly because they
distract attention from U.S. malfeasance around the world.
If they were capable of looking intently at the Soviet Union, leftists and
liberals alike would have to concur with Susan Sontag’s contention—which
many of them jeered at when she announced it—that communism is simply left-
wing fascism.
One of the reasons the left has been so cautious in its reassessments of the
Soviets is the fiction that the U.S.S.R. is on the side of history. This assumption
is echoed in Fred Halliday’s euphoric claim, in a recent issue of New Left
Review, that Soviet support was crucial to 14 Third World revolutions during the
era of “détente”—including such triumphs of human progress as Iran and South
Yemen—and in Andrew Kopkind’s fatuous observation that “the Soviet Union
has almost always sided with the revolutionists, the liberationists, the
insurgents.” In Ethiopia? Propped up by 20,000 Cuban legionnaires, the Marxist
government of Mengistu Haile Mariam has as its main accomplishment a “Red
Campaign of Terror” (its official designation) that killed thousands of people.
Where were those who cheer the Soviets’ work in behalf of the socialist Zeitgeist
when this episode took place? Or this past fall, when the Marxist liberator
squandered more than $40 million on a party celebrating the tenth anniversary of
his murderous rule while his people starved? Where were they to point out the
moral when capitalist America rushed in 250 million metric tons of grain to help
allay the Ethiopian starvation, while the Soviets were managing to contribute
only ten million? Where are they now that Mengistu withholds emergency food
supplies from the starving provinces of Eritrea and Tigre, because the people
there are in rebellion against his tyranny?
Reagan is often upbraided for having described the Soviet Union as an evil
empire. Those opposed to this term seem to be offended esthetically rather than
politically. Just how wide of the mark is the president? Oppressing an array of
nationalities whose populations far outnumber its own, Russia is the last of the
old European empires, keeping in subjugation not only formerly independent
states such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—Hitler’s gift to Stalin—but also the
nations of Eastern Europe. Every country “liberated” into the Soviet bloc has
been transformed into a national prison, where the borders are guarded to keep
the inmates in rather than the foreigners out.
The war in Afghanistan is much more a metaphor for the Soviets’ view of the
world than Vietnam ever was for America’s. Of the approximately 16 million
people living in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet invasion, an estimated one
million have already been killed and wounded. There are now about four million
refugees, a figure that does not include “internal” refugees—the hundreds of
thousands of villagers forced to leave their scorched earth for the Soviet-
controlled big cities, the only places where food is available. Or the thousands of
Afghan children who been taken to the Soviet Union to be “educated” and who
will eventually be returned to their native land as spies and quislings.
Soviet strategy is based on a brutal rejoinder to Mao’s poetic notion—which
we old New Leftists used to enjoy citing—about guerrillas as fish swimming in a
sea of popular support. The Soviet solution is to boil the sea and drain it, leaving
the fish exposed and gasping on barren land. The Russian presence is
characterized by systematic destruction of crops and medical facilities,
indiscriminate terror against the civilian population, carpet-bombings and the
deadly “yellow rain” that even the leftist Peoples’ Tribunal in Paris—successor
to the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal—has said is being used in
Afghanistan.
During each December anniversary of the Soviet invasion, when liberal
politicians rediscover the mujahedin guerrillas in the hills after eleven months of
moral amnesia, there are blithe references to Afghanistan as “Russia’s Vietnam.”
Those who invoke the analogy seem to think that simply by doing so they have
doomed the Russian stormtroopers to defeat. But this analogy is based on a
misunderstanding of what Vietnam was and what Afghanistan is. Unlike
America’s high-tech television war, Afghanistan is one of those old-fashioned
encounters that take place in the dark. The Soviets make no attempt to win hearts
and minds; the My Lais that are daily occurrences there cause no shock because
they do not appear on Moscow TV; there are no scenes of the peasant children
whose hands and faces have been destroyed by antipersonnel bombs in the
shapes of toy trucks and butterflies that the Soviets have strewn over the Afghan
countryside; there are no images of body-bags being offloaded from Soviet
transports. Because there is no media coverage, there can be no growing
revulsion on the home front, no protests on Soviet campuses and in Soviet
streets, no clamor to bring the boys home.
Afghanistan is not the Soviets’ Vietnam for another reason. Not only are the
Soviet people kept from seeing the atrocities their government has committed;
the rest of the world is blacked out too. At the height of the Vietnam War there
was a noncombatant army of foreign journalists present to witness its conduct. In
Afghanistan they are forbidden, as are the Red Cross and all other international
relief agencies that were integral to what happened in Vietnam. Without those
witnesses, Afghanistan is a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.” In Vietnam we
waged a war against ourselves and lost. The Soviets will not let that happen to
them. The truth of the Vietnam analogy is not that guerrillas must inevitably bog
down and defeat a superior force of invaders, but that a war against indigenous
forces by a superpower can be won if it is waged against a backdrop of
international ignorance and apathy. The proper analogy for Afghanistan is not
Vietnam at all but rather 1930s Spain—not in the nature of the war, but in the
symbolic value it has for our time, or should have, in terms of democracy’s will
to resist aggression. Aid to the mujahedin should not be a dirty little secret of the
CIA but a matter of public policy and national honor.
Perhaps the leading feature of the left today is the moral selectivity that
French social critic Jean-François Revel has identified as “the syndrome of the
cross-eyed left.” Leftists can describe Vietnam’s conquest and colonization of
Cambodia as a “rescue mission,” while reviling Ronald Reagan for applying the
same term to the Grenada operation, although better than 90 percent of the
island’s population told independent pollsters they were grateful for the arrival
of U.S. troops. Forgetting for a moment that Afghanistan is “Russia’s Vietnam,”
leftists call Grenada “America’s Afghanistan,” although people in Afghanistan
—as one member of the resistance there told us—would literally die for the
elections held in Grenada.
The left’s memory can be as selective as its morality. When it comes to past
commitments that have failed, the leftist mentality is utterly unable to produce a
coherent balance-sheet, let alone a profit-and-loss statement. The attitude toward
Soviet penetration of the Americas is a good example. Current enthusiasm for
the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua should recall to those of us old enough to
remember a previous enthusiasm for Cuba 25 years ago. Many of us began our
New Leftism with the Fair Play for Cuba demonstrations. We raised our voices
and chanted, “Cuba Si! Yanqui No!” We embraced Fidel Castro not only
because of the flamboyant personal style of the barbudos of his 26th of July
Movement but also because Castro assured the world that his revolution
belonged to neither Communists nor capitalists, that it was neither red nor black
but Cuban olive-green.
We attributed Castro’s expanding links with Moscow to the U.S.-sponsored
invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and then to the “secret war” waged against Cuba by
U.S. intelligence and paramilitary organizations. But while Castro’s apologists in
the United States may find it expedient to maintain these fictions, Carlos Franqui
and other old Fidelistas now in exile have made it clear that Castro embraced the
Soviets even before the U.S. hostility became decisive, and that he steered his
country into the Soviet bloc with considerable enthusiasm. Before the Bay of
Pigs he put a Soviet general in charge of Cuban forces. Before the Bay of Pigs
he destroyed Cuba’s democratic trade-union movement, although its elected
leadership was drawn from his own 26th of July Movement. He did so because
he knew that the Stalinists of Cuba’s Communist Party would be dependable
cheerleaders and efficient policemen of his emerging dictatorship.
A symbolic event along the way that many of us missed was Castro’s
imprisonment of his old comrade Huber Matos, liberator of Matanzas province
and one of the four key military leaders of the revolution. Matos’s crime:
criticizing the growing influence of Cuban Communists, thereby jeopardizing
Castro’s plans to use them as his palace-guard. Matos’s sentence: 20 years in a
four-by-eleven-foot concrete box. Given such a precedent, how can we fail to
support Edén Pastora for taking up arms against early signs of similar
totalitarianism in Nicaragua?
What has come of Cuba’s revolution to break the chains of American
imperialism? Soviets administer the still one-crop Cuban economy; Soviets train
the Cuban army; and Soviet subsidies, fully one-quarter of Cuba’s gross national
product, prevent the Cuban treasury from going broke. Before the revolution
there were more than 35 independent newspapers and radio stations in Havana.
Now, there is only the official voice of Granma, the Cuban Pravda, and a
handful of other outlets spouting the same party line. Today Cuba is a more
abject and deformed colony of the Soviet empire than it ever was of America.
The arch-rebel of our youth, Fidel Castro, has become a party hack who
cheerfully endorsed the rape of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and endorses the
ongoing plunder of Afghanistan today—an aging pimp who sells his young men
to the Russians for use in their military adventures in return for $10 billion a
year.
In leftist circles, of course, such arguments are anathema, and no historical
precedent, however daunting, can prevent outbreaks of radical chic. That
perennial delinquent Abbie Hoffman will lead his Potemkin-village tours of
Managua. The Hollywood stars will dish up Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega
as an exotic hors d’oeuvre on the Beverly Hills cocktail circuit. In the self-
righteous moral glow accompanying such gatherings, it will be forgotten that,
through the offices of the U.S. government, more economic and military aid was
provided the Sandinistas in the first 18 months following their takeover than was
given to Somoza in the previous 20 years, and that this aid was cut off primarily
because of clear signs that political pluralism in Nicaragua was being terminated.
Adherents of today’s version of radical chic may never take seriously the
words of Sandinista directorate member Bayardo Arce when he says that
elections are a “hindrance” to the goal of “a dictatorship of the proletariat” and
necessary only “as an expedient to deprive our enemies of an argument.” They
will ignore former Sandinista hero and now contra leader Edén Pastora who sees
the junta as traitors who have sold out the revolutionary dream: “Now that we
are occupied by foreign forces from Cuba and Russia, now that we are governed
by a dictatorial government of nine men, now more than ever the [anti-
]Sandinista struggle is justified.” They will ignore opposition leader Arturo
Cruz, an early supporter of the Sandinista revolution and previously critical of
the contras, when the worsening situation makes him change his mind and ask
the Reagan administration to support the contras in a statement that should have
the same weight as Andrei Sakharov’s plea to the West to match the Soviet arms
buildup.
American leftists propose solutions for the people of Central America that
they wouldn’t dare propose for themselves. These armchair revolutionaries
project their self-hatred and their contempt for the privileges of democracy—
which allow them to live well and to think badly—onto people who would be
only too grateful for the luxuries they disdain. Dismissing “bourgeois” rights as
a decadent frill that the peoples of the Third World can’t afford, leftists spread-
eagle the Central Americans between dictators of the right and dictators of the
left. The latter, of course, are their chosen instruments for bringing social justice
and economic wellbeing, although no leftist revolution has yet provided
impressive returns in either area,, and most have made the lives of their people
considerably more wretched than they were before.
Voting is symbolic behavior, a way of evaluating what one’s country has been
as well as what it might become. We do not accept Reagan’s policies chapter-
and-verse—especially in domestic policy, which we haven’t discussed here—but
we agree with his vision of the world as a place increasingly inhospitable to
democracy and increasingly dangerous for America.
One of the few saving-graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of
youth. Looking back on the left’s revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years,
we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: we live in
an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made
worse—much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a
lifetime’s experience it seems about right.
2

My Vietnam Lessons

When I see today’s protesters in the flush of youthful idealism with their signs
proclaiming “No Vietnams in Central America,” a feeling of ineffable sadness
overtakes me. For 20 years ago I was one of them. In 1962, as a graduate student
at Berkeley, I wrote the first book of New Left protest, Student, and helped to
organize perhaps the first antiwar demonstration opposing what we denounced
as U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In the mid-Sixties I went to England and helped
to organize the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which supported what we called
the Vietnamese struggle for independence from the United States, as well as the
International War Crimes Tribunal, which brought American war atrocities
under intense and damning scrutiny but ignored atrocities committed by
Communist forces in Vietnam. While in England I also wrote The Free World
Colossus, a New Left history of the Cold War, which was used as a radical text
in colleges and in the growing movement against the Vietnam War. At the end
of the Sixties I returned to America as an editor of Ramparts, the most widely
read New Left magazine. Our most famous cover appeared during Richard
Nixon’s campaign in 1972 for a second term. It featured a photograph of the My
Lai massacre with a sign superimposed and planted among the corpses, saying
“Re-Elect the President.”

This was a speech to a congressional seminar on the tenth anniversary of

the fall of Saigon, April 10, 1985.

Let me make this perfectly clear. Those of us who inspired and then led the
antiwar movement did not want just to stop the killing, as so many veterans of
those domestic battles now claim. We wanted the Communists to win. It is true
that some of us may have said we only wanted the United States to get out of
Vietnam, but we understood that this meant the Communists would win. “Bring
the troops home” was our slogan; the fall of Saigon was the result.
There was a political force in American life that did want a peace, which
would not also mean a Communist victory—a peace that would deny Hanoi its
conquest and preserve the integrity of South Vietnam. That force was led by our
archenemy, President Richard Nixon, whose campaign slogans were “Peace with
Honor” in Vietnam and “Law and Order” at home. But we did not want “honor”
because that meant preserving the government of South Vietnam; and we did not
respect “law and order” because respecting the democratic process would have
meant that the majority in America, who supported President Nixon and South
Vietnam, would have prevailed.
Like today’s young radicals, we Sixties activists had a double standard when
it came to making moral and political judgments. We judged other countries and
political movements—meaning socialist countries and revolutionary movements
—by the futures we imagined they could have if only the United States and its
allies would get out of their way. We judged America, on the other hand, by its
actual performance, which we held up to a standard of high and even impossible
ideals. Of course, if we had been able to look at the facts we would have seen
that America was more tolerant, more democratic, and more open to change than
the countries and movements to whom we gave our support. But we were unable
to do that. We were, in the then-fashionable term, “alienated” from what was
near to us, unable to judge it objectively.
Some of this alienation—a perennial and essential ingredient of all political
leftism—could be attributed to youth itself, the feeling that we could understand
the world better and accomplish more than our elders could. But there was
another dimension to our disaffection, an ideology that committed us to “truths”
behind the common-sense surface of things. Like most of the left’s leaders, I was
a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and therefore,
even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by
ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist
democracies. I attributed their negative features to underdevelopment and to the
capitalist pasts from which they had emerged. I believed that Marxist economic
planning was the most rational solution to their underdevelopment and would
soon bring them unparalleled prosperity—an idea refuted as dramatically by the
experience of the last 70 years as the ancillary notion that private property is the
source of all tyranny and that socialist states would soon become free. (They
might become free, but only by giving up their socialist delusions.) The same
Marxist analysis told me that America, however amenable to reform in the past,
was set on a course that would make it increasingly rigid, repressive, and
ultimately fascist. The United States was the leviathan of a global imperialist
system under attack at home and abroad. Its ruling class could not afford to
retreat from this challenge; it could only grow more reactionary and repressive.
Those expectations, wrong in every respect, were not an idiosyncratic theory
of mine but the core of the New Left’s view of the world generally and of its
opposition to America’s Vietnam War in particular. The New Left believed that
in Vietnam America’s corporate liberal empire had reached a point of no return.
As a result, electoral politics and any effort to reform them were futile and
counterproductive. The only way to alter America’s imperial course was to take
to the streets—first to organize resistance to the war and then to liberate
ourselves from the corporate capitalist system. That was why we were in the
streets in the first place, and why we did not take a hard stand against the bomb-
throwers in our midst.
What took place that changed my views and gave me second thoughts? As our
opposition to the war grew more violent and our prophecies of impending
fascism more intense, I took note of how we were actually being treated by the
system we condemned. By the decade’s end we had deliberately crossed the line
of legitimate dissent and abused every First Amendment privilege and right
reserved to us as Americans. While American boys were dying overseas, we spat
on the flag, broke the law, denigrated and disrupted the institutions of
government and education, gave comfort and aid, even revealing classified
secrets, to the enemy. Some of us, like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, provided a
protective propaganda shield for Hanoi’s Communist regime while it tortured
American war-prisoners; others engaged in violent sabotage against the war
effort. All the time I thought to myself: If we did this in any other country, the
very least of our punishments would be long prison terms and the pariah status
of traitors. In any of the socialist countries we supported—from Cuba to North
Vietnam—we would spend most of our lives in jail and, more probably, be shot.
What actually happened to us in repressive, capitalist America? Here and
there our wrists were slapped—some of us went to trial, some spent months in
jail—but basically the country tolerated us. And listened to us. We began as a
peripheral minority, but as the war dragged on without an end in sight, people
joined us: first in thousands and then in tens of thousands, swelling our ranks
until finally we reached the conscience of the nation. America itself became
troubled about its presence in Vietnam, about the justice and morality of the war
it had gone there to fight. And because the nation became so troubled, it lost its
will to continue the war and withdrew.
Out the window for me went all those pre-conceptions we had had about the
rigidity of American politics, about the controlled capitalist media, which, in
fact, provided the data that fueled our attacks on the war, and about the ruling-
class stranglehold on American foreign policy. That policy had shown itself in
its most critical dimension responsive to the will of ordinary people and to their
sense of justice and morality. As something of a historian, I believe I am correct
in my judgment that America’s withdrawal from the battlefront in Vietnam
because of domestic opposition is unique in human history. I know no other case
on record of a major power retreating from a war in response to the moral
opposition of its own citizenry.
If America’s response to this test of fire gave me an entirely new
understanding of American institutions and of the culture of democracy that
informed and supported them, the aftermath of the U.S. retreat gave me a new
appreciation of the Communist adversary. America not only withdrew its forces
from Vietnam, as we on the left had said it could never do, but from Laos and
Cambodia and, ultimately, from its role as guardian of the international status-
quo. But far from increasing the freedom and wellbeing of Third World nations,
as we on the left had predicted, America’s withdrawal resulted in an
international power-vacuum that was quickly filled by the armies of Russia,
Cuba, and the mass-murderers of the Khmer Rouge, not to mention the non-
Communist but no less bloodthirsty fanatics of revolutionary Islam. All this
bloodshed and misery was the direct result of America’s post-Vietnam
withdrawal, the end of Pax Americana, which we had ardently desired and
helped to bring about.
In Vietnam itself, the war’s aftermath showed beyond any doubt that the
struggle there was not ultimately to achieve or prevent self-determination but—
as various presidents had said and we denied—a Communist conquest of the
South. Today the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, whose cause we
supported, no longer exists. Its leaders are dead, in detention camps, under house
arrest, in exile, powerless. America left Vietnam ten years ago; but today
Hanoi’s army is the fourth-largest in the world, while Vietnam has emerged as a
Soviet satellite and imperialist aggressor in its own right, subverting the
independence of Laos, invading and colonizing Cambodia.
Those events confronted me with a supreme irony: the nation I had believed to
be governed by corporate interests, a fountainhead of world reaction, was halted
in mid-course by its conscience-stricken and morally aroused populace; the
forces I had identified with progress, once freed from the grip of U.S.
“imperialism,” revealed themselves to be oppressive, unspeakably ruthless and
predatory. I was left with this question: What true friend of the South
Vietnamese, or the Cambodians, or the Ethiopians, or the Afghans, would not
wish that Pax Americana were still in force?
There was yet another Vietnam lesson for me when I pondered the question
put by Jeane Kirkpatrick to the still-active veterans of the New Left: “How can it
be that persons so deeply committed to the liberation of South Vietnam and
Cambodia from Generals Thieu and Lon Nol were so little affected by the
enslavement that followed their liberation? Why was there so little anguish
among the American accomplices who helped Pol Pot to power?” Indeed, why
have those passionate advocates of Third World liberation not raised their voices
in protest over the rape of Afghanistan or the Cuban-abetted slaughter in
Ethiopia?
Not only has the left failed to make a cause of those Marxist atrocities; it has
failed to consider the implications of what we now know about Hanoi’s role in
South Vietnam’s so-called “civil war.” For North Vietnam’s victors have boldly
acknowledged that early in the war they had intruded even more regular troops
into the South than was claimed by the Lyndon Johnson’s White Paper that had
been used to justify America’s original commitment of military forces—a White
Paper that we leftists had scorned as a fiction based on anti-Communist paranoia
and deception. But today’s left is too busy denigrating Ronald Reagan’s White
Papers on Soviet and Cuban intervention in Central America to consider the
implications of the past.
My experience has convinced me that historical ignorance and moral
blindness are endemic to the American left, necessary conditions of its existence.
The left does not value the bounty it actually has in this country. In the effort to
achieve a historically bankrupt fantasy called “socialism,” it undermines the very
privileges and rights it is the first to claim. The lesson I learned from Vietnam
was not a lesson in theory but a lesson in practice. Observing this nation go
through its worst historical hour from a vantage point on the other side of the
barricade, I came to understand that democratic values are easily lost and, as
history attests, only rarely achieved; that America is a precious gift, a unique
presence in the world of nations. Because it is the strongest of the few
democratic societies that mankind has managed to create, it is also a fortress that
stands between the free nations of the world and the dark, totalitarian forces that
threaten to engulf them.
My values have not changed, but my sense of what supports and makes them
possible has. I no longer can join “antiwar” movements that seek to disarm the
Western democracies in the face of the danger that confronts them. I support the
current efforts of America’s leadership to rebuild our dangerously weakened
military defenses; and I endorse the conservative argument that America needs
to be vigilant, strong, and clear of purpose in its life-and-death struggle with its
global totalitarian enemies. As an ex-radical, I would only add that in this
struggle Americans need to respect and encourage their own generosity—their
tolerance for internal dissent and their willingness to come to the aid of people
who are fighting for their freedom.
3

Semper Fidel

Twenty-five years ago, as one of the founders of the New Left, I was an
organizer of the first political demonstrations on this Berkeley campus—and
indeed on any campus—to protest our government’s anti-Communist policies in
Cuba and Vietnam. Tonight, I come before you as a man I used to tell myself I
would never be: a supporter of President Reagan, a committed opponent of
Communist rule in Nicaragua. I make no apologies for my present position. It
was what I believed to be the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I
was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that
has made me what I am now. If my former comrades who support the Sandinista
cause were to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into
the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean
of blood.

This was a speech given at a debate on Nicaragua at the University of

California at Berkeley, April 4, 1986 and published in Commentary, June
1986.

The real issue before us is not whether it is morally right for the United States
to arm the anti-Sandinista contras, or whether there are unpleasant men among
them. The issue before us and before all people who cherish freedom is how to
oppose a Soviet imperialism so vicious and so vast as to dwarf any previously
known. An “ocean of blood” is no metaphor. As we speak here tonight, this
empire—whose axis runs through Havana and now Managua—is killing
hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to consolidate a dictatorship whose policies
against its black citizens make the South African government look civilized and
humane.
There is another issue at stake here, especially important to me: the credibility
and commitment of the American left, whose attitudes to American power have
gained a far-reaching influence since the end of the Vietnam War. In his speech
on Nicaragua, President Reagan rightly invoked the precedent of the Truman
Doctrine, the first attempt to oppose Soviet expansion through revolutionary
surrogates in Greece. The first protest of my radical life was against the Truman
Doctrine in a May Day march in 1948. I was with the left defending revolutions
in Russia and China, in Eastern Europe and Cuba, in Cambodia and Vietnam—
just as the left defends the Sandinistas now. And I remember clearly the
arguments with which we made our case in forums like this, and what the other
side said, too—the presidents who came and went, and the anti-Communists on
the right, the William Buckleys and the Ronald Reagans. And, in every case,
without exception, time has proven the left wrong—tragically and destructively
wrong—wrong in its views of the revolutionaries’ intentions and wrong about
the facts of their revolutionary rule. And just as consistently, the anti-
Communists have been proven right.
Just as the left now dismisses the president’s warnings about Soviet expansion
—calling them anti-Communist paranoia, a threat to peace, a mask for American
imperialism—so we attacked President Truman as a warmonger and aggressor
then. Russia’s control of Eastern Europe, we said, was only a defensive buffer, a
temporary response to American power; first because Russia had no nuclear
weapons, and then because it lacked the missiles to deliver them. Today the
Soviet Union is a nuclear superpower, missiles and all, but it has not given up an
inch of the empire it gained during the Second World War—not Eastern Europe;
not the Baltic states that Hitler delivered to Stalin, whose nationhood Stalin
erased and which are now all but forgotten; not even the Kurile islands that were
once part of Japan.
Not only have the Soviets failed to relinquish their conquests in all these years
—years of dramatic, total decolonization in the West—but their growing
strength and the wounds of Vietnam, a scab liberals and leftists continue to pick,
have encouraged them to reach for more. South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Ethiopia, Yemen, Mozambique, and Angola are among the nations that have
recently fallen into the Soviet orbit. To expand their territorial core—which their
apologists still call a “defensive perimeter”—Moscow has already slaughtered a
million peasants in Afghanistan, an atrocity warmly endorsed by the Sandinista
government. Its Minister of Defense, Humberto Ortega, describes the army of
the conquerors, whose scorched-earth policy has driven half the population of
Afghanistan from its homes, as the “pillar of peace” in the world today. To any
self-respecting socialist, praise for such barbarism would be an inconceivable
outrage, as it was to the former Sandinista, now contra, Edén Pastora. But praise
for the barbarians is sincere tribute coming from the Sandinista rulers, who see
themselves as an integral part of the Soviet empire.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting.” So wrote the Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose name and work no
longer exist in his homeland. In all the Americas, Fidel Castro was the only head
of state to cheer the Russian tanks as they rolled over the brave people of Prague.
Cheering right along with Fidel were Carlos Fonseca, Tomás Borge, Humberto
Ortega and the other creators of the present Nicaraguan regime. One way to
assess what has happened in Nicaragua is to realize that wherever Soviet tanks
crush freedom in the future, there will now be two governments in the Americas
supporting them all the way—Cuba, where Castro sells his young men as Soviet
legionnaires for billions of dollars a year, and Nicaragua, whose time to provide
Soviet conscripts for empire will come, if and when the American left manages
to cut the contras adrift.
Memory against power: about its own crimes and for its own criminals the left
has no memory at all, which is the only reason it can wag its finger at President
Reagan and the anti-Communist Right. In the eyes of the left in which I grew up,
as well as in those of the Sandinista founders, Stalin’s Russia was a socialist
paradise, the model of mankind’s liberated future: Literacy to the uneducated,
power to the weak, justice to the forgotten. We praised Russia then, just as the
left praises the Sandinistas now. And just as they ignore warnings like Violeta
Chamorro’s—“With all my heart, I tell you it is worse here now than it was in
the times of the Somoza dictatorship”—so we dismissed as anti-Soviet lies the
testimonies about Stalinist repression.
In the society we hailed as a new human dawn, tens of millions of people were
confined in slave-labor camps, in conditions rivaling Auschwitz and
Buchenwald. Between 30 and 40 million people were killed, in peacetime, in the
daily routine of socialist rule. While leftists applauded the Soviet Union’s
progressive policies and guarded its frontiers, Soviet Marxists killed more
peasants, more workers, and even more Communists than all the capitalist
governments together since the beginning of time. And for the entire duration of
this nightmare, the William Buckleys and Ronald Reagans and other anti-
Communists went on telling the world exactly what was happening. And all that
time the pro-Soviet left and its fellow travelers went on denouncing them as
reactionaries and liars, using the same contemptuous terms with which the left
attacks the president today.
In fact, the left would still be denying the Soviet atrocities if the perpetrators
themselves had not finally acknowledged their crimes. In 1956, in a secret
speech to the party elite, Khrushchev made the crimes a Communist fact; but it
was only the CIA that actually made the crimes public, allowing radicals to
come to terms with what they had done. Khrushchev and his cohorts could not
have cared less about the misplaced faiths and misspent lives of their naive
supporters on the left. The Soviet rulers were concerned about themselves.
Stalin’s mania had spread the slaughter into their own ranks. His henchmen
wanted to make totalitarianism safe for its rulers—Stalinism without Stalin. In
place of a dictator whose paranoia could not be controlled, they instituted a
dictatorship by directorate, which not coincidentally is the form of rule in
Nicaragua today. In the future, Soviet repression would work one way only:
from the privileged top of society to the powerless bottom.
The year 1956, which is the year Soviet tanks flattened the freedom-fighters
of Budapest, tells us who the Sandinistas really are. In that year, the Khrushchev
Report made the facts about the Stalin era unavoidable, even for the faithful, and
the left all over the world was forced to redefine itself in relation to the truth.
China’s Communist leader, Mao, decided he liked Stalin’s way better. As a
result of Mao’s sinister folly, 25 million people died in the “great leaps” and
“cultural revolutions” he then launched. But in Europe and America a new anti-
Stalinist left was born. This “New Left,” of which I was one of the founders, was
repelled by the evils it was now forced to see, and embarrassed by the tarnish the
totalitarians had brought to the socialist cause. It turned its back on the Soviet
model of Stalin and his heirs.
In Nicaragua, however, the Sandinista vanguard was neither embarrassed nor
repelled. The following year, 1957, Carlos Fonseca, the revered founding father
of the Sandinista Front, visited Russia and its new and improved totalitarian
state. To Fonseca, as to Borge and his other comrades, the Soviet monstrosity
was their revolutionary dream come true. In his pamphlet A Nicaraguan in
Moscow, Fonseca proclaimed Soviet Communism his model for Latin America’s
revolutionary future. A second step in this vision of a Communist America is
now being realized in Nicaragua. The comandante directorate, the army and the
secret police are already mirrors of the Soviet state, not only structurally but in
their personnel, which is trained and often manned by agents of the Soviet axis.
Yet the most important figure in this transformation is not a Nicaraguan at all
but Cuba’s first Communist, Fidel Castro. From 1959, when Carlos Fonseca and
Tomas Borge arrived in Havana, and for 20 years after, the Sandinista leaders
became disciples of Fidel and with his blessings went on to Moscow, where
Stalin’s henchman completed their revolutionary course. Humberto Ortega,
Daniel’s less visible but more important brother, is Fidel’s personal protégé.
Humberto is the author of the tercerista strategy, which allied their minuscule
sect to a coalition of democrats contending for power. Fidel is not only the
image in which the Sandinista leadership has created itself and the author of its
victorious strategy; he is the architect of its politburo, the comandante
directorate. The directorate was personally created by Fidel in Havana on the eve
of the final struggle, sealed with a pledge of military aid against the Somoza
regime. Without Castro’s intervention, Arturo Cruz and the other anti-Somoza,
pro-democratic contras would be the government of Nicaragua today. It was
Fidel who showed the Sandinistas how to steal the revolution after its victory
and how to secure their theft by manipulating their most important allies: the
American left and its liberal sympathizers.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Sandinistas began their apprenticeship, Fidel
was our revolutionary hero. Like today’s campus radicals, some of us became
“coffee-pickers” and passengers on the revolutionary tour. We wrote glowingly
about literacy campaigns, health clinics, and other wonders of the new world a-
coming. When Fidel spoke, his words were revolutionary music to our ears.
“Freedom with bread. Bread without terror.” “A revolution neither red nor black
but Cuban olive-green.” And so in Managua today: “Not Communism but
Nicaraguan Sandinismo” is the formula his imitators proclaim.
So persuasive were Fidel’s political poems that radicals all over the world fell
under his spell. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote one of the first and most influential books
admiring the new leader: “If this man asked me for the moon,” the philosopher
wrote, “I would give it to him. Because he would have a need for it.”
When I listen to today’s enthusiasts for the Sandinista redeemers with their
scorn for the contra rebels, the fate of a fidelista hero comes to my mind: one of
the liberators of Cuba, whose role in the revolution was the equal of Che
Guevara’s. For in the year that Jean-Paul Sartre came to Havana and fell in love
with the humanitarian Fidel, Huber Matos embarked on a long, windowless
night of the soul.
Huber Matos’s fate came to pass with Fidel’s second revolution. All the fine
gestures and words with which Fidel had seduced us and won our support—the
open Marxism, the socialist humanism, the independent path—were calculated
lies. For even as he proclaimed his color to be olive-green, he was planning to
make his revolution Moscow-red. So cynical was Fidel’s strategy that at the time
it was difficult for many to comprehend. One by one Fidel removed his own
comrades from the revolutionary regime and replaced them with Cuban
Communists. At the time, the Communists were a party in disgrace. They had
opposed the revolution; they had even served in the cabinet of the tyrant Batista
while the revolution was taking place. But this was all incidental to Fidel. Fidel
knew how to use people. And Fidel was planning a new revolution that he could
trust the Communists to support. He had decided to turn Cuba into a Soviet state.
Moreover, Fidel also knew that he could no longer trust his fidelista comrades,
because they had made a revolution they thought was going to be Cuban olive-
green.
 Although Fidel was a party of one and the Sandinistas are a party of nine, and
though Fidel removed socialists and they removed democrats, the pattern of
betrayal has been the same: to gain power, the Sandinistas concealed their true
intention (a Soviet state) behind a revolutionary lie (a pluralist democracy). To
consolidate power they fashioned a second lie—democracy, but only within the
revolution—and those who believed in the first lie were removed. At the end of
the process there will be no democracy in Nicaragua at all, which is exactly what
Fonseca and the Sandinistas had intended when they began. When the
Sandinistas removed their anti-Somoza allies, they did not need Nicaraguan
Communists because they had Fidel and thousands of agents and technicians
from the Soviet bloc.
When Huber Matos saw Fidel’s strategy unfolding in Cuba, he got on the
telephone with other Fidelistas to discuss what they should do. That was a
mistake. In the first year of Cuba’s liberation, the phones of revolutionary
legends like Huber Matos were already tapped by Fidel’s secret police. Huber
Matos was arrested.
In the bad old days of Batista oppression, Fidel had been arrested himself. His
crime was not words on a telephone but leading an attack on a military barracks
to overthrow the Batista regime. Twelve people were killed. For his offense,
Fidel spent a total of 18 months in the tyrant’s jail writing a book. Huber Matos
was not so lucky. Fidel was no Batista, and the revolution was no two-bit
dictatorship, like the one it replaced. For his phone call, Huber Matos was tried
in such secrecy that not even members of the government were privy to the
proceeding. Afterward he was consigned to solitary confinement in a
windowless cell, where he remained for the next 20 years. And even as Fidel had
buried alive his former friend and comrade, he went on singing songs of
revolutionary humanism and social justice.
In another context, Milan Kundera explains the meaning of this revolutionary
parable of Huber Matos and Fidel. Recalling the French Communist Paul Eluard,
who wrote poems praising brotherhood while his friend was murdered by
Eluard’s comrades in Communist Prague, Kundera remarked: “The hangman
killed while the poet sang.” He explained the words thus. “People like to say:
Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this
is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained
in the dream of paradise. . . . To condemn gulags is easy, but to reject the
totalitarian poetry which leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as
ever.” Words to bear in mind today as we consider Nicaragua and its revolution
of poets.
To believe in the revolutionary dream is the tragedy of its supporters; to
exploit the dream is the talent of its dictators. Revolutionary cynicism, the source
of this talent, is Fidel’s most important teaching imparted to his Sandinista
disciples. That is the faculty which allows the comandantes to emulate Fidel
himself: to be poets and hangmen at the same time; to promise democracy and
organize repression; to attack imperialism and join an empire; to talk peace and
plan war; to champion justice and to deliver Nicaragua to a fraternity of
inhumane, repressive, militarized, economically crippled states.
“We used to have one main prison, now we have many,” laments a former
Fidelista for the socialist paradise that Nicaragua has gained. “We used to have a
few barracks; now we have many. We used to have many plantations; now we
have only one, and it belongs to Fidel. Who enjoys the fruits of the revolution?
The houses of the rich, the luxuries of the rich? The comandante and his
court.”35
Nicaragua is in the grip of utterly cynical and utterly ruthless men whose
purpose is to crush its society from top to bottom, to institute totalitarian rule,
and to use Nicaragua as a base to spread Communist terror and regimes
throughout the hemisphere. The Sandinista anthem that proclaims the Yankee to
be the “enemy of mankind” expresses precisely the revolutionaries’ sentiment
and goal. That goal is not to create new societies—the sordid record of
Communist states would dissuade any reformer from choosing the Communist
path—but to destroy societies that already exist. For Nicaragua, a contra victory
would mean the restoration of the democratic leadership from whom the
Sandinistas stole the revolution—the government that Nicaragua would have had
if Cuba had not intervened in the first place. For the Americas, it would mean a
halt to the Communist march that threatens its freedoms and its peace. Support
for the contras is a first line of defense. If the contras fail, it will hasten the time
when Americans will have to defend themselves.
A final word to my former comrades and successors on the left. It is no
accident that the greatest atrocities of the 20th century have been committed by
Marxist radicals; and it is no accident that they have been committed by radicals
in power against their own people. Hatred of self, and by extension one’s
country, is the root of the radical cause. As American radicals, the most
egregious sin you commit is to betray the privileges and freedoms which
ordinary people from all over the world have come to this country to create—
privileges and freedoms that ordinary people all over the world would feel
blessed to have for themselves. But the worst of it is this: you betray all of the
tangible good that you can see around you for a socialist pie-in-the-sky that has
meant horrible deaths and miserable lives for the hundreds of millions who have
fallen under its sway.
4

A Decade Overrated and Unmourned

(co-authored with Peter Collier)

From its earliest battle-cry—“You can’t trust anyone over 30”—until the end of
its brief strut on the stage of national attention, the Sixties generation saw itself
as a scouting party for a new world. It was the master of ceremonies presenting a
“cultural revolution” that would better the lot of inmates in the prison of linear
thought. It was the social horticulturist whose “greening of America” would
allow the long-stalled post-industrialist age finally to break through the crust of
the Puritan past. It was the avenging angel that would destroy the evil empire of
“Amerikkka” and free the captive peoples of color around the world. The Sixties
generation had created a new age, the Age of Aquarius, whose kingdom was
surely at hand.
It is little wonder that people who lived through the Sixties, or who felt the
nostalgia for it that such films as The Big Chill conveyed, regard this decade as
the last good time. The images that remain are of youth—kids arriving in buses
from all over America to converge on Haight-Ashbury, kids sharing their dope
and bodies with newcomers who dropped into their communes, kids with
pictures of the outlaw-heroes Bonnie and Clyde on their walls. It was a time of
eternal youth; even the adults acted like kids.

A version of this article originally appeared in Playboy, January 1989.

Has any other generation ever been so successful in promoting its claims of
Utopia? Looking at the era two decades later, we only see the images that
reflected in the glass of Sixties’ narcissism. We are assured that it was a time of
great idealism, populated by individuals who wanted nothing more than to give
peace a chance; a time when dewy-eyed young people in the throes of moral
passion sought to remake the world. Were they driven to extreme remedies? It
was because the world was governed by cruel power. Did they burn out quickly?
It was because a dark world greedily consumed their glorious light.
The reality was less exalted. If not quite the low, dishonest decade of the
Thirties, the Sixties was nonetheless a time when what began as American
mischief matured into real destructiveness. It was a time when a gang of ghetto
thugs like the Black Panthers could be anointed as political visionaries; when
Merry Pranksters of all stripes went into business as social evangelists spreading
a chemical gospel. It was the most self-dramatizing of decades, a time when the
only indispensable props were a soapbox, a megaphone, and a suppository.
If God had died in the Fifties, the victim in the Sixties was the “System,” that
collection of inherited values and assumptions which provide guidelines for the
individual and the nation. As one center of authority after another was
discredited under our assault, we convinced ourselves that we murdered to
create. But what we proposed to put in the place of destroyed authority—a new
social order, a new system of human relationships—turned out to be dangerous
Utopias infected with banal dreams and totalitarian passions.
New decades rarely start on time. The election of John Kennedy, however,
was such a calculated attempt to break with the past—substituting youth for
Eisenhower’s age, and Kennedy’s “vigah” for the old president’s evident
exhaustion with the ambiguities of the postwar world—that 1960 seemed like a
watershed. Kennedy did lend the office an existential brio, but his thousand days
were spent playing out the themes of the Fifties. What we think of as the Sixties
—that historical interlude that would have such a distinctive style and tone—
really began the day the assassin came to Dallas. The “lone, crazed gunman,” a
specter that would haunt the era, had been loosed. JFK became a melancholy
ghost rattling his chains for the rest of the decade—a symbol first of its betrayed
promise and then of its corrupted innocence.
Even during his three years in office, Kennedy had been a bystander at the
most crucial event of the beginning of the decade. This was the civil-rights
movement, which opened America to its black outcasts. The summary moment
of the civil rights movement came three months before Kennedy’s death, when
Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his
“I Have a Dream” speech. It seemed at the time that the speech might have set
the tone for the Sixties. What was surprising about King’s movement, however,
was not how quickly it arrived—for it was preeminently a movement of the
Fifties—but how quickly it passed.
By 1965, when the high Sixties were in gear, King was on the defensive,
under attack by a new radical generation. With Stokely Carmichael as their
representative figure, black militants rejected nonviolence and social integration,
calling instead for “black power.” They used threats of violence to exclude
traditional civil-rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young from their
protest and put pressure on King himself. The torching of the urban ghettos,
beginning with Watts in 1965, provided the light by which the black-power
movement wrote a violent and chaotic epilogue to King’s history of decency and
courage.
King continued to speak, before diminishing audiences, about peaceful and
creative change, about building a movement of love and hope. The black
activists opposed to him rode his coattails at the same time they were privately
deriding him as “Uncle Martin” and “de Lawd.” In a gesture characteristic of the
nihilism that was coming to be the most typical feature of Sixties politics, they
made it clear that they wanted no part of King’s American dream. They were not
interested in being integrated into a “System” they had decided was
irredeemably racist; in fact, they wanted only to bring the “System” to its knees.
King talked about brotherhood; Carmichael preached the doctrine that blacks
were a “colony” and called for “national liberation” from America itself.
The guerrilla army of this liberation was to be the Black Panthers. While King
had enriched the national dialogue on race and civil rights, the Panthers
completed the debasement of political language and process with totalitarian
slogans like “Off the pigs,” “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and “If
you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” As investigations
later revealed, they were using the Santa Cruz Mountains as a killing-field to
solve their internal power struggles while at the same time using rhetoric to
titillate whites momentarily enamored of “revolutionary violence.”
Except for the Panthers’ murders of several of their own and their gun battles
with local police, black militancy was primarily talk. But even talk had
consequences. A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy
rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a
time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got
pushed off the political agenda.
While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary
front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a
commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic
and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task
force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the
obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by
other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the
same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published
findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an
individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were
headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,”
he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow
up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable
relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations
about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence,
unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the
whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to
inevitable.”
Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority;
but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals,
who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the
window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as
racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to
stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not
want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the
only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their
demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White
House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.
As Moynihan said later, “From being buoyantly open to ideas and enterprises,
[Johnson] became near contemptuous of civil-rights leaders who he now
believed cared only for symbols.” In his next State of the Union address, the
president devoted only 45 words of his speech to the problems confronting
blacks.
It is an archetypal Sixties case history—the rejection of real solutions in favor
of demands that are made with the knowledge they cannot be met. The
consequences of this syndrome have become, with time, painfully clear. While
in 1950 some 30 percent of Americans had been poor according to official
definitions, the normal workings of the system had reduced the figure to 13
percent by 1968 when Great Society programs were just beginning. Over the
next 12 years, federal spending on poverty would quadruple but without the
intended effect. In 1980, 13 percent of Americans were still classified as poor,
the same figure as 12 years and more than $100 billion earlier. What had
changed was the nature of poverty itself. It had become increasingly youthful,
black, feminized and entrenched. Unwed black teen mothers had become the
norm rather than the exception in the black community.
It is a problem that the present-day apologists for the Sixties blame on the
“System.” By 1970, however, black families which were intact and living
outside the South, both adults having a high-school education, had attained
income equality with their white counterparts. These were blacks who had
remained committed to the opportunity-system Martin Luther King had
embraced. These are the blacks who today have entered the professional and
managerial class in huge numbers, an increase of 63 percent during the Eighties
alone; a decade when, for the first time in U.S. history, the black middle-class
outnumbered the black poor.
But radical leaders who had pushed King aside continued to condemn the
system and advised blacks to buy out of it so vehemently that a commitment to
self-betterment almost had to be made against the grain of black life. In 1950,
when America did have a racist system but did not have a self-anointed
priesthood denouncing its evils, 9.5 percent of black teenagers, as opposed to 8.7
percent of white teens, were unemployed. In 1980, after a decade-and-a-half of
Sixties rhetoric, some 38 percent of black teens were unemployed. Obviously the
bad-mouthing of America was not the only cause for this disastrous turn of
events, but it was an instance of contributory negligence on the part of radicals.
A part of the black community has made advances since 1960. But those
accomplishments are in spite of Sixties figures like Stokely Carmichael, who
opted for a privileged exile in totalitarian Guinea after a frightening run-in with
the Panthers; or like Huey Newton, who was charged with one felony after
another before his sordid death on an Oakland street-corner in 1989. The success
of the black middle-class is a reward for following Martin Luther King’s advice
to commit to the American dream; while others were trapped in the self-pitying
victimhood so adroitly exploited by radical demagogues.
Black radicals who reviled King during his lifetime as an Uncle Tom now
kneel with cynical reverence at his shrine, although they still reject his vision.
Blacks still face poverty and unemployment; but chief among their disabilities
are Sixties leftovers, like the opportunistic Jesse Jackson, who have revived the
anti-Americanism and infatuation with Third-World totalitarianism exhibited by
King’s radical opponents 20 years ago. How would King have regarded
Jackson’s remarks about “Hymies” or his praise for a black fascist like Louis
Farrakhan? Probably in much the same way he regarded white demagogues in
the Sixties who talked about “niggers” and praised white fascists in robes.
Another reason for the degradation of the civil-rights movement was the
willingness of its radical leaders to buy into the notion—part of the vulgar
Marxism in vogue during the Sixties—that blacks were victims not only of
discrimination and prejudice but of the American empire, of America itself. Like
other destructive ideas that fastened themselves like an exotic jungle fungus on
our national self-conception, this notion came directly by way of Vietnam.
 If the struggle for civil rights was the central movement of the Sixties, the war
in Vietnam was the central fact. The war informed the life of an entire
generation. It was such a pervasive experience that even non-combatants felt as
though they had been waist-deep in rice paddies and occasionally experienced a
sudden stab of fear at the staccato rhythms of helicopter blades. The war
continued to be fought well into the Eighties in literature and film as well as in
foreign policy. Should the United States have gone into Vietnam? Could we
have won?
To argue these questions is to become mired in the battles long after the war
has been lost. It is also to lose sight of the most important fact about Vietnam: It
was a cultural occasion as much as an historical event. The destructive anti-
Americanism that eventually came to characterize the era had been off-limits,
intellectually and morally, at the beginning of the decade; the Vietnam War was
the justification the movement needed to cross the line.
The first antiwar protests—by those who had been part of the civil-rights
movement as it developed under King—were caused by what people saw as the
inhumanity of the war. But this moral dimension was soon replaced in the
antiwar movement by an irrational hatred of America and all it stood for. The
war corrupted everything—the people who protested against it as well as those
who fought. The movement soon determined that what it perceived as the lies of
the U.S. government must be fought by lies of its own. These lies were
sentimental—Ho Chi Minh, a life-long Comintern agent, was simply a
misunderstood nationalist, the George Washington of his country. Or the lies
were strategic—North Vietnamese regular troops were not fighting in the South
alongside the NLF. Truth was the first casualty, in the war at home as much as in
Vietnam.
After it was over and movement “activists,” as the media generously called
them, were looking for a way to make their revolt seem like a patriotic act, they
created the myth that they had detoured into hard-line positions because this was
the only way to stop the war. In fact, like Voltaire’s God, Vietnam would have
had to be invented if it hadn’t existed, because it justified the anti-Americanism
that was part of the movement from its very beginnings. Tom Hayden let that
particular cat out of the bag later on, when speaking about the founding charter
of Students for a Democratic Society, the 1962 Port Huron Statement: “We were
opposed . . . to doctrines imposed from the past. In that sense we were not
Marxist. . . . But we were conscious of what we were driving at, which was a
revolutionary change in the American structure. We were never reformers who
became disillusioned and, therefore, more radical.” In other words, the war in
Vietnam was a gift of chance that allowed radical leaders to convince others of
the need for a social apocalypse and of the necessity for their destructive
strategies.
As the war escalated, the treason of the heart committed by the many became
treason in fact for a few. In 1969 SDS splintered into factions, the chief of which
was the Weathermen. That year its leadership went to Havana to form the
Venceremos Brigade. While they were there, they held discussions with the
Vietnamese and Cubans that led them to return home with plans for a wave of
terrorism cut short only because their high command blew itself up in a
Manhattan townhouse.
Like other wounds suffered by Sixties radicals, this one was self-inflicted.
Despite their incessant complaints of police brutality, Sixties radicals lived for
the most part in a no-fault system, demanding their constitutional rights at the
same time they were abusing and denouncing the Constitution. They knew they
had the option, which many ultimately used, of diving back into the system
when they tired of being extrinsic. For this reason, New Leftism, although
discredited in politics, continues to thrive in the “academic work” of former
radicals who returned for post-graduate degrees to the universities they had
earlier tried to destroy. It was an example of the cynicism that marked the Sixties
—an underlying awareness that America was exactly the sort of flexible and
forgiving society the leftists condemned it for failing to be.
The radicals’ assault in the Sixties was never directed against conservatives.
The target was liberalism itself. It had been liberalism that had guided America
to power in the postwar world. It was liberalism that had gotten the United States
into Vietnam. Centrist liberalism was the balance wheel giving synchronicity to
the entire political system. But now radicals assaulted the center; if it could not
hold, America would fall. Liberals were bashed not only over foreign affairs but
also for the domestic program installed by the New Deal. Radicals in the
university began a systematic revisionism that challenged the whole
achievement of the American liberal tradition—from the origins of the
Constitution to the origins of the Cold War.
The decisive moment in the assault against liberalism was the destruction of
the last Democratic Party presidential candidate in this tradition, Hubert
Humphrey. The instrument was the riot that a handful of radical leaders
organized for the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Tom Hayden
and the other leaders knew that Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, in the wake of
the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination, had called for the shooting of
“looters” on sight. They knew that “the whole world was watching.” They knew
that a confrontation on the streets of Chicago would inevitably lead to violence
and explode in political shocks felt across the globe.
 The Chicago demonstrations became the Tet Offensive of the antiwar
movement: the military defeat on the battlefield that won a political victory in
Washington. In the wake of the riots, Humphrey was defeated, and four years
later the New Left vision possessed the Democratic Party—the “cold war”
liberals’ ability to fight the takeover having been destroyed by the Chicago
debacle. The left’s candidate lost, but its vision prevailed. George McGovern’s
candidacy became for the left what Barry Goldwater’s eight years earlier had
been for the right—a way of entering and eventually possessing a party. A sign
of the times was the way Tom Hayden, who had destroyed the Democrats’
chances in Chicago in 1968, resurfaced as a party regular in California in the
mid-Seventies.
Vietnam was a powerful narcotic. One of the self-revealing comments of the
antiwar movement came when the Communists first agreed to negotiate. “We
fight, fight, fight, and then they sell us out!” was the despairing response of
Harlem Maoist Bill Epton. The movement was addicted to the sense of being
invincibly correct and utterly moral that the war had given it. And so a feeling of
emptiness came over the Sixties generation when the withdrawal from Vietnam
began.
By the time the last U.S. personnel had ingloriously left, Sixties radicals were
already searching for new connections, in Africa and Central America, that
would restore the “high” they had lost. They turned their backs on Vietnam.
Their moral outrage did not come into play when Hanoi conquered the South.
The only “lessons” of Vietnam that interested them were those that confirmed
American guilt. The left wasn’t interested in the curriculum involving
Communist genocide in Cambodia or the imperialism of Moscow and Hanoi.
Their moral amnesia allowed them to ignore the fact that more Indochinese were
killed in the first two years of the Communist peace than had been killed on all
sides in a decade of the anti-Communist war.
At the same time they ignored these realities, the Sixties radicals were making
sure that the war, or at least their version of it, would linger in the nation’s
consciousness. Just as the Sixties had been dominated by the fact of Vietnam, so
the postwar era was dominated by the Vietnam metaphor. Until the Sixties, the
dominant political image had been provided by Munich, which encapsulated the
lessons of the Thirties as a warning to democracies to arm themselves against
aggressors who talked about peace. But the Munich metaphor was repeatedly
assaulted in the Sixties by those who claimed that it had lured us into the
Southeast Asian war. In the Seventies, “Munich” was replaced by “Vietnam,” an
experience with the opposite moral—that anti-communism led to “quagmire”
and a vigilant democracy to “abuses of power;” and that totalitarian Third-World
movements were actually manifestations of harmless nationalism.
The Vietnam metaphor dominated the politics of the Eighties as the Vietnam
War had the politics of the Sixties. It made policy. Whenever America even
considered acting in its self-defense, opponents of such action merely invoked
the specter of Vietnam. They talked about the “holocaust” in Indochina, with full
awareness of the symbolic resonance in comparing America to Nazi Germany.
“Another Vietnam” was a curse on action. Less an argument than an incantation,
it became an irresistible pressure for passivity, isolationism and appeasement.
The battle-cry “No Vietnams in Central America” showed the Vietnam
metaphor in action. The slogan smothered all distinctions of time and place that
separated these conflicts and defined their meanings. Playing on fears of another
quagmire that would again bleed this country, the slogan became a persuasion to
do nothing about the expansionism of Marxist-Leninist regimes or about
dominoes that might fall in our own hemisphere. For nostalgic radicals, “No
Vietnams in Central America” has also been an unfulfilled wish. The Sixties is
still seen as the last good time by these people, who are like the Japanese
soldiers wandering in a cerebral jungle—unwilling to admit that the war is over.
They really want another Vietnam, another cultural upheaval; another defeat for
the United States; another drama of moral self-inflation; another orgy of guilt
and recrimination; a reprise, in short, of the Sixties.
In the Vietnam metaphor, we have the tunnel at the end of the light.
During the Sixties, we also became a culture of splinter-groups, of people who
identified ourselves according to ethnicity, gender, special interests—a galaxy of
minorities, united only by a sensibility that now regarded society at large with
suspicion. The political philosopher Michael Walzer unconsciously expressed
this sensibility when he confessed, in a recent article in The New Republic, “It is
still true that only when I go to Washington to demonstrate do I feel at home
there.” Within the culture the Sixties created, its minorities exist in a perpetual
adversarial relationship to America, inspired by assumptions about its malign
intent, which they “learned” as a result of the symbiosis between the black
revolution and the war in Vietnam. This factionalization and division, this
readiness to believe the worst about our home-ground, is the enduring legacy of
the Sixties.
“Liberation” was the radical watchword. Where did it lead us? No cause
followed so swiftly or so instructively along the path cleared by its radical
vanguard as the one in behalf of American women. Even before feminism was
able to proclaim itself as an independent cause of the era, a contrite American
power-structure had included women in the compact it made with the civil-rights
movement led by Martin Luther King. In 1963, the first federal statute requiring
“equal pay for equal work” sailed through Congress, and the Civil Rights Act of
1964 specifically extended its protection to women, banning discrimination on
the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
But like its black counterpart, the women’s movement had already been seized
by the radical passion. Its manifesto, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,
went beyond a plea for equality in the system to an indictment of the system
itself: “Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need
to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.”
There was an important truth in the claim that America’s women had been
denied their place in its dream, a truth that the victories of the next decade would
confirm, permanently expanding their horizons and opportunities as dramatically
as the civil-rights revolution had done for America’s blacks. But the
exaggerations in the indictment were equally important and consequential. The
culture that Friedan had indicted because it did not permit women to grow had
provided Friedan herself with an Ivy League education and an opportunity not
only to have three children but a writing career subsidized by her working
husband. The family that she claimed was a “concentration camp” for American
women had supported her in the years of her labor. Far from denying her
recognition, her “masculine” profession had rewarded her with the hyperbolic
acclaim of reviewers who hailed her work as “the most important book of the
20th century.”
But in 1966, when Friedan and her associates founded the National
Organization of Women, the radical enthusiasms of the time blinded them to
positive American realities like this and committed them instead to a rhetoric
that was rejectionist. To the feminists of NOW, women were an “oppressed
majority,” the victims of a “sexism” that paralleled racism and was imposed by
the “patriarchal” character of the American system. Women’s liberation could
not be achieved by extending the “rights” of such an oppressive system to
American women, but only by a “cultural revolution” that would “restructure”
American society. Such a revolution must abolish the “gender roles” that the
system had imposed, along with the legal and moral restraints that denied
women control over their bodies and delivered them to “the tyranny of their
reproductive biology.”
In the name of liberation, the radicals crusaded against laws that recognized
differences between men and women, providing special protections for women
in the workplace, the family, and society at large. To radicals, the family was
nothing more than a target of opportunity. Gloria Steinem denounced marriage
as a form of prostitution, while 50,000 feminists marked the anniversary of
women’s suffrage with a march on Fifth Avenue and expressive slogans like
“Don’t Cook Dinner—Starve a Rat Today.” Radical feminists linked all the
Sixties revolutions. “We want to destroy the three pillars of class and caste
society—the family, private property, and the state.”
Eventually, the sorcerer’s apprentices of the feminist movement would draw
back in horror from what they had unloosed. Referring to the excessive “Second
Wave” of the movement she had begun, Friedan decried the way that the
feminine mystique had been superseded “by a feminist mystique which denied
that core of women’s person hood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home.”
Feminists like Andrea Dworkin began to warn that “sexual liberation only made
life harder for women.”
The toll of this sexual confusion on the emotional life and psyche of a
generation is difficult to assess. But consequences of the revolutionary feminism
that outlasted the Sixties are measurable. Between 1960 and 1980, the
percentage of illegitimate births more than doubled. “Only a minority of
American children may now expect to reach age 18 having lived continuously
with their natural parents,” New York Senator Daniel Moynihan noted in
January 1987. “Sixty percent of children now being born may expect at one time
or another to live in a single-parent family and nine in ten of such families are
headed by females.” Of the nation’s 33.7 million poor in 1984, 35 percent lived
in female-headed households. Without the sharp increase in the number of such
families, U.S. poverty would have dropped significantly between 1960 and 1984.
Friedan and other feminists may now be chastened by the unforeseen
consequences of their attack on the American family. But the nation whose
institutions they assaulted is finding its equilibrium less easy to recover. As
previous revolutions have shown, it is far more difficult to restore protective
traditions that have been destroyed than it was to destroy them in the first place.
This grim historical lesson is underscored by another of the Sixties’ cultural
liberations, one of the unintended consequences of which is a venereal epidemic
that now threatens a death-toll many times greater than that of the war in
Vietnam. Basking in the reflected glow of the Sixties, gays cast off the chains of
a moral tradition they denounced as oppressive and established their own
“liberated zones” where they pursued an ideal of free sex for more than a
decade. Their bathhouses became institutional symbols and political organizing-
halls as well as the sexual gymnasiums of the gay movement. In time they also
came to resemble petri dishes, culturing the dangerous diseases that began to
afflict the gay community.
Public-health officials in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York watched
with alarm as a succession of serious venereal epidemics—rectal gonorrhea,
Hepatitis B, CMV—swept through these communities—epidemics so extensive
that they cost taxpayers in excess of $1 million a day to provide treatment. In the
past, action would have been taken; this time there was no action. The liberated
gay culture was “doing its thing.” Public-health officials were intimidated from
speaking out, lest they trespass against a “minority lifestyle;” proven public-
health measures were rejected as an infringement on “civil rights.”36
Even after AIDS appeared at the beginning of the Eighties, the situation did
not change. In San Francisco, gay activists and their liberal allies in the city’s
political machine prevented action to close the bathhouses. This coalition
obscured life-and-death matters with fusty Sixties rhetoric about “pink triangles”
and “final solutions.” The political and public-health establishments caved in to
this rhetoric and withheld warnings during crucial years when the virus first
spread—warnings that would have educated the gay public about the sexual
transmission of AIDS—a fact that was, at first, obdurately denied by leading gay
activists. They also denied the snowballing evidence that the epidemic was
caused by reckless promiscuity and anal intercourse. Even today, the phrase
“promiscuous anal intercourse” is still censored out of the “education” literature
that government agencies provide as the cornerstone of official anti-AIDS
programs, because they are politically unacceptable to gay activists.
The attitudes struck and the policies adopted in San Francisco set the standard
for the rest of the country. Gay leaders and the public-health officials they so
easily cowed refused to pursue strategies that might have slowed or isolated the
epidemic, for fear they would infringe on a liberated lifestyle. Instead, with true
Sixties gall, they indicted the government as “homophobic” for not providing
more money for AIDS research. America was to blame. Ronald Reagan had
somehow caused AIDS by failing to mention it often enough. It was the sort of
logic that might have been retrieved from a Sixties time-capsule.
It is now too late for many of the public-health measures that are a
community’s first line of defense against a virulent epidemic. The AIDS virus is
in place. It has now infected three-quarters of San Francisco’s gay men and more
than one million people nationwide. Other proven public-health procedures like
mandatory testing and contact-tracing have been blocked by gay and liberal
activists in the name of “civil rights.” That it is in name only is clear from the
tactic of “outing” practiced by radical gay groups themselves. The purpose of
“outing” is to expose prominent gays still in the closet; a gay tabloid called
Outweek provides the means. There has been no protest in the gay political
community over this calculated invasion of privacy, despite the fact that
protection of “confidentiality” is alleged as the primary reason for opposition to
testing.
Meanwhile, the rhetorical excess continues. At the first national gay civil-
rights “March on Washington,” a reprise of King’s moment in history, which
was attended by 200,000 activists in December 1987, a prominent slogan
proclaimed: “Reagan No, Sodomy Yes.” It was as if anal sex had not been firmly
established as one of the two principal modes of AIDS transmission, along with
the sharing of needles. In a feature essay in The Village Voice, writer Richard
Goldstein described AIDS imbecilely as the metaphor of the present generation
in the way that Vietnam had been for the previous one. He declared: “The
sharing of needles must be understood in the same context as anal sex—as an
ecstatic act that enhances social solidarity.”
The same lesson about liberation can be learned from social epidemics as
from venereal ones. The unprecedented increase in violent crimes that has
infected America over the past two decades is an example. The Sixties defined
itself by its efforts to delegitimize the police as an “army of occupation,” while
also celebrating crime as a form of existential rebellion and the outlaw as a
perceptive social critic. There was a numbing barrage against what was derided
as “law and order” seen in slogans like “off the pigs,” in the insistence that “all
minority prisoners are political prisoners,” and in the romanticizing of murderers
like George Jackson who deserved to be locked deeper in the prison system
rather than becoming international symbols of American “injustice.”
The Sixties raised incalculably what we now regard as an acceptable level of
violence and menace in our workaday existence—the crime equivalent of Muzak
murmuring in the background of our lives. Once again, however, the most
prominent victims were the intended beneficiaries of this liberation: the black
communities of the inner cities, who watch helplessly as crime tears their lives
apart. But the social theorists and Sixties nostalgia-artists are as uncaring of
those people as they were for the millions they delivered into the hands of the
Communists in Vietnam.
And finally there is the Eighties’ drug epidemic, a delayed gift from the
Sixties and its ideology of consciousness-expansion. For people like Ken Kesey
and Timothy Leary, drugs were the weapons of a folk revolution, a
democratization of the sublime, America in Wonderland. For political radicals,
drugs were a shortcut to potentially revolutionary alienation and repudiation of
the social mainstream. In 1969, during the People’s Park uprising in Berkeley,
Tom Hayden and other radicals drew up the “Berkeley Liberation Program” that
promised, among other things, to “protect and expand our drug culture” and to
recognize “the right of people to use those drugs which are known from
experience to be harmful.” Before the movement’s successes, drugs had been
quarantined in the social underground; now they had become part of an
individual’s bill-of-rights. This moral imbecility stood out even in the Sixties
theater of the absurd. Yet the political ethos behind it survives to this day. Thus
The Nation, a leftist publication, condemned Reagan’s anti-drug policies as “an
ideological mobilization like the war against Communism . . . with its redolence
of racism, its anti-Third World and anti-Sixties overtones.”
The nihilism that was part of the Sixties’ advertisement for itself makes it
tempting to blame the decade for everything that has gone wrong since then. But
to leave such an impression would be uncharitable and untrue. In some ways, it
was the best of times. There was an expansion of consciousness, of social space,
of tolerance, of experience itself. It was exciting to be alive, to find oneself
swimming in the rush of history’s stream-of-consciousness. But while the beauty
of the Sixties was that it was a decade of youth, its defect was an inability to
grow up. It was constitutionally unable to see the other side of the ledger—
condemned to ignore the fact that, as in physics, there are equal and opposite
reactions in society—social costs for social acts.
In the end, the words of Lennon decipher the truth of the era in a way that the
works of the other Lenin, who enjoyed a brief but depressing vogue among
radicals of the day, did not:

You say you want a revolution?

Well you know,
We all want to change the world.
You say you got a real solution?
Well you know,
We’d all love to see the plan.

But when all the posturing and self-dramatization was over, there was no plan,
no idea about how to replace what had been destroyed.
Schizophrenic to its core, the era was never clear whether its primary identity
was that of creator or destroyer. Its ambivalence was suggested by the two
groups that dominated its popular music—perhaps the only real artistic
achievement of the time. Was the inner voice of the Sixties that of the Beatles,
innocent minstrels on a “magical mystery tour?” Or that of the Rolling Stones,
the vandals presiding at its “beggars’ banquet?”
For a while, these groups reigned jointly over popular culture, expressing the
audacious delusion of the Sixties that it was beyond consequences, beyond good
and evil, able to have it all. It was possible to assault the cops by word and deed
but also be safe on the streets; to reject authority and yet live coherently; to be an
outlaw culture and yet a humane and harmoniously ordered one.
Listening to the Beatles and the Stones, Sixties rebels registered these ideas
with growing grandiosity, believing they had gone from counterculture to
counter-nation once they planted the flag of discovery at Woodstock. A place
consecrated by love, holy to the Sixties in the way the Paris commune was to
Marxists, Woodstock institutionalized the right to live outside the rules. Unlike
the doomed inhabitants of “Amerika,” the citizens of this new nation could have
joyous copulation and access to illegal drugs. If the drugs caused bad trips or the
sex carried disease, the caring immigrants of Woodstock would be there to care
for their own.
But the Woodstock Nation was an illusion as ungrounded in reality as the
hallucinations induced by the LSD that was its national chemical. A few months
after its founding, the decade began to draw toward its apocalyptic close. As a
portent of things to come, the Beatles were breaking up. The title-song of the
album Let It Be might be taken as a recognition of the destructiveness of the
Sixties crusade against established order. The Rolling Stones answered this act
of contrition with the title-song of their album Let It Bleed. Then came
Altamont, the Kristallnacht of the Woodstock Nation. At Altamont, the gentle
folk of Woodstock met the Hell’s Angels—not only criminals but suppliers of
the drugs that were destroying the new nation from within. While the Stones
were singing Sympathy for the Devil, a black man lunged near the stage with a
knife in his hand and was beaten to death in front of everyone by the Angels.
Devils and Angels: it all came together and all came apart.
Appalled at what had happened, Mick Jagger dropped the song from his
repertory. He saw that the Sixties were over. It was time to go back to the
dressing-room, time to stop posturing as the “satanic majesties” of an era, time
to grow up and simply become part of the rock scene again.
The rest of us had to do the same thing: learn to live with adulthood. And so
the Sixties faded into gauzy memory—the good old days when we were all so
bad, a time of limitless possibilities and wild dreams made all the brighter by the
somber and complex world that succeeded it. The paradoxical reason for the
Sixties’ growing appeal is this: it created the tawdry world that we now measure
and find wanting by comparison to it.
There is truth in the nostalgia. It is the memory of the era that is false. The
Pandora’s box the Sixties opened then is still unclosed; the malign influences the
Sixties released then still plague us today.
5

Keepers of the Flame

(co-authored with Peter Collier)

The Church of Radicalism administers a harsh communion and has no patience
with apostates. We knew this before and discovered it again when we published
Destructive Generation. The book is not a plea for grace but an attempt to
understand the varieties of religious experience that characterized the movement
in its heyday and among its hard core; to understand what went wrong with the
Sixties left, what responsibility people like ourselves bear, and how the faith of
leftism has been kept going in our own time despite an unrelieved record of
disaster.
In writing Destructive Generation, of course, we expected to be
excommunicated from the Church of the Left yet again. But this time, in
addition to being shown the exit sign at the gates of Eden, we found ourselves
stigmatized as something even worse than anti-left. We were anti-Sixties. In
writing about the decade, we had stumbled into the nostalgia factory where the
touch-up artists of radical history work with airbrushes to erase unpleasant
memories and smooth out rough moments. We had seen the smithy where the
myths of this golden age are forged; myths intended to restore the power of the
radical dream and to make sure that our present political culture doesn’t learn
from its history so that it will be condemned to repeat it.

This article appeared in The New Republic on June 26, 1989, in response to
radical critics of Destructive Generation.

Of these myths about the Sixties, the first and most pernicious is the doctrine
of original innocence. This holds that the left is purer of heart and therefore
better—more compassionate, more idealistic, more peace-loving, more humane
—than all other political movements. To remake this innocence, defenders of
Sixties radicalism must now propose that groups such as the Black Panther Party
and the Weatherman terrorists—groups of which we had enough first-hand
knowledge to write about them plausibly in Destructive Generation—were
nothing more than a lunatic fringe that had only minuscule support 20 years ago
and have no legitimate standing as historical metaphors today. There might have
been excesses back then—justifications of “revolutionary violence,” a fashion
for zany neo-Marxist creeds. But those involved in such things were part of what
university administrators once called “a small but vociferous minority”—a
minority that gets smaller with each passing year as yesterday’s radicals pop out
of their cocoons and take wing as today’s progressives.
“It wasn’t us, babe,” these fluttering revisionists say today. “We were not
violent. You might have been, but not us. We were not proponents of revolution
or even radical change. Of course, somebody did it. Since you admit in your
book that these things took place, you are guilty.” Such is the fate of those who
use the second-person plural as part of the grammar of collective responsibility.
For us, there is an irony in being called the last New Left extremists. Having
actually drawn back from the Sixties left during its heaviest weather, we thought
that when Destructive Generation appeared we might be criticized by remnants
of the hardcore as being inauthentic. “Where were you when we were getting
ready for the armed revolution?” we imagined them asking. But we obviously
misjudged the strength of the historical rewrite now under way. Instead of
clenching the fist, our old comrades have pointed the finger. “You guys were
part of the lunatic fringe then, and you’re part of it now,” they have told us.
“You’ve just exchanged one radicalism for another, while the rest of us have
been integrating ourselves back into society and getting on with our lives.” Or,
as New Republic editor Hendrik Hertzberg complained to us in a recent
conversation, “You were apologists for communism then and you are apologists
for anti-communism now.” As though these postures were morally equivalent.
Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale and all the other quick-change artists of the left
have a right to get on with their lives. But they have no right to deface the truth
of the Sixties to ease their mid-life transits. In Hayden’s autobiography Reunion,
one looks in vain for any serious admission of complicity in the North
Vietnamese rape of South Vietnam. Or for any illumination of the year or so he
spent perpetually out of breath from trying to inflate the revolutionary legend of
the Black Panthers as “America’s Viet Cong.” Or for any mention of his
experiences in the hills of northern California doing target-practice under the
tutelage of the Minister of Defense of the “Red Family” in giddy anticipation of
the fascism he thought Richard Nixon might install, thus giving a little goose to
the revolution that had then entered a period of dry labor. Hayden was no worse
than many at the time. But he is no better now because he has decided to subtract
these facts from his own life and from the history of the movement in the
interests of getting on with it. This lack of second thoughts is the telltale heart of
the American left.
Why no reckoning? Because reckonings are conservative. They counsel
against the heedless rush to redeem the ambiguous and mottled realities of the
human condition. They prove that life is made better only incrementally and
with great difficulty, but it is made worse—much worse—very easily.
Reckonings examine the toxic waste that revolutionary enthusiasms leave in
their wake. Reckonings open the mass graves to examine the shards of bone that
are all that is left of the New Men and Women created by utopias past.
Because they want to continue their crusades, our old comrades not only don’t
want second thoughts of their own. They don’t want us to have them either.
They not only want to protect their sense of moral superiority as a special
generation formed by a crucial decade. They also want to keep that decade
inviolate, so that some future radical generation can use it as a model when it
decides to pull the sword from the stone.
A second myth of Sixties nostalgia artists is that “we” were actually more
sinned against than sinning. In fact, “we” never really “knew sin” at all (to use
Todd Gitlin’s phrase in The Sixties) until the end of the decade, when the
unending war had blunted our moral affect and driven us into a state of
temporary insanity. In the battle between memory and forgetting, this is an
example not only of amnesia but of auto-lobotomy. The New Left bit the apple
the first time the first journalist thrust the first microphone into its face and told
it that it was a “prophetic minority.” It knew sin early in the Sixties in the
founding sessions of Students for a Democratic Society, when Hayden and
others proposed a moral equivalence between the United States and the USSR;
in the middle of the decade when it claimed that Ho Chi Minh was the George
Washington of his country; and at the end of the decade when it transmuted the
slogan “Bring the troops home” into “Bring the war home.”
To serve memory means admitting that we radicals generically (not just we
two) did not love this country enough. We did not do all we could to stop the
war without hating our heritage root-and-branch. If we did not carry North
Vietnamese flags ourselves, we did not face down those who did. If we did not
spell Amerika with a “k” ourselves, we failed to repudiate those who did. There
was enough sin to go around in the Sixties, sins of omission as well as
commission, sins of the heart as well as the hand.
The fault-lines around the Sixties and the left go deep in our culture. Exactly
how deep we realized when Village Voice leftist Paul Berman, who had attacked
us in print on several previous occasions as “renegades”—a term of the Thirties
that has outlived the Stalinist neo-logicians who created it—was given our book
by The New Republic for an unusually lengthy review. Because our position on
issues such as the spread of totalitarianism in Central America were closer to the
magazine’s than those of Berman, who has vacillated between being a
cheerleader for the Sandinistas and a fence-sitter in the struggle over
Nicaragua’s future, this assignment had the feel of a political hit.
A 1986 Berman article in Mother Jones, magazine of the long radical exile,
opens with a scene in which the author is in Managua chumming it up with
Omar Cabezas, the number-two cop in Tomás Borge’s Ministry of the Interior. It
seems that he had just read Cabezas’s autobiography Fire from the Mountain and
was “astonished”—not by the fact that Cabezas had falsified the history of the
revolution, but rather by the intoxicating discovery that “backwater Nicaragua
was the world center of the New Left.” Proceeding from this aperçu, Berman
wrote: “Elsewhere, the dream of Che led to stupid posturings. [But] in León
[where Cabezas had launched his Sandinista career] the dream of Che was the
road to the Ministry of the Interior. Fantasy elsewhere was realism in
Nicaragua.”
Here is the authentic voice of the Sixties left thrown as if by ventriloquism
into the present. Twenty years ago we saw the Fidelistas as archetypal New
Leftists, the ones who had done it while we pampered Americans were only
fantasizing about it. Cuba having proved unpalatable, it is now the Sandinistas
who have the authenticity that America’s radicals never achieved. There is no
acknowledgment that in Cuba Che’s New-Left dream led directly to Fidel’s
gulag. Here it might be different, Berman muses, while sitting in the
headquarters of the Sandinista police state batting his eyes at another dreamer of
Che’s dream.
Berman typifies those intellectuals of the left who—for all their birdwalking
and backtracking—always wind up on the wrong side. Determined to locate the
good part of the New Left in this newest workers’ paradise, he dons his Mexican
wedding-shirt and huaraches and wanders through Managua in pinched-face
concentration searching for evidence that socialism cares about people. We saw
him there in the fall of 1987; we were amused by his mumbled apologies for the
bêtise of staying two nights in the Intercontinental Hotel and by the quick dash
he made every morning to breathe the heady fumes of the barrio.
It is not surprising that the whole literary repertory of leftism is on display in
his attack on our book—the shameless mendacity, the tabulation of history, the
brain-dwarfing moral smugness, and above all the insuperable intellectual
mediocrity. Berman is not only ignorant about basic realities of the decade we
write about, he is also tone-deaf to the era’s complexity. This is shown by what
he writes about the Black Panthers. Collier and Horowitz alone, he fatuously
suggests, got an illicit thrill from those heavy dudes. Only we were intrigued by
their Promethean willingness to pick up the gun; only we suspended our disbelief
when they said they had put the gun down in favor of serving the people.
The Panthers were, in fact, an icon for the great mass of worshipers in the
Church of Leftism, a larger and more joyous congregation then than now. The
posters of Huey P. Newton sitting on his Zulu throne adorned the walls of hip
lawyers as well as college students. Leonard Bernstein didn’t invite just anyone
into his living room even in those balmy days. Berman has the gall to ignore it
all. Ain’t nobody here but us moderates, he says; we didn’t believe in no Black
Panthers back then.
The irony is that it was only after the early Seventies, when the so-called
violent Panther faction of Eldridge Cleaver’s followers had been expelled from
the party, that people like us, who had remained aloof from the Panthers during
their maximalist phase, did get involved. As we point out in Destructive
Generation, we did so because Huey Newton claimed not only to have put down
the gun but to have embraced exactly the sort of community-organizing and
development passionately believed in by that tiny group of social democrats
among whom Berman counts himself. Like Berman and his ilk today, we wanted
back then to continue to believe in the left. We were searching for a soulful
socialism in the Oakland ghetto just as he now searches for it in the barrio of
Managua. Of course we were wrong 15 years ago, just as he is today. The “sane”
wing of the Black Panther Party turned out to be filled with insane killers.
But if we were wrong, we were not, as Berman claims, alone in our self-
delusion. At about the time we became involved in the Panthers’ “survival”
programs, Bobby Seale came surprisingly close to being elected mayor of
Oakland. In the spring of 1973, The Nation ran a long article explaining the
change for the better that had taken place in the party. Rutgers political scientist
Ross Baker assured readers that it was safe to support the Panthers once again
because they had “outgrown their rhetoric.”
A few months after the two of us had become involved with the Panthers, the
much-adulated liberal journalist Murray Kempton wrote a front-page review of
Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide in The New York Times Book Review that
concludes with this peroration: “We must hear him out because we suspect that
he comes not as avenger but as healer. Here is the only visible American who
has managed to arrive at the Platonic conception of himself.” In a final flourish,
Kempton noted that Huey had run a joint seminar at Yale with Erik Erikson,
using the reference to compare the Panther leader favorably to Luther and
Gandhi. That was in May 1973. A few weeks later, Kempton’s book on the
“Panther 21,” The Briar Patch, was published. And it was favorably reviewed by
another soi-disant social democrat, Garry Wills, who served up another front-
page Times review containing such gems about the Panthers—the Eldridge
Cleaver Panthers, no less—as these: “Never, it would seem, have people
threatened more and been guilty of less. . . . And in the end there is a sense of the
almost incredible ability of men to find dignity in resisting the viciousness of
other men—like lifting a 500-pound weight with one hand while stooped under a
1,000-pound weight kept on one’s back.”
The image is as awkward as many of Berman’s own, but the message is clear:
these noble Panthers were victims. Thus Kempton and Wills said in the liberal
New York Times what even we, at this stage, would have thought a bit much. So
our sin is not in being the only ones who enthused over the Black Panthers in
1973, but being the only ones who care to remember today the nasty things that
took place back then when Huey Newton was still a fetish for liberals and social
democrats as well as for scraggly West Coast radicals.
The story we tell of the Panther Götterdamerung, moreover, would remain
trapped in the memory-hole of the left if not for our book Destructive
Generation. We alone have pointed out what Berman now claims is obvious:
that the Panthers, for all their success in blandishing liberals and social
democrats, had never been anything more than a violent street-gang. Protective
of the faith, Berman bristles when we apply this term to the hardcore left as a
whole. Lest we forget, however, Bonnie and Clyde (“We rob banks”) were as
much cult-heroes in the Sixties as Huey and Eldridge were. More prototypically,
Stalin had a gang that also robbed banks. SDS wound up, after elemental
mitosis, as a gang of terrorists called Weatherman. The Sandinistas are a gang in
power; the FMLN is a gang in El Salvador that’s out of power so far; Castro is
the last great revolutionary gangster in the Soviet world.
The metaphor may not be perfect but it is apt, because the gang, like the left,
is ruled by power, not law; the gang aims only to perpetuate itself; the gang uses
rackets and scams to accumulate its wealth—shaking down the Oakland ghetto
or shaking down the campesinos. The gang thrives on feudalism and
backwardness; and as that darkness is lifted, as we see today in the Soviet bloc,
the gang’s hold is threatened. Of course, criminal gangs are often candid about
themselves in a way that the gangs of the left never are. Criminal gangs never
say they are serving the people, or midwifing the birth of a socialist utopia.
Looking for love in all the wrong places, Berman is one of those socialist
butterflies for whom the bloody and bankrupt history of socialism has no
conclusive meaning. That is why he continues to travel to Managua and bring
back reports that careen between agonizing reappraisal and reaffirmation of
belief.
At home Berman postures as an independent, if sympathetic, critic of the
revolution. In Managua, however, the desire to be a communicant in the Church
of Socialism gets the better of him. He goes to see Cabezas and reports back that
the Sandinistas are the only New Leftists who actually made it happen. The
image of someone who postures as a leftist of conscience sitting in the
headquarters of the secret police has a cognitive dissonance right out of the
Sixties.
6

Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem & Mine

More than a decade ago, when I was in my late 30s, I was visited by an elderly
woman named Ann Colloms, the mother of my best childhood friend. Like my
own parents and indeed all the adults I knew in the years I was growing up, Ann
had been a member of the Communist Party. She had come to discuss an
incident that occurred when she was in the Party and that still troubled her nearly
20 years later. Although I still considered myself part of the left at that time, I
had already developed some publicly-expressed doubts about the radical heritage
we all shared. It was for this reason that Ann now sought me out: to confess her
complicity in a crime committed when she was a Communist long ago.
Ann and my parents belonged to a colony of Jewish Communists who, in the
early Forties, had settled in a ten-block neighborhood of working-class Catholics
in Sunnyside, Queens. The members of this colony lived two lives. Outwardly
they were middle-class: scrupulous in their respect for the mores of the
community and unfailing in their obedience to its civil laws. They always
identified themselves publicly as “progressives,” espousing views that were
liberal and democratic. They thought of themselves, and were perceived by
others, as “socially conscious” and “idealistic;” This article appeared in the July
1989 issue of Commentary. they were active in trade unions and civil-rights
groups and in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

This article appeared in the July 1989 issue of Commentary.

The picture is consistent with that myth now struggling to be born in our
literary culture that such people were “small-c” communists whose belief in
democratic values outweighed their commitment to big “C” Communism. But
this is a myth with malevolent implications. In fact the members of this colony,
like Ann and my parents, also inhabited another, secret world as soldiers in the
Third International founded by Lenin. In their eyes, a sixth of humanity had
entered an entirely new stage of history in Soviet Russia in 1917—a triumphant
humanity that would be extended all over the world by the actions of the
vanguard they had joined. The world of liberal and progressive politics may
have been the world in which outsiders saw them; but their secret membership in
this revolutionary army was the world that really mattered to Ann, to my parents
and to all their political friends. It was the world that gave significance and
meaning to what otherwise were modest and rather ordinary lives.
In their own minds, Ann and my parents were secret agents. When they joined
the Communist Party, they had even been given secret names for the time when
their true objective would require them to abandon the facade of their liberal
politics and go underground to take the lead in the revolutionary struggle. (My
mother’s secret name was “Anne Powers,” which always struck me as terribly
WASP-y.) All their legitimate political activities were merely preparations or
fronts for the real tasks of their political commitment, which they could discuss
only with other secret agents like themselves. Their activities in the democratic
organizations they entered and controlled and in the liberal campaigns they
promoted were all part of their secret service. Their real purpose in pursuing
them was not to advance liberal or democratic values but to serve the interests of
the Soviet state—because in their minds the Soviet Union was the place where
the future had already begun. For those in the Party, the revolutionary role was
not the kitsch fantasy it seems in retrospect but something that was very real and
ultimately sinister. The story that Ann told me was proof enough.
No more than five feet tall in her stocking feet, Ann had been a high-school
teacher of foreign languages. Her only flirtation with a reality beyond the
prudent bounds of her middle-class existence was, in fact, her membership in the
Communist Party. But even her Party life—despite its little Bolshevik rituals and
conspiratorial overtones—was organized around activities that were quite un-
extraordinary: raising funds for the volunteers of loyalist Spain, marching for
civil rights, and playing the part of a loyal cadre in the New York City Teacher’s
Union, which the Party controlled. But on one occasion Ann was chosen for a
task that was not like the others—one that would burden her with guilt for the
rest of her life.
In 1940 the Party selected Ann, then a new mother, for a special mission. The
nature of the mission required that its purpose not be revealed, even to her, and
that its details be concealed even from her Party comrades. In any other area of
Ann’s life, the suggestions of illegality and the dangers inherent in such a
proposal would have provoked intolerable anxieties and suspicions in a person
of her middle-class temperament and sheltered experience. But it was the Party
that had made the request. And because it was the Party, the same elements had
an opposite effect. The fear that was present only emphasized the importance of
the cause that beckoned. The prospect of danger only heightened the honor of
receiving a call from the vanguard Party. She understood instinctively that it was
the very insignificance of her life up to that moment—its unobtrusiveness—that
made her suitable for the task she was being called perform. It was the Party that
spoke but it was History that called, and she answered.
Ann left her infant son with her husband in New York and took a plane to
Mexico. There she delivered a sealed envelope to a contact the Party had
designated. After making the delivery, she flew back to New York and resumed
the life she had lived before. It was as simple as that. Yet it was not simple at all.
As Ann soon discovered, she had become a small but decisive link in the chain
by which Joseph Stalin reached out from Moscow to Cayocoán, Mexico, to put
an ice-pick in Leon Trotsky’s head.
One of the most disturbing elements in Ann’s story lay in the fact that she had
waited so long to tell it, and then only to me. It had been 20 years after
Khrushchev’s report exposing to the Party faithful the crimes that Stalin had
committed. It was at that time that she and my parents had left the Communist
Party. Twenty years later she had come to me to tell her story and relieve her
guilt. But neither she nor my parents had ever thought to tell me this or similar
stories to warn me of the minefields I might encounter when, as a young man, I
started on my own career in the left. They had never told their stories publicly,
nor would they approve of my doing so now. The attitude of Ann and my parents
toward historical truth was a telling one. Like thousands of others, they had left
the Party but could not leave the faith.
Al Bernstein, the father of Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, had been a
member of the Communist Party and a secret agent in the same way that Ann
and my parents were secret agents. Like them, Al Bernstein is one of those
progressives who left the Party but could never leave its political faith. When
Carl Bernstein approached his father about a book he intended to write on “the
witch-hunts leading up to the McCarthy era,” Al Bernstein stonewalled him,
refusing to be interviewed even by his own son. He did not approve his son’s
proposed quest for the truth about his Communist past. He did not want his son
to discover the truth about his experience in the Communist Party or about the
Party’s role in American life. He did not want him to write about it. Even to ask
the questions his son was asking indicated an incorrect political attitude. “I think
your focus on the Party is cockeyed. You’re up the wrong tree. The right tree is
what people did. . . . I worry about your premise. The right premise, the premise
of a lot of recent books about the period, is that people were persecuted because
of what they did, not because of their affiliation. Because once you admit
affiliation you get into all that Stalinist crap.” (emphasis in the original)
Not to accept the “right” premise was more than politically incorrect; it was
dangerous. “The premise people eventually accepted after the McCarthy period
was that the victims weren’t Communists. If you’re going to write a book that
says McCarthy was right, that a lot of us were Communists, you’re going to
write a dangerous book.... You’re going to prove McCarthy right, because all he
was saying was that the system was loaded with Communists. And he was
right.”
In Al Bernstein’s view, even though McCarthy was right about the presence
of Communists posing as liberals in the political woodwork, and even though
virtually all of McCarthy’s targets were Communists, the fact that they were
Communists who lied about being Communists had nothing to do with their
being singled out: “Was I ‘oppressed’ because I was a Communist? . . . No. It
was incidental. I was ‘oppressed’ because of what I did, because I was affiliated
with a left-wing union.”
We should not be misled by this fatuous catechism. The sacrament that the
father rams down the son’s throat is brutal as well as tasteless. In point of fact,
Al Bernstein was a Communist. He was not merely “affiliated with” the United
Public Workers of America; he was a leader of the union. The United Public
Workers of America was not merely a “left-wing union” but a union under
Communist Party control. And the fact that it was a union under Communist
control—despite Al Bernstein’s protestations—made it entirely different than
other unions that were not Communist-controlled.
The difference was manifested most dramatically in the Cold War year 1948,
which began with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Coming ten years
after Munich, the event sent shock waves through the capitals of the West. In an
effort to halt the march of Soviet power, the Truman administration announced it
was launching the Marshall Plan—an economic-aid program to revive the war-
shattered economies of Western Europe and to shore up its democracies against
their own Communist threats. While most American unions supported the
Marshall Plan as an economic boon for their members and a necessary defense
measure for the West, Al Bernstein’s union did not. Along with all the other
Communist-controlled unions in America, Al Bernstein’s United Public Workers
attacked the Marshall Plan as a Cold War plot and launched an all-out campaign
against it. On the political front, Al Bernstein and his comrades bolted the
Democratic Party and organized the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry
Wallace in the hope of unseating Truman and ending his anti-Communist
program. Their actions were in fact a Soviet-orchestrated plot to sabotage the
defense of Europe against Soviet aggression.
Most unions were not agents of the Soviet Union as Al Bernstein’s was. In
response to their sedition, Al Bernstein’s union and other Communist-controlled
unions were purged from the CIO. They were purged not by McCarthy or by
Harry Truman and his Loyalty Board but by patriotic unionists like Philip
Murray and Walter Reuther, who as liberal socialists would not go along with
the Communist betrayal of their country and their union members in the service
of the Soviet Union. Phillip Murray, who is cited in Carl Bernstein’s Loyalties
for his principled opposition to the Loyalty Boards, also told the CIO convention
in 1948 that he opposed the Communists “because they have subverted every
decent movement into which they have infiltrated themselves in the course of
their unholy career.”
At 70-plus years of age, more than three decades after Senator McCarthy’s
death, Al Bernstein is still actively practicing his old Stalinist deceits, still taking
the Fifth Amendment towards any inquiry, however innocent, into his
commitments and beliefs, still hiding his Communist agendas behind a liberal
façade—and not only to the world at large but to his own pathetically inquisitive
son. To be called a witch-hunter by your father for trying, however ineffectually,
to sort out the Oedipal tangle must be a daunting experience.
Carl, whose memoir is utterly innocent of the vast literature on American
Communism—which refutes virtually every page of this little book he took
eleven years to write—measures the dimensions of his filial love in a passage
that occurs a little less than halfway through the text: “Many years later, . . . [I]
realized that it is my father for whom I write, whose judgment I most respect,
whose approval I still seek.” Loyalties is little more than a unilateral withdrawal
from the Oedipal struggle.
In the end, it is the sheer desperation of this filial hunger that overwhelms the
text Carl Bernstein intended to write and that explains the deficiencies of the
preposterous book he has had the bad judgment to publish. (Even the title—
originally Disloyal—has been changed to fit the fashions of the paternal party
line.) He resists his father’s “correct premise,” manfully at the outset. But by the
final chapters of Loyalties he has capitulated and even joined up. Al Bernstein’s
Communist Party loyalties didn’t matter, not to him and not to those who
pursued him—or so Carl avows. Al Bernstein and all the other agents of the
Communist cause were targeted solely for their activities on behalf of trade
unionism and civil rights; the internal security program of the Truman
administration “really was a war against liberals.”
This is not a book about the Communist Party and its discontents but a lecture
on the need to keep the tattered faith at whatever cost to one’s integrity. As Al
Bernstein, shrewder and intellectually stronger than his wayward son,
impatiently observes, “the right premise”—the Communist Party’s premise—is
“the premise of a lot of recent books about the period.” Thus the standard
academic work on the subject of American universities in the loyalty-oath era
—No Ivory Tower by Princeton professor Eleanor Schrecker—is written from
this neo-Stalinist perspective, as are most other recent studies written by
academic leftists about the early Cold War security conflicts.
Even more striking support for Al Bernstein’s perspective is offered by the
notices of Loyalties in the prestigious book-reviews of the Sunday New York
Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In each, Carl had his
literary knuckles rapped by leftist reviewers who chided him for not justifying
his parents’ Communist politics enough. Thus, Paul Robeson’s neo-Stalinist
biographer Professor Martin Duberman complained in The Washington Post
Book World: “In his dedication, Carl Bernstein asserts that he is proud of the
choices his parents made. But he never provides enough argued detail about
what went into those choices to allow most Americans to join him—as surely
they should—in his approbation.” Indeed.
What are the tenets of the neo-Stalinist faith that has so unexpectedly
resurfaced in American letters? Basically there are two: first, that Communists
were peace-loving, do-gooding, civil-rights activists and American patriots;
second, that they were the innocent victims of a fascist America. Carl has it
down pat: “‘It was a reign of terror.’ I have never heard my father talk like that,
have never known him to reach for a cliché. But this was no cliché.” (emphasis
in original). Correct: it was not a cliché; it is a lie.
No, Carl, we in America didn’t have a reign of terror, not the way that phrase
is understood to apply to the Stalinist world out of which our families both came
and where it means blood in the gutters. In America, my mother elected to take
an early disability retirement from the New York school-system rather than
answer questions about her membership in the Party. But with the help of Party
friends and liberal sympathizers she immediately went on to other, better
careers, as secretary to the head of the National Lawyers Guild and research
librarian for Planned Parenthood. Your father became a small-time entrepreneur
and you got a job, through his personal connections, as a reporter at The
Washington Star. When later you were at the Post and about to help topple a
sitting president during the Watergate scandal, you went to managing editor Ben
Bradlee to reveal the terrible secret about your parents’ Communist past, and
what did he do? Remove you from the case? No; in horrific, anti-Communist,
paranoid America, the home of McCarthy’s reign of terror, the editor of The
Washington Post told you to get on with the story. And what did you learn from
that? Exactly nothing.
That is my ultimate complaint about Loyalties and its pseudo-account of the
anti-Communist era. As in all the recent rewrites of this history, whose premise
is to keep the faith, the reality of the postwar domestic conflict between
Communists and anti-Communists goes unreported. In a fleeting episode of
Loyalties, Carl’s friend and former boss Ben Bradlee recalls over dinner that he
had always thought of progressives like Carl’s parents, whom he did not
personally know, as “awful people.” Even in the jagged structure of this book,
the observation is jarring. But even more unnerving is the fact that the famous
investigative reporter of Watergate does not pursue the remark to inquire what
memories might lie behind it. The same lack of inquisitiveness is seen in his
feeble efforts to understand the nature of his parents’ true commitments. He
describes his mother, then in her 70s, as a woman who is “very forgiving.” But
when she refers to a political adversary of 30 years ago as a “vicious bastard,”
her son simply ignores the emotional signal, missing anything that it might tell
us about the polarized psyches and virulent hatreds of progressives like his
parents.
Elsewhere he describes how his grandfather would take him to a Jewish
bookstore to buy the Yiddish-language Communist newspaper Freiheit. “Until
the day he died in 1967 he had no use for the [non-Communist] Forward—or the
[non-Communist] Socialists. ‘Fareters,’ traitors of the cause, he called them, and
he didn’t much like having any of them into his house. . . .” This life-long hatred
toward non-Communist leftists, coupled with casual vitriolic abuse, was a staple
of the personalities of Bernstein’s parents and of the other “victims” of the
postwar “purge.” In attempting to explain to Carl, at another point in the text,
why Al Bernstein joined the party, family friend and fellow-Communist Bob
Treuhaft observed: “There was a feeling that unless you joined and were with us
you were the enemy.” Carl lets this one slip by, too.
These progressive activists had many enemies. John L. Lewis, head of the
CIO’s United Mine Workers, had once been a party ally; but when he refused to
go along with the Communist-supported no-strike pledge after the German
invasion of Russia, the party attacked him as a “pro-Nazi” who was committing
“treason.” The Communists also routinely denounced civil rights leader A.
Philip Randolph, the organizer of the war-time March on Washington, as “a
fascist helping defeatism,” because Randolph had refused to shelve the struggle
for civil rights—as the party demanded—in favor of joining the effort to help
save the USSR from defeat. So much for the fantasy that Communist Party
members were at bottom only unionists and civil-rights activists, or that
progressives love peace.
Not only were progressives not libertarians; they were also, despite their pious
wails later on, notorious masters of the political blacklist in all the organizations
they managed to control. It was partly for these reasons that when the loyalty
boards and congressional committees finally did come to town, there were a lot
of people—a lot of liberal people—waiting to settle scores with the Communists.
To them, Communists were not the civil-libertarian idealists of Carl Bernstein’s
book but political conspirators who had infiltrated, manipulated and taken over
their own liberal organizations to subvert them for hidden agendas; had
slandered, libeled, and blacklisted people who opposed the party line; and had
then lied to the public, pretending they were not Marxists or Soviet loyalists
when questions about their political affiliations were asked.
The Communists lied to everyone then, and the new keepers of their faith are
still lying today. “If you’re going to write a book that says McCarthy was right,
that a lot of us were Communists, you’re going to write a dangerous book,” Al
Bernstein had warned. Look for a moment at this logic: To admit that they were
Communists is to lend credence to the claims of Joe McCarthy. Why is this
dangerous at so late a date? Is not McCarthy himself the most irretrievable
political corpse of the McCarthy era? It is dangerous for progressives to admit
the truth not because it will bring persecution but because it will remove the
final veil and show progressive life to be simple service to the totalitarian cause.
It is not a fear of smearing “innocents” that haunts the political left when it
looks at its disgraceful past. It is something more like the fear that haunted the
conscience of deconstructionist scholar Paul De Man: embarrassment over a
terrible guilt. “‘Look,’ [Al Bernstein] snapped, ‘you’ve read Lillian Hellman’s
book. She skirts these questions [about Communist Party membership] very
neatly. She’s too sharp to leave herself open to that kind of embarrassment.’”
As always, Al Bernstein’s old Stalinist politics reveal a judgment sharper than
that of his born-again son. Embarrassment is the problem, not a sham reign of
terror. It is the shame of being exposed as a loyal supporter of a mass-murderer
like Stalin for all those years. The struggle now is not over the fact, but what it
actually meant to be a Communist then and an apologist for Communists now.
Civil rights, trade unionism, human brotherhood and peace: That’s what we were
—they now stubbornly claim as their fallback position—that was our cause.
Communism? Marxism? Socialism? Those were incidental—irrelevant to who
we were and what we did.
Loyalties reveals the secret of how the progressive left aims to be born again
—by erasing the embarrassment of its disreputable past; by hiding the shame of
having supported Stalin and Mao and Fidel and Ho and all the terrible purges,
murders, and other despicable means that finally served no beneficial ends. The
ultimate embarrassment is of having been so stubbornly and perversely on the
wrong side of history; of having embraced “solutions” that were politically,
economically and morally bankrupt in the great struggles of our time. As Joseph
Stalin was the first socialist leader to understand, the airbrushing of history is the
only sure means to preserve the honor of the left. In this, as no doubt in other
parts of his undiscovered life, Al Bernstein follows right along the Stalinist path.
And his son walks in lockstep behind him, picking up his mess.
7

Political Cross-Dresser: Michael Lind Perpetrates a

Hoax

Last winter, while working on my autobiography, I received a phone-call from

my friend Ronald Radosh telling me about an article Michael Lind had written
for the socialist magazine Dissent. The article was called “The Death of
Intellectual Conservatism” and was Lind’s explanation of the political
transformation that had led him to abandon his career as a journalist ostensibly
on the political right. The article was announced with great fanfare on his part
and accepted by the left, Lind’s new home, as a God That Failed in reverse.
Prior to the appearance of Lind’s article, and despite the fact that we were
presumably both members of a relatively small community of conservative
intellectuals, I had only been vaguely conscious of his existence. Although I was
an inveterate reader of conservative magazines and books, and familiar with
most if not all of the intellectual lights of the movement, I knew Lind only as a
name on the masthead of Irving Kristol’s foreign-policy magazine, The National
Interest, and as the author of one or two articles whose subjects and arguments
had not left a lasting impression.

Published May 15, 1998 on www.frontpagemag.com;

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24322

Despite Lind’s obscurity, there were reasons for the interest that news of his
apostasy now aroused in me. To begin with, there was the appearance of a
parallel career, as someone who seemed to be stepping onto a path that both
Radosh and I had previously trod, albeit in the opposite direction. The path had
begun in 1952, when Radosh and I had gotten to know each other at a meeting of
his chapter of the Labor Youth League, a Communist Party front in lower
Manhattan, where I had come to recruit writers for the Daily Worker’s “youth
page,” which had been launched improbably at my suggestion since I was only
13 at the time. (My parents were friends with Joe North, one of the paper’s
editors.) The youth page lasted for only one issue but Ron and I became lifelong
friends. In 1987 he was one of the former radicals whom Peter Collier and I
recruited for the “Second Thoughts Conference” we held at the Grand Hyatt in
Washington, D.C. We had assembled a group of former Sixties radicals who
were fed up with the anti-American passions and totalitarian romances of the left
and were ready to say goodbye to all that. The intellectuals grouped around
Dissent, whom Michael Lind now counts as his comrades, were among the most
vocal in attacking our second thoughts about the Sixties as overwrought and
even renegade.
The second reason for my interest in Lind’s political conversion was a long-
running dialogue between Radosh and myself about whether we should have
wound up as conservatives at all. Radosh was, in fact, still on the editorial board
of Dissent, though more in name than anything else at the time of Lind’s
conversion. He had been banned by Dissent’s editor, Irving Howe, from writing
in its pages because of his opposition to the Sandinista dictatorship. Having
forbidden Radosh to write on this subject, Howe then pressured him to resign
from the Dissent board. Howe stopped short of actually removing Radosh
because another board member, Marty Peretz, shared Ron’s views and Howe
was reluctant to antagonize Marty, who was one of the magazine’s funders.
Although hated by the left for his courageous book The Rosenberg File–which
showed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had indeed been part of a Communist
espionage effort—and for his writings against the Sandinistas, Radosh still
thought of himself as a “social democrat.” He had voted for Bill Clinton in the
1992 election. He was ambivalent about being situated in the conservative camp
where leftwing critics had effectively placed him by their constant vilification. I
had no such ambivalence. The image of the right that the left had manufactured
—authoritarian, bigoted, mean-spirited, “Neanderthal”—was an absurd
caricature that had no relation to the way I saw myself or my new comrades-in-
arms. Conservatism to me was liberal, a commitment to the values and principles
of individual liberty embodied in the American founding. I had rejected the
leveling illusions and totalitarian longings of the left. I had no apologies for what
I had become. My only political regrets had to do with the durability of the
politics that Radosh and I had once espoused and now rejected as dangerous and
destructive. When Radosh alerted me to the appearance of Lind’s article, the
subtext of his call was a question: “Is Lind right about intellectual conservatism?
Should you be having third thoughts?”
And so I came to regard Lind as a sort of Doppelgänger. I wanted to see how
the intellectual world was going to treat him for his apostasy. I had been
prepared for what happened to Peter Collier and myself when our own rejection
of half a lifetime of leftism became public. I had expected the attacks from the
Left. I knew that we and Radosh would be smeared as renegades, CIA
spokesmen and worse. But only Collier foresaw the real punishments that were
in store for us; in particular, the penalties that the left would exact on our
intellectual and literary careers. At the time Collier and I published our
declaration of independence in The Washington Post and were called “Lefties
for Reagan,” we had not been active in the movement for nearly a decade. After
our disillusionment, we had allowed a decent interval to elapse before reentering
the political arena; we had not betrayed or exploited the confidences of recent
friends. We thought the long gestation—a calculated gesture to preserve our
political options—would pre-empt the attacks on us as renegades and traitors. In
this regard we were hopelessly naïve.
During the ten-year interval, we had written a series of best-selling
biographies and several celebrated magazine articles, some of which were
optioned by Hollywood producers. We were hoping to carve out new careers as
literary figures. But when our apostasy became public, the retribution was swift
and without limit. Before our declaration, the biographies we had written were
regularly given frontpage treatment in the Sunday New York Times Book Review,
which described them as “hypnotically fascinating,” “irresistible” and the like,
and put them on its list of the year’s top ten books. But once we openly
discussed the reasons for our rejection of the left and admitted to voting for
Ronald Reagan, all that changed. Our next biographies were relegated to the
back of the Book Review; while Destructive Generation was derisively
dismissed, by a reviewer who had once raved about us, as the work of political
“extremists.”
Despite our best efforts not to be typed as political conservatives, we found
that we were now unwelcome in the pages of The Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s,
The New York Review of Books and even The New Republic, where we had
hoped to find a home. Our first biography, The Rockefellers, had been nominated
for a National Book Award but now we realized that we would never be in line
for literary prizes again. Nor were the issues that we raised in our apostasy the
source of much attention or interest in these intellectual journals. We had been
founders of the New Left, had written some of its basic political texts, and had
edited Ramparts, its flagship publication. Yet our defection was treated as venal
in motive and our commitments dismissed by writers like Garry Wills as
“marginal” to the movement and the Sixties. None of the above-mentioned
magazines took seriously the arguments we and the other members of our
second-thoughts group had raised at the conference.
There was a further irony in all this, which added to my curiosity about the
fate of Michael Lind. Perhaps no greater caution exists for a leftist tempted to
leave the faith than the charge of “selling out.” To those who have it, the radical
commitment seems to be less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the
political faith is thus as inconceivable as leaving a religious one. Only
pathological behavior—taking money or some other material benefit—could
explain to a leftist the decision to adopt an opposing political stance; no decent
person could ever make such a choice in the absence of some kind of payoff.
Even in the post-Communist world, the average leftist remains in this way a
vulgar Marxist despite all. The fact that Peter and I had actually lost
opportunities for personal gain as a result of our change-of-heart was
incomprehensible to our former comrades, who accused us of selling out.
The penalties we paid were a lesson for me in the pervasive control the left
exercised over the culture’s commanding heights. Lind’s successes in the
aftermath of his Dissent piece now completed the course. Prior to his apostasy,
Lind was a nonentity in the conservative movement. He had no claim to
importance other than the fact that he had been sponsored and befriended by
important conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. and Irving Kristol, whose
hands he then proceeded to bite. But once he did his about-face, this obscure
junior editor of an obscure magazine (circulation 4,000) became an intellectual
hot property. Whereas Collier and I found ourselves unwelcome in the literary
culture after our Washington Post piece, lead articles and cover stories by Lind
suddenly appeared within months of each other in The New York Review of
Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
He was made a senior editor successively of Harper’s, The New Republic, and
The New Yorker; he was signed by New York publishers for three lucrative book
deals, including an account of his apostasy, based on the Dissent article, called—
what else?—Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America.
The transformation from right to left had paid off handsomely. In fact, it
seemed less a conversion than a career move. Lind actually got all the rewards
our former leftist comrades had falsely accused Collier and me of getting; but he
drew no suspicion about his motives. I was curious to see if his book lived up to
the billing—if he had the goods as well as the goodies.
Up from Conservatism comes with a flap copy that describes Lind as “a
former rising star of the Right,” which he was not, and a blurb from Gore Vidal
describing the book as “a fascinating look—from the inside—at that web of
foundations and other interested people, corporate and simply dotty, that now
shape most of what passes for political commentary.” In his blurb, Vidal also
compares Lind to Alexis de Tocqueville.
My first interest, in the Dissent article and the book, was the reason for Lind’s
break with the conservative movement I had joined. They would provide an
opportunity to check on any illusions that might have insinuated themselves into
my new political directions. In writing our own explications de vie, Collier and I
had been careful to point out that for us there was no sudden revelation on the
road to Damascus, no single moment or event that unraveled the skein of our
former political selves. The change in our perspective had occurred through
many events in the course of many years.
If there was a single chain of events that encapsulated the process of our
second thoughts, it was the war in Vietnam, which provided what we referred to
as the shaping metaphor for our generation’s view of the world. It was the
tormented aftermath of that war that became our point of no return. As the
Soviets moved into the vacuum created by America’s defeat, it was clear to us
that the Cold War was ultimately a zero-sum game. When America lost, so did
humanity and the cause of freedom, even in Vietnam. More people were killed
in Indochina in the first three years of the Communist peace than had been killed
in thirteen years of the anti-Communist war. Those victims were a direct result
of the antiwar movement’s efforts. The survivors had been swallowed by a
socialist police-state even worse than the corrupt regimes that it replaced. Salting
those wounds, the left showed a lack of concern for the victims that was matched
only by its continuing malice towards America. But what finally turned us away
from the left was not only the evil it had done. It was its inability to look at its
deeds and make a moral accounting, to steer an altered course that would keep it
from contributing to similar tragedies in the future.
In Up from Conservatism, Michael Lind reveals that in contrast to us he
actually did experience a Damascus-style revelation on the way to his new
career. His epiphany came from the 1991 publication of a book called The New
World Order by Pat Robertson, which detailed “a conspiracy theory blaming
wars and revolutions on a secret cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons,
Illuminati, atheists, and internationalists.” Confronted with this threat from
Robertson, who had founded a new and powerful organization called the
Christian Coalition, “the leaders of intellectual conservatism—William F.
Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz, instead of protesting, chose
unilateral surrender.” Those intrepid souls who criticized Robertson, like Lind
himself, were “denounced as ‘liberals’ and even ‘Marxists.’” The result,
according to Lind, was an “exodus of the major young intellectuals formerly
associated with the right,” himself among them. The overall consequence of
these events, as Lind tells it, was that “American conservatism is dead. . . .
Today the right is defined by Robertson, Buchanan, and the militia movement.”
Any reader who was not a liberal zealot or otherwise predisposed to hate and
fear the right, and who was reasonably acquainted with the conservative
movement in America, might be tempted to close Lind’s book right there. The
characterization is so off-the-wall and self-discrediting that further exploration
of the author’s thoughts would seem hardly necessary. Consider for example the
remark about an exodus of “the major young intellectuals” of the right following
the alleged surrender to Robertson. This flourish may add a frisson of
importance to his own departure, while seeming to support his claim about the
death of conservatism. But where is the evidence? I actually did a double-take on
reading the sentence, since I was unaware that any such defection besides his
own had taken place. This despite the fact that my personal interest in such a
development would have been great.
Later Lind identifies “the major young intellectuals” as actually only three:
Jeffrey Herf, Bruce Bawer and Jacob Heilbrunn. Herf was, in fact, one of the
featured speakers at our Second Thoughts Conference in 1987 and is still a
friend. It is news to me that Jeffrey Herf ever thought of himself as a
Republican, let alone a conservative. He has second thoughts about the Sixties
left, but he has always been a Democrat and on the left side of the spectrum. At
our conference, he particularly outraged Hilton Kramer by defending some of
what the New Left had done and by describing himself as a “feminist.” Bruce
Bawer is a book and film critic who actually remains a conservative.37 Jacob
Heilbrunn is a Harvard graduate student who was briefly at The National Interest
and is known only for the article he wrote about Pat Robertson in liberal New
Republic, which he co-authored with Michael Lind. Whatever his politics, he is
hardly a conservative “star.”
As though sensitive to the indefensible nature of his thesis, Lind repeats it
endlessly throughout his book: “The ‘right’ now means the overlapping
movements of the ‘far right’. . . . [same paragraph] The only movement on the
right in the United States today that has any significant political influence is the
far right. . . .” Lind summarizes the philosophy of this right in the following
words: “The fact remains that a common worldview animates both the followers
of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the far-right extremists who bomb
abortion clinics, murder federal marshals and country sheriffs, and blow up
buildings and trains. That worldview is summed up by three letters: ZOG. ZOG
stands for ‘Zionist-occupied government,’ the phrase used by far-right white
supremacists, anti-Semites, and militia members for the federal government.”
Nor is it just hateful philosophy which conservatives share. “In the manner of
the southern right from the Civil War until the civil rights revolution, which
operated both through the Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan, or the
modern Irish Republican movement, with its party (Sinn Fein) and its terrorist
branch (the IRA), the contemporary American far right has both public, political
wings (the Christian Coalition and Project Rescue) and its covert, paramilitary,
terrorist factions.” Naturally, Lind doesn’t name any of these factions or attempt
to link terrorist and paramilitary groups with their alleged fronts, like the
Christian Coalition, which (unlike Sinn Fein) has denounced such violence. For
Lind, whose book is an exercise in slander, the accusation is all that matters.
Lind doesn’t explain how William F. Buckley, Jr.—who 30 years ago
drummed anti-Semites and John Birchers out of the mainstream right and whose
most recent book is about the anti-Semitism of Pat Buchanan and others
—“surrendered unilaterally” to those hateful and menacing forces. Nor does he
attempt to explain how Norman Podhoretz, accused by Lind’s new anti-Semitic
admirer Gore Vidal of being an Israeli agent, could be brought to do the same.
Lind’s claim is simply that Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition is electorally so
powerful that conservatives like Buckley and neo-conservatives like Podhoretz
are reluctant to challenge him for fear of jeopardizing the Republican agenda.
The absurdity of Lind’s argument is breathtaking. If Robertson shared such
extremist worldviews with Pat Buchanan and were acting on them within the
Republican Party, why would he and his Christian Coalition support Robert Dole
in the Republican primaries and not Buchanan? Lind refers to Robertson as “the
kingmaker” of the Republican Party. What does that mean if not the ability to
determine the party’s candidate? And if that were the case then why not himself,
since he has run as a candidate before? If the far right had been the only
“significant political influence on the right,” why didn’t Robertson engineer his
own nomination, or at least give it to another rightwing outlier like Phil Gramm
or Bob Dornan? If fear of losing Robertson was enough to intimidate Buckley,
Podhoretz and the neo-conservatives from confronting his alleged anti-Semitism,
why were they so ready to attack his alleged cohort Pat Buchanan as an anti-
Semite and even “fascist” (as both The American Spectator and Bill Bennett
called him), at a time when Buchanan was winning 30 percent of the vote in two
presidential primaries? And where is the evidence that Buchanan, who has
become almost a darling of the left, believes in the ZOG?
It needs to be said, since Lind does not bring it up in his book, that when
Lind’s original attacks on Robertson were taken up by the general media
Robertson responded publicly. Both in interviews and in paid advertisements in
The New York Times, Robertson expressed his personal anguish and dismay at
the implications that others had found in his works. He denied any intention to
identify Jews as social conspirators; he apologized to the Jewish community for
any offense his book may have given, pointing out that nowhere in his book
were the Jews explicitly singled out for blame; and he recalled his longstanding
efforts on behalf of Israel, which included marshalling crucial votes in Congress
during the 1973 and 1990–91 Middle East wars, where Israel’s survival may be
said to have hung in the balance. He concluded his mea culpa by declaring that
he was proud to be a strong supporter and dependable friend of both Israel and
the Jews. Rather than fear, this testimony and the facts behind it explain why
Buckley and Podhoretz were quick to descend on Buchanan—who refused even
to consider that his notorious outbursts might give anyone offense—but left
Robertson relatively (only relatively) unscathed.
Robertson’s behavior in explaining himself, it should be said, contrasts
dramatically with that of leftwing political anti-Semites like Lind’s blurb-writer
Gore Vidal, not to speak of Louis Farrakhan, who unlike Robertson actually
preaches a virulent anti-Semitism and has been embraced by forty congressional
members of the Democratic Party that Lind has chosen for his new ideological
home.
When he gets around to actually analyzing Robertson’s text, Lind reveals just
how manipulative a polemicist he can be. In composing The New World Order,
Robertson or his researcher did make an egregious decision to draw on tired
conspiracy-theories from anti-Semitic texts. But what is interesting about his use
of those texts is that in his own book, where he cited them, he removed most of
their specific references to Jews, and particularly to the Jewishness of principals
involved in the alleged conspiracies—a peculiar quirk, to say the least, for an
anti-Semite, let alone for the kind of neo-Nazi menace that Lind has conjured.
Nor is Lind unaware of Robertson’s editorial process. Indeed, Lind actually
draws his readers’ attention to it in claiming that Robertson’s omission of ethnic
particulars is further evidence of his anti-Semitism: “Throughout The New
World Order, as I shall show in further detail below, Robertson uses ‘German’
or ‘European’ where his anti-Semitic sources have ‘Jewish.’” Because this
seems to convey a certain innocence in Robertson’s references, Lind quotes a
passage from Robertson’s text and inserts in brackets the offending connections
Robertson has removed:
Later the European powers [i.e., bankers like the Rothschilds] began to see
the wealth of North America as a great treasure, and some of them still
wanted to get their tentacles into America’s economy [note the ‘octopus’
metaphor, a staple of anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist rhetoric]. They
eventually did so not by force, but by investing their money here, by
sending people [i.e., Jewish bankers like Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff],
and by buying land.

This is a bizarre way to demonstrate that an author is anti-Semitic.
 The crucial questions to ask about what Lind calls “The Pat Robertson
Scandal,” are these. First: are Robertson’s politics actually governed by these
conspiratorial views? And if so, how did he come to be an early supporter of
Bob Dole? Second: are they shared by Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian
Coalition, whom everybody, including his liberal opponents, agree is a shrewd
strategist and supple intellect operating in the political mainstream? Third: are
they shared by the 1.8 million members of the Christian Coalition, which as even
Lind is forced to admit is a direct-mail coalition and not a party or cult in the
manner of the Posse Comitatus, the John Birch Society, or the Nation of Islam?
Lind makes no effort whatsoever to assemble evidence that would illuminate
or answer these critical questions, and thus to ascertain whether Pat Robertson’s
conspiracy views are anything more than one man’s hot air. In other words,
Lind’s “analysis” is completely empty of any real-world referents or
implications.
What Lind does for effect is to lump Robertson with David Duke, who unlike
Robertson was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis.
Lind also asserts, without argument or evidence, that the Christian Coalition is
identical to the John Birch Society. He takes Buckley’s unwillingness to attack
Robertson publicly as evidence for the historic capitulation of mainstream
conservatism to the anti-Semitic, racist far right. But the kooky doctrines of John
Birch Society leader Robert Welch were demonstrably separate from the GOP
mainstream. Welch publicly attacked Dwight Eisenhower as a Communist, and
his members followed suit. Lind does not mention a single occasion during the
six years of the Christian Coalition’s existence when its policies have reflected a
conspiratorial mentality or an anti-ZOG agenda.
A section of this silly and squalid book that fascinated me was Lind’s effort to
explain the world of intellectual conservatism, an environment with which I am
quite familiar. Lind’s chapter on the subject, “The Triangular Trade: How the
Conservative Movement Works,” is as dishonestly constructed and argued as the
rest of his book. The title itself is an open smear: “One might speak of the
interaction of money, ideas, and activists on the right as a ‘triangular trade, like
the Eighteenth Century cycle of rum-slaves-molasses.” According to Lind, part
one of this trade is the grassroots faction that he identifies as the Goldwater-YAF
right, linked in McCarthy-like sweeps to the John Birch Society, The National
Review, and all the dread demons, anti-Semites, bigots, militia storm-troopers
and killers of federal agents whom he seems to invoke on every other page. The
second leg in the trade is the “corporate right,” which turns out be the hoary
specter of Wall Street and Big Business. The business elite, according to Lind,
has “acquired its own intelligentsia in the form of libertarians,” specifically the
Cato Institute, which in Lind’s fantasies draft all the tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-
legislation that incite Richard Gephardt and David Bonior to their fits of
egalitarian outrage. In sum, according to Lind: “The strategy of the modern
Republican party is based on a division of labor, with the grassroots right serving
as an electoral coalition, and the libertarian right as a governing elite.”
According to Lind, this arrangement presents a problem for Republicans
because the libertarians regard the grassroots Gold-waterites as fascists, while
the Goldwater fascists regard the libertarians as betrayers of their authoritarian
dreams. To make this alliance work, an “umbrella ideology” is provided by the
third part of the triangular trade—the neo-conservative “brain trust,” a network
of intellectual think-tanks. The purpose of the think-tanks is to compel
conservative intellectuals, through monetary bribes, to shill for the Republican
agenda.
I will pause here for the benefit of readers who may not have any personal
contact with the intellectual right, in order to shed some anecdotal light on this
picture, which is as remote from the realities of contemporary conservatism as
Pluto is from the sun. Thus, for example, my friend Marshall Wittman, a former
New Leftist—onetime head of the Waco, Texas Free Angela Davis Committee
and also a Jew—was until recently the legislative director of the Christian
Coalition in Washington and thus in Lind’s typology a crypto-fascist anti-
Semite. Marshall is now at the Heritage Foundation, which is the biggest policy
think-tank on the right but passed over in Lind’s text because it is not libertarian
and so its role in formulating the Republican agenda would completely refute his
thesis.
Another friend, Shawn Steel, is a veteran of the Goldwater campaign, a
former YAFer and grassroots activist. He is treasurer of the California
Republican Party and finance chair of conservative Republican Dana
Rohrabacher’s campaign organization. He is also on the board of the Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, part of Lind’s neo-conservative “brain trust.” Both
Steel and Rohrabacher are devout libertarians, farther from being “fascists” than
any of my former comrades on the left including all of Lind’s new friends. Both
have been particularly active in recruiting Asian-Americans to the Republican
cause. Neither is an isolated example. A reunion of Goldwater activists, which I
attended, was held in Orange County during the presidential primaries four years
ago. Every significant rightwing Republican from the California congressional
delegation and legislature was present to honor Howard Ahmanson, whom the
Los Angeles Times has described as the “king of the religious right” in the state,
but who opposed, for example, Prop 187, California’s anti-illegal immigration
initiative. Nearly every one of the 27 speakers, led by far-right Representative
“B-1 Bob” Dornan, supported the moderate George Bush over the far-right Pat
Buchanan for president. So much for Lind’s guide as to how the conservative
movement and the Republican Party work.
In fact, Lind’s analysis amounts to little more than the kind of crackpot
conspiracy theory he pretends to deride. Indeed, Lind’s book reminds me of
nothing so much as the Bircher tracts of the Sixties like None Dare Call It
Conspiracy. According to Lind, “The modern conservative brain trust originated
in a scheme hatched in the 1970s by William E. Simon, Irving Kristol, and
others.” The alleged plan was to make conservative intellectuals, hitherto an
independent-minded, quirky, and diverse community, a controlled monolith that
would function as a reliable tool of the Republican Party. “By the early 1990s,
thanks to the success of the Simon-Kristol initiative, almost all major
conservative magazines, think tanks, and even individual scholars had become
dependent on money from a small number of conservative foundations.” By this
point, the puppet-masters Simon and Kristol are being referred to by Lind as the
“Wall Street corporate raider” and the “ex-Communist-apparatchik.” For the
record, it is worth noting that Irving Kristol’s connection to the Communist
Party is this: in 1938 he spent a year in a Trotskyist—read anti-Communist—
splinter group, arguing with the apparatchiks and demonstrating what a poor
candidate for any Leninist Party he was.
Smears like this are not coincidental to Lind’s argument; they are his
argument. He writes: “The conservative movement these ex-radicals [like
Kristol] crafted was therefore one that adopted the characteristic institutions and
strategies of Communism while purveying an anti-Communist (not merely a
non-Communist) message.” The Communist Party imposed conformity on its
intellectuals through ideology and terror. Kristol’s party, according to Lind,
imposes an identical uniformity through the dispensation of monies under the
control of a few rightwing foundations. “What passes for intellectual
conservatism is little more than the subsidized propaganda wing of the
Republican Party. Public dissent on matters of concern to the U.S. business elite
is not tolerated.”
This is a pathetic rant without a scintilla of evidence to back up its claims.
Joshua Muravchik and Ben Wattenberg, to name just two fellows at the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), signed a public ad supporting Bill Clinton
in 1992, without losing their jobs or suffering any other consequences. Currently
there are at least three conflicting and hotly-debated conservative positions on
immigration reform, an issue of obvious concern to the business elite. The head
of one conservative think-tank has been hired by Silicon Valley computer firms
to promote open immigration, while other “brain trust” members call for greater
restrictions. Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett, whose Empower America qualifies as
a unit of the “brain trust,” flew to California to oppose the immigration-
restriction ballot proposition, which was the principal platform of the Republican
governor’s election campaign, supported by the heads of all of California’s
conservative think tanks. Almost every conservative journal has published
vigorous debates on this issue. It would be hard to imagine that kind of political
diversity on the Democratic side of the political spectrum on any issue so
important.
The grand puppet-master himself, Irving Kristol, is correctly described by
Lind as censorious on cultural issues. But then Lind doesn’t explain how it is
that congressional Republicans have led the fight against the V-Chip and
censorship on the Internet. The range of issues on which conservatives disagree
is almost endless. The National Review recently published a cover feature by Bill
Buckley calling for the legalization of drugs, to the dismay of Bill Bennett and
most of the conservative intellectual community, including the editorial board of
The National Review itself. An even more instructive incident took place last
spring over the publication of Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism. While the
D’Souza book was funded in part by one of Lind’s demonic rightwing
foundations, it was publicly attacked and damaged by two foundation-funded
intellectuals and charter members of the conservative brain trust, Glenn Loury
and Robert Woodson. So much for the party line.
Since Lind’s strategy is reflexively one of tar-and-feather, D’Souza and
Charles Murray get extra punishment as they have already been targets of
vicious liberal attacks. Murray is indisputably one of the leading social scientists
in America but he and D’Souza are portrayed by Lind as intellectual whores,
“subsidized conservative publicists,” hired to promote the political agendas of
the Republican party. “If this seems too harsh a judgment,” Lind writes,
“suppose that Murray’s research had convinced him that in fact Head Start
programs did work, and needed to be substantially expanded—and that to do so
he recommended higher income-taxes on the rich. One need not be a complete
cynic to think that he might have trouble getting grants in the future from
conservative foundations, or renewing his stay at AEI.”
If complete cynicism is not required, a dose of ideological blindness or just
plain stupidity helps. How could anyone overlook the fact that Murray and
D’Souza are best-selling authors and national celebrities who can command six-
figure book contracts and lucrative speaking fees and thus are quite able to
support themselves, in the unlikely event that AEI should decide to terminate
them for ideological deviations? Murray would not even have to make that
choice because there is enough diversity in the conservative universe to support
conflicting views. In fact, Murray left another conservative think-tank and went
to AEI precisely because the first did not want to support his work on The Bell
Curve, while AEI was willing to do so. So much for Lind’s conservative
monolith.
As if Lind’s penchant for the political gutter and his disregard for the simple
truth were not sufficient, when Up from Conservatism turns to a brief
autobiographical moment, what is revealed is that Lind is a poseur and phony as
well. The man who has exploited his minor-league political metamorphosis for
great personal gain reveals that he was never a conservative at all, and did not
rise “up from conservatism.” In his own words, which appear midway through
his text: “My political journey has been far less dramatic than a switch from left
to right. My political views have scarcely changed since college.”
Lind’s views, it turns out, are and have always been those of a centrist
Democrat whose political hero is Lyndon Baines Johnson. Notwithstanding this
unswerving political allegiance, Lind insinuated himself into the conservative
movement while still at Yale, accepted a job at The National Review and
proceeded mole-like for ten years to burrow through conservative institutions—
the Heritage Foundation, the Bush Administration, The National Interest —
taking advantage of conservative patrons all along the way, only to turn them,
for personal gain, into the unlikely villains of his intellectually vapid, self-
promoting tract.
Shortly after Peter Collier and I first entered the conservative world, Norman
Podhoretz warned me: “When you were on the left, you got away with
everything. Now that you’re on the right, you’d better be careful because they
won’t let you get away with anything.” Michael Lind has made the reverse
crossing. Indeed, Getting Away With Everything would have been a good title for
this reprehensible, gutter-sniping book.
8

Still Lying After All These Years

Perhaps the most famous statement about the Sixties, an era we seem unable to
escape, is a quip attributed to its own Pied Piper, the late Timothy Leary: “If you
remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.” Unhappily, it is an observation that
applies not only to burnt-out acid-heads like Leary, but to the hard-wired
political activists and humor-free Marxists who once guided the Movement on
its destructive mission to remake America as well.
To me it is this generally overlooked phenomenon that has been the biggest
surprise of all. Who would have thought that New Leftists, having made a cult of
authenticity in their youth, would become such hypocritical ass-kissers of that
Zeitgeist in middle age? It cracks me up whenever Tom Hayden or Angela Davis
or Noam Chomsky or The Nation’s editors are described by their media friends
as liberals—Chomsky as a “Jewish liberal,” no less—and the same veteran
radicals embrace the label as though it belonged to them. Holy My Lai!
Remember when the LBJ liberals were the enemy and we were the In-Your-
Face, Up-Against-the-Wall-Motherf—-er revolutionaries? Apparently none of
them wants to.

This article was published July 30, 1998 on frontpagemag.com;

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=22637

A few years back, I found myself on a panel at Georgetown University
debating the historian Michael Kazin on the subject of the Sixties and Vietnam.
Kazin was maintaining to undergraduates who hadn’t even been born at the time
that “all we wanted was to give peace a chance.” It was a phrase, of course, from
a famous tune by John Lennon and a kind of anti-Leninist manifesto at that. For
that was the hour of the Weathermen bombers, and the party-line slogan among
leaders of the “anti-Vietnam” protest movement, like Kazin himself, was “Bring
the War Home.” “Give Peace a Chance” was namby-pamby liberalism, the
politics we hated most. Nixon wanted peace. We wanted the Vietnamese
revolution to triumph. In those days, Michael Kazin was not a liberal at all but
an SDS revolutionary and proud of it. As head of the Harvard chapter of SDS,
Kazin had led the famous chant at the 1969 national SDS convention: “Ho, Ho,
Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Gonna Win!” It was a response to the chorus on the other
side of the hall, where Progressive Labor Maoists were screaming, “Mao, Mao,
Mao-Tse-Tung, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.” That was what Kazin’s New
Left was about. But when I reminded him of it at Georgetown he refused to
acknowledge the truth, preferring instead to repeat the self-serving lie.
Memory can play tricks on all of us, but Kazin’s failure to correct himself
showed that this was no false memory. It was more like a fallback position. After
all, no one wants to remember the glory days of youth as a time of support for a
bloody Communist aggressor and desertion of one’s country in time of war.
Not Salon’s Joe Conason, for sure. In a July 4th column attempting to show
that American leftists are really patriots, Conason summed up the “progressive”
attitude towards the war against Communism this way: “The criminal excesses
of the Cold War in Vietnam and elsewhere, so eagerly indulged by the right,
alienated many Americans on the left from their country for a time.” Sure, Joe, it
was the “excesses” of a war to save the rest of the world from the cruelest and
most oppressive empire in human history that caused dim-witted (if well-
meaning) leftists like yourself to side with the Communist enemy in Vietnam,
Korea, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, China and Central Europe.
It is mealy-mouthed and cowardly evasions like this that distinguish the
present pathetic left from the Sixties originals, whose candor was their only
redeeming feature. A famous Ramparts cover, showcasing a ten-year-old with
Vietcong flag in hand, explained the position of radicals thus: “Alienation is
when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” Alienation, Joe,
is where the left begins, not where it is pushed by some alleged excess.
This year we are marking the 30th anniversary of 1968 and one of the darker
periods in American history. The commemorations have produced some bald
manifestations of the bad-faith syndrome, and have also provided a revelation or
two. At a Freedom Forum conference on 1968, Life magazine editor and former
Sixties activist Robert Friedman claimed that most student protestors were not
simply trying to avoid the draft (as they most assuredly were) but were
“motivated by something beyond that was weighing on us.”38 Folksinger and
former Sixties activist Mary Travers (of “Peter, Paul and Mary”) explained the
“something” as idealism. Then she said this:

I think sometimes that that was the last generation who believed in the
American dream and its myths. These kids had gotten involved in the civil-
rights movement and they were on the side of the angels, they were going
 to make America the country that it’s always said it was.

Referring to oneself in the third person is a characteristic dissembling, but
here it is only the beginning of the baloney. Come off it, Mary. Your diapers
were red. Your father was a hack novelist for the Communist Party, USA. When
other kids were going to Frank Sinatra concerts, you were headed for the Party’s
annual May Day parade to march against Wall Street warmongers and show
your solidarity with Stalin’s peace-loving commissars. You didn’t believe in the
American dream. You lusted after a Communist utopia midwifed by armies of
bearded guerrillas or carried on the wings of a MIG-21. Why all the liberal
folderol? Why can’t you just tell it like it was?
Another Freedom Forum panel featured the ex-president of SDS and
ubiquitous academic pundit Todd Gitlin, author of a history of the Sixties called
Years of Hope, Days of Rage. (Even the title is classical New Left b.s.; it was
years of rage and days of hope.) In his book Gitlin claims that “most New Left
radicals were, in the end, reluctant revolutionaries.” In fact, the opposite is true.
According to Gitlin, however, it was only the terrible war and the assassinations
of leaders like Kennedy and King that convinced leftists like him that revolution
was the answer. “With King and Kennedy dead, a promise of redemption not
only passed out of American politics, it passed out of ourselves.”
On that panel, Gitlin faced his ideological enemy Maureen Reagan and
experienced repressed-memory syndrome, recovering a crucial moment he had
blocked. Maureen Reagan brought up the other radical movement of the Sixties,
the 1964 Goldwater campaign, recalling that Goldwater did not want America to
get involved in a land war in Asia and had opposed the escalation of a war that
Democratic Party liberals had launched. At the time America was only providing
military “advisors” and had not committed its armies to Vietnam. Where was
Gitlin in this pivotal presidential debate over whether America should get into
the war?

Gitlin: I didn’t vote for president in 1964.

Reagan: Ah.
Gitlin: I was then involved in what we felt was a movement that was going
to try to change the terms of American society.

Well, Todd, that’s a delicate way to put it. Far from mooning after Kennedy
and King—liberals whom you and your radical comrades disdained—you were
engaged in a subversive movement to overthrow the whole damn American
system: values, culture, traditions, political institutions, economic arrangements,
everything. Like the rest of us, you knew better than anyone over 30 what was
good for everyone else. Remember? You were on a mission to destroy
Amerikkka and replace it with some Marxist utopia that couldn’t work—as even
you now probably realize. You were too busy with your revolutionary agendas
to bother about a little thing like keeping America out of an Asian war. And now
you cannot even remember it.
Here are some things you and Mary and Joe and all the other arrogant
nostalgists for those times should remember. First, Vietnam. Whether America
should have attempted to save South Vietnam from a brutal conquest by
Communists is perhaps a problematic issue. Perhaps it cannot be resolved. But
here’s an issue that is clear: after America was forced to withdraw from
Southeast Asia because of the turmoil that leftists like you promoted at home,
two million innocent peasants were slaughtered by your Communist allies—
more than had been killed in all 13 years of the war that Kennedy and Johnson
and Nixon had waged to prevent the bloodbath from happening. By the way, if
you want a measure of what you have inflicted on the peasants of Vietnam, think
of South Korea, which was rescued from a similar fate by U.S. Cold Warriors
who were not obstructed by antiwar protestors like you. South Korea is now one
of the richest nations in the world and its leading dissident has been elected
prime minister, although in 1950 it was a dictatorship and its per-capita income
was lower than Cuba’s. In contrast, twenty years after the Communists
conquered Vietnam, that country of New-Left dreams is a ruthless dictatorship
and one of the poorest nations on earth, because that it is what Marxist
progressives do: they ruin economies, which they haven’t got a clue how to run,
and make people unbelievably poor in the process. Cuba, the New Left’s favorite
socialist paradise, is poorer than it was in the Fifties and is ruled by the longest-
surviving dictator in the world.
Second, the Sixties is not a time that decent Americans should remember with
affection. It may have been a great party, who can doubt it, but the hangover has
been horrific—and who can doubt that? The Sixties pioneers promoted drugs
and promiscuous sex while delegitimizing authority, law, and the moral
restraints that keep the human beast at bay. The results of counter-cultural
agitations were massive drug, crime, and AIDS epidemics that together have
taken a greater toll in young American lives than all the wars of the Cold War
that the counter-culture opposed. On top of that, the Sixties spawned a politics of
racial division—black power, racial preferences, identity-politics—that has
practically undone the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the entire
civil-rights movement—nonviolence, integration, and universal moral, ethical,
and intellectual standards for all. Your new politics of race has pushed us down
the path toward racial separatism and national disintegration.
Instead of applying the tainted brush of socialist realism to the Sixties and
painting it in the false colors of idealism and hope, it would be far better to think
of the decade as a cautionary tale and a reminder that we are not necessarily
smarter than our parents—most certainly not wiser. If there is a generation not to
trust, it is probably the one under 30, which hasn’t had time to test its ideas or to
have sobering second thoughts.
9

Repressed Memory Syndrome

Nostalgia is in the air. A generation of balding boomers is busy remembering the
30th anniversary of the year 1968. In their imaginations it is a time of lost
innocence—a moment when impossible dreams were brutally cut short by
assassinations and repressions that left them stranded on the shores of a
conservative landscape.
A summary expression of such utopian regrets appeared recently in a Salon
article by Stephen Talbot, who is also the producer of the recent PBS
documentary 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation.39 The narrative line of
this film was shaped by radicals of the era like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden.
This choice of authorities was predictable for the veteran of a movement that
promotes itself as an avatar of “participatory democracy” but also closes off
debate in its ranks with a regularity worthy of the Communist states it admired.
Thus Talbot excludes from his cinematic paean to revolutionary youth any
dissenters among those who were there.

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Dissenters like me; for I am one of those former radicals who does not share
Talbot’s enthusiasm for 1968 or his view of it as a fable of Innocents at Home.
One explanation may be the fact that I am ten years older than Talbot, and I
know about the state of our “innocence.” Yet Gitlin and Hayden are also pre-
boomers. An age gap cannot really explain the differing views of what took
place. Oh sure, like Gitlin and Hayden I would prefer to recall the glory days of
my youth in a golden light, but for me the era has been irreparably tarnished by
actions and attitudes which I vividly remember and they prefer to forget.
The myth of innocence begins with President Lyndon Johnson’s
announcement in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Talbot was
19 years old and draft-eligible. “We were all like Yossarian in Catch-22,” he
recalls. “We took this very personally. They were trying to kill us. But now
Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle.”40 The
miracle, of course, was the democratic system that we had declared war on.
Contrary to what Hayden, Gitlin, Talbot and all the rest of us were saying at the
time, the system worked—and we should have defended it instead of trying to
tear it down. Talbot does not notice or reflect on this fact.
And, of course, “they” were not trying to kill “us.” Even in retrospect, the
narcissism of the boomer generation is still a marvel to behold. The attention of
Johnson and Nixon after him was actually on the fate of Indochina, where they
were committing American forces to prevent the bloodbath and oppression that
were in store for the Vietnamese should the Communists win the war. In the
event, more people—more poor Indochinese peasants—were killed by the
Marxist victors and friends of the New Left in the first three years of the
Communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the 13 years of the anti-
Communist war. That’s a fact which has caused many veterans of those years to
reconsider our “innocence”—but not Talbot or the other nostalgists he cites.
In their memory, innocence was brutally ambushed when forces allegedly
inherent in the System conspired to murder the agents of our hope: Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. “I experienced King’s assassination as the
murder of hope,” writes Talbot, speaking for all of them. Gitlin, whose history of
the Sixties first announced this theme, remembers his thoughts at the time:
“America tried to redeem itself and now they’ve killed the man who was taking
us to the mountaintop.” There is something extremely distasteful in this false
memory of Gitlin’s; for, as Gitlin well knows, in 1968 neither he nor Hayden nor
Talbot nor any serious New Left radical was following King. Here’s an
indicator: not a single white student activist leader or antiwar spokesman was in
Memphis demonstrating alongside King at the time that he was killed. In fact,
not one known activist in the New Left was following King when he was killed.
Two years earlier, while King was still very much alive, he had been
unceremoniously toppled from the leadership of the civil-rights struggle by the
radicals of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely
Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose agendas of black power, racial separatism
and violent struggle had replaced King’s nonviolent integrationism in the
imagination of the left.
Gitlin was far from the idealistic liberal he portrays himself in his book or as a
talking head in Talbot’s film. Like everyone else in Students for a Democratic
Society, he had stopped voting in national elections as early as 1964 because, as
the SDS slogan put it, “The revolution is in the streets.” As New Leftists viewed
them, the Republican and Democratic parties were the Tweedledum and
Tweedledee of the corporate ruling class. Activists who saw themselves as
revolutionaries against a “sham” democracy were not going to invest hope in a
man whose agenda was integration into the system, and who refused to join their
war on the Johnson administration.
Tom Hayden’s attempt to formulate a doctrine of original innocence involves
fewer untruths than Gitlin’s but is no less dishonest. Instead of flat untruths,
Hayden manipulates facts. “At that point,” he says of the King assassination, “I
had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn’t know
what would happen. Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy
elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I’d be
imprisoned or killed.” But the reality was that any “middle-class assumptions”
held by Hayden or other SDS activists had been chucked into the garbage-bin
years before. Three out of four drafters of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, SDS’s
charter, had been red-diaper babies, offspring of Communist Party members and
Marxists. The fourth was Hayden himself, who by his own account had learned
his politics in Berkeley in 1960—eight years before the King and Kennedy
assassinations—at the feet of “red-diaper babies and Marxists.” (Hayden names
Communist Party member Michael Tigar in particular.) By 1965, Carl Oglesby
was proclaiming publicly that it was time to “name the System” that New
Leftists wanted to destroy. The name of the System was, of course, “corporate
capitalism,” analyzed in pretty much the same terms as in the texts read by
Communist cadres in Moscow, Havana and Hanoi.
In 1968 Hayden was already calling the Black Panthers “America’s Vietcong”
and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic Convention in
Chicago in August. Hayden’s attack on the Democratic Party convention is
conveniently misrepresented as a “police riot” in Talbot’s film, Gitlin’s book,
and Hayden’s own disingenuous memoir, Reunion. Civil war in America was
not something that might be imposed on the SDS revolutionaries from the
outside or above, as Hayden insinuates. Civil war was what they were trying to
launch themselves. In his 1970 book The Trial, Hayden actually called for armed
civil war.
Talbot’s mythology continues: “Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of
King’s murder, new hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who (in less than
four years, and after reading Camus) had undergone a profound transformation
from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for
the dispossessed.” Sure, and President Clinton is a virgin.
It is true that Bobby Kennedy had made a feint in the direction of the antiwar
crowd and a gesture or two for César Chávez. It is also true that Hayden attended
Kennedy’s funeral and even wept a tear or two. But those tears had little to do
with Hayden’s political agendas, which were more accurately summed up in Che
Guevara’s call to create “two, three, many Vietnams” inside America’s borders.
Hayden’s tears for Kennedy were personal, and he paid a huge political price for
them. After the funeral, SDS activists wondered out loud, and in print, whether
he had “sold out” by mourning a figure whom they saw not as a champion of the
cause but as a Trojan horse for the other side.
With Kennedy and King dead, the stage was set for what Talbot calls “the
inevitable showdown” in Chicago. And here a glimmer of the truth enters his
narrative. “Both sides, rebels and rulers, were spoiling for a confrontation.” But
then, almost as quickly, he reverts to political correctness: “Chicago’s Mayor
Richard Daley made it possible. He denied permits for protesters at the
Democratic Convention.” Thus, according to Talbot, the denied permits made
confrontation inevitable.
The epigram that Talbot employs for the article he wrote about’68 to go with
his film—“Demand the Impossible”—explains far more accurately why it was
Hayden, not Daley, who set the agenda for Chicago and was therefore
responsible for the riot that ensued. True, the police behaved badly, and they
have been justly and roundly condemned for their reactions. But those reactions
were entirely predictable. After all, it was Daley who just months before had
ordered his police to “shoot looters on sight” during the rioting after King’s
murder. The predictable response of Chicago’s police was an essential part of
Hayden’s calculation in choosing to organize protests against the Democrats in
Chicago in the first place.
In a year when any national demonstration would attract 100,000 protesters,
closer to 3,000 actually showed up for the Chicago blood-fest. That was because
most of us realized there was going to be bloodshed and didn’t see the point. The
two-party system was a sham; the revolution was in the streets. Why was
Hayden focusing on a Democratic Party convention? In retrospect, Hayden was
more cynical and proved to be shrewder than we were. By destroying the
presidential aspirations of Hubert Humphrey, he broke the power of the anti-
Communist liberals in the Democratic Party and paved the way for a takeover of
its apparatus by forces that dramatically shifted the party to the left.
One reason the facts surrounding the Chicago riots have been obscured by the
left is that the nostalgists don’t really want to take credit for getting Richard
Nixon elected. As a matter of political discretion, they are also willing to let their
greatest coup—the capture of the Democratic Party—go un-memorialized.
Instead they prefer to ascribe this remarkable development to impersonal forces
that apparently had nothing to do with their own agendas and actions. Talbot
summarizes: “‘While the whole world [was] watching,’ [Daley’s] police rioted,
clubbing demonstrators, reporters, and bystanders indiscriminately. The
Democratic Party self-destructed.” Well, actually, it was destroyed.
When the fires of Watergate consumed the Nixon presidency in 1974, the
left’s newly-won control of the Democratic Party produced the exact result that
Hayden and his comrades had worked so hard to achieve. In 1974, a new class of
Democrats was elected to Congress which included antiwar activists like Ron
Dellums, Pat Schroeder, David Bonior and Bella Abzug. Their politics were left
as opposed to the anti-Communist liberalism of the Daleys and the Humphreys;
and their first act was to cut off economic aid and military supplies to the
regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Though it is conveniently forgotten
now, this cutoff occurred two years after the United States had signed a truce
with Hanoi and all American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.
“Bring the Troops Home” may have been the slogan of the so-called antiwar
movement but was never its ultimate goal. The ultimate goal was a Communist
Vietnam. Anti-Communist regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh fell, and the
killing fields began, within three months of the cutoff. The mass slaughters in
Cambodia and South Vietnam from 1975 to 1978, which took place as a result of
the withdrawal of aid, was the real achievement of the New Left and could not
have been achieved without Hayden’s sabotage of anti-Communist liberals like
Humphrey and Daley.
While Talbot forgets the dénouement, he does get the significance of the war
correctly: “The war in Vietnam and the draft were absolutely central. I remember
a cover of Ramparts magazine that captured how I felt: ‘Alienation is when your
country is at war and you hope the other side wins.’” This is a softened version
of what we actually felt. As the author of that cover line, let me correct Talbot’s
memory and add a detail. The Ramparts cover featured a picture of a Huck Finn-
like seven-year-old—our art director Dugald Stermer’s son—holding the flag of
the Vietcong, America’s enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said: “Alienation is
when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” (italics added)
That represented what we actually believed—Hayden, Gitlin, Steve Talbot and I.
It is not that important to me what lessons my former comrades now draw from
our service to the wrong side in the Cold War. I just wish they would remember
it as it happened.
I also wish they wouldn’t make themselves retrospective supporters of the
latter-day struggle against Communism, whose true warriors and champions—
however distasteful, embarrassing, and uncomfortable it must be for them—were
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the leaders they most resented and despised.
Go over the 50 years of the Cold War against the Soviet empire and you will
find that every single political or military program to contain the spread of this
cancer and ultimately to destroy it was opposed by those who now invoke the
“spirit of ’68”—the anti-Communist rebellions in Czechoslovakia and Eastern
Europe—as their own.
“Assassinations, repression, and exhaustion extinguished the spirit of ’68,”
Talbot concludes his story. “But like a subterranean fire, it resurfaces at historic
moments.” Citing socialist writer Paul Berman, the originator of this myth,
Talbot argues that “the embers of ’68 helped ignite the revolution of 1989 that
brought liberal democracy to Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War.”41 The
distortion of memory is one thing for Berman, who belongs to a minuscule
faction of the Left that was indeed anti-Communist—even if Berman himself
supported the Black Panthers and went on to praise the deputy chief of the
Sandinista secret-police as a “quintessential New Leftist.” But it is particularly
unappetizing in Talbot, who made films into the ’80s celebrating Communist
insurgents as they busily extended the Soviet sphere in Africa. America, bless its
generous heart, has already forgiven Steve Talbot for that. So why lie about it
now?
Of course, the New Left was critical of the Soviet Union—and so at various
times were Khrushchev, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. But its true enemy was
always democratic America—a hatred that was never merely reactive, never
truly innocent, and remains remarkably intact to this day. The worldview of this
left was aptly summarized by I. F. Stone’s adoring biographer, who reported
approvingly Stone’s belief that “in spite of the brutal collectivization campaign,
the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy, and the
Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe . . . Communism was a progressive force,
lined up on the correct side of historical events.” Indeed.
Berman, Gitlin, and now Talbot have mounted this preposterous last-ditch
effort to save the left from the embarrassments of its deeds by trying to take
credit for helping end a Communist system that in spite of everything the left
had aided and abetted throughout its career. From its beginning, the New Left
disparaged the threat from the Communist enemy as a paranoid fantasy of the
Cold War Right. The unseemly attempt to retrieve an honorable past from such
dishonorable occasions might be more convincing if any of these memorialists
were able to recall a single left-wing demonstration against Communist
oppression in Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, the rape of Afghanistan or the
dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua. Or if one veteran leader of the New Left
had once publicly called on the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall, as Ronald
Reagan actually did. Support for the anti-Communist freedom fighters in
Afghanistan and Africa and Central America during the 1980s came from
Goldwater and Reagan activists on the Right, like Grover Norquist, Oliver North
and Dana Rohrabacher, whom progressives despise for that very reason.
It would be nice if we could use this 30th anniversary of the events of 1968 to
end the cold war over our past, and start restoring a sense of the tragic to both
sides. But to do that, the nostalgists of the left will first have to be persuaded to
give up their futile attempt to rewrite what happened and to start telling it like it
was.
10

Fidel, Pinochet & Me

The arrest of Chile’s counterrevolutionary general, Augusto Pinochet, and the
approach of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, together bring into
focus two celebrated battles of the Cold War in which members of my
generation took passionate sides. As one who went into these battles on one side
and came out on another, I have mixed but ultimately clear emotions about this
history and the events that shaped it.
Being in the left imbues one with a sense of having chosen the moral side in
all such conflicts. Belonging to the camp of morality and progress becomes a
kind of second nature, and compensates for the fact that most, and ultimately all,
of these battles are necessarily lost. It used to be said among us, for example,
that as revolutionaries we were destined to lose every battle but the last. We did
not join the progressive cause to support history’s winners but to stand up for its
losers: the powerless, the victimized, the oppressed. Our political commitment
was about weighing in on the side of social justice. It was a good feeling.

This article was published on November 23, 1998,

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http://www.salon.com/1998/11/23/nc_23horo/

When it came time to relinquish those political commitments, it was for that
very reason far easier to identify what was wrong with the left and to draw back
from it than it was to move in the direction of the right and plant my feet on new
political terrain. As a matter of fact, I withdrew from all politics for nearly ten
years before changing course. As I was stepping back from the left, repelled by
crimes that progressives had committed and catastrophes they were responsible
for, I had a nagging feeling about certain political events and historical figures
associated with this past. One of the figures was Pinochet who now, as an invalid
at death’s door, is being hounded by the left which wants him arrested and tried
for crimes 30 years past.
In our progressive version of Chile’s history, we saw the restoration of
democracy in Chile as having produced a historical anomaly, a Marxist elected
to power in 1970. This Marxist, Salvador Allende, had even been allowed by the
ruling forces to form a government and begin a program of social reform. We
knew, of course, that this could not last. Ruling classes never give up their power
without a fight; that was one of our basic maxims. Sooner or later there would be
a counterrevolution, probably a military coup. The only question was when. In
making this calculation we had our eye on Washington, the capital of the world
imperialist system. In political statements we issued, we invoked the cautionary
memory of the Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA attempt to topple Fidel Castro in the
third year of his revolutionary regime. This was the true face of American
power, whose policies were orchestrated by multinational corporations with
investment stakes in the Third World. It was only a matter of time before their
interests asserted themselves.
As predicted in our script, the coup against Allende came in 1973. The regime
was toppled, and in the heat of the battle Allende committed suicide. The
generals’ coup had been led by Pinochet, who became the nation’s military
dictator. Thousands of progressives were rounded up; some 5,000 were
executed. The military dictatorship was made permanent. Chile’s democracy
was dead.
We knew, of course, that the CIA was behind these events. Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger could not tolerate another revolutionary example in the
hemisphere. The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) had
big investments; its influence reached far into the Nixon Administration and the
American intelligence community. It was all straight out of Lenin.
Even though I was a defector from the left, I did not want to be any part of
such developments, even retrospectively. It was one thing to reject the left; it
was quite another to embrace what appeared to be this kind of right—one that
trampled over defenseless people, making their lives even more miserable than
they had been. Nor was there any particular reason for me to do so. It was
perfectly possible to have concluded that the schemes of the left were utopian
and could result in great social disasters without jumping to an opposite
conclusion: that the sadism of military dictators was a proper or even preferable
alternative.
Another reflex familiar in the thought-patterns of progressives like myself was
to avert one’s eyes from bad news when it came from the left. Too much was at
stake in each revolutionary enterprise, which we saw as a harbinger of human
possibility. The enemies of promise would use every socialist failing to kill the
socialist dream, and thus hope itself. Because these habits die hard, while I was
on the left I had paid less and less attention to the fate of the Cuban revolution
that had inspired Allende and the Chilean progressives. For many years I knew
Castro’s revolution had been going from bad to worse but I ascribed its problems
mainly to the machinations of the two evil empires, Washington and Moscow.
At the end of the Seventies, I went to see a documentary about Castro’s
revolution made by Cuban filmmaker Nestor Almendros, who had left the island
in 1963. Almendros was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer whose
credits included Sophie’s Choice, Kramer vs. Kramer and Days of Heaven. His
documentary, Improper Conduct, focused on the Cuban government’s treatment
of homosexuals as a metaphor for its treatment of all social and political
deviance. It was a stunning indictment of what the revolution had become. One
scene was an interview of a black Cuban exile filmed on a street in New York’s
Harlem. The exile was a flamboyant homosexual in his early 20s, dressed in a
tangerine satin shirt open to the sternum and white flared trousers. The
interviewer asked him whether he liked the freedom he had found in America
and in Harlem. With a broad smile, he answered he did. The interviewer asked
why. He said, “I am free here. In Cuba I could be arrested just for being dressed
like this, and put in jail for six months.” The interviewer asked: “How many
times were you arrested?” The Cuban answered: “Seventeen.”
The young man was not a political person. He was one of those ordinary
Cubans on whom history had been inflicted, and with it the drama that socialist
intellectuals had created. If this was what the revolution represented to a Cuban
like him, what did that say about the ideals to which I had been so devoted? The
island now had a lower per-capita income than in 1959, when Castro took
power. The political prisons were full. Hundreds of thousands had fled.
Hundreds of thousands more were waiting to flee. Castro had turned Cuba into
an island prison.
Ten years after I saw Almendros’s film, an election was held in Chile.
Pinochet was ending his military rule and restoring Chilean democracy. A
national referendum, authorized by Pinochet, would be held to pronounce
judgment on his own regime. Even the left would have the right to field a
candidate. Pinochet had always justified his military regime as a temporary
measure in much the same way that Castro had defended the revolutionary
dictatorship. It was necessary to defend the regime, restore stability, and create
the economic foundations of a true democracy. But Castro’s “temporary”
dictatorship was still in place, and Cubans had no democratic freedoms.
Under the 15 years of Pinochet’s rule, Chile had prospered so greatly that it
was dubbed the “miracle economy,” one of the two or three richest in Latin
America. It provided a stark contrast to Castro’s achievement. In 1959, when
Castro took power, Cuba had been the second richest economy in Latin America,
but in the 25 years since then it had become one of the three poorest. While
Pinochet was holding his referendum, Castro was approached by socialists in
Europe to hold a similar election that would create a democratic regime in Cuba.
He refused.
The results of Pinochet’s referendum were instructive. If Pinochet had won,
he would have become the new president of a democratic Chile. But Chileans
rejected Pinochet and elected a more moderate candidate who was not of the left.
True to his word, Pinochet stepped down. His dictatorship had indeed been a
temporary measure to restore Chile’s stability, prosperity, and democracy.
Those developments prompted me to look again at the events that had taken
place after Allende’s election and his attempt to institute radical programs that
led to a civil war and the coup. I had long since become suspicious of the idea
that a CIA intervention explained this result. The CIA surely had a finger in the
pot, but it had become clear over time that there were real limits to what the CIA
could accomplish. It had not, for example, been able to overthrow Castro despite
30 years of trying. It could not even oust the Marxist dictator of a mini-state like
Granada, or a drug lord in its own employ like Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Those
removals had needed military invasions. And Chile was not a tiny island or an
isthmus nation but a relatively large country, with a long-standing democratic
tradition.
An article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal shortly after Pinochet’s
recent arrest summarizes what I discovered. “Salvador Allende reached the
presidency of Chile in 1970 with only 36 percent of the vote, barely 40,000 votes
ahead of the candidate of the right. In Mr. Allende’s 1,000 days of rule, Chile
degenerated into what the much-lionized former Chilean President Eduardo Frei
Montalva (father of the current president) called a ‘carnival of madness’. . . . The
Chilean Supreme Court, the Bar Association, and the leftist Medical Society,
along with the Chamber of Deputies and provincial heads of the Christian
Democrat Party, all warned that Allende was systematically trampling the law
and constitution. By August 1973, more than a million Chileans, half the work
force, were on strike, demanding that Allende go. Transport and industry were
paralyzed. On Sept. 11, 1973, the armed forces acted to oust Allende, going into
battle against his gunslingers. Six hours after the fighting erupted, Allende blew
his head off in the presidential palace with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel
Castro.”
Forty years of history have left us with a perspective on two regimes. Castro
bankrupted his country, tyrannized its inhabitants, and is now the longest-ruling
dictator in the world. Pinochet presided over his own ruthless dictatorship for
fifteen years, created a booming economy, and restored democracy to Chile. If
one had to choose between a Castro and a Pinochet, from the point of view of
the poor, the victimized, and the oppressed, the choice would not be difficult. As
an American conservative, however, I don’t even have to do that. It was
Chileans, not Henry Kissinger or Richard Nixon, who made the real decision to
remove Allende and put Pinochet in power. Unlike the American left, which
actively and passionately supported Fidel Castro and denied the realities of the
oppressive state, the American right’s sympathies for Pinochet were muted, and
did not involve blindness to the stringencies of his rule. In short, Pinochet’s
dictatorship does not compromise any conservative expectations in the way that
Castro’s dictatorship refutes the visions of the left.
Imprisoning Pinochet while he is on a foreign trip to seek medical help is one
of those bad ideas of progressives that will come back to bite them. Consider the
prospect for Castro when he ventures abroad for parallel reasons. Yet, on second
thought, perhaps the idea does work from their point of view because what made
Pinochet vulnerable to this kind of arrest is that he had voluntarily retired from
his dictatorial regime. There is no danger of Castro doing that.
11

Marginalizing Conservative Ideas

People who identify with the left often ask the following question: How is it
possible for decent human beings not to be progressive like us? How can they
not share our concern for social justice or the better world we are attempting to
create? The answer offered by progressives themselves is twofold: that
ignorance clouds their understanding or that social privilege blocks their human
responses. In the eyes of progressives, their conservative opponents who are not
members of the “ruling class” are prisoners of a false consciousness that
prevents them from recognizing human possibility. This false consciousness is
rooted in the self-interest of the ruling class or gender or race, which is intent on
defending the system that secures its privilege. In other words, opposition to
progressive agendas grows naturally from human selfishness, myopia and greed.
To progressives, theirs alone is the calling of reason and compassion.
The right has questions too. How is it possible for progressives to remain so
blind to the grim realities their efforts have created? How can they overlook the
crimes they have committed against the poor and oppressed they set out to
defend? How can they have learned so little from the history their ideas have
engendered?

This article was published on December 01, 1998,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24290. (Adapted
from Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future)

The answer is that progressives have a false consciousness of their own. Being
so noble in their own eyes, how could they not be blind? And their blindness
also springs from an insularity created by their contempt for those not gifted
with progressive sight. As a result, radicals are largely innocent of the ideas and
perspectives that oppose their agendas because their assumptions and beliefs are
false. The works of Mises, Hayek, Oakeshott, Sowell, Strauss, Bloom, Kirk,
Kristol and other anti-socialist thinkers are virtually unknown on the left,
excluded from the canons of the institutions they dominate and absent from the
texts they write. This silencing of ideological opponents has led to a situation
which one academic philosopher lamented as “the collapse of serious argument
throughout the lower reaches of the humanities and the social sciences in the
universities.” The same judgment cannot be made about the excluded
conservatives, who are forced by the cultural dominance of the left to be
thoroughly familiar with the intellectual traditions and arguments that sustain it.
This is one reason for the vitality of contemporary conservative thought outside
the academy, and for the inability of progressives to learn from the past.
Following the collapse of the socialist empire, the marginalization of
conservative ideas in the academy has been so pervasive that even those
conservatives whose analyses were dramatically vindicated by the events
continue to remain hopelessly obscure. As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises
wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not work. Socialist
theorists, he wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic realities that would
eventually bankrupt the future they were creating. These included the
indispensability of markets for allocating resources, and of private property for
providing the incentives that drive the engines of social wealth. Moreover,
socialists showed no inclination to take seriously the problems their schemes
created: “Without troubling about the fact that they had not succeeded in
disproving the assertion of the liberal school that productivity under socialism
would sink so low that want and poverty would be general, socialist writers
began to promulgate fantastic assertions about the increase in productivity to be
expected under socialism.”42
As close as any analysis could, Mises’s warning anticipated the next 70 years
of socialist history. Under the Soviet Union’s central planning, the Kremlin
rulers were indeed unable to allocate resources rationally, or to promote
technological innovation, or to replace the profit motive with a viable system of
non-monetary “social” incentives. As a result, the socialist economy was unable
to keep abreast of the technological changes that would catapult the West into
the post-industrial era. The socialist economy could not even create sufficient
growth to feed its own people. Once the breadbasket of Europe, Soviet Russia
became under socialist planning a chronic importer of grain, an economy of
forced rationing and periodic famine. The effect of socialist order was exactly as
Mises had predicted in 1922: the generalization of poverty and the crippling of
productivity, so that Russia was unable to enter the information age and compete
economically with the West.
Although history has dramatically confirmed Mises’s analysis, and just as
dramatically refuted his left-wing opponents, his intellectual contributions are as
unrecognized today as they were before the Communist fall. On the other hand,
while the intellectual tradition that gave rise to Mises’s insights is marginalized
in American universities and its paradigm dismissed, Marxism and its variants,
which inspired the Soviet catastrophe, flourish. The profusion of Marxists on
university faculties is, in fact, without precedent, while Marxist ideas and
theories have spawned the principal texts of the new generations. While Mises’s
writings are invisible, the works of Stalinists like Antonio Gramsci, Eric
Hobsbawm, Howard Zinn and Walter Benjamin—which ignore the most basic
economic realities of how modern societies function—are familiar to
undergraduates. In fields like critical studies, cultural studies and American
studies, and in academic schools like historicism, structuralism, post-modernism,
and feminism, the discredited Marxist tradition has become the intellectual
wellspring of current academic theory. The comparable schools of conservative
and libertarian thought hardly exist within university walls.
It is hardly necessary to add that no serious attempt has been made by
progressive intellectuals to re-visit Mises’s critique—or to respond with answers
that would justify the respect now accorded to the bankrupt intellectual tradition
of the left. Given the verdict of history on socialist experiments, Mises’s works
and others that derive from the tradition of classical liberalism should central
texts in any serious academic discourse. Instead they are so marginal to
university curricula, it is as if they had never been written.
In contrast to Mises’s fate, Stalinist intellectuals like Gramsci, Hobsbawm,
and Zinn have become icons of the left-wing professoriate, their writings
reissued in scholarly editions, their texts well-thumbed by undergraduates, their
ideas developed and refined in doctoral studies. As though the human disasters
produced by its ideas had never taken place, the reactionary tradition of the left
is now dominant in the American university in a way its disciples would never
have dreamed possible 30 years ago
Mises of course is not alone. His disciple Friedrich Hayek, an equally
towering intellectual figure and Nobel Prize-winner in economics, is equally
obscure in the academic culture. As with Mises, the theoretical edifice Hayek
created is as comprehensive as Marx’s, and has been vindicated by the same
history that refuted Marx’s ideas. Yet the name Hayek is all but absent from the
discourse of the left, and from the academic curriculum the left has designed.
Typically, Hayek’s mature works on capitalism and socialism are rarely if ever
mentioned in the broad intellectual culture, their arguments never confronted.
The average college graduate is acquainted with whole libraries of radical
blather, the repackaging by third-rate intellects of discredited Marxist formulas
in the works of bell hooks, Frederic Jameson, Derrick Bell, Andrew Ross,
Richard Delgado and Catharine MacKinnon; but that graduate has never opened
a text by the most important figures of 20th-century social thought.
An ideological omertà is the left’s response to its vindicated critics, especially
to those who emerged from its own ranks. It is an intellectual version of Stalin’s
efforts to transform his political opponents into “unpersons,” to obliterate their
influence and ideas. The historian Aileen Kraditor, once a star in the firmament
of the academic left, is a figure less prominent than Mises and Hayek but no less
illustrative of the method by which the left deals with its critics. The books
Kraditor wrote—The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Means and Ends
in American Abolitionism, and The Radical Persuasion—were once routinely
cited by Sixties progressives as models of the scholarship radicals produced. But
then Kraditor had second thoughts and departed the radical ranks. As a pioneer
in feminist scholarship, Aileen Kraditor should have been a prime candidate for
high honors in today’s academy. But she had the bad judgment to become an
anti-Communist and to write a book puncturing the radical illusion.43 As a
result, it is as though she had never existed.
Based on her own experience as a member of the Party during the height of
the Cold War, Kraditor’s last book set out to describe the intellectual world-view
of American Communists. “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the
American Rank and File Communist, 1930–1958 is the definitive study of its
subject. Yet despite an explosion of academic interest in the history of American
Communism, Kraditor’s work is almost never referred to, its insights never
engaged by the academic community. Instead, Communists and Communist
sympathizers like NYU’s Robin D. G. Kelley and Princeton’s Ellen Schrecker
have become preeminent academic authorities on American Communism, while
Kraditor has been made an unperson in the intellectual culture.
This politically motivated censorship and self-enforced ignorance insulates the
left from uncomfortable encounters with former comrades and necessary truths.
Defectors from the radical ranks quickly discover that their ideas are ignored and
their realities erased. It is the way a bankrupt intellectual tradition enforces its
academic rule. The unwritten law of the radical intellect is this: once the
revolutionary idea has been called into question, the questioner must cease to
exist. In a democracy, this extinction may be accomplished by character smears
or ideological exclusion. But it is required in order to preserve the radical faith.
To the religious mind, the thought of God’s death is unthinkable.
12

Can There Be a Decent Left?

Fifteen years ago, Peter Collier and I assembled a group of disillusioned New
Leftists for a conference in Washington we called “Second Thoughts.” Those
second thoughts had been provoked by many factors and events, most
instrumental among them the wholesale slaughter of innocents in “liberated”
Cambodia and Vietnam by forces that had been supported by the American left.
It was not the first sprouting of radical second thoughts. Generations of leftists
before us had been repelled by the similar crimes of Stalin and Mao and Castro,
and had shed their progressive worldviews for more sober and conservative
politics. Irving Kristol, who was on the panel of elders we invited to our
conference, observed that second thoughts had begun with the creation of the
modern left during the French Revolution, and had been repeated many times
since. Our second thoughts, he said wrily, were an instance of what Yogi Berra
called “déjà vu all over again.”

This article was published on Tuesday, March 26, 2002,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24456
http://www.salon.com/2002/03/28/walzer/. Reprinted in Left Illusions, 2004

Now it is déjà vu once more. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath have
produced a whole new generation of second-thoughters in various stages of
reassessment. They include such luminaries of the literary left as Salman
Rushdie, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens who this fall joined with their
sometime opponents to defend America’s empire against a radical Islamic
enemy they might once have considered a vanguard of the Third World
oppressed. Now the editor of Dissent, Michael Walzer has come forward with an
articulate question about second thoughts and how far to push them. A
philosopher, social critic and lifelong democratic socialist. Walzer has pointedly
titled his article, “Can There Be A Decent Left?”44
The seriousness of that question can be measured in the fact that insofar as
there is a “decent left,” Michael Walzer has exemplified it throughout his career.
I should interject here that our political paths crossed nearly 40 years ago, when
I was a young and combative Marxist in England. I do not remember the
substance of our disagreements, and I no longer have copies of Views, the
obscure leftwing magazine that printed them. But I am certain that he was the
more civil of the two of us—and just as certain that he, being to my right, was
more correct on the issues.
One could also say that the faction of the left which Dissent represents is itself
the decent left. During the Sixties Dissent’s founder Irving Howe symbolized
resistance within the left to the totalitarian elements that had come to dominate
the decade. Although its editors were seduced in the 1980s into a “critical”
defense of the Sandinista dictatorship, they had an otherwise honorable record of
having opposed Communism throughout the Cold War, even if they only
grudgingly supported, and were often excessively critical of, America’s efforts
to contain the Communist threat.
It may also be that “decency” more describes Walzer’s personal temperament
than it does the politics of the Dissent community. An obvious manifestation of
decency is to respect those you disagree with if they deserve it. As a matter of
disclosure, I must interject here that Dissent editor Paul Berman once described
me in its pages as a “demented lunatic”—as if my sins had been great enough to
deserve the redundancy. Dissent’s other intellectual leader, Richard Rorty, has
defined the left as a movement “against cruelty.” But his own writings have not
been without crude demo-nizations and peremptory dismissals of his
conservative opponents as dolts and fascists, whose ideas a civilized progressive
is obliged to dismiss. He has even celebrated the left’s political domination of
university faculties, something he well knows is the result of an ideological
purge of conservatives that he would certainly deplore if the roles were reversed.
In bygone eras, political second thoughts tended to focus on the left’s active
support for nightmare regimes it mistook for earthly paradises, the embodiments
of its utopian dreams. By contrast Walzer’s doubts originate in his observations
about the left’s passivity in regard to the defense of America against what he
recognizes to be a nightmare threat. “Many left intellectuals live in America like
internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint
of patriot feeling as politically incorrect,” Walzer writes. “That’s why they had
such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining
in the expression of solidarity that followed.” In their first responses, Walzer
notes, leftists failed “to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the
human pain it caused.” Instead they felt Schadenfreude, a German word meaning
joy at another’s sorrows, a “barely concealed glee that the imperial state had
finally gotten what it deserved.”
Even though some of these leftists regained their “moral balance,” they still
exhibited a myopic attitude when addressing the problem of what should be
done. Their sense of being internal exiles in America was again at the root of
their response. “That’s why their participation in the policy debate after the
attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to the UN, collect evidence against bin
Laden, and so on) seem to have been developed with no concern for
effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They talked and wrote as if they could
not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow-citizens. That
was someone else’s business; the business of the left was . . . what? To oppose
the authorities, whatever they did.”
Hence the left put its energies into defending the civil liberties of—suspected
terrorists. Walzer is himself still unwilling to calling it this bluntly. That would
mean finally stepping away from the left, which he is not ready to do. So he
applauds the exaggerated concern of the left for, say, the prisoners of
Guantanamo, calling it “a spirited defense of civil liberties” and a “good result.”
But that is a minor hesitation in the face of the larger question he has raised
about the way the left sees and feels itself to be an alien presence in its own
country. This latter observation is a classic second thought.
In my own passage out of the left nearly 20 years ago, it occurred to me that
my revolutionary comrades never addressed to themselves what should be the
obvious questions for social reformers: “What makes a society work?” “What
will make this society work?” In all the socialist literature I had read, there was
hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people
to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively
addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else
had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records
in making their inhabitants poor?
Michael Walzer puzzles at length over the failure of the left to understand the
religious nature of the al-Qaeda enemy. “Whenever writers on the left say that
the root cause of terror is global inequality or human poverty, the assertion is in
fact a denial that religious motives really count. Theology, on this view, is just
the temporary, colloquial idiom in which the legitimate rage of oppressed men
and women is expressed.” He notes that “a few brave leftists” like Christopher
Hitchens have described the al-Qaeda movement as a “clerical fascism.”
Actually this is a lingering political correctness in Walzer. Hitchens described al-
Qaeda as “Islamo-fascists.” But Walzer does not seem to grasp the religious
roots of radicalism generally, and therefore fails to understand the affinity of
American radicals for al-Qaeda and its Palestinian kin.
 The indecent left reacted badly to 9/11, Walzer concludes, because it is still
under the spell of the Marxist schema. These “ideologically primed leftists were
likely to think that they already understood whatever needed to be understood.
Any group that attacks the imperial power must be a representative of the
oppressed, and its agenda must be the agenda of the left. It isn’t necessary to
listen to its spokesmen. What else can they want except . . . the redistribution of
resources across the globe, the withdrawal of American soldiers from wherever
they are, the closing down of aid programs for repressive governments, the end
of the blockade of Iraq, and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside
Israel?”
This is an accurate reading of the political left. But Walzer is still puzzled: “I
don’t doubt that there is some overlap between this program and the dreams of
al-Qaeda leaders—though al-Qaeda is not an egalitarian movement, and the idea
that it supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is crazy.
The overlap is circumstantial and convenient, nothing more. A holy war against
infidels is not, even unintentionally, unconsciously, or ‘objectively,’ a left
politics. But how many leftists can even imagine a holy war against infidels?”
This question reveals a gap in Walzer’s perception of the left that has its roots
in his own decency; as well as in the fact that, after all is said and done, he is a
moralist and reformer, not a revolutionary. There is, in fact, a large literature
examining the religious character of the modern revolutionary left written by
authors as different as Berdyaev, Talmon, Voegelin, Niemeyer, Furet and
Kolakowski. (I have written about this myself in Radical Son and The Politics of
Bad Faith.) If one looks, it is not hard to see how the left’s social melodrama
neatly fits traditional Judeo-Christian eschatologies, from which its key texts
were derived. Marx, as is well known, descended from a long line of rabbis.
There is the Fall from an idyllic communal state, the travail through a vale of
suffering and tears, and then a social redemption. There is the passion for moral
purity and for the purges—witch-hunts—that result. The left’s redemption, of
course, comes not through the agency of a divine Messiah but through the
actions of a political vanguard deploying its power through the socialist state.
In the last thirty years, but particularly in the last dozen, it has been impossible
for leftists to visualize the utopian redemption that one once motivated their
mislabeled “idealism.” The catastrophe of every socialist scheme in the 20th
century has had a devastating effect on leftwing optimism and has replaced it
with the corrosive nihilism that makes it impossible for most leftists to defend a
country which, compared to the socialist paradises, is a veritable heaven on
earth. All that remains of the revolutionary project is the bitter hatred of the
society its exponents inhabit, and their destructive will to bring it down. This
answers Walzer’s question as to how so-called “progressives” could be either so
unwilling or so slow to distinguish and defend their own country—a tolerant,
secular democracy—in the face of evil.
Peter Collier and I drew attention to this nihilism more than a decade ago in a
book we wrote about our second thoughts. We also pointed to its sense of
alienation as the defining element of the “progressive” left. As editors of
Ramparts magazine, we produced a cover that featured a seven-year-old holding
the flag of the Vietcong, America’s Communist enemy in Vietnam. The cover
line said, “Alienation is when your country is at war, and you want the other side
to win.” Coincidentally, in our book, Destructive Generation, we offered as an
exemplary instance of this alienation a quote from Michael Walzer: “It is still
true,” Walzer wrote, “that only when I go to Washington to demonstrate do I feel
at home there.” The statement made more than a decade ago provides a measure
of Walzer’s present second thoughts. Like Christopher Hitchens, who published
a beautiful tableau of his own transition for Vanity Fair after 9/11, Michael
Walzer has come home.
Yet, his second thoughts are incomplete. They are inspired by his rejection of
the left’s nihilism rather than of its visionary goals. In the end, Walzer does not
actually answer the title question of his article with a “no,” even if he comes
admirably close. “I would once have said that we [the left] were well along: the
American left has an honorable history, and we have certainly gotten some
things right, above all, our opposition to domestic and global inequalities. But
what the aftermath of September 11 suggests is that we have not advanced very
far—and not always in the right direction. The left needs to begin again.”
Those of us whose second thoughts have led us away from the left are
naturally skeptical of this optimism. The left has been beginning again since the
French Revolution—and again and again. If after all this tragedy if it is “déjà vu
all over again,” why not give it up entirely and save the world another century of
grief?
13

The Left and the Constitution

More than a decade ago, Peter Collier and I wrote a book about Sixties radicals
called Destructive Generation, which provoked—among other responses—one
of the most savage attacks on us that anyone has written before or since. The
author of this attack, Hendrik Hertzberg, is now a senior editor at the New
Yorker. I mention this otherwise trivial fact in the interest of full disclosure,
since I am about to address his latest article, which is an attack on the
Constitution and eerily related to his earlier assault on Collier and myself.
That assault was inspired by a reference we made in our book to Michael
Walzer, Hertzberg’s friend and the editor of the socialist magazine Dissent. In
Destructive Generation, Collier and I suggested that a key to understanding the
radical agendas of Sixties leftists could be found in the alienation they felt from
their own heritage. We offered as an example a cover illustration for Ramparts,
the radical magazine we once edited. The cover in question featured the photo of
an all-American youngster holding the flag of the Communist Vietcong. The
cover line said, “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the
other side to win.” We linked this extreme statement to what we thought was a
more temperate version of the same sentiment by Walzer, who had written that
the only time he felt at home in Washington was when he went there to protest.

This article was originally published as “Alienation In a Time of War,”

Tuesday, August 06, 2002,
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=23390, Reprinted in
Left Illusions, 2004

This was the trigger of Hertzberg’s attack. In his view, we had conflated
Walzer—and by implication himself—with the hate-America, Vietcong-loving
radicals of the New Left. To him, this was unfair and even outrageous. Not only
did he and Walzer not share the pro-Communist allegiances of radicals; they had
fought them in ideological combats over this very issue. At the Port Huron
founding of SDS, their political colleague Michael Harrington had thrown down
the gauntlet to the SDS founders for refusing to take an anti-Communist stand.
As socialists, Hertzberg and his friends identified with the left and were often
fierce in their rejection of American capitalism and its political governors. But it
was also true that they were willing to make peace when the opportunity arose.
After the Sixties, Hertzberg had even gone to Washington to write speeches for
President Jimmy Carter.
Hertzberg’s dislike of being linked to a left that had slipped its patriotic
moorings was a product of the select political space he had chosen as his own.
As a “democratic socialist” he belonged to a progressive elite, carrying the torch
of the true socialist faith against reactionaries on both sides of the political
barricades. At a May Day gathering of Socialist Party veterans held in
Washington this year, he unveiled this conceit at the core of his faith: “I still
believe that the anti-communism of the socialist was a superior kind of anti-
communism. A lot of people here are all too familiar with the old, long noble
struggle for the good name of socialism: the endless explanations that no,
socialism isn’t the same as ommunism, and no, socialism isn’t some milder form
of communism, and yes, socialism is in fact the very opposite of communism.
That struggle . . . forced you to think clearly . . . just what it was you were
against and just what it was you were for.”
Those outside Hertzberg’s faith might not be so easily convinced that he and
his vanguard stood for “the very opposite of communism,” but his presentation
was nothing if not forceful. “You weren’t against communism because
communism had aspirations of equality. You weren’t against communism
because communism wanted free medical care for everybody. You were against
it because it crushed democracy and terrorized people and ruled by violence and
fear, and systematically destroyed the most elementary and indispensable
liberties, like freedom of speech.”
In other words, being a “democratic socialist” made you an avatar of the best
of all possible worlds. It was obviously unforgivable that anyone should attempt
to sully your reputation with guilty associations and improper conflations as
Peter Collier and I had allegedly done. But then fate intervened, and the terrorist
attack on America had recently caused Hertzberg’s idol, Michael Walzer, to
make the same conflation and the same association. Reflecting on the attacks of
9/11 in a spring editorial for Dissent, Walzer came remarkably close to the very
perception of Collier’s and mine that had provoked Hertzberg’s wrath a decade
before.
In his editorial, Walzer asked, “Can There Be A Decent Left?” a question
provoked by the spectacle of his progressive comrades rushing to judgment
against their own country in the wake of 9/11. Walzer wondered about the
depths of an alienation that could cause people to refuse to come to the defense
of their country even when it was attacked. “Many left intellectuals live in
America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens,
regarding any hint of patriot feeling as politically incorrect. . . . Many of the[ir]
first responses [manifested a] barely concealed glee that the imperial state had
finally gotten what it deserved.” Walzer wanted to know why America should
inspire such “resentment” and alienation in radical hearts. “Wasn’t America a
beacon of light to the old world, a city on a hill, an unprecedented experiment in
democratic politics?”
Two months after Walzer posed these questions, Hertzberg responded with an
article in the July 29 issue of the New Yorker, which the editors billed as
“Hendrik Hertzberg on Our Flawed Constitution.” According to Hertzberg,
while America’s democratic values provided an inspiration to the world,
America’s institutions did not provide a democratic model of governance that
others should follow. Once again he was laying down a marker that separated
him from the rest of the crowd. To provide a foil for his argument, Hertzberg
referred to a book by Robert Dahl that asked the question, How Democratic Is
the American Constitution?
Challenging America’s founding principles is fair enough, even perhaps at a
time when both the nation and its ideals are under ferocious attack. But
Hertzberg’s authorial voice in this article has an emotional edge and a disturbing
animus that does not seem so fair. From Dahl’s book, for example, Hertzberg
cites a negative report card on America’s performance in areas like economic
inequality, energy efficiency and social expenditures, and then comments:
“although Dahl doesn’t mention, this, we [Americans] seem to be getting
straight A’s in world domination.”
Hertzberg is quick to preface his assault with the observation that he is not the
first to strike at the Founding: “Treating the Constitution as imperfect is not new.
The angrier abolitionists saw it, in William Lloyd Garrison’s words, as a
‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell.’ . . . Academic paint balls have
splattered the parchment with some regularity.” According to Hertzberg, on the
other hand, such critiques are only permitted to intellectual and political elites.
For the unwashed mass, questioning the Constitution remains unthinkable: “But
in the public square the Constitution is beyond criticism. The American civic
religion affords it Biblical or Koranic status, even to the point of seeing it as
divinely inspired. It’s the flag in prose.” This makes the terrain dangerous for
reformers like himself, particularly in the post-9/11 environment. “The
Constitution of the United States is emphatically not something to be debunked,
especially in the afterglow of sole-superpower triumphalism.”
 But can Hertzberg really be referring to this country as one in which the
Constitution cannot be challenged? Did he miss the feminist clamor over the
Constitution’s failure to protect women, or the movement for an Equal Rights
Amendment that this sentiment spawned? Is he oblivious to the complaint from
the right that the framers failed to provide a defense clause for the unborn? Was
he comatose in the aftermath of the last presidential election when agitated
Democrats, including United States senators and the former First Lady, called on
the nation to scrap the Electoral College and alter the way the Constitution has
mandated our choice of presidents for over two hundred years?
What really upsets Hertzberg is not any superstitious attachment Americans
may have to their Constitution, but his own isolation from the conviction of
ordinary Americans that the system has worked pretty well—well enough to
make America a “beacon of light” to the rest of the world.
Hertzberg’s perverse distance from his countrymen is announced in his
opening remarks about the American Founding: “The most blatantly
undemocratic feature of the document that the framers adopted in Philadelphia in
1787 was its acceptance—indeed, its enshrinement—of slavery, which in its
American form was as vicious and repugnant as any institution ever devised by
man.” Ever devised by man? What about Auschwitz? The Soviet gulag? How
about the slavery in Egypt that built the pyramids? How about the institution of
virgin sacrifice among the Incas? How about black slavery in Cuba or Brazil?
Perhaps Hertzberg is unaware that in Caribbean slave-societies the mortality
rates for slaves exceeded the birth rates. Perhaps he is ignorant of the fact that
slavery in the United States was the only slavery in the West whose environment
encouraged the natural generation of the slave population so that, between the
signing of the Constitution and the Civil War, the slave census in the United
States increased more than fivefold, whereas everywhere else in the Hemisphere
slaves had to be imported annually to make up the manpower deficit caused by
attrition.
To write, as Hertzberg does, that the Constitution enshrined slavery is worse
than a mere distortion of the facts. Far from glorifying it, the framers avoided
even using the words “slave” or “slavery” because the majority of them abhorred
the institution and were determined to end it–were convinced in fact it would
shortly die of its own reactionary weight.
Hertzberg’s distortion of the founders’ intentions does not end here. Listing
the constitutional compromises they made with slavery, he writes: “Most
notoriously, under Article I, Section 2, a state’s allotment of seats in the House
of Representatives (and, by extension, its Presidential electors) was determined
by counting not only ‘free Persons’ but also ‘three-fifths of all other Persons.’
This is simply diabolical, because to the insult of defining a person held in
bondage as three-fifths of a human being it added the injury of using that
definition to augment the political power of that person’s oppressors.”
Actually the opposite was the case. Far from being either an insult or an
injury, the three-fifths compromise weakened the voting power of the Southern
slaveholders who had demanded that “slaves should stand on equality with
whites.” Had the framers counted slaves as five-fifths and not merely three-fifths
of a person, they would have maximized the voting power of the slave states.
Hertzberg’s distortion of this history is even worse than it appears, because it
is based on the suppression of a more basic fact. All the constitutional
compromises with slavery were necessary in order to achieve the Union that,
within 20 years, would abolish the slave trade and within a single generation
would fight a civil war to free the slaves themselves. The only real moral issue
involved in the constitutional arrangement was whether the framers should have
made any compromise with the slaveholding South. Should there have been a
Union at all? On that question the final word belongs to Frederick Douglass, the
most renowned free black person in the Republic and a former slave himself.
“My argument against the dissolution of the American Union is this: It would
place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slaveholding
states, and withdraw it from the power in the Northern states which is opposed to
slavery. . . . I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of the Union more closely, and
bringing the Slave States more completely under the power of the Free States.”45
While Douglass’s statement exposes the injustice of Hertzberg’s attack, it also
understates it. In 1787 the American founders had just completed the only
successful colonial rebellion in human history, defeating the greatest empire of
the age. If the Northern states had rejected a compromise with the South, it is
perfectly reasonable to suppose that the British imperialists who burned the
White House in 1812 would have forged an alliance with the Southern slave
states and crushed the North. Then slavery would have been institutionalized
throughout the continent; there would have been no Civil War; and it is anyone’s
guess when the slaves might eventually have been freed.
Hertzberg acknowledges the amendments outlawing slavery and guaranteeing
equal rights that were incorporated into the Constitution after the South’s defeat.
He then adds this. “But nothing was done to alter the political institutions that in
1860 had held four million people—one American in eight—in bondage and
that, for the next century and, arguably, more, denied millions of their ‘free’
descendants both equal protection and the franchise.” So stated, that is another
incomprehensible charge. The enslavement of four million people was not the
work of American political institutions but a legacy of the British Empire and
the necessity of compromise to hold that empire at bay. As Hertzberg continues
his attack, he reveals its logic. Because of America’s flawed political
institutions, “even so grotesque and obvious an injustice as apartheid in the
public schools [in the South] was beyond the ability of the national government
to correct. And when, after ninety years, formal, official school segregation was
outlawed the deed was done through the exercise of un-elected, unaccountable,
unchecked, quasi-legislative judicial power. . . .”
In the end, Hertzberg’s disenchantment with the American system is that it is
not “majoritarian,” but was constructed with a built in system of checks and
balances at times thwarting the majority will. In pursuing social justice, the
federal government is unable to ignore state’s rights, judicial precedents and
other governmental restraints that have made America’s political history
different from, say, that of revolutionary France. Like other socialists, Hertzberg
yearns for a government that can enforce what they regard as the “General Will”
and secure social justice through an Assembly or Parliament, directly elected by
the people—one man one vote.
One of the institutions currently thwarting this General Will is the United
States Senate. “Once slavery was removed, the most undemocratic remaining
provision of the Constitution was, and is, the composition of the Senate—its so-
called equality of representation, whereby each state gets two senators,
regardless of population.” While Hertzberg regards this representation as unfair,
the founders devised it specifically to provide a check on the will of the people,
which the founders famously distrusted. The House of Representatives is the
chamber known as the “People’s House” because it is elected once every two
years instead of six, and is composed of members who represent equal portions
of the electorate. The Senate was the framers’ device to slow the machinery of
popular justice because they recognized that popular injustice—the tyranny of
the majority—was an equally likely result of democratic power unchecked.
Summing up his case, Hertzberg cites Dahl. “Compared with the political
systems of other advanced democratic countries, ours is among the most opaque,
complex, confusing, and difficult to understand.” On the other hand, along with
England’s equally complex constitutional monarchy, it is the most stable
democracy that history records. By contrast the advanced democratic countries
that Dahl has in mind include France—with its four bloody revolutions and five
Republics—and Germany, of which no more need be said.
Ignoring these unpleasant facts, Hertzberg insists on a “true” democracy
whose government could run roughshod over communities that don’t agree with
his political agendas. Consider the argument he makes against senatorial
privilege: “The rejection of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations after
the First World War and then of preparedness on the eve of the Second are only
the best known of the Senate’s many acts of foreign policy sabotage, which have
continued down to the present, with its refusal to ratify international instruments
on genocide, nuclear testing and human rights.” Hertzberg concedes that “some
will take all this as proof that the system has worked exactly as the framers
planned.” But then he adds: “To believe that, one must believe that the framers
were heartless, brainless reactionaries.”
The cat is out of the bag: Americans who disagree with progressives like
Hertzberg are heartless, brainless and reactionary. It is precisely this kind of
arrogance, not unusual for social reformers, that made the framers fearful of
democratic majorities in the first place, and that made them determined to
provide checks which would prevent majorities from tyrannizing everyone else.
The founders were not democrats and socialists like Hertzberg. They were
conservatives who had a healthy distrust of political passions and who devised a
complex system designed to frustrate the schemes of social redeemers and others
convinced of their own invincible virtue. If not for the immense, undemocratic
power vested in the Supreme Court, schools might still be legally segregated. If
not for states’ rights, slavery might have spread throughout the nation. If not for
the opaque, complex, confusing American framework, the descendants of
Africans who were dragged to this country in chains might not today be the
freest and richest blacks in the world.
What makes these ancient issues important is that our nation is now under
attack. It must confront its enemies in a state weakened by 30 years of cultural
assaults from the left that have made many Americans ambivalent about their
heritage. Moral ambivalence about one’s country can lead to an uncertainty of
resolve in defending it. But there is really no historical justification for
Americans to be ambivalent about their history and the institutions of their
founding. As Michael Walzer and President Bush have both pointed out, this
nation is still a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world, and its defense is
important not only to us but to them as well.
14

Neo-Communism

Anation’s wars are tests of its citizens’ loyalties, commitments and political
understandings. It was a striking fact of the “antiwar” demonstrations against
Operation Iraqi Freedom that leftists were able to mobilize more protesters in
three months—from the UN deadline of November 7 to the launch of the war in
March—than its predecessor had been able to mobilize in the first six years of
the Vietnam War. This was also true of the worldwide protests against
America’s determination to topple the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

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Both the rapidity and size of the anti-Iraq mobilization indicate that it was not
merely—and not mainly—a response to the particular war or to the issues that
defined it but the expression of an attitude toward American power itself, with
the war as a pretext. Indeed, the rapid growth of protests in advance of the facts
that might justify them—e.g., the “quagmire” that Vietnam became, the
mounting loss of life without apparent result—shows that the left’s attitude
towards American power is relatively indifferent to the uses to which that power
is put. Otherwise, why go into the streets to save a regime as despicable as
Saddam Hussein’s? This same phenomenon was on display in the
demonstrations after the 9/11 attacks, which mobilized tens of thousands of
American college students to oppose an American response before America had
lifted a finger in response. The purpose of the demonstrations was to protest any
military response that America might consider to the unprovoked terrorist attack.
The same attitude was manifest after the mission to topple the regime had
been accomplished with minimal casualties and no significant reaction from the
“Arab street” (as critics had assured us there would be). In April 2003—less than
a week after United States and British forces had liberated Iraq; after the victors
had opened Saddam’s prisons, dismantled the torture chambers, shipped vast
quantities of food and medicine to the Iraqi population and had begun to
assemble the first Iraqi regime in history that would not be a monarchy, military
junta, fascist dictatorship or chamber of horrors—at that very moment the faculty
senate of the University of California, Los Angeles passed a resolution to
“condemn . . . [the] United States invasion of Iraq.” The extraordinary session
was convened for the express purpose of making that condemnation. The vote
was 180–7 in favor, reflecting just how left the faculty senate of that university
had become. The professors also voted to “deplore the doctrine of preventive
war the president has used to justify the invasion” and to “oppose the
establishment of the American protectorate in Iraq,” even though the president
had already justified Iraq’s liberation under U.N. Security Council Resolution
1441 and no American “protectorate” was ever contemplated.
In other words, 95 percent of the faculty senate at one of America’s most
prestigious academic institutions espoused the view—without any visible
evidence to support it—that its own country was a dangerous, imperialist
aggressor, bent on acquiring control of a sovereign nation. The co-author of the
UCLA resolution, Professor Maurice Zeitlin, is a leftist I happen to have known
for 40 years from the moment we both arrived at the University of California to
pursue graduate studies at the beginning of the Sixties. Zeitlin was a Marxist
who in 1961 published one of the first books hailing the triumph of the
Communist revolution in Cuba (although he and co-author Robert Scheer
naturally didn’t call it that).46 In October 1997 Zeitlin spoke at a UCLA
symposium on 20th century utopias, praising the dead guerrilla leader Che
Guevara who had attempted to incite a global conflagration, calling for the
creation of “two, three, . . . many Vietnams.” Zeitlin declared his continuing
faith in the cause that Guevara symbolized. “Che was above all a revolutionary
socialist and a leader of the first socialist revolution in this hemisphere. His
legacy is embodied in the fact that the Cuban revolution is alive today despite
the collapse of the Soviet bloc. . . . No social justice is possible without a vision
like Che’s.”47
In other words, for 40 years, the co-author of UCLA’s anti-Iraq resolution had
remained a “small-c” communist or—as I prefer—a “neo-communist,” by which
I mean a political radical and determined enemy of America’s capitalist
democracy. The UCLA resolution is an expression of those commitments rather
than a reaction to a particular policy or war.
The faculty resolution at UCLA mirrored an equally illuminating event that
had taken place weeks earlier at a Columbia University “teach-in” against the
war. During this protest led by 30 members of the Columbia faculty, Professor
Nicholas DeGenova declared that every honest opponent of the Iraq War should
want America to lose. For his own part, he said, he wished for “a million
Mogadishus,” referring to the 1993 incident in which 18 American soldiers were
killed in an al-Qaeda ambush in Somalia.48 The negative reaction to DeGenova’s
statement was so strong that other faculty protesters led by Eric Foner, the leftist
chairman of Columbia’s History Department, immediately distanced themselves
from DeGenova’s statement. In Foner’s words, “We do not desire the deaths of
American soldiers.”
The immediate effect of Foner’s gesture was to obscure how universally
DeGenova’s view of the war was shared by those present, including Foner
himself. That much was made apparent when DeGenova attempted to explain
himself in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.49 In that
interview, DeGenova categorically denied he wanted American soldiers to die,
and explained why he had referred to Mogadishu in the context of Iraq. “I was
referring to what Mogadishu symbolizes politically. The U.S. invasion of
Somalia was humiliated [sic] in an excruciating way by the Somali people. And
Mogadishu was the premier symbol of that.” DeGenova’s comment was
virtually identical to remarks made by Noam Chomsky after the attacks of
9/11.50 Chomsky, an intellectual leader of the antiwar left, has written a book
about 9/11 that has sold over 200,000 copies. In Chomsky’s view, the World
Trade Center deaths were regrettable but the unprecedented humiliation of the
imperialist power—America—was an historic victory for social justice and
human progress .51
In the Chronicle interview, DeGenova explained that at Columbia he had also
drawn an analogy between Mogadishu and the “historical lesson” of Vietnam.
“What I was intent to emphasize was that the importance of Vietnam [was] that
it was a defeat for the U.S. war machine and a victory for the cause of human
self-determination.” DeGenova did not explain how the slaughter of two-and-a-
half million Cambodians and a hundred thousand Vietnamese by the Communist
victors after America’s defeat, or the colonization of South Vietnam and
Cambodia by the Hanoi regime, was a triumph of self-determination. But he did
elaborate on the present relevance of the historical distortion. “The analogy
between Mogadishu and Vietnam is that they were defeats for U.S.
imperialism.... The analogy between Mogadishu and Iraq is simply that there
was an invasion of Somalia and there was an invasion of Iraq.”
Of course there was no invasion of Somalia. U.S. troops were sent to
Mogadishu not to invade the country but to feed starving Somali Muslims. A
local al-Qaeda warlord named Aidid was stealing the food before it could reach
the Somali people, and Americans were sent to try to capture the thief. But it is
safe to say that not a single protester at the Columbia event nor a single signer of
the UCLA resolution, nor many of the 14,000 professors who signed a protest
petition against the war, would disagree with DeGenova’s reading of this history
of Vietnam, Mogadishu and Iraq.
These same views are reflected in an antiwar declaration by Michael T.
Klare,52 Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at
Hampshire College and four other schools.53 Klare is also a regular contributor
to The Nation, where he was an apologist for Soviet expansion and a staunch
opponent of American policy during the Cold War. More than a month before
the hostilities began in Iraq, Klare wrote an article for The Nation titled, “Resist
War and Empire.” While the UN inspectors were conducting their searches for
weapons of mass destruction, while the world was waiting to see if Saddam
Hussein would disarm, while the Russians were attempting to get Saddam to
step down, and before a single shot had been fired or troop deployed, Klare
issued this clarion call: “The peace movement must prepare itself to conduct a
long-term struggle against the administration’s imperial designs in the Gulf.
These plans must be exposed for what they are: a classic appropriation of
political power and material goods (especially petroleum) by material force
masquerading as a campaign for democracy.” Vladimir Lenin could not have
chosen the words better.
What the prologue to the war and its aftermath reveal is that the facts of the
war are not the issue for the “antiwar” left and neither is the war itself. The so-
called “antiwar” left is a neo-communist movement that was launched forty
years ago under the pretense of being a “new left.” It has been at war with the
American “empire” ever since. Throughout America’s Cold War conflicts with
Communists in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Southeast Asia, Africa
and Central America, and in the aftermath of America’s liberation of a billion
inhabitants of the Communist empire, this left has been impervious to every
good deed America has done and oblivious towards every bad deed its Marxist
and now Islamo-fascist enemies have committed. Instead this left habitually
attributes bad deeds perpetrated by America’s enemies to America itself—hence
the search for “root causes” of the hatred directed against America every time
America is attacked.
The neo-communist left opposes America’s efforts to promote freedom and
supports America’s declared enemies not because of what America does, but
because of what they think America is. The neo-communist left is impervious to
facts because it is a political messianism, in essence a religious movement. Its
delusions of social redemption are fed on a rich diet of anti-American myths.
Those myths were once generated in institutions funded by the Communist Party
and other marginal radical sects. But that has all changed with the long march of
the left during the last 30 years through America’s institutions of higher
learning. The neo-communist left is now entrenched in the liberal arts faculties
of America’s elite universities, where it is a dominant presence. It has converted
America’s universities into a political base for its radical and anti-American
agendas. In the present war with radical Islam, this poses a problem Americans
can continue to ignore only at their peril, and which sooner or later they must
address.
15

Neo-Communism II

How to identify the political left? Current usage refers to everyone left of center
as “liberal.” But what are currently identified liberals “liberal” about except hard
drugs and sex? In regard to everything else, they are determined to intervene,
regulate and control other people’s lives, or redistribute their incomes.
Obviously, when terror-hugging radicals like Ramsey Clark and Communist
hacks like Angela Davis are referred to as “liberals”—as they routinely are—the
obfuscation works to their advantage and against the interests of veracity and
democracy. The term “liberal” should be reserved for those who actually occupy
the center of the political spectrum; those to the left should be referred to as
leftists, which is what they are. This is the easy part of rectifying the political
lexicon. A more difficult aspect is how to identify the “hard” left, which is to say
not mere fellow-travelers but those who are dedicated enemies of America and
its purposes. In practice it is not hard to identify such leftists or to describe them.
They are people who identify with hostile regimes like North Korea, Cuba, and
China, or who argue that the United States is the imperialist guardian of a world
system which radicals must defeat before they can establish “social justice.”
Adherents of this anti-American creed variously describe themselves as
“Marxists,” “anti-globalists,” “antiwar activists” or more generally
“progressives.” Their secular worldview holds that

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America is responsible for reaction, oppression and exploitation across the

globe, which causes them to regard this country as the moral equivalent of
militant Islam’s “Great Satan.” This explains the otherwise incomprehensible
practical alliances that people pretending to be avatars of social justice have
made with Islamo-fascists like Saddam Hussein.
Among the intellectual leaders of this left are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Gore Vidal, Edward Said and Cornel West; among its figureheads Angela Davis
and Ramsey Clark; among its cultural icons Tim Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver,
Arundahti Roy and Michael Moore; among its political leaders Ralph Nader and
the heads of the three major “peace” organizations, Leslie Cagan, Brian Becker
and Clark Kissinger; among its electoral organizations the Green Party, the
Peace and Freedom Party and the “Progressive Caucus” of the Democratic Party;
among its elected officials Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California) and
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio); among its organizations the misnamed
Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild; among its
publications and media institutions The Nation, Z Magazine, The Progressive,
Counterpunch, Pacifica radio, indymedia.organd commondreams.org. Like the
Communist Party in the heyday of the Soviet empire, the influence of the hard
left extends far beyond the institutions, organizations and publications it
controls.
Yet what to call them? One of the hard left’s survival secrets has been its
ability to embargo attempts to identify it by labeling as “red-baiters” and “witch-
hunters” those who do so, as if simply to name it meant to persecute it. Those
same people, on the other hand, think nothing of labeling their opponents
“racists” and “fascists,” or calling the president of the United States a “Nazi”
puppet of the oil cartel. Yet their defense strategy is highly effective in the
tolerant democracy they are determined to destroy. I myself have been called a
“red-baiter” and “McCarthyite” for pointing out that current “peace”
organizations like International ANSWER and Not in Our Name are fronts for
the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that identifies with North
Korea, and for the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist sect. The facts are
obvious and indisputable but their implications are unpleasant, which is what
inspires the defamatory attacks.
Notwithstanding this difficulty, a more significant concern is that the term
“Communist” in the context of the contemporary left can be misleading. While
the Communist Party still exists and is even growing, it is a minor player and
enjoys nothing approaching its former influence or power in the left. Even in the
hard left, the Communist Party USA is only a constituent part of the whole
whereas once, along with its front groups, it dominated progressive politics.
In these circumstances the best term to describe the hard left and its adherents
is “neo-communist.” The place to begin an understanding of neo-communists, or
neo-coms, is the period following 1956, when the left shed its Communist shell
to become first a “New Left” and then what might be called a “post-New Left
left.” In my own writings, particularly Radical Son and The Politics of Bad
Faith, I have shown that the “new left” was in reality no such thing. While
starting out as a rejection of Stalinism, by the end of the Sixties the “new left”
had devolved into a movement virtually indistinguishable from the Communist
predecessor it had claimed to supercede. This was as true of its Marxist
underpinnings as of its anti-Americanism and its indiscriminate embrace of
totalitarian revolutions and revolutionaries abroad.
At the end of the Sixties the New Left imploded, a victim of its own
revolutionary enthusiasms, which had led it to pursue a violent politics it could
not sustain. America’s withdrawal from Vietnam in the early Seventies deprived
the left of the immediate pretext for its radical agendas. Many of its cadre retired
from the “revolution in the streets” they had tried to launch and instead entered
the Democratic Party. Others turned to careers in journalism and teaching, the
professions of choice for secular missionaries. Still others took up local
agitations and discrete campaigns on behalf of the environment, feminist issues
and gay rights— without, however, giving up their radical illusions. In the
1980s, spurred by the Soviet-sponsored “nuclear freeze” campaign and by the
“solidarity” movements for Communist forces in Central America, the left began
to regroup without formally announcing its reemergence or proclaiming a new
collective identity, as its Sixties predecessor had done.
At the end of the decade, the collapse of the Soviet empire ushered in an
interregnum of confusion for the left, calling a temporary halt to this radical
progress. In the Soviet debacle “revolutionary” leftists confronted the
catastrophic failure of everything they had fought for during the previous 70
years. Even those radicals who recognized the political failures of the Soviet
regime still believed in what Trotsky had called “the gains of October”—the
superior forces of socialist production. This leftist faith proved impervious to its
rebuttal by historical events. Insulated by its religious devotion to the
progressive idea, the left survived the refutation of its socialist dreams. Instead
of acknowledging their wrongheaded commitment to the cause, leftists treated
the collapse of “the first socialist state,” as the death of an albatross whose
burden providence had lifted from their shoulders. Having defended the
indefensible for 70 years, once it was gone they were simply relieved that they
would no longer have to do so.
Turning their backs on their own past, they pretended it was someone else’s.
They said the collapse proved nothing because it was only the demise of
“actually existing socialism,” not real socialism. Real socialism hadn’t been
tried. This subterfuge rescued them from having to apologize for abetting
regimes that had killed tens of millions and enslaved tens of millions more—that
had broken eggs with no omelet to show for it. Better yet, it relieved them of
having to admit that the democracy whose anti-Communist efforts they opposed,
and whose actions they condemned, had liberated a billion people from the most
oppressive empire in world history. They had no need for second thoughts about
what they had done. They just went on to the next destructions, the newest
incarnations of the radical cause.
This cosmic bad faith was the foundation of the left’s revival in the decade
that followed. It was the necessary premise of its reemergence as a leader of the
“anti-globalization” and “antiwar” movements that emerged at the end of the
Nineties and the onset of the millennium. The progressive left was now ready to
resurrect its internal war against America at home and abroad.
If one looks at almost any aspect of this movement—its acknowledged
intellectual lineage, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Fanon, Gramsci, in
sum, the totalitarian tradition—its analytic model for the democracies of the
west, hierarchy and oppression—its redemptive agenda, social justice imposed
by state-enforced leveling—and its enemy, imperialist America—one would be
hard put to find a scintilla of difference from the Communist past. Of course
leftists themselves will concede none of this. Most of them will proclaim their
anti-Stalinism and will not defend the Communist systems that have
disappeared. But so what? The Soviet rulers themselves eventually denounced
Stalin. Were they less Communist for that?
It is appropriate to identify the unreconstructed hard-liners as “neo-
communists”—a term that would accurately describe their negative assaults on
American capitalism and their anti-American “internationalist” agendas. It may
be objected that the term “neo-communist” does not describe a group that
identifies itself with the term, but then neither does “neo-conservative.” There is
no current movement calling itself “neo-conservative,” nor do the individuals so
designated refer to their own ideas as “neo-conservative.” “Neo-conservative” is,
in fact, a label imposed by the left on a group of former Democrats, loosely
grouped around Senator “Scoop” Jackson, who left the party at the end of the
Seventies to support the Reagan administration. They accepted the label after
protest and then out of necessity, because the left so dominates the political
culture that resistance was futile. But it is no longer used by “neo-conservatives”
because, as Norman Podhoretz observed some time ago, “neo-conservatism” is
indistinguishable from conservatism itself.
No “neo-conservative” that I know of has challenged Podhoretz’s conclusion.
Yet others persist in sticking the “neo” label to conservatives who are seen as
foreign-policy hawks. My question is: if the “neo” shoe can be made to fit
conservatives, then why not the left as well?
16

Neo-Communism III

I have argued that the contemporary left, which denounces American
corporations and the global capitalist system, should be called “neo-communist,”
a term to denote anti-American leftists who demonize the American economic
system and identify it as a “root cause” of global problems. An objection to the
term is that some members of this left—perhaps many—no longer openly
advocate a Communist future. Many call themselves “anarchists” and would be
eager to denounce the late Soviet state. I have already provided one answer to
this objection. There is no group that identifies its politics as “neo-conservative”
either. There are no “neo-conservative” organizations, official or unofficial, and
there is no “neo-conservative” policy or plan. Yet there is little objection to the
use of “neo-conservative” to describe what others consider a readily identifiable
political position.

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The resistance to the term “neo-communist” derives from a misunderstanding
of the nature of a political left that is actually proud of its Communist intellectual
heritage, and still supports socialist “solutions” and the revolutionary idea that
created the totalitarian states. It needs to be borne in mind that there are always,
and inevitably, two sides to the revolutionary coin. The first is negative and
destructive, and leads to the drive to undermine the beliefs, values and
institutions of the old order, which must be destroyed before a new one can be
created. The second component of the revolutionary vision is positive and
utopian—the image of a future that condemns the present and encapsulates the
idea of a redemptive fate.
For half a century now, ever since Khrushchev’s revelations about the crimes
of Stalin, the left has been driven by its negative agendas. This is even more the
case since the implosion of “actually existing socialism.” Leaders of the
contemporary left have put forward no serious plans for the post-capitalist
future. More important, none of the energies that drive them are inspired by such
plans. The left’s inspirations are mainly negative and nihilistic, and have been so
for nearly fifty years.
Even in its more innocent beginnings, the new left defined itself by negatives
as “anti-anti-Communist.” It was a “new” left because it did not want to identify
with Communism. But it also did not want to oppose Communism, because then
it would have had to support America’s Cold War. “Anti-anti-Communism” was
code for anti-Americanism. What the left wanted was to oppose America and its
“sham” democracy.
There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its
destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that: utopian, a vision of
nowhere. In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have
worked because it was based on false premises about human psychology and
society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist
theory, and in all of Marx’s compendious works, there is not a chapter devoted
to the creation of wealth—to what will cause human beings to work and
innovate, or to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is strictly a plan
of morally-sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created.
Consequently, socialist economies create poverty instead of wealth. This is an
unarguable historical fact, but has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.
Because its positive agendas are unworkable, the left is appropriately
characterized by its negative critiques and destructive agendas. Everything else,
everything it claims to intend, everything it may in fact intend is so much
utopian hot air. In the first article of this series I identified several exemplars of
the neo-communist left, one of whom has since responded. Maurice Zeitlin is a
professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-
author of a faculty resolution condemning, after the fact, America’s liberation of
Iraq. Because the resolution was drafted and passed after the liberation of
Baghdad, its agendas were clearly aimed at America and not at the reality in
Iraq.
I have known Maurice Zeitlin for more than 40 years, since we were both
New Left radicals in the 1960s. In my article, I pointed out that Zeitlin had
recently hailed the late Che Guevara at an academic conference, calling him “a
leader of the first socialist revolution in this hemisphere.” He had asserted that
“[Guevara’s] legacy is embodied in the fact that Cuban revolution is alive today
despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc,” and also that “No social justice is
possible without a vision like Che’s.”54 I concluded that it was Zeitlin’s neo-
communist agenda, and not any specifics of the war in Iraq, which had inspired
the post-hoc UCLA faculty resolution condemning the U.S. action. Zeitlin
responded to the article in a terse and angry email which he sent to my assistant,
Elizabeth Ruiz, referring to me in the third person. This email affords a further
look into the mind of the neo-communist left.
In my article I had mentioned that Zeitlin and Robert Scheer, an L.A. Times
columnist with similar politics, had written one of the first books celebrating the
Communist revolution in Cuba. In his email Zeitlin expressed irritation because I
hadn’t mentioned in the article that I had edited Scheer’s book. (“You can tell
Davey for me that he might have mentioned in this column that he edited the
book by myself and Scheer on Cuba—and we thanked him in the
acknowledgments.”) Zeitlin appeared to think that this fact implicated me in his
radical politics in a way I had not already owned in my autobiography Radical
Son. He said of me: “To think that I saved him from an enraged audience and
protected his right to speak at the L.A. Times Festival of Books a few years
ago.”55 I have also written about this incident.56 “Saved” is a little excessive for
the remarks Zeitlin made in defense of my right to express myself. Book-readers
are not the most violent of audiences and in any case the event was being
televised on C-SPAN. The point Zeitlin seemed to make is that since he
defended my free speech at UCLA, he cannot be called a “neo-communist.”
Why not? Didn’t Communists defend the principle of free speech in America
when they stood up to Senator McCarthy? Communists are great defenders of
freedom in the democracies they want to overthrow. It enhances their
opportunities to subvert the system. Didn’t Lenin defend the right to vote in
democratic Russia before abolishing it as soon as he took power?
In the second brief paragraph of his email, Zeitlin made his objection to my
article clearer, and made explicit his concern to defend his good intentions:
“[David] knows damn well that I have long opposed execrable regimes like
Hussein’s, years before, indeed, Bush even knew who Hussein was. He also
knows that I wrote severe criticisms of the restrictions on rights in revolutionary
Cuba in Ramparts, when he was its very editor and still gung-ho for Fidel. . . .”
This cri de coeur begs the most important question: What does it mean to
oppose Saddam Hussein’s “execrable regime” and at the same time oppose the
effort to change it? Or to condemn the regime-change after the fact, when Iraqis
are rejoicing in the streets? What are intentions worth when actions contradict
them? Are Zeitlin’s critiques of Castro harsher than Khrushchev’s criticisms of
Stalin? Did Khrushchev cease to be a Communist because he criticized Stalin?
Zeitlin was indeed critical of the Cuban revolutionary regime, and was critical
even earlier than he indicates. He is correct as well that as a fellow-leftist I did
not want to see such criticisms aired—even though I might not have described
myself at the time as simply “gung ho for Fidel”. The fact is that I published
Zeitlin’s critique. But Zeitlin could have cited a much more impressive instance
of his new-left independence from the Communist past. In 1960 Zeitlin had
visited Cuba and interviewed Che Guevara, who was then the second most
powerful man in the dictatorship. We published the interview in the first issue of
our Berkeley magazine, Root and Branch, which was one of the political
journals that launched the new left. (Robert Scheer was also an editor.) The rest
of us were both shocked and impressed when we read the interview and realized
what Maurice had done.
He had not just interviewed Guevara, already a radical legend. He had
challenged Guevara’s policies and in effect called into question his revolutionary
credentials. Maurice had asked Guevara about the role he thought the trade
unions should play in a socialist country, specifically Cuba. Should they be
independent—as new-left socialists like us wanted—or would they be
appendages of the state, as Lenin and Stalin had made them? Maurice reminded
Guevara that the elimination of independent unions, which were the
organizations of the revolutionary class, had paved the way for the Soviet gulag.
Guevara was angered by the question and by Maurice’s temerity in raising the
question; he refused to criticize the Soviets, abruptly changing the subject.
Forty years ago, Zeitlin had put Guevara to the test and Guevara had failed.
Zeitlin’s interview revealed that Guevara was himself a Stalinist. We all
recognized the significance of what Guevara had said. Yet to our shame we
continued to support the Cuban regime, knowing that it was destined to be a
totalitarian gulag because that was the intention of its creators. Maurice did write
a subsequent critique for Ramparts. But, like us, he continued to support the
regime and to attack the United States and its efforts to restore freedom to Cuba.
Later, when I had second thoughts about my political commitments and departed
the political left and comrades like Zeitlin, I wrote about my regrets for
defending a regime that had become the most sadistic dictatorship in Latin
American history. Except for Ronald Radosh and other “second thoughters” who
have also turned their backs on the left, I don’t know any former comrade still of
the left, like Zeitlin, who has done the same.
The left’s silence over the unforeseen consequences of its political
commitments underscores the pitiful impotence and ultimate irrelevance of good
intentions. What does it matter that we wanted to create a “new” left or a
“democratic socialism” if we did not put our actions behind these desires? If we
did not apply the same standards of judgment, and action, to socialist tyrannies
that we did towards others? What were our “critiques” worth if we were
prepared to continue our support for such regimes, or to remain part of a
movement that actually defended them? What are Zeitlin’s critiques worth if he
preserves the myth of Che’s leadership and maintains the viability of the
socialist idea? If the bulwark against Communist totalitarianism—the United
States—remains his main enemy?
Forty years later, the results of our defense of the Cuban revolution are
indisputable. Cuba is an island prison, a land of regime-induced poverty, of
misery and human oppression greater by far than the regime it replaced. Yet
despite his criticisms Maurice Zeitlin is still defending the Cuban “revolution”
along with its patron saint, Che Guevara. As a UCLA professor he is now
teaching a new generation of college students, who have no memory of this past,
that Guevara is an inspiration for the future, in other words to idolize the very
predator that Zeitlin himself had justly criticized 40 years earlier! In view of this
record, what do Zeitlin’s parenthetical condemnations and critical asides matter?
Zeitlin’s career reminds me of an Irwin Shaw story called “The Ninety-Yard
Run,” about a college football star whose great play in his senior college year
turns out to be the high-point of his life, and the rest downhill all the way.
In defining the term “neo-communist” and applying it to leftists like Zeitlin, I
was careful to be specific. I defined a neo-ommunist as “a political radical and a
determined opponent of America and its capitalist democracy.” What I had in
mind was not just a political outlook, but an outlook reflecting a profound
feeling of alienation from America and a hostility towards it that only someone
who was or had been a radical himself could really understand. In attempting to
describe this attitude, I have elsewhere employed as an example a line we once
used in Ramparts magazine, the flagship publication of the new left. On the
cover of our issue we had placed a photograph of a seven-year-old holding the
flag of the Communist enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said, “Alienation is
when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.”57 That was the
way we felt, and we felt that way because our outlook led us to look at the
United States as the imperialist leader of world reaction, which meant that
anything that caused America’s defeat would benefit mankind.
In the 1980s, I was provided a personal insight into Maurice Zeitlin’s own
profound alienation from his country—a country that had provided him with
intellectual freedom, a six-figure income, and opportunities to travel all over the
world doing research and writing Marxist tracts at American taxpayers’ expense.
When the incident in question occurred, I had not seen Maurice nor heard from
him in more than 20 years, since our days together in the radical Sixties. I had no
idea whether he had had second thoughts like mine or whether he was still on the
left. Our paths crossed, so to speak, because of a newspaper report about another
Sixties radical named Margaret Randall who was applying for the reinstatement
of her American citizenship, which she had renounced years before. She was
being supported by a chorus of comrades, who claimed that in resisting her
request the State Department was trampling on her civil rights.
This news item so outraged me that I wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times
urging the authorities to deny her request. The reason Randall no longer had her
citizenship was that she had joined a movement of local terrorists in Mexico City
who were attempting to sabotage the 1968 Olympic games. When the street-
battles were over and many lay dead, she publicly renounced her American
citizenship and attacked her homeland as a “fascist” state. She then went to live
in Communist Cuba and work there as a teacher, indoctrinating Cuban
schoolchildren in the Communist creed. In my letter to the Times, I urged
officials to demand that Randall apologize to her country before reinstating the
citizenship she had renounced. Being an American, in my view, meant accepting
a social contract that included a commitment to democracy and individual
freedom. I thought Randall should be treated like new citizen-applicants, who
are required to make a formal commitment to the country and its principles
before being receiving its citizenship. What is America if it is not a nation of
citizens committed to these common ends?
Zeitlin read my letter to the Los Angeles Times. His reaction, which I learned
through a mutual friend, was: “I wonder how low Horowitz will sink next?” That
came as a shock to me, because I remembered his bold defense of freedom to
Che Guevara years before, and I was unaware of his political evolution since.
The remark told me more about Zeitlin’s political commitments than I cared to
know.
The purpose of the term “neo-communist” is to identify a movement that
regards the United States as the root cause of international evil on grounds that it
is the guardian of the international property system. In the eyes of radicals, this
makes America the bulwark of “social injustice” around the world. These
propositions have profound implications for one’s loyalties and commitments.
They explain how individuals who claim to honor peace, justice, equality and
freedom can interpose themselves between America and a monstrous fascist like
Saddam Hussein.
In an earlier article in this series, I referred to Nicholas DeGenova, the
Columbia professor who made himself notorious by wishing for “a million
Mogadishus”—a million American military defeats. The outrage at his remarks
was a response to his wish for American military casualties. But this was to miss
the forest for the trees. As DeGenova himself explained in defending his remarks
afterwards, what he meant was not that a lot of Americans should be killed—the
left always imagines it can separate support for America’s troops from support
for America’s wars—but that the defeat of America itself would be a victory for
humanity. This is the essence of the neo-communist vision. It explains how
leftists like Maurice Zeitlin can condemn America’s liberation of Iraq, despite
the fact that they recognize that Iraq’s regime is “execrable” and that the Iraqi
people have been freed from a tyranny. The defeat of America is a defeat of
“U.S. Imperialism,” the oppressor of peoples all over the world, and thus a
victory for “social justice.”
A key to understanding the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its
best intentions, while judging its opponents—America chief among them—by
their worst deeds. Or by the fantasies of what their worst deeds might be. By
imagining a perfect world of social justice that leftists will surely create, they
can make America’s most positive achievements look bad. If a world can be
created in which everyone would be fed and have shelter and medical attention,
then the fact that they don’t can be attributed to America, because America is the
guardian of the international “status quo.” From this vantage, every good that
America has achieved can be seen as a social obscenity. It may be the case, for
example, that America has raised unprecedented millions out of the ranks of
poverty into a comfortable middle-class existence. But a neo-communist sees
this achievement as one that is realized at the expense of a million greater
achievements. A historical good that America has accomplished is thus turned
into a malevolent deprivation, an evil deed. By extension, when the left acts to
weaken America or defend America’s enemies, it is really advancing the cause
of social progress.
In the past the Communist left was driven by the illusion that the Soviet Union
was actually a “workers’ paradise” and that true socialism had been achieved.
Communists who defended Stalin’s oppressive state believed that Russia was
really a paradigm of human freedom. Neo-communists know the execrable
nature of regimes like Iraq’s but defend them against American arms
nonetheless. Unlike Moscow, Baghdad is not their socialist mecca. In order to
sustain their antagonism to America’s intervention in Iraq, they must disconnect
their intentions from their actions and their actions from the results. In the past,
Communists believed in what they did. Today, neo-communists justify their
deeds with the excuse of good intentions. Isn’t it what all utopians do? If you
believe in a future that will redeem mankind, what lie will you not tell, what
crime will you not commit to make the future happen? Which is why
progressives have committed so many atrocities in the last half-century and lied
to everyone, especially themselves. The Communist mantra, “the ends justify the
means,” is exactly the rationalization that neo-communists use to defend their
alliances with reactionary Islamic radicals and fascist regimes. Using good
intentions to justify bad deeds is the first requirement of a utopian faith.
17

Discover the Networks

[PREFATORY NOTE: DiscovertheNetworks.org, a website I created, is an
encyclopedia about the post-Communist left. In its seven-year existence, it has
been visited by millions of individuals, many of them writers and broadcasters
who have turned the insights afforded by it into books and on-air analyses. When
the website was first posted on February 15, 2005, it was visited by 250,000
individuals in its first two days and aroused a furious controversy on the political
left. The focus of the left’s attacks was a one-page index of some of the figures
included in the database, illustrated by thumbnail-size photos. Protesters
objected to the apparent linkage of American leftists and Islamic terrorists like
Osama bin Laden, even if the link was merely a juxtaposition on the index-page.
I understood that such a juxtaposition, even without any overt linkage, could
lead to unsubstantiated conclusions but was not about to remove bin Laden or
other Islamists from website since there were already de facto alliances between
the left and Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Moreover, anti-Western utopianism was a fundamental political bond between
these forces, which had already led to the formation of what I had described as
an “unholy alliance” in a book of that name the year before. Nonetheless, to
accommodate any legitimate concerns, I decided to divide the offending index-
page into five columns representing five categories of leftists. In this way the
website now distinguished, for example, radical and moderate leftists,
accommodating some of the criticisms—though not, it should be said, to the
satisfaction of the leftists, who still complained. The article that follows is my
defense of the new index and an explanation of why it made sense. The photos
were eventually removed to forestall copyright claims, after we had been
harassed by several of these. With the photos gone, there was no point in
retaining the page itself, since it was merely an attempt to encourage readers to
enter the database. The article that follows was my defense of the categories we
had introduced for the page that no longer exists, and is included here because it
analyzes the factions of the left as I perceived them.]
 This article was published on March 02, 2005,
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=9412

If you visit the “Individuals” search-page in DiscoverTheNetworks, you will see
that we have separated the leftists included there into five columns, identified as
“totalitarian radicals,” “anti-American radicals,” “leftists,” “moderate leftists”
and “affective leftists.” The latter includes mostly entertainment figures whose
political commitments are emotionally rather than intellectually based in a way I
will analyze below. We have arranged the grid this way even though we think it
feeds certain illusions, to accommodate those who expressed anguish over the
original format where no such distinctions were made. Their anguish focused on
the fact that the original grid contained radicals characterized by a spectrum of
views from the totalitarian left to the democratic left, and that it also included
Islamic radicals along with Hollywood entertainers, Democratic Party legislators
and academics.
It is particularly ironic that one of the most outraged critics of regarding this
aspect of the site was a professor named Michael Bérubé, whose blogs can be
found here.58 For among academics the links are the clearest, since the
university is the most obvious political base of the hard left. Sami al-Arian, a
figure in the grid, ran the Palestinian Islamic Jihad whose most recent feat was
the assassination of the former premier of Lebanon. Al-Arian ran this operation
from the University of South Florida, where he was a professor of engineering.
After his terrorist activities had been exposed by The Miami Herald, and while
he was being pursued by the FBI, al-Arian was defended by the American
Association of University Professors as a persecuted Palestinian. Venerable
leftist institutions like Salon.com and The Nation, the ACLU and the Center for
Constitutional Rights joined in his defense. Just before his arrest, al-Arian had
been the featured speaker at a Duke-sponsored symposium on “Terrorism and
Civil Liberties,” where he was presented as an expert on civil liberties. More
recently, the AAUP and academic leftists have joined in protesting the State
Department’s decision to bar Tariq Ramadan from joining the “Peace Studies”
faculty at Notre Dame. “Peace Studies” itself is an academic field that teaches
“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” and that—in the phrase
used by academics Noam Chomsky and Robert Jensen—America is the world’s
“greatest terrorist state.” This is just the tip of the iceberg concerning
relationships between leftist professors on American faculties and Islamic
radicals conducting a jihad against the West.
On the one hand, there was an element in the criticisms against us that could
not be so easily dismissed. Moderate leftists who were also included in the grid
are obviously patriotic Americans with no relation to Islamic radicals. It did
seem unfair to include them. On the other hand, we were trying to make a point
that political analysts who are commonly referred to as “liberal” or “populist”
are often simply leftists. They are redistributionists and statists, and their
networks of support extend into the heart of the “progressive” movement.59
The answer to these dilemmas came to me in a conversation with John
Gorenfeld, a writer assigned to cover DiscoverTheNetworks by his editors at
Salon.com. Salon, despite its defense of Sami al-Arian and similar lapses, is part
of what we describe in the new grid as the “left” sans the adjectives “totalitarian”
and “anti-American.” Not quite moderate but not quite radical either, the editors
of Salon, according to our taxonomy, are leftists of patriotic and democratic
intent. I wrote a column for Salon for two years and would do so again if invited.
I assure you that such a relationship would not be possible with hard-left venues
like CounterPunch. org, alternet.org, the Progressive or The Nation.
In today’s conventional political lexicon, the term “moderate leftist” is
equivalent to “liberal.” We have not used “liberal” as a designation because part
of the agenda of DiscoverTheNetworks is to challenge the use of the word
“liberal” to describe people who are leftists. To do so obscures the seamless
network of the left. Redistributionism, support for racial preferences, and a
complacent acceptance of the existing political monolith on academic faculties
are not attitudes that can reasonably be called liberal. They are the product of a
successful campaign by leftists to conduct “a long march through the
institutions” by assuming the political coloration of liberalism in order to escape
accountability for the leftist past and in order more easily to advance their
radical agendas in the American mainstream. The leftist slide of the Democratic
Party is a by-product of this campaign.
Another ambition of the DiscoverTheNetworks website is to unmask the
radical agendas of faux-liberal organizations and individuals like the misnamed
Center for Constitutional Rights. This organization was founded by totalitarian
radicals and has merged with the National Emergency Civil Liberties
Committee, a communist front. Its politics are aligned with Castro’s uba and
Islamo-fascists. The convicted terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart is a protégée and
icon of the Center, as is Stanley Cohen, the lawyer for Hamas.
The term “affective leftist” requires some explanation, and I am grateful to
Peter Collier for the description that follows. “These are people in positions of
influence who are bien-pensant in the extreme. In spite of their social status,
they see themselves ‘in opposition’—a legacy from the 1960s when the notion of
‘The System’ as a malign code word for America was born. They are also
involved in post-radical chic, glorifying people who ‘authentically’ represent
oppositional ideas in a way they would not have the courage or really even the
political inclination to do themselves. To these people, as opposed to serious
leftists, political ‘ideas’ are the intellectual equivalent of a fashion statement,
always adjusting to meet current trends, always meant as a sort of code to tell the
world that they are good people. Obviously, I’m talking here about people like
Katie Couric and Robin Williams and almost all of Hollywood. Some
Hollywood people like Sean Penn with his Communist lineage are harder core
and should be distinguished from this category; but there aren’t that many of
them, and in any case as actors their politics are largely emotion-based as well.
These affective liberals have as their bottom-line definition the fact that they
want to feel that they are on the right side rather than any real commitment to a
vision (or anti-vision) for the country. They are for ‘freedom’ when it is freedom
to kill third-term fetuses or engage in same-sex marriages or stuff coke up their
noses; they do not define freedom as anything to do with captive peoples around
the world having the chance to escape the tyrannies that constrain them. They
like Fidel because he is a thorn in America’s side and a sort of dime-store
existentialist, and they rhapsodize about his spreading of literacy in Cuba
without considering the fact that at the same time that he teaches people to read
he tortures writers like Armando Valladares whose books he doesn’t like.”
Those who are still unconvinced about the principle of inclusion that governs
this database are invited to read my book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and
the American Left, written alongside the construction of
DiscovertheNetworks.org, whose taxonomy reflects its perspective. Unholy
Alliance describes the “mind of the left” in its journey from Stalinism to the
present day.60 It sets this analysis within the frame of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. It
shows how the “antiwar” left, was formed, how it created “solidarity” links to
Islamic radicalism, how it shaped the Democratic Party’s 2004 election
campaigns and how it determined the unprecedented defection of mainstream
“liberalism” from the war itself.
The purpose of DiscoverTheNetworks is informational, not polemical. It seeks
to describe the political left, and thus clarify the terms of the political debate. For
example, it is impossible to understand the recent leftward turn of the
Democratic Party if the entire left from Noam Chomsky to Jimmy Carter is
subsumed by the term “liberal,” which is the way the culture’s arbiters—e.g.,
The New York Times, the network news bureaus—currently frame this subject. If
Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis are referred to as liberals—as they are in
these media outlets—how does one understand the politics of Joe Lieberman?
The conflation of liberal and radical agendas, of leftwing politics and liberal
dispositions, is a misnomer that makes crucial political conflicts
incomprehensible. There is a battle raging in the Democratic Party between a
moderate left and a radical left, between an authentic centrism and
“progressivism.” This conflict cannot be detected, let alone understood, when
viewed through a lens as ill-defined as “liberalism” in its current usage. Joseph
Lieberman is liberal; MoveOn.org is not.61
Having revised our database to reflect the varieties of leftism, we welcome
further comments and observations. But past a certain point such revision would
support familiar delusions of the left about its record of the last fifty years. The
progressive left supported Communist enemies of freedom during the Cold War.
Many progressives did so “critically,” deploring the lack of freedom in the
Soviet bloc countries, while explaining it away as the result of America’s Cold
War “aggressions” against the socialist world. The same explanations are still
offered for the Cuban dictatorship’s domestic failures and repressions: The
American blockade did it. These same leftists, while rhetorically critical of the
Soviet bloc, were busily applauding the totalitarian camp for “restraining”
American “imperialism.” They dedicated themselves to weakening America’s
Cold War efforts by launching campaigns for unilateral disarmament and the
like. Yet when the Soviet system collapsed, they pretended not to have done
what they had done, or felt what they had felt. They washed their hands of
“actually existing socialism” and accepted no responsibility for their complicity
in its crimes.
We have some concern that the attitudes reflected in this false innocence are
encouraged by descriptions that distinguish factions of the left in our new grid.
In creating the categories of leftists who are neither anti-American radicals nor
totalitarians we may seem to be absolving “moderates” from responsibility when
they work in coalitions with radicals who are anti-American and totalitarian, or
when they fail to reject those radicals. Political commitments are not only
reflected in ideals and hopes; they are also measured by oppositions,
partnerships and actions. Antiwar leftists of the Sixties may have described
themselves as “anarchists” and democratic socialists, but the effect of their
activities was to establish brutal police-states in Cambodia and Vietnam that
slaughtered masses of innocents.
Contemporary leftism is, in fact, largely a nihilism. Since the collapse of
socialism—and really since the collapse of the international Communist
monolith in the wake of the Khrushchev report—the left hasn’t had a coherent
unifying agenda. It has been split into many protesting factions balkanized by
“identity politics” and with no common remedies for perceived ills. This is a
fallout from the failure of Marxist class politics, which subsumed all radical
agendas concerning race, gender and ethnicity into a universal formula of
socialist revolution. According to the formula, the elimination of private
property and the rule of the working class would create a universal brotherhood
of man that would resolve all serious social conflicts, including those of race and
gender. Few leftists believe this anymore, which is why they are unable to form
a shared and coherent vision of the liberated future. What is left is nihilism—
anti-globalization, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia .62 As a result,
according to a recent article by an academic Marxist, the “twin pillars” of
leftwing unity are now its hostility to Israel and to the United States.63 It is a
negative inspiration that explains the unholy alliance between American and
Islamic radicals, despite all their obvious differences. The enemy of my enemies
is my friend.
The importance of the negative in understanding the forces that create the left
can be seen most clearly in regard to the war in Iraq. Most leftists who are not of
a totalitarian persuasion deplored the Saddam regime. Nonetheless they acted to
save it. The bottom-line in politics is not what your good intentions are, but the
consequences of your actions. Opposition to the Iraq War forged a defacto
partnership between leftwing critics of Saddam and Islamic radicals who
supported him. Osama bin Laden himself recognized this in a fatwa on al-
Jazeera TV just before American and British troops entered Iraq: “The interests
of Muslims and the interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the
crusaders.”
The current revision to the “Individuals” grid on DiscoverTheNetworks
stresses the positive intentions of leftists, which can be misleading. In the war
for democracy in the Middle East, the left—and this means the entire left,
totalitarian, anti-American and “moderate”—has either been AWOL in
supporting the war or has been pulling for the wrong side—against the liberation
of Iraq, and against the establishment of democracies in the Middle East. There
are some exceptions. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Gephardt both qualify as
moderate leftists who supported the war against Saddam and thus the war to
make the Iraqi elections possible. There were others. But the majority of leftists
—the majority of the Democratic Party—were on the wrong side of this battle.
In politics, it is the side you’re on that matters. So even if we have provided a
grid that shows these important distinctions, we have not considered it necessary
to remove from the database any of the individuals we originally included.
18

Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat

One of the most frequent questions I am asked about my journey to the right is
why I did not stop somewhere in the middle, by which the questioner usually
means the “conservative” end of the Democratic Party. In fact, I remember very
clearly why I did not. At the time, which was just before the 1984 election,
Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were trying to hold the line against a
Communist offensive in Central America, while Democratic senators led by
Tom Harkin, John Kerry and Christopher Dodd were conducting their own
private diplomacy in Central America attempting to cut deals with the
Communists. Back home the Democratic House was seeking to cut funds to the
anti-Communist forces on the ground. I had turned my back on the left because
of the support it gave to the Communists in Indochina; I was not about to throw
in my lot with them when they were enabling another Communist conquest.

This article was published on March 16, 2010,

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/keeping-an-eye-on-the-
domestic-threat-2/print/

I was put in mind of these events by a recent report on the Newsweek website.
“Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and other prominent
Senate Democrats have accused spies at the Homeland Security Department of
basing official intelligence reports on dubious open-source material. Inquiries . .
. indicate that at least some of the data that Feinstein and her colleagues deemed
‘questionable’ came from a website set up by outspoken conservative activist
David Horowitz to catalogue negative information about the political left.”
It was a reference to DiscovertheNetworks.org. According to Newsweek,
Senator Feinstein’s immediate concern was “a profile of an unnamed but
prominent American Islamic leader [ . . . ] produced by Homeland Security’s
intelligence office during the latter years of the Bush administration. The report
was requested by the Department’s civil rights office, whose officials were
preparing to meet with the Islamic leader. But instead of sending the civil rights
office a quick bio of the individual in question, Homeland’s intelligence office
issued a ‘finished’ intel report that was circulated to other intelligence agencies
and, eventually, to Congressional oversight committees.”
In other words, Senator Feinstein and the Democrats were objecting to the
scrutiny of a prominent Islamic leader scheduled to meet with the Bush
Administration, even though leaders of prominent “mainstream” Islamic
organizations such as CAIR have been convicted of terrorist activities, while
others have been linked by the FBI to a formally-organized network of the
Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Islamic terrorism. The letter from the
Senate Intelligence Committee, which was the focus of the Newsweek article,
complained that the Department of Homeland Security “used ‘certain
questionable’ source material to glean ‘derogatory’ information about [a
particular] Muslim leader, including information from an unidentified source
‘with obvious political motivation whose stated purpose is to “identif[y] the
individuals and organizations that make up the left.”’” The senators added that
the source also included information on “‘numerous members of Congress and
two former Presidents of the United States.’”
The source was censored from the Intelligence Committee letter, but
Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball was able to identify it via a Google search as
Discoverthenetworks.org: “The website is one of a number of anti-left and anti-
Islamic websites operated by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Los
Angeles-based assortment of conservative political organizations founded and
headed by David Horowitz, a 1960s-vintage far-left organizer who migrated
sharply to the political right.”
When Hosenball interviewed me, I told him that I had no knowledge of the
Homeland Security matter but hoped that intelligence officials were consulting
DiscovertheNetworks regularly—for the sake of the country. He quoted me as
saying that the political left, including some members of Congress—the one I
named was Barbara Lee, head of the Congressional Black Caucus—have “a long
history of . . . actively working with and collaborating with America’s enemies.”
I also assured him that the material on DiscovertheNetworks.org, which can
easily be checked, is factual.
Of all the projects of the David Horowitz Freedom Center during a 22-year
history—its university campaigns, the scores of books its principals and
contributors have authored, the hundreds of lectures they have given and the
thousands of articles its websites have published—I regard the creation of
DiscovertheNetworks as its single most significant achievement with the most
far reaching long-term impact. This is not because it is a “catalogue [of] negative
political information about the political left,” as Newsweek claimed. It is rather a
map describing the origins, activities, agendas, funding and interlocking
networks of a movement whose collective goal is the destruction of American
capitalism and pluralism, of the framework America’s founders created more
than 200 years ago.
Ever since making my political conversion I have been aware that the
American public is dangerously naïve about the nature and purposes of the
American left; although mercifully this innocence is rapidly coming to an end.
The extent of it is reflected in an incident twenty years past, when I gave a
speech to the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St. Louis. Cardinal Mindszenty
was a hero of the anti-Communist cause, and the Mindszenty Foundation was as
conservative an organization as was likely to host me. In my days as a radical I
would have described myself as a “Marxist revolutionary,” but when it came to
my introduction, my host presented me as “a former peace activist and civil-
rights worker.” How familiar is this? Sworn enemies of American capitalism and
American democracy such as Angela Davis and Michael Moore are universally
described by mainstream media as “liberals” even though they are Marxists. The
campaign to prevent America from toppling Saddam Hussein was portrayed in
the mainstream media as a “peace movement” even though its leaders were self-
described supporters of Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and other Communists; they
had not organized a single “peace” demonstration in front of the Iraqi embassy
to demand that Saddam Hussein cease his defiance of 17 UN arms-control
resolutions and allow inspectors to visit his weapons sites.
DiscoverTheNetworks strips the veil from thousands of radical groups that fly
under false flags and evade detection by referring to themselves as peace
movements, civil-liberties organizations and campaigns for “social justice.”
Now, for the first time, the left’s history, its agendas and commitments are
displayed for a public that has not made the study of the left a lifetime
occupation. The most alarming aspect of the Newsweek report is the fact that the
Bush Homeland Security Department had to refer to our research to warn the
White House of the dangers a prospective visitor might pose, because the
department did not have the information in its own files.
 PART III

Slander As Political Discourse

1

Paul Berman’s Demented Lunacy

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
in the Winter issue of Dissent, the expectation that he will misrepresent you in
ways both small and large is high. Berman doesn’t disappoint. To avoid
unnecessary tedium, and because Radical Son is readily available, I will confine
this reply to two of his distortions.

This article was published on January 8, 1998,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24351

Berman portrays me as a Leninist, not only in my adolescence in the 1950s,
but also as a New Left activist in the 1960s, and even in conservative middle-
age, now that I have progressed in his view from being a “fanatic” of the left to
one of the right. 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. . . . ” Readers of Radical Son will know that my feelings are precisely
the opposite. My break with Lenin’s duplicitous politics was triggered by a sort
of epiphany that occurred in 1953 and is described on page 78 of my
autobiography. I was all of 14 at the time, and was walking across the
Triborough Bridge on my way to a demonstration in behalf of the Rosenberg
spies. During the walk, 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.” I instinctively rebelled at this idea. “How
could we make a virtue of lying, and still advance the cause of truth? Would the
Rosenbergs lie about their innocence? In my heart, I . . . felt that Lenin’s
instruction to be dishonest was wrong.” It is a theme that runs throughout my
book, and has guided my political life.
This very anti-Leninist rebellion is what defined my politics as a New Leftist
in the Sixties. During that time I avoided joining any of the Leninist sects then
proliferating in the movement. 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 for telling 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 the silent source for Coleman’s courageous
article. I still live with an element of risk, perhaps far greater than any Berman
has experienced, as a result of my efforts to bring the truth to light.
Berman attaches great significance to an article of mine that appeared in
Soldier of Fortune magazine in January 1987, “an episode in his publishing
career that [Horowitz] evidently wishes to suppress.” This is a Berman
invention. Here is how he embellishes the episode in the course of adversely
comparing my career to that of another second-thoughter, André Glucksmann:
“Now was [Horowitz’s] moment at Soldier of Fortune. He became a simple-
minded fanatic [sic] the mirror image of his worst (and not his best) moments on
the left.” The piece he is referring to was actually a “Speech to My Former
Comrades on the Left” (published in this volume as “Semper Fidel”) that I gave
at a Berkeley teach-in on Nicaragua, held on April 4, 1986. The speech was
reprinted under that title in Commentary in June 1986. Berman himself replied to
it in The Village Voice in August 1986, six months before its appearance in
Soldier of Fortune under the title “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade
Horowitz.”64 Following its appearance in Commentary the article was picked up
by many journals, including the Utne Reader (a left-wing Reader’s Digest).
Soldier of Fortune was one of the journals that requested reprint rights. I granted
the rights, without exception, to every magazine (and textbook editor) who
requested them. Had I realized the uses to which future detractors might put this
liberality, I might have been more selective. But the idea that I embraced the
politics of Soldier of Fortune at that time, or any time, is absurd.
2

In Defense of Matt Drudge

The oddest feature of the affair that pits White House flack Sidney Blumenthal
against Internet gadfly Matt Drudge is probably the most revealing: the failure of
the press to defend one of its own. Last August, Blumenthal filed a $30 million
libel suit against Drudge for reporting a rumor that Blumenthal was once
involved in a spousal-abuse court case and then failing to reveal his unnamed
sources, even though Drudge quickly retracted the claim. I should state at the
outset that I am the co-chair of the Matt Drudge Defense Fund, which is raising
money to support his legal case.

November 17, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?

ArtId=24382http://www.salon.com/1997/11/17/nc_17horo/

Matt Drudge is an entrepreneur who made his web-based Drudge Report a
national media player. While media conglomerates, in their glass-towered
fortresses, deploy battalions of scribes across the globe, Drudge operates alone
from his Hollywood apartment on a salary of $36,000 a year. Such a mismatch
should have made Drudge the underdog favorite in a case that would seem to pit
a White House Goliath against an Internet David. But it hasn’t. One obvious
reason is that little Matt Drudge kept scooping the big guys on stories ranging
from alleged White House scandals to Republican politics and network
television changes. Drudge also played right into the hands of a journalistic
establishment that resents this upstart new medium, the Internet. His apparent
recklessness in reporting a rumor he couldn’t back up evoked images of
journalistic irresponsibility and informational chaos generated by a free medium
many find threatening.
The fact that Drudge is an Internet libertarian rather than a statist liberal
doesn’t help his case, either. Sidney Blumenthal, on the other hand, began his
career at the socialist tabloid In These Times. From there he went to such
bastions of official liberalism as the New Republic and the Washington Post. His
time at the Post was an up-and-down experience; he did a brief stint reporting
foreign policy before being sent (some say demoted) to the less weighty Style
section. He then shifted to The New Yorker where political soulmate Rick
Hertzberg had become the new managing editor. After Blumenthal was made
White House reporter, the sycophancy of his stories about Bill and Hillary
Clinton and his constant playing down of the mushrooming Whitewater scandal
made other reporters at the New Yorker wince. Yanked from his beat,
Blumenthal finally got what he really wanted: a job at the Clinton White House,
as a senior communications advisor. There was a chorus of hoots to send him off
from his colleagues in the press; The New Republic suggested the Clintons owed
him back pay for services already rendered.
This is the man who has taken a holier-than-thou attitude to the offending
Matt Drudge for reporting a “Republican” rumor he was unable to back up. No
matter that Drudge immediately retracted the item when it was first challenged
and apologized for it in an interview with the Post’s Howard Kurtz. Blumenthal
wanted sources and when Drudge refused, as any other self-respecting journalist
would have, Blumenthal slapped him with a $30 million suit. For good measure
(and for its deep pockets) Blumenthal also named America Online as a
defendant, since it had a contract to run the Drudge Report on its network.
Blumenthal’s attorneys compiled a 137-page summary of the charges,
throwing in chunks of columns from Howard Kurtz and other comments from
Blumenthal friends they thought incriminating to Drudge, and circulated the
lawsuit to the entire media and anyone else who requested it. Since lawsuits
often contain damaging but unsubstantiated charges, lawyers, as a rule, forbid
their clients from distributing such filings, even to friends, to avoid the prospect
of libel suits in return. The aim is clear: not merely to nail Drudge but to warn
other critics of the Clinton establishment, including those online, to beware.
Despite such attempted intimidation, not to mention the rather low esteem in
which he is held by the profession, Blumenthal has up to now been able to rally
the press to his cause. When asked about Drudge in a Christian Science Monitor
survey on Internet reporters, Joan Konner, head of the Columbia Journalism
School, sneered: “Drudge isn’t a reporter, he’s your next-door neighbor
gossiping over the electronic fence.” Forgotten in their dismissive rush to
judgment about Drudge are some of the lowball hits Blumenthal has
administered against people he didn’t like, calling former vice-presidential
candidate Geraldine Ferraro a “Mafia princess” in a New Republic cover story,
or referring to Midge Decter as a “dog” in his book-length takedown of the neo-
conservative movement. As for accuracy, in a piece he wrote about me in the
Washington Post he managed to mangle three separate details about my life in
the space of three sentences.65
 The press would be well advised to put aside its snobbish disdain for
cyberspace journalism and consider the consequences of abandoning Drudge to
the mercies of Blumenthal and his legal juggernaut. Is there a reporter in any
corner of the media who has never made a comparable mistake? Or is Drudge
being turned into a whipping-boy for media’s ancien régime fearful of the
subversive and the new? The cry has gone out: the Internet must be brought
under control. At the same time, online content providers like AOL have been
warned: Don’t mess around with upstarts. This fight isn’t just about Matt
Drudge; it’s about the battle for Internet freedom. And if the Internet loses, guess
who’s next?
3

Target of a Witch-Hunt

An old writer-friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been advised
by a senior editor of The New Republic not to have anything to do with my
partner Peter Collier and myself because we were “Nazis.” The reason? We had
organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly who broke the story
of the President’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and is being sued by White
House aide Sidney Blumenthal, the actual architect of Hillary Clinton’s “vast
right conspiracy” charges. Every day, now, I get calls from the press about my
connections to two points on Blumenthal’s charts, Matt Drudge and
philanthropist Richard Scaife, who were targeted, for example, in a recent
Newsweek story. In The Nation this week, the Center for the Study of Popular
Culture, the institution that Peter and I created, is itself featured as an element in
Blumenthal’s web.

Originally published as “The Drudge Affair and Its Ripple Effect, ” January
01, 1998, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24331
http://www.salon.com/1998/02/23/nc_23horo_3/

How does it feel to be the focus of a witch-hunt? Actually, it feels quite
familiar. I grew up in the Cold War Fifties in a family of American Communists.
The FBI used to linger on the streets of our neighborhood, charting people’s
comings and goings. My parents lost their jobs as high-school teachers because
they would not answer the question “Have you ever been?” Or at least could not
answer it honestly. Once in a junior high-school auditorium, when I was 13, a
group of toughs whom I didn’t know put a drapery cord around my neck and
started shouting “String him up, he’s a red!” So I know the drill. Unfair as the
treatment of my family and some of our Communist friends was during the
McCarthy era, there was a large element of truth in the conspiracy charge itself.
My parents were indeed Communists, willing enlistees in a disciplined and
secretive movement that did take its orders (and its money) from Moscow and
was indeed dedicated to the overthrow of American democracy and the
undermining of its security vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. My parents, their friends
and most of those who fell into McCarthy’s net harbored these loyalties and
subscribed to these goals. Yet most people agree, and I am one of them, that
McCarthy’s witch-hunt was a smear-campaign that injured some people who
were innocent of any connection to the actual Communist conspiracy and others
who, while connected to the conspiracy, were guiltless of any criminal behavior.
McCarthy’s true target was not Communists, who were already under FBI
surveillance, but his political opponents in the Democratic Party. The
Democrats, it should be said, were a rich target since they went out of their way
to protect the Communists—Alger Hiss being the most obvious example. Which
is why they despised McCarthy and decried his “witch-hunt.”
Why then the seeming tolerance by so-called liberals for the current White
House inquisition, whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? As
anyone can see, there was no conspiracy surrounding the events which evinced
the First Lady’s accusation. Although it was publicly unknown at the time she
made the accusation, her husband had indeed strayed from his marriage vows on
the floor of the Oval Office. There is no Communist Party of the right with
secret codes and top-down discipline that has the ability to give marching orders
to anyone. If Monica Lewinsky was planted in the White House, Democrats did
the planting. It was Newsweek, no conservative publication, that developed the
Lewinsky story. Drudge only made it public. Richard Scaife, who is villain #2 in
Blumenthal’s conspiracy web, funded investigations that suggested the suicide
of Vince Foster might have been involuntary. But then the special prosecutor,
Ken Starr, who is villain #1, issued a summary report refuting the speculations
that Scaife had funded, while supporting the original suicide report. What kind
of a conspiracy is this?
As for my miniscule role in this matter, I had hardly been aware of Drudge’s
existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit and offered to introduce the
Internet reporter to a lawyer. The lawyer I chose, Manny Klausner, is a well-
known civil rights advocate with long-standing and very public ties to the
Libertarian Party. My Center for the Study of Popular Culture also has long been
interested in free-speech issues, and has defended feminists and Afro-centrists as
well as conservatives on First Amendment issues. Its legal arm spearheaded the
battle against speech codes on college campuses some years ago. We even
attained some notoriety when we forced a Vice-Chancellor at the University of
California to undergo “sensitivity training” in the First Amendment after he
banned a fraternity for producing a T-shirt the PC crowd didn’t like. We were
even criticized by George Will in one of his Newsweek columns when he didn’t
get the satire. So we were active in defending free speech well before the
punitive White House suit against Matt Drudge. Our interest did not, in other
words, flow from our involvement in a vast conspiracy to discredit President
Clinton with false rumors of infidelity as Mrs. Clinton claimed.
It is true that we do get funds from two foundations funded by the Scaife
fortune, in addition to 20 others and 15,000 individuals. [Note: Unclear here
whether those 20 groups & 15,000 receive money from Scaife, or whether they
fund you.] But why is Richard Scaife, whom I have met and talked to twice in
my life, being demonized as though he were the mastermind of a plot against the
White House? Why is the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has
sought only to defend a journalist from what it perceived as a punitive and
chilling attack, being dragged into the plot? The answer should be obvious from
witch-hunts of the past. It is to deflect attention away from the real issues that
separate the White House from its critics. It is to conjure fantasy-demons in
order to smear and cripple those critics. The question that should be asked is
why, given the black record of witch-hunts of the past, are Democrats so tolerant
of this latest version?
The editor of The New Republic who called Peter and me Nazis because of our
defense of Matt Drudge was an old friend named John Judis. After writing a
defense of Drudge, which appeared in Salon magazine, I received a call from my
writing partner and Heterodoxy co-editor, Peter Collier. He himself had just had
a call from our mutual friend and fellow second-thoughter, Ron Radosh, whose
article on his old Communist summer camp appeared in Heterodoxy. Radosh had
contacted Judis to suggest he read the article. Judis replied he wouldn’t read
anything printed in Heterodoxy anymore, saying that we were “Nazis” (a charge
he withdrew when confronted). The occasion of his wrath was the fact that I had
set up a defense fund for Matt Drudge. Peter promptly e-mailed Judis the
following message:

John:
Drudge, Heterodoxy, Susan Estrich, Kinsley, Nazis. Yikes. Collier

Collier’s references were to the fact that Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley
had also defended Drudge. This prompted a reply from Judis:

I assume your letter was prompted by a conversation I had with Ron

Radosh this afternoon, since I haven’t talked to you in ages. You need to
know a little background. Ron brought up Heterodoxy. I said, as I have said
before to him that I was pissed off about Horowitz’s defense of that
scumbag Drudge. Radosh attributed my position to my being friends with
 Sid Blumenthal, and instead of blowing up at him as I should have (the
implication is that the only reason I defended him on the George
Washington thing was because he was a friend of mine),66 I started railing
about Nazis. I don’t think Horowitz is a Nazi, but I do think that his
position is detestable. I wrote him a letter at the time but it was returned
because he no longer lives at the address to which I sent it. Assuming you
are in cahoots on this stuff, I’ll send it to you and you can forward it to him
if you desire. John

What follows is the letter to me that was never sent, which Judis e-mailed to
Collier:

11/19/97
Dear David:
This morning, a mutual friend or ours urged me to read your articles on Sid
Blumenthal and the Drudge Report.2 Rather than responding simply to him
(I think I said something to the effect that I’d rather eat dogshit), I thought I
would tell you what I thought of your leading the defense of Mr. Drudge.
Let me make the point indirectly through two anecdotes:
1) When the Drudge report first came out, one of my friends called me
that afternoon to ask whether I’d seen it and what I knew of Sid’s private
life. This person, who didn’t know Sid, assumed the report was true. I read
it myself, and reading about court records, wondered, too, whether Sid
hadn’t concealed a part of himself from me all these years. Afterwards, I
talked to several people who knew Sid and Jackie socially better than I did
who thought the report was preposterous, but until the hoax was fully
revealed, I still had lingering doubts. The point is this: there is no slander so
insidious or so subversive to a person’s reputation and character as a charge
of wife-beating, especially when backed up with claims about court records.
It can lead a friend of twenty years to harbor doubts about them. That’s why
law schools use this kind of charge as a model for slander and defamation.
2) After the hoax was revealed, I suggested to one of the editors at The
New Republic that they run a short about it, noting, among other things, the
connection to AOL, but this editor, knowing Mike Kelly’s animosity
toward Sid (at least the equal in ferocity of your own) hesitated to suggest
it.67 To my surprise, Kelly brought it up himself and insisted on running a
short. His one concern was that even mentioning such a charge in the
course of explaining it was a hoax could lend credence to it. In this case,
Kelly was willing to put aside his feelings toward Sid because it was a
 question of principle—of someone attacking someone’s reputation in the
most scurrilous manner and using the new power of the Internet to do so.
Kelly also believed, as I do, that it was important to sue in this instance,
because it is important to establish a precedent so that other would-be
journalists are deterred from following the example of Mr. Drudge and so
that publishers, such as America-on-Line, are deterring from promoting
these kind of scumbags.
I’d draw a very sharp contrast between your conduct and Kelly’s. The
mark of a moral person is the ability, upon occasion, to transcend one’s
own resentments and hatreds, as well as one’s loves and enthusiasms. Kelly
was able to do it. You are not. The main difference between your defense of
Drudge in the Nineties and your defense of Huey Newton or Los Siete
during the Sixties is that in the latter cases, you still had a smidgeon of
principle.68 I detest what you are doing.
Yours,
John

Peter replied to this e-mail from John:

2/14/98
John:
I put the letter of 11/19 in the trash receptacle of my e-mail program. If you
want to send it to David, go ahead. He will send you one, I’m sure, by
return mail that will be equally morally uppity and probably even more (and
I have to say, more justly) contemptuous.
He will accuse you of ignoring how the item was published and retracted.
He will point out that there is an illuminating sequel in the events that
monopolize the news today. He will note that Blumenthal is a loathsome
individual figure who is doubtless, at this very moment, blackguarding
someone, somewhere, somehow, since that is his only discernible talent.
If I know David, he will take you to task particularly for the last
paragraph of this still-unsent letter of yours, which won’t be difficult, since
you’ve given him a target as big as a barn with what could easily be
interpreted as a morally imbecilic proposition about supporting criminal
gangs in the Sixties being some sort of misguided principle that can still be
said to travel well, in extreme rhetorical instances such as the case at hand,
in the Nineties.
“Innocently” supporting murderers in the Sixties: morally ok. Less
innocently supporting an Internet gossip-monger in the Nineties: morally
 criminal. This is a weird moral calculus, my friend.
And after all these bitternesses are exhumed, then where will we all be?
Nowhere. Worse than nowhere. Which is why I didn’t forward your letter
to David.
Some things are better off left unsaid.
Cheers,
Peter

Peter and I then had a conversation, and I asked him to retrieve John’s e-mail
from his trash, and send it to me. I then replied to John myself:

2/14/98
Dear John,
I have Peter’s trash of your e-mail of November in which you explain why
you have washed your hands of me, and “detest” what I do, apparently
because I have come to the defense of Matt Drudge. This makes me a
conspirator, apparently, in the plot to wound Sidney Blumenthal through
unkind and inaccurate words that misrepresent the person you presume him
to be. Peter has also sent me the reply he wrote in my behalf, and while I
concur in his observations, they seem nonetheless incomplete. For me the
attack in your letter also broaches basic issues about the nature of our
political discourse and I am, therefore, also answering you in my own
voice.
Over the last ten years I have kept in touch with you, partly for old times’
sake, and partly because I thought you were a man of integrity and would
keep faith with the past we shared. Though we no longer shared agendas, I
thought there might even come a time when you might provide testimony
against the powerful attacks and distortions of my life and Peter’s that have
been a direct consequence of our political defection. As you can see, this
touches directly on the issues you raise about the misrepresentation of your
friend at the hands of Mr. Drudge. For Peter and I have been the target of
far more relentless distortion and more calculated slander than Sidney
Blumenthal. In terms of actual wounds inflicted by mean-spirited and
vicious misrepresentations of self, as of damages incurred, your friend does
not begin to know what pain is. Or, evidently, how to deal with it.
In view of your attack on me now, it is something of an irony that I
thought you might be up to the task of one day defending me against
political slanders. I was perhaps misled by the fact that you were willing to
entertain any overtures at all from me, when almost everyone Peter and I
had known and befriended in the community of the left had turned on us
with an irrational hatred. (Let it be said, that I am still grateful for this
generosity.) The passion of these newly minted enemies was so intense that
we could no longer count on those who had witnessed what we had done to
respect the integrity of a single fact that we had shared, if that fact should
come under attack. Were Peter and David holy rollers of the ideological
sects, partisans of mindless extremes? It was left to us, and to others who
had second thoughts, to remember that we were not. Consider how total this
attack on our reality has been. While an almost universal hatred has been
directed at Peter and me by our former comrades since our politics changed,
we are the ones accused by them of malice; of having acted out criminal
fantasies in the past and of being driven only by our hatred of old friends in
the present.
But your personal tolerance of me was not the only factor that
encouraged my misplaced trust. I was also impressed that in your own
writing you made a significant effort to be fair to intellectual opponents on
the right like Bill Buckley whose biographer you became. You made a
modest specialty of conservative intellectuals and even of “renegades” from
the left like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. I respected this, and
it encouraged me to hope that this spirit of fairness might one day prompt
you to be a witness to our truth and thus counter-act the politically
motivated efforts to defame us, and thereby dismiss anything we had to say.
Only this month, for example, your friend Paul Berman has described me as
a “demented lunatic” in the foremost intellectual journal of the left, and as
someone who was a Leninist fanatic before his second thoughts and
remains one today; lies on both counts.
From the time Peter and I announced our political “second thoughts” in a
piece in the Washington Post some thirteen years ago, and then organized a
conference of other “second thoughters,” we were greeted by a wall of hate
erected by our former comrades. Your friend Sidney played a significant
part in creating that wall. In a signature piece on our conference that
appeared in the Washington Post, he caricatured us as political buffoons
and right-wing extremists. It was the beginning of a campaign to
marginalize us in the culture and as human beings. In the same article,
Sidney portrayed me as a callow narcissist who had abandoned his
principles and his children to flee to the fleshpots of Beverly Hills. Every
word he wrote was false, but there was no way for me to respond or to clear
my name.
And that was just the beginning. Over the last ten years, the attacks on
Peter and myself have relentlessly continued. We have been portrayed as
murderers (by your friends Hertzberg and Berman), as political criminals,
as racists and homophobes, and always as shrill and monomaniacal
ideologues to whom no self-respecting intellectual should pay the slightest
serious attention.
This is the culture war John. And it has been successfully waged against
us in the very precincts that you roam. Peter and I have written the only
books by members of the Sixties left that challenge its myths. They are
primary sources for the period as well as analytical texts about its
meanings. But in college curricula you will rarely find references to
Destructive Generation or Second Thoughts About the Sixties. The tenured
left has seen to that. Instead you will find texts by Sixties loyalists, Angela
Davis, Todd Gitlin, and even Huey Newton. Racist anti-Semites like
Stokely Carmichael will visit these same campuses as well-paid speakers,
and radical ideologues will be invited to serve as commencement speakers.
We get no such invitations. This campaign of political libel conducted by
Sidney and your friends has not silenced us as they intended but it has not
been without success either.
Now I will tell you something that you will not believe, but it is true
nonetheless. I don’t harbor any personal malice towards Sidney
Blumenthal, and that is not the reason I came to the defense of Matt
Drudge. For myself, the immediate pain that Sidney inflicted in his
caricature in the Post, was washed away when I was able to write my own
story in Radical Son and thus correct his misrepresentation. Moreover, the
malice towards Peter and me and the general misrepresentation of our
politics is so generic to the left that it would be foolish to load responsibility
on one man. If Matt Drudge had deliberately libeled Sidney for political
ends and revealed a malicious intent to destroy him in the process, I assure
you I would not have come to Drudge’s aid.
Nor would I hesitate to have done what Michael Kelly did in printing a
correction of the Drudge error. The fact is, as Peter has pointed out, that
Drudge did this himself and did so immediately on being informed of his
mistake. And his retraction was reported throughout the press and to a far
greater audience than the original error.
What then is the purpose of Sidney’s $30 million lawsuit? Surely not to
send a warning to other writers as you suggest. The suit and the retraction
already perform that function. My own piece in Salon about the affair was
censored in several of its parts simply because the editors were afraid of a
similar suit. I reported, for example, that Sidney had been shifted to the
Style section of the Post when his editors became unhappy about his
journalistic methods. This was factually true, but still too risky for Salon’s
editors in the climate Sidney and his lawyers have created. Is this an
atmosphere that you, as a writer, want to encourage?
You want to make a claim of special heinousness for Drudge’s offense.
You write that there is no slander so insidious or subversive of character as
the charge of wife-beating. Really? More insidious than Berman’s charge
that Peter and I were complicit in the murder of our friend, and then sought
to shift the blame to others?
Or, let’s take your claim about wife-beating charges at face value. Have
you considered the case of Don Sipple, the Republican pollster charged
with wife-beating by your friends at Mother Jones? Perhaps you’ll
remember that this was the immediate provocation of Drudge’s own sin.
Mother Jones also accused Sipple on the basis of “court records” and did
not, like Drudge, qualify the charge as “rumor.” Drudge reported the rumor
about Blumenthal as one that Republicans were going to surface in order to
revenge and neutralize the charge against Sipple. Unlike Blumenthal, who
suffered no material damages, Sipple actually lost his job, and had no
friends at Newsweek, the NY Times, Time and the Washington Post to report
and support his side of the story.
Do you have any idea of what the basis for the charge against Sipple
was? The impression given in the media was that he had been convicted of
beating his wife in a court of law. When I looked at the original article in
Mother Jones, it was somewhat of a shock to discover that the charge was
actually an unproven claim made by a scorned ex-wife in the course of a
bitter custody battle. I have no idea of the truth of this charge, but neither
does Mother Jones or you. Yet a man has been seriously damaged as a
result. Where is your outrage over the insidious subversion of Don Sipple’s
life?
Here is what is so perverse in your anguish over Sid. Unlike Sipple (or
Peter and myself), Blumenthal commands enormous influence and power as
a Presidential aide with a large network of friends in the press. He was able
to reach millions with his side of the story immediately. In context, such
pain as he incurred, though I am sure it was serious, was minimized. By
contrast, ten years ago, when I went to Richard Harwood, the ombudsman
of the Washington Post, to point out the lies that Sidney had written about
me, Harwood shrugged his shoulders sympathetically, and suggested I write
a letter to the editor. He did remove the offending column from the Post’s
weekly national edition, a small but gratefully acknowledged gesture. On
the other hand, your Sid, now cognizant of the facts and wholly
unrepentant, made sure that the slander would reach a wider audience by
reprinting the lies he had written, uncorrected, in a book of his collected
articles called Pledging Allegiance.
Certainly no one in politics is immunized from name-calling, gross
misrepresentation and unfounded accusation. That is deplorable but it is
also the territory, and has been for a long time. In such an environment, all
anyone can ask is to be able to respond to the slanders that are made and
correct them. Occupying so high a political ground, Blumenthal had powers
of correction that most of us lack. He should be the last to whine. That you
and Blumenthal seem so refreshingly thin-skinned only reveals how
protected you are, as members of the left, by a media sympathetic to you,
and by the relative civility of the conservative press.
In the end, Blumenthal’s suit has only one agenda: to destroy Drudge, to
run him out of the business, to discredit him, and shut him up along with all
the other Clinton thorns from Gennifer Flowers to Paula Jones. In these
battles the White House is a Goliath from which you would normally keep
your distance. So, why your animus against the Internet David? The error
Drudge made in passing on the rumor about your friend hardly reflects a
pattern in his journalism. He is so innocent of such smears and of the suits
that can attend them that he didn’t even have an attorney until I put him in
touch with one.
The same cannot be said for your friend. Sid has no doubt the best legal
advice money and his proximity to the Clintons can secure. His lawyers
showed no qualms about circulating a 137-page suit, filled with
unsubstantiated charges against Drudge to the entire media (a practice that
invites a libel suit in return). Moreover, he is supported by an armada of
prominent left-wing journalists for whom liberal distortion and personal
abuse are the lingua franca of their craft; Joe Conason, Christopher
Hitchens, Frank Rich, Eric Alterman, Alex Cockburn, and Robert Scheer.
It is Sid, isn’t it, whose new career is that of the Clintons’ shadow
McCarthy, architect of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” charge that Hillary
dropped on TV the other morning and that has reporters calling me daily. In
the reigning paranoia that Sid has stoked in his job as Clinton spear-carrier,
I have become part of his infamous conspiracy chart because I set up a fund
to pay Drudge’s legal bills. This ugly claim is what Maureen Dowd
identifies as the Clinton “doomsday strategy” and what Stephanopoulos
described as the determination “to take everybody down with him,” interns,
witnesses, journalists—by exposing their dirty secrets to the public. I’m
 sure the 941 FBI files the Clintons illegally appropriated will come in
handy for such purposes.
It was only a year ago that Peter and I hosted an event in Los Angeles
you attended as our guest. The meeting was warm with nostalgia, and for
our part we made every effort to put you at ease, in the environment you
were entering. Yet, cordial as our relations seemed to be, you didn’t call me
or even bother to make sure that your letter was put in my hands. You chose
instead to attack me behind my back, and to warn our mutual friend Ron
Radosh of the contagion involved in any contact with us, that Heterodoxy
was now off limits if he wanted respectability. “Don’t write for Heterodoxy.
I won’t read it. I’d rather eat dog shit,” is how you put it.
And so, you have developed your own way of dehumanizing Peter and
me, and of becoming part of the Kulturkampf against us. This must be why
you have abandoned your usual judgment in embracing a scoundrel like
Blumenthal (or at least his scoundrel acts). And this is why, while
championing Sid, you have never thought to correct the insidious slanders
directed at us in the magazines you write for and among the audiences you
reach. An assessment of our work that recognized its seriousness and that
corrected the caricatures of our character and allegiances would have been a
natural sequel to your pieces on previously despised defectors like James
Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. The difference is that they are safely
dead and we are not. For the people you call your friends and whose praise
and plaudits you seek, Peter and I are radioactive—political untouchables,
as we have been for the nearly twenty years since those first lies from
Blumenthal’s pen. What lawsuit is going to give us redress from that?
David

I never heard from Judis again.
4

The Serial Distortions of Sid Vicious

As readers of Christopher Hitchens’s point-by-point refutation of virtually every
“factual” comment that Sidney Blumenthal (the former special assistant to
President Clinton) made about Christopher in his new book The Clinton Wars
will already know, Sid is such a compulsive prevaricator that he gives ordinary
liars a bad name. Sid is also litigious and therefore I will take this opportunity to
invite him to sue me for any libelous statement in the article that follows. I have
no concerns about Sid filing such a suit because in matters of libel, truth is a
bulletproof defense.
Sid has written about me twice. In both instances—and they are related—there
are more factual misrepresentations than there are sentences in his texts.
Moreover, the misrepresentations are wittingly made, and therefore lies, and also
malicious. I haven’t sued Sid (and won’t) because as everyone knows (and as
Sid would have learned had he not dropped his vindictive tort against Matt
Drudge) one has to prove damages—loss of income or a job—as well as actual
malice in order to win. Another consideration is the fact that libel laws exert a
chilling effect on the democratic exchange of ideas and should therefore be used
only as a last resort.

*This article was published on May 30, 2003,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=18034

I have myself once or twice used the threat of a suit to deter particularly
scurrilous charges and to forestall the kind of damage such suits were made for.
In the 1980s, Alex Cockburn spent a lot of time at cocktail parties spreading the
rumor that I was a CIA agent. I have never had contact with a CIA official or
operative that I am aware of, or worked for any government agency or—with
four exceptions—any employer but myself. The exceptions are a one-year stint
as a teaching assistant at the University of California, two years as a lecturer in a
University of Maryland College program in England in the 1960s, the Bertrand
Russell Peace Foundation during the same period and for a year after, and a little
over a year with Ramparts Magazine, in 1968, before Peter Collier and I took it
over in 1969. For the last six months, I have been on contract as a Fox News
contributor. This exhausts my paychecks from others for the last 45 years.
During the rest of the time, I have been a self-employed author and also head of
a foundation I created.
Sidney Blumenthal’s first outburst of literary malice was directed at me in a
profile he wrote as a reporter for the Washington Post in 1987. The article was
headlined, “Thunder on the New Right,” and purported to be a report of the
coming-out conference Peter Collier and I organized in 1987 for new-left
radicals who had grown tired of supporting totalitarian causes, as Sidney
evidently had not. Oh, I am aware that Sidney thinks of himself as a “third way”
liberal and a small “d” democrat. But at our Second Thoughts Conference we did
not propose conservative or “rightwing” agendas and did not think of ourselves
in those terms at the time. This was a label that Sid pinned on us. In fact our
conference featured several self-professed liberals. One of them, David Ifshin,
had been the general counsel of the Mondale campaign and was a well-known
Democrat. In our interview with Sidney (and with other reporters) we made a big
point of the fact that our only political litmus for the event was that “second
thoughters” (as we called ourselves) be anti-Communist and anti-Sandinista,
since Nicaragua was the current battleground country in the still-active Cold
War. Sidney’s attack, therefore, was a matter of the enemies of his friends being
his enemies. Why else would he have attacked us so viciously?
In addition to the big lie he told about our conference as the gathering of a
rightwing conspiracy—a term he was to coin later for Hillary Clinton—Sidney
added three other specific falsehoods about me: “When Horowitz abandoned
radicalism, he also left his wife and three children, escaping into conservatism
and Beverly Hills. ‘When I was a Marxist, I was puritanical,’ he said, ‘then I got
loose.’”
In fact, I had four children not three; I abandoned radicalism in 1975 at a time
when I was married (my marriage ended in 1978); I never left my children;
never lived in Beverly Hills and never made the statement Blumenthal attributed
to me. When I lodged a complaint with the ombudsman of The Washington Post
he removed the slander from the national edition of the paper. But when Sidney
reprinted the same piece in his book Pledging Allegiance, all the slanderous and
false statements remained intact.
I felt the sting of Sidney’s personal slanders for a long time afterwards. I did
not have the access to powerful media like The Washington Post to reach the
same audience. These days, Sidney rarely appears on television without
bemoaning “the politics of personal destruction,” which a practice he attributes
to the demonic right. This is the White House operative who invented the term
“vast rightwing conspiracy” to allege that conservatives had made up the
president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and who led the charge in defaming
the female victims of the president who had the courage to come forward.
The Second Thoughts Conference that Peter Collier and I organized was a
notable success, although it was slandered by half a dozen leftwing journalists,
including Alex Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman, Jim Sleeper and
Todd Gitlin. Twenty years later Peter and I learned from Hitchens that
Blumenthal had called each of these worthies prior to the event, and summoned
them to attend in order to attack us.
In his new book, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal returns to my case, because I
was the person who introduced Matt Drudge to attorney Manny Klausner, who
defended Drudge against Blumenthal’s libel suit. In Blumenthal’s text, I am
described as funding Klausner as well. In this accounting, the Matt Drudge affair
is a sinister manifestation of the vast rightwing conspiracy’s efforts to overthrow
a president. The puppet-master of these efforts, according to Blumenthal, was
the philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. Two related players are Barbara and
Michael Ledeen, whom Blumenthal’s lawyer deposed. I willingly stipulate that I
am fond of Dick Scaife, a decent American, and that Barbara and Michael
Ledeen are old friends. What follows is the entire Blumenthal account of our
conspiracy, along with my inter-linear comments:

In July, the Ledeens’ testimony yielded the information that they had
arranged through a friend, David Horowitz, for Drudge’s defense to be paid
for and handled.

It is true that Barbara Ledeen called me and said, “You have to help Matt
Drudge,” whom I had never met. As Barbara and many other people knew, I had
created an “Individual Rights Foundation,” which mainly fought speech-codes
on college campuses, but also defended a liberal feminist under attack from the
politically-correct left and filed an amicus brief for a leftwing racist, Leonard
Jeffries, because he was fired for making a public speech, a violation of his First
Amendment rights.
I had no other conversations with Barbara or anyone else apart from Klausner,
a libertarian, about the legal defense of Matt Drudge. Following Barbara’s phone
call, I had a lunch with Drudge and persuaded him he needed a lawyer. I then set
up a meeting between Drudge and Klausner, who was taken on as counsel. I then
created a “Matt Drudge Defense Fund,” which raised money through direct mail
and Internet appeals to pay Klausner’s fees, although healthy proportions of his
services were donated. The Ledeens had no hand in these matters whatsoever.
The next sentence of Blumenthal’s text describes my interest in the case and is
an instance of Blumenthal-phobia, his Rosetta stone for explaining any and all
opposition to his political agendas:

Horowitz shared [the Ledeens’] animosity, in his case because of an article

I had reported for the Post about a political project of his that became a
public embarrassment.

I have already described the Second Thoughts conference and the fact that
outside the leftwing press the event was a success. The only “public
embarrassment” I experienced was the mendacious headline in the Post and
specific lies with which Sidney attempted to blacken my reputation, in particular
his claims that I had abandoned my family along with my principles and fled to
the fleshpots of Beverly Hills.
In the next sentence, Blumenthal elaborates the conspiracy he invented whose
evil genie is the redoubtable Richard Scaife:

Horowitz now headed a conservative group funded by Scaife, and he would

serve as a conduit for Scaife’s underwriting of Drudge’s defense and
provision of a lawyer employed by a Scaife-funded front group.

The lawyer employed by the Scaife “front” group would be Klausner and the
front group would be my Individual Rights Foundation. In fact, I have had four
conversations with Dick Scaife in the 17 years his foundation has provided funds
for mine, none of them about Drudge. Nor did Scaife earmark any contribution
he ever made to me or my foundation for Drudge. Scaife’s funds represent about
10 percent of the total monies that went to support all my efforts at that time.
Though I would certainly miss them, if Scaife should decide to terminate his
support, their absence would not significantly impact my operation. I am
supported by more than 30,000 individual donors along with 15 foundations and
am confident that if any among them should abandon me, there will be others to
fill their place.
I am not even certain that Dick Scaife is familiar with the specific activities of
the Individual Rights Foundation, which was actually funded by his son, David,
a liberal, who has not been on speaking terms with him for years. Manny
Klausner is the general counsel of the Individual Rights Foundation. Most of the
funds that went to Klausner were raised through the Matt Drudge Defense Fund
appeals and were contributed by tens of thousands of individuals and no
foundations, including Dick Scaife’s. Moreover, most of the underwriting for the
Drudge legal effort was contributed by Klausner himself in the form of pro bono
hours. The money we were able to raise barely covered the court costs, expenses
for depositions, and travel to Washington DC.
Blumenthal makes a big deal in his book (and in all his self-dramatizations) of
the fact that Matt Drudge didn’t call him to fact check the story that precipitated
his libel suit. Here is a passage from the letter his lawyer wrote to Drudge when
the story appeared, which is reprinted in The Clinton Wars:

Your action in disseminating these outrageous falsehoods across the

country was despicable. You acted with actual malice in that you knew that
these allegations were false, but published them anyway. You took no steps
to verify your allegations. . . . Indeed, in your cowardice, you never even
bothered to check with Mr. and Mrs. Blumenthal before scattering your lies.
. . .

Which is a perfect description of Sidney Blumenthal’s own journalistic and
political modus operandi.
5

The Surreal World of the Progressive Left

It is not for nothing that George Orwell had to invent terms like “double-think”
and “double-speak” to describe the universe totalitarians created. Those who
have observed the left as long as I have understand the impossible task that
progressives confront in conducting their crusades. Rhetorically, they are
passionate proponents of “equality” but in practice they are committed
enthusiasts of a hierarchy of privilege in which the highest ranks are reserved for
themselves as the guardians of social righteousness. Rhetorically they are
secularists and champions of tolerance, but in practice they are religious fanatics
who regard their opponents as sinners and agents of civil darkness. Therefore,
when they engage opponents it is rarely to examine the facts or refute an
argument but rather to destroy the messenger himself and remove him from the
field of battle.
Consequently, misrepresentation of facts, distortion of motives and general
acts of character assassination are the familiar modes of progressive discourse,
as any conservative can attest. The raw material for this verbal malice is stored
on data-sites with titles like RightwingWatch, SourceWatch, MediaMatters and
Media-Transparency, which provide an armory of abuse to be deployed in
conflicts with their opponents. Eventually the sheer volume creates an
alternative reality which no progressive would even think to check.

*This article was published on January 25, 2008,

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=29654

Of course not all leftists are ideological zealots or at least don’t start off that
way. Last week we posted an interview with me that was conducted by an
intelligent and seemingly reasonable young progressive at Campus Progress
named Jesse Singal.69 Before agreeing to be interviewed by Singal, I asked him
to correct a malicious profile of me that Campus Progress had posted as one of
the guides it provides to its student activists under a general heading “Know
Your Right-Wing Speakers.” In its grotesque distortions of my statements and
positions, the profile is typical of the caricature that passes for “David Horowitz”
in the universe of progressive discourse.
Once Singal offered to correct any errors in the Campus Progress profile, I
readily agreed to make myself available for the interview. After a month had
passed, however, without any correction, I contacted Singal who assured me it
was just a matter of fact-checking and would be changed. It never was, although
to be fair Campus Progress did post my rebuttal alongside its smears.70 I am
reprinting it here with my specific rebuttals inserted, as a case study in
progressive dishonesty.

Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: David Horowitz

Friday March 30, 2007
David Horowitz seems to relish his role as a former campus leftist who now
gleefully spews angry criticism of academia and the left. Horowitz spent his
college years, in the late 1950s, at Columbia University, where he was
involved in American Maoist Communist political organizations. He went
on to receive his Master’s degree at another hotbed of liberalism, the
University of California, Berkeley.

I was never a Maoist. I will be happy to produce copies of my attacks on
Maoism that appeared in Ramparts in the 1960s and 1970s, or a copy of my
book Left Illusions, which contains at least one of these articles. At Columbia I
was a member of the NAACP, which was the only organization I belonged to in
college.

His about-face occurred in 1985 when he launched an assault against his

erstwhile leftward compatriots, whom he now calls “violently, fervently
committed to their unholy war to tear down American democracy and
replace it with their version—an Americanized version—of communism.”
In his reformed state, Horowitz still describes himself as “a civil rights
activist” on his website. His blood, sweat, and tears go into defending that
downtrodden demographic, white males.

I didn’t do “an about face,” as a single act, let alone in 1985. I stopped being
active on the left when the Black Panthers murdered my friend Betty Van Patter
in 1974. I have described this event, along with the transformation of my
politics, at length in Radical Son (which is available to anyone who is interested
in the actual record). I wrote an article about my disenchantment for The Nation
in 1979, because even though I had grave concerns about the movement and had
ceased to be politically active, the left was still my community. The article was
about the left’s double standards, and unwillingness to take responsibility for its
own crimes and mistakes.71 In 1984, I cast my first Republican vote for Reagan.
I did so because he was opposing the efforts of the Sandinista Marxists to turn
Nicaragua into a socialist gulag like Cuba. I had supported Fidel; I wasn’t going
to make the same mistake twice.
The description of my civil-rights activism as defending white males is a
malicious misrepresentation of my attitudes but typical of leftist attacks. To take
one practical example I am responsible for millions of dollars flowing into an
inner-city organization called Operation Hope, which has Andrew Young and
other leftwing Democrats on its board. I received an award from this
organization for my efforts. As should be evident to any honest reader, what I’ve
actually written on civil-rights issues (e.g., in Hating Whitey and Other
Progressive Causes, 1999), my efforts are directed in support of blacks and
against their oppression by white progressives who control inner-city councils
and school boards.

Horowitz’s “civil rights” activism has manifested itself in a twisted series

of seemingly bigoted and clearly controversial attacks. Included in this list
are his August 16, 1999, column in Salon entitled, “Guns don’t kill black
people, other blacks do” and his 1999 book, Hating Whitey and Other
Progressive Causes. In 2001, Horowitz stirred national controversy when
he ran nasty advertisements in college newspapers across the country
entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and
Racist Too.” The full-page ads ran in several college papers, causing some
to issue retractions and apologies, and others to receive protest from
outraged students and accusations of racism. Horowitz capitalized on the
latter by declaring an “assault on free speech” by left-leaning students.

If my article about guns and blacks was actually bigoted, how is it that Salon’s
progressive editors published it without objection (I was a regular columnist for
Salon in those days.) In fact the article is not bigoted but is a criticism of the
NAACP for suing gun manufacturers because the number-one killer of young
black males is gun homicides.72 My article challenged the NAACP to address
the real problems that afflict inner city blacks and cause this violence. Here’s a
sample paragraph: “If the NAACP and other black leaders want to end the
terrible scourge of gun violence committed by young inner-city blacks they
should launch a campaign to promote marriage and family formation in the
African American community; they should issue a moral plea to the community
to stigmatize fathers who abandon their children and parents who have more
children than they can afford. Instead of waging war against law enforcement
agencies and supporting destructive racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, they
should support the Rudy Giu-lianis and other champions of public safety, whom
they now attack. They should campaign for a tripling of police forces in inner
city areas to protect the vast majority of inhabitants who are law-abiding and
who are the true victims of the predators among them.”
One may disagree with this point of view but only a moral illiterate or
someone who hasn’t read my article would describe it as bigoted against blacks.
My book Hating Whitey (which is about the left’s hatred of white people) is an
argument in behalf of black people, not against them. The ad I ran against
reparations also originated as a Salon article, which was titled “Ten Reasons
Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—for Black People—and Racist too.”
I thought it was a bad idea for black people because it isolated them from all
other Americans including Hispanic immigrants, who were being asked to
assume responsibility for slavery and pay reparations for a system that was
ended 135 years before.

Campus Progress doesn’t join those who say Horowitz doesn’t have the
right to speak. We just think his speech is ill-mannered, ill-considered, and
ill-informed. It should be met with rational, firm, strong arguments and real
facts. Horowitz came under fire again for a January 26, 2005, posting on
the History News Network website about “Why I Am Not Celebrating” the
90th birthday of the esteemed African-American historian John Hope
Franklin. Franklin is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at
Duke University and chairman of President Clinton’s Commission on Race.
Horowitz launched an attack on Franklin for his response to Horowitz’s
anti-reparations ad, denouncing him as “a racial ideologue rather than a
historian” and “almost pathological.”

John Hope Franklin attacked me as someone who was pro-slavery, an easily
disproven lie, which Campus Progress repeats:

In the piece, Horowitz tried to defend his claim that “free blacks and the
free descendants of blacks . . . benefited from slavery.”

What this fragment of a quote really said was this: Proponents of reparations
argue that all of America’s wealth is based on slavery and that’s why everyone
alive today, including Hispanic immigrants whose ancestors weren’t living in
America during slavery, should pay reparations. My response was that if all
Americans today benefit from slavery as the proponents of reparations argue,
then blacks alive today are also beneficiaries, which undermines the reparations
argument. To represent this as being pro-slavery or as saying slavery was
beneficial to blacks is either ignorant or dishonest. For a historian like John
Hope Franklin to make such a claim is disturbing.

Through it all, Horowitz has found a smarmy, backhanded way of

misrepresenting himself as a defender of civil rights—he baselessly brands
his ideological opponents as “racist” to deflect criticism of his own racially
inflammatory remarks.

If I have called opponents racist it is either in response to their attacks calling
me racist (to make a point), or a description specific to their racial beliefs. It is
not a label I carelessly or baselessly ascribe to my ideological opponents. This is
something the left is comfortable doing, as I have just demonstrated.

A contributor to numerous right-wing publications, Horowitz is the

president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a think tank
financed by conservative funders that serves as an incubator for right-wing
radicals. The group’s online journal, Front Page Magazine, began running
Ann Coulter’s column after her post-9/11 radical anti-Muslim comments
got her fired from The National Review. Horowitz is a regular on TV and
radio shows, where he mindlessly attacks the supposedly liberal media and
denounces it for its “falsehoods.”

Ann Coulter was never employed by The National Review. They merely
dropped her syndicated column. Her remarks about 9/11 were obviously satire.
The left apparently has no sense of humor. If Jonathan Swift were alive today
the left would accuse him of suggesting people eat babies.

Horowitz continues his campaign against supposed “liberal bias” on

college campuses through his organization Students for Academic
Freedom. According to Horowitz, America’s schools are moving towards a
“one party academic state” that is governed by a ruthless liberal
dictatorship.

I have never campaigned against “liberal bias, never use the word “bias”
(since everyone has one) and wrote—in so many words—in The Professors that
academics have a right to express their points of view.

He regales campuses with tales of liberal outrages, some of which cannot

be documented despite diligent efforts by researchers and may never have
occurred at all.

This is false. There have been no such diligent efforts, and I have refuted this
canard on many occasions which can be found in the article archive on my
website, Frontpagemag.com, under “Replies to Critics.”

Horowitz also authored the “Academic Bill of Rights,” a misleading

manifesto already introduced in eight state legislatures—and in the U.S.
House of Representatives—touting the need for “academic diversity” in
university faculty.
The Academic Bill of Rights would prohibit professors at both public and
private colleges from introducing “controversial matter” into the
classroom.

This statement is false. I have never called for the prohibition of controversial
matter in the classroom. I have said that if a controversial issue is being
discussed, it is a professor’s obligation to make students aware that it is
controversial and provide them with critical material so that they hear at least
two sides to the question. This is what used to be called a liberal position and has
been part of the academic-freedom tradition articulated by the American
Association of University Professors since 1915.

The bill would shift oversight of college course content away from trained
professors and administrators and into the hands of state governments and
courts.

This statement is false. I have never sought such legislation, nor have I ever
suggested that government should have oversight of college curricula.

While it has not been formally adopted anywhere yet, it has inspired
legislative policies toward “intellectual diversity” in Ohio and
Pennsylvania. The Inter-University Council of Ohio has reached an
agreement with Senate sponsors of the Ohio Academic Bill of Rights to
implement key principles of “academic freedom” in Ohio public and
private universities.
 Despite fierce objections from the American Association of University
Professors, the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed
a resolution that required a Select Committee to “examine, study and
inform the legislature about the condition of academic freedom in the
state’s universities” on July 5th, 2005.
Horowitz smugly declared that if the liberal school boards had not
refused to adopt his non-legislative Academic Bill, government intervention
would be unnecessary. Horowitz and his overwhelmingly right-wing
supporters insist that the grievance procedures in the Ohio Academic Bill
of Rights and the Pennsylvania resolution protect all students from
discrimination based on political/ideological affiliation. After nearly a year
and countless hours of testimony, the committee concluded that there were
few if any academic freedom violations in Pennsylvania, and that no
legislation was necessary. Horowitz has continuously mischaracterized the
hearings.

The above says very little and what it implies is misleading. The Committee
conducted no investigation whatsoever of academic-freedom abuses. It was
tasked with inquiring about academic freedom policies. What the committee
found was that students had no academic-freedom rights in Pennsylvania and no
grievance machinery, so it is no wonder that the administrators who testified said
that there were no abuses. The Committee’s absurd conclusion was the result of
a political coup by the teacher unions and their legislative allies.73

The Academic Bill of Rights is both redundant and misleading. Most

colleges already have rules ensuring free expression (political and
otherwise), and Horowitz and his supporters have been able to offer scant
evidence of campus political bullying.

Both these statements are false. The Academic Bill of Rights is not about free
expression; it is about what is professionally appropriate in a classroom and
preventing professors from indoctrinating students instead of educating them.
The evidence of faculty bullying of students is substantial.

The Bill of Rights serves as a perfect guise for his true aim: to pressure
state-funded colleges and universities to pack their faculties with
conservative professors.

 This is absolutely false. The first tenets of the Academic Bill of Rights forbid
the hiring or firing of teachers on the basis of their political views.

According to Students for Academic Freedom, the group seeks “to get more
than 500,000 signatures—10,000 per state—to present to lawmakers,
alumni, regents and administrations across the nation” in support of the
bill.

This is news to me. I know of no such plans.

Leading the “victimize us no more!” call to arms that has become a

trademark of conservative pundits, Horowitz laments the blacklisting” of
conservative students and professors and calls on his followers to keep a
close eye on their professors. He urges them to help him keep a record of
the supposed political bullying that he says occurs regularly in college
classrooms in his Academic Freedom Abuse Center.
The Academic Freedom Abuse Center, housed on the Students for
Academic Freedom website, invites students to report having their “rights
abused” in class. But it only looks impressive until you start reading the
actual claims. Some highlights: One student complains because her
professor suggested men and women might see colors differently. Another
is offended she was asked to watch an “immoral Seinfeld episode.” A
recent entry in the database was from an Ohio State student who claims he
got a bad grade on an essay because his English professor “ hates families
and thinks it’s okay to be gay.” (Another complaint comes from an
Augustana College senior who is upset her school used “funds from Student
activity fees to bring in the one-sided speaker David Horowitz. ”)

This refers to what is simply a bulletin-board for students and their
complaints. The last comment from the Augustana student shows that we’re fair-
minded.

Campus Progress hopes that students, faculty, campus administrators, and

legislators of all ideological and political stripes will stand up against these
efforts by Horowitz to turn state governments into Campus Thought Police.

This is a false and malicious claim. Every piece of legislation I had something
to do with was a toothless resolution asking universities themselves to honor
their own commitments to academic freedom. They are attempts to thwart the
Campus Thought Police and encourage administrations to put their houses in
order.

Censorship is wrong, whether from the left or the right. Faculty members
ought to be judged on whether their scholarship is strong under the
standards of their academic discipline and whether they are good teachers
—not on whether the views they express meet specific guidelines
established by state legislatures.

I agree that censorship is wrong, which is why I have campaigned against it,
whether it’s conducted by government or by professors who suppress one side of
an argument.

In addition to the widely criticized Hating Whitey and Other Progressive

Causes, Horowitz has authored such books as Destructive Generation:
Second Thoughts About the Sixties, The Politics of Bad Faith, and The Art
of Political War, which Bush chief campaign strategist Karl Rove called a
“must read.”
In a recent “lesson“ on his new website, DiscoverTheNetworks. org,
Horowitz makes the outlandish claim that most of America’s progressive
leaders, Hollywood entertainers and civil rights advocates are closely
aligned with radical Islamist terrorists known for killing Americans.

Please provide the quote which makes this outlandish claim. I never said any
such thing, specifically that most of America’s progressive leaders, Hollywood
entertainers and civil rights advocates are closely aligned with radical Islamist
terrorists known for killing Americans. DiscoverTheNetworks is an
encyclopedia of the left. It is not an argument that everyone on the left thinks
alike or is in alliance with anyone else on the left. A social democrat headed
NATO during the Cold War. That did not make him a conservative. He was a
leftist who was an anti-Communist.

He’s not kidding around. Though at first glance (not to mention upon
further inspection) it seems like a simple-minded ploy to earn chortles
among the right at the expense of the left, he warns, “This database reflects
links that are not merely caricatures by political enemies but are legitimate
indices of a political reality.” In Horowitz’s political reality, Sen. Barack
Obama appears on the same row as terrorist leader Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi, and John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, appears next to
 the Center for American Progress’s very own John Podesta.

The previous comment should suffice to dispel these misconceptions.
However, what is being referred to here is a picture-index for the database which
no longer exists. The fact that Podesta and Zarqawi are in the same database has
no more significance than the fact that they are in the Wikipedia database except
that the DiscovertheNetworks database is limited to the political left. I’ll wager
that no one at Campus Progress would object to a database of the right that
included Hitler and Sean Hannity or Phyllis Schlafly so why make a federal case
out of this one?

Lately it seems that Horowitz will peddle crazy stories to just about anyone
who will buy them. In March, he admitted that one of his favorite examples
of the extreme liberal bias among college and university professors, is a
story which he had never been able to substantiate,
For months Horowitz and his ilk had been chirping on and on about a
University of Northern Colorado professor who, they said, asked his
criminology class to explain on a midterm “why President Bush was a war
criminal” and then failed a student who explained instead why Saddam
Hussein was a war criminal. Anti-conservative bias at its best!
Unfortunately, in a March 15th report on InsideHigherEd.com, a
spokesperson for the school deflated Horowitz’s claims, saying that its
information “was inconsistent with the story Horowitz has told about this
incident,” including the question asked, the grade given, and the reasons
for the grade the student received.

To repeat: I never use the word bias let alone the phrase “extreme liberal
bias.” Second this was not about bias on an exam; it was about compelling
students to take one side of controversial issues. Third, what I said was correct.
The details are contained in “The Case of the Colorado Exam,” available on the
Frontpagemag. com website.74

Meanwhile, the day before InsideHigherEd published its report, Horowitz

had attacked Media Matters for slander on his website and had stood up for
the validity of the story. Horowitz, always interested in the limelight,
continued to beat this horse further to death, arguing that Media Matters
was “creating a mountain out of the molehill of this particular case (our
campaign is based on hundreds of cases).” Sound familiar? Remind anyone
of a very posthumously abused horse named Ward Churchill—one crazy in
 a hundred non-crazies that folks like Horowitz talked about till they were
blue in the face? Seems that Horowitz was just getting a taste of his own
medicine.

Churchill has hundreds if not thousands of “crazy” faculty supporters
including the Ethnic Studies Association and the entire Ethnic Studies
Department at his University.

Speaking of tasting, Horowitz was one of several conservative speakers

who got pelted with food by students during speaking events in April 2005.
On April 6, while delivering a speech to Butler University students,
someone hurled a cream pie that hit Horowitz smack in the face. Campus
Progress in no way endorses such attempts to curb free speech. Horowitz
has as much of a right to speak his mind as the rest of us, no matter how
weak his arguments or hazy his facts. And we don’t like wasting pie, which
is (often) delicious. We do think it’s particularly lame that instead of
chuckling it off and trying to save face, Horowitz is pressing criminal
charges and is on a mission to get the perp suspended.

This is made up. The cream pie was shoved in my face. I didn’t press criminal
charges. I don’t think and never claimed that the “perp” was a student, and never
pressed for him to be suspended.

On April 29, 2005, while speaking at Columbia University, Horowitz

caused quite a stir when he passed out a pamphlet that bore a picture of
Noam Chomsky with a turban and beard, under the heading, “The
Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate.” At least Horowitz has a sense of irony:
He was there to lecture students about the importance of “ideological
diversity.” Apparently, this diversity doesn’t apply to lefty American
scholars.

I don’t get this. I have never called for Chomsky to be fired or to be barred
from classrooms. I wrote a pamphlet about Chomsky’s anti-American fervor.
How is this anti-diversity?

Students are starting to push back against Horowitz’s famous untruths and
hate speech (and we don’t mean with pies). Recently, when speaking to
students at the University of Hawaii, Horowitz was interrupted by a student
each time he told a lie. Instead of shouting him down, however, the students
 simply corrected Horowitz’s misstatements. Needless to say, the students
were then told to “shut up” by Horowitz supporters.

The account of my appearance in Hawaii is pure fantasy. My speech couldn’t
be started for 20 minutes because of the disruptions of campus fascists—
leftwingers who had welcomed Ward Churchill as a conquering hero only a
month or so before. There were no interruptions once university officials warned
the disrupters they would be removed if they continued.

Also recently, our friends at ThinkProgress had the pleasure of being

featured in a FrontPage magazine article by Horowitz titled, “The Multiple
Lies of John Podesta and Friends” for filing his precious Academic Bill of
Rights under “Radical Rightwing Agenda. ”Apparently Horowitz doesn’t
see how equating a progressive and inspiring young leader like Senator
Obama with a murderous terrorist would be considered radical.

This is a reference to the misunderstood index in DiscovertheNetworks. org,
which I’ve already dealt with and which no longer exists.75

These days, Horowitz is continuing his unapologetic, unquestioning defense

of the Bush White House while accusing liberals who question the war of
being anti-American.

This is false. Todd Gitlin opposes the war. I published an article by Gitlin on
Frontpagemag.com and called it “A View From the Patriotic Left.” I published
another anti-war leftist, Sherman Alexie, and also referred to him as patriotic.

He recently attempted to convince the public that Bush was “exonerated”

by the bipartisan membership of the Senate Intelligence Committee for his
false statements during the 2003 State of the Union about Saddam Hussein
seeking African uranium. Actually, what Horowitz referenced was not part
of the Senate report, but rather a sentence from a British government
inquiry that wasn’t published until a week after the Senate report came out.
Meanwhile, he slams liberals who question the war—calling them anti-
American in his columns in FrontPage Magazine—but never speaks of his
fellow conservatives who likewise are outraged about the mess in Iraq.

This is garbage regurgitated from Media Matters, a website run by a self-
confessed compulsive liar, David Brock. I have harshly criticized anti-American
right-wingers like Justin Raimondo and Lew Rockwell, as well as presidential
candidate Ron Paul, on my website.

Horowitz, envisioning right-wing extremism beyond college campuses, has

now launched Parents and Students for Academic Freedom, an
organization promoting his agenda in primary and secondary schools. They
have partnered with ProtestWarrior, one of the far-right’s primary high
school organizing groups that specializes in outrageous pro-war
propaganda. The site for his new underage crusade prominently features
stories from an anonymous 11-year-old who complains of such events as
when a teacher asked the class, “What would a Taoist think of Bush?”
After researchers have failed to confirm many of the stories from university
campuses Horowitz has claimed to collect, are we really supposed to trust
his nameless grammar school insider?

This is a repeated slander thrown in my direction by the organized left that
opposes my Academic Bill of Rights. I have replied to the so-called researchers
of the left in the “Replies to Critics” section of my site. The left declares
evidence of abuses to be false, and disregards the refutation of their claims.

Despite Horowitz’s continuing inability to prove any systematic anti-

conservative bias, he continues to spew forth accusations.

I have written almost 100,000 words analyzing the curricula of more than 200
college courses which actively indoctrinate students in leftwing ideology, not
merely express a leftwing bias. These analyses can be found at
www.discoverthenetworks.org in the academia section under Indoctrination
Studies.76

In 2006, Horowitz published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous

Academics in America, attempting to create a McCarthyish blacklist of
liberal professors.

The above statement is false. The book specifically defends the right of
leftwing professors to express their leftwing views. It is not a blacklist and it is
the opposite of “McCarthyish.”

Once again, Horowitz’s undoing came by way of fact-check. As Media

Matters documented, Horowitz’s condemnations are based on in-classroom
 statements by professors in only six of the cases, and, in 52 cases, was
entirely dependent on outside-classroom activities. Furthermore, an in-
depth report by Free Exchange on Campus, entitled “Facts Count,” further
eviscerated Horowitz’s claims, document-ting an absence of student
corroboration (only 13 cases, none of which have withstood further
scrutiny), manipulation and distortion of quotes, and in some cases,
outright fabrication. Many of the accused professors have responded to
Horowitz, often finding the accusations so unsubstantiated as to be comical.

The ludicrous “reports” by MediaMatters and Free Exchange (a wholly-
owned subsidiary of the American Federation of Teachers) were refuted point by
point by Jacob Laksin in “Discounting the Facts,” which is available in my
article archive under “Replies to Critics.”77 Free Exchange simply ignored the
refutation and failed to reply to it.

However blatantly ideological and indefensible, Horowitz appears

determined to continue preaching “Academic Freedom” to his dwindling
choir. In 2007, an increasingly grumpy Horowitz (see grumpy photo)
published Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom.
Despite Professors having been roundly denounced, Horowitz recycles
already-debunked misrepresentations, half-truths, and creative
exaggerations to rehash his agenda. Horowitz blames those intolerant
leftists and indoctrinated drones for dismissing his campaign, brushing past
any substantive critiques of his ideological bias and dishonesty. Horowitz
appears to have been drowned out by his own petulance, with his book
already in the discount bin.

More falsehoods. Indoctrination U will sell about 20,000 copies, quite
respectable for such a book, and probably several times what Michael Bérubé’s
What’s So Liberal About the Liberal Arts (which was written to combat my
campaign) has sold. The Professors has sold about 50,000 copies. This summary
of the contents of my book is no more accurate than the wishful thinking about
its sales.

As even the conservative faithful lose their taste for pundits high on
provocation and weak on proof, perhaps Horowitz should reassess just why
nobody is listening to him. (And, no, we’re not just saying all this because
Horowitz recently referred to Campus Progress as “the gutter left.” But
thanks for the mention!)

With this “profile” as evidence, I think it’s safe to say “gutter left” is about
right.

So read up on Horowitz and get ready—he may just be bringing his cries of
liberal bias to a campus near you! You can track legislation in state
legislatures and find out more at Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition
organized by Campus Progress, the American Federation of Teachers, the
Center for Campus Free Speech, the ACLU, and others.
Some of our Favorite Horowitz Quotes:
“Leftism itself is an infantile disorder. In the view of this puerile left, the
American government is an omnipotent father who is to be blamed for
everything—and is so blamed in order to exculpate the children, leftists like
Brown and Sheehan, from their responsibility for anything.” (9/1/05)
“Do I think some members of the anti-war movement are in actual
formal contact with the radical Islamists and advancing their agendas. Yes
I do. Do I think you and Cindy Sheehan are? Only peripherally in that the
radical Islamists are integrated into the anti-war coalition generally.” (to
David Swanson, creator of MeetWithCindy.org, 8/19/05)
“You see, the left isn’t forgiving or civil. Instead they are violently,
fervently committed to their unholy war to tear down American democracy
and replace it with their version—an Americanized version—of
communism.” (3/8/2000)
“The so-called “peace movement” today is led by the same hate-America
radicals who supported America’s totalitarian enemies during the Cold
War. They marched in support of the Vietcong, the Sandinista Marxists and
the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. Before that they marched in
behalf of Stalin and Mao. They still support Castro and the nuclear lunatic
in North Korea, Kim Jong-Il. They are the friends in deed of Osama bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein.” (4/7/2003) …
—updated by Niral Shah, Dartmouth College

 PART IV

Two Talks on Autobiographical Themes

1

Plus Ça Change: Fifty Years Gone By

I’m glad to be here with you at this our fiftieth class reunion. In fact (and sorry
to remind you of this) we’ve all reached that point in life where we can
appreciate George Burns’ crack that at his age he was glad to be anywhere.
I am especially pleased to be on a platform with my old teacher, Professor
Bernard Wishy, whom I have not seen in fifty years. I have often reflected on the
impact a few select teachers encountered early can have over the course of a life.
Even though Professor Wishy was an instructor of mine for only a single term in
my sophomore year in 1956, he is one of these influential mentors for me.
I vividly recall an exchange in his class with a student who strenuously
objected to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for reasons I have long since
forgotten. What I do recall is Professor Wishy’s command of Freud’s sources
and the texts of his critics, in answering the student, even though it was not his
own academic field of expertise. In that exchange Professor Wishy conveyed a
powerful message to us—that knowledge was a serious business and that there
were no simple answers to the questions that truly mattered.
But the most profound impression he left was his classroom demeanor, which
exemplified Columbia’s official mission, defined in those days as “the
disinterested pursuit of knowledge.”

This is a talk given at Columbia at the fifty-year reunion of the Class of’59,
June 9, 2009, on a panel titled “Changes in the Fifty Years Since We
Graduated.” [Some leftwing alumni made a failed attempt to rescind my
invitation.] http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=35156

Professor Wishy was a scholar, not a proselytizer. We never knew when he
might be playing devil’s advocate, and taking positions he didn’t himself hold in
order to shake us from our reflexive assumptions. I don’t recall him ever
expressing his personal beliefs in the classroom, whether political or religious or
otherwise. I don’t know how he voted in the 1956 election, or whether he was of
the opinion that religion is an illusion as Freud maintained.
 Instead, the point of his teaching was to illuminate the process by which one
confronts an intellectual argument, understanding that in order to do so one must
be acquainted not only with the facts but with the arguments that have preceded
one’s own. He was there, in other words, to teach us how to think and not to tell
us what to think—therefore to respect the divergent opinions of others. I am
afraid this is a vanishing ethos in our culture and a dying pedagogical art in our
university classrooms today.
In short, what Professor Wishy taught by example was respect for the
difficulty we experience as ordinary mortals in arriving at the truth concerning
life’s most vexing questions. This was not a lesson I absorbed easily. I was too
filled with my own youthful certitudes for that. Nonetheless, I kept the memory
of Professor Wishy’s classroom with me for the next 20 years until a personal
crisis of belief finally allowed me to appreciate what he had taught.
Another influential Columbia teacher was Moses Hadas, a professor of
classics who is no longer with us. In one memorable class Professor Hadas drew
our attention to the Roman General Scipio Africanus, who wept when his
soldiers burned the great city of Carthage because he saw in the flames the future
of his beloved Rome. The ancients did not have our view of history as a
progress. For them it was a series of cycles, the story of civilizations that rose
and fell, came into being and were gone.
In retrospect, it seems odd to me now that Scipio’s tears should have made
such an impression on a young radical. I arrived at Columbia believing that a
progressive future was imminent and that it would transform everything we
knew.
Consequently, I viewed my college education not as a step on a personal
career path but a preparation for my life mission, which was to participate in a
revolution that would change the world. Grandiose as this may sound, it was an
audacity of hope shared by all progressives in one form or another, and is still so
today.
By contrast, the ancients believed that the world cannot be fundamentally
changed, at least not by human beings. At the end of the first chapters of
Genesis, an angel with a flaming sword is said to stand at the gates of Eden to
prevent us from re-entering because the first man and woman had already
demonstrated that it is not within our nature to achieve an earthly bliss.
As a result of the flaws in our nature although we may secure justice in this
case or that, injustice we will have with us always. This is why the preacher,
Ecclesiastes, said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The French have a
similar phrase: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the more things
change, the more they are the same.
 These statements recognize the fact that the world that so obviously needs
repair is a world that we and human beings like us have made. Consequently, our
efforts to make it a different world will necessarily fail. This is the religious
view of the circumstance we find ourselves in. It is also the conservative view,
and it is mine.
Have there been changes since we left Columbia fifty years ago? There have.
But from a conservative vantage, none of them have altered the fundamental
pattern of our lives—the self-centered and selfish desires, the envy and
resentment of others, the resort to dishonesty when it suits our ends, which are
the real causes of the social ills we wish to redress.
Some of the changes of these 50 years have been good; others have been bad;
some of the good changes have come with consequences that are bad; and
regarding some of the changes, there is less to them than meets the eye. Plus ça
change.
I came to Columbia more than 50 years ago at the tail-end of the McCarthy
era as a leftist whose Communist parents had lost their teaching jobs because of
their political views. Today, I have returned to Columbia as a conservative.
But in fact the views I hold on the issues that are thought to define these labels
such as race and freedom of expression, and my concerns for the poor and those
left behind, are no different today from what they were then. The parameters
around me have changed, and also my understanding of how things work, but
not my fundamental values. Fifty years ago, my radical views caused me to feel
like an outsider at Columbia. Returning as a conservative, I find myself an
outsider still—and again it is because of my political views.
In the half-century since I graduated, this is the first time that I have been
invited to an official Columbia function, and even so the occasion is an alumni
reunion not a formal academic event. This exclusion has occurred despite the
fact that I am the well-known author of many books, several concerned with
university reform; and despite the fact that my son who is also a Columbia
alumnus has donated a generous scholarship fund to the college for minority
students; or that my granddaughter is currently a Columbia student so that we
are in a manner of speaking a Columbia family. Evidently, I have been more
loyal to Columbia than Columbia has been to me. Even the invitation to this
alumni function had to be sustained against a strenuous resistance by some of
my classmates who are professors now at other schools and are apparently of the
opinion that my views should be suppressed.
And this attitude of exclusion is a prevailing one among current Columbia
faculty. So far as I can ascertain, there is not a single prominent conservative
intellectual on Columbia’s liberal arts faculty today. The dozen or so books I
have written, like those of other well-known conservatives, though widely
praised and highly regarded in the world outside Columbia, are more effectively
banned in its classrooms than were the books of Marxists 50 years ago, during
the height of the McCarthy era.
From a conservative vantage, the changes that have taken place in the last 50
years can be regarded as the result of scientific and technological advances, and
do not represent a fundamental reordering of the relations between human beings
themselves.
This is the case, for example, with the changes that have taken place in the
lives of women, who have moved into a variety of public roles in unprecedented
numbers. These developments are quite different than a change in the
fundamental relationships between the genders, in male respect for women or in
the nature of women themselves.
To the politically incorrect like myself, these new roles and the respect they
earn are the result of technological developments that have relieved women of
arduous tasks on their end of the division of labor, and of scientific innovations
that allow them to control their reproductive cycles and be protected from
routine mortality in childbirth.
This conclusion is reinforced by my experience as a student of English
literature at Columbia fifty years ago. One of the leading and most honored
Shakespearean scholars in the nation at the time was Columbia professor
Caroline Spurgeon. Benighted as we may have been back then, I do not
remember anyone who thought it odd that Professor Spurgeon was a woman or
thoughtless of her work because of it.
Similarly, when I took a course in the 19th-century English novel, five of the
twelve authors we read were women, and this was well before the publication of
The Feminine Mystique and the beginnings of the so-called “women’s liberation
movement,” whose subtext was that men, which would have included my
teachers, were their oppressors.
It is true that in recent years we have witnessed the appointments of the first
three women secretaries of state, and the first two women Supreme Court
justices, with a third now on the way. But these are easily understood as a
consequence of technological improvements that afford women new freedom to
pursue such careers, rather than the overthrow of an oppressive ruling
“patriarchy.”
Thus, the Elizabethans I studied in my literature classes were called
“Elizabethans” in deference to one of the most powerful monarchs in English
history, because long before the women’s movement she ruled her era.
In sum, as we embark on the 21st century, women and men are pretty much
the familiar genders we encountered in our first days as undergraduates in our
Humanities sections reading Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic about Helen of Troy,
who had the power even then to cause the launching of a thousand ships and the
burning of the “topless towers of Illium.”
Of course if you were to enroll today in Columbia’s Department of Women’s
Studies you would be taught that we still live in an oppressive patriarchy and
that gender differences are “socially constructed” and can be re-constructed, and
then eliminated as we reach the highest stage of women’s liberation. But this is
ideology, not reality.
The fact that this ideology is a required creed for students of Women’s Studies
reflects not an advance in consciousness but the retrogressive return of American
liberal arts colleges to their 19th-century roles as doctrinal institutions, the
difference being that this time the doctrines are secular and political rather than
religious.
Of course a large and important sector of our modern research universities has
not regressed. The hard sciences—the engines of our technological futures—
continue to progress. If one were to walk over to the departments of biology and
neuroscience, one would learn that gender differences are not “socially
constructed” but hard-wired as part of our genetic makeup. We can already see
the next academic reformation coming as the new progressive religions
increasingly clash with empirical discoveries in the biological sciences. Plus ça
change.
While some changes add up to less than meets the eye, others have led to
consequences that are nothing short of catastrophic. The last fifty years have
witnessed the growth of a new environmental consciousness, for example, whose
modest goal is to “save the planet.” Talk about hubris! Shortly after we
graduated Columbia, Rachel Carson published a book that is regarded as a
founding document of the environmental crusade. Her tract warned that the
continued use of DDT pesticides would kill the world’s bird population and
create a “silent spring.” A little over a decade later, because of the influence of
her book, DDT pesticides were globally banned.
As it happens, at the time Carson wrote, the world had been recently freed
from the scourge of malaria, which had previously accounted for three million
deaths a year. This was thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation78 and its funding of
a malaria eradication program, which relied on the pesticide DDT. Soon after the
pesticide was banned, malaria reappeared. The resulting epidemics have
produced a toll of preventable deaths that already exceeds any other in the grim
annals of man-made mortalities.
Since the progressive doctrine of The Silent Spring was implemented, three
million people have died of malaria every year for more than thirty years, adding
up to a total now of nearly 100 million. Ninety-five percent of the victims have
been black African children under the age of five. As a footnote to this tragedy,
Carson’s claim that DDT was harmful to birds has since been discredited.
Of all the battles Americans have fought to advance agendas that are generally
regarded as “progressive,” the one that appears to have had the most
uncontroversial success is the fight against racial discrimination. There was a
time not long before we came to Columbia when there were overt and
unapologetic bigots in the U.S. Congress, such as Senator Theodore Bilbo, a
member of the Ku Klux Klan and an avowed racist. Today no anti-black bigot
could stand up in the public square and proclaim his bigotry and survive with a
public career. And now we have our first black president.
At Columbia last year a noose was posted anonymously on an African
American professor’s office door.79 The entire university—administrators,
faculty and students—recoiled in horror and came to the defense of the target.
We have come so far that no one could be surprised at that.
But it is only half the story. At the same time that anti-black prejudice has
retreated from the public square, other forms of prejudice using other groups as
targets have become acceptable, even normal, and particularly in the most
“progressive” circles. At Duke University not too long ago a drug-addicted
prostitute who was black accused three white students of a crime they did not
commit.80
There was not a shred of evidence to sustain the charge, and much to
contradict it. Yet the prosecutor, seeking the support of the black vote in Durham
was not deterred. So reckless and racially motivated was his prosecution of the
innocent students that he was subsequently disbarred for his actions, which
included suppressing evidence that proved conclusively that they had not
committed the crime.
Yet because they were white and the alleged victim was black, the public
lynching of their reputations continued for a year. The president of Duke, an Ivy
League scholar, expelled them in advance of any trial, terminated the athletic
season of their team, and fired their coach.
Eighty-eight professors81 condemned them as racists, associating them with
slave owners and white rapists of the past. While the press protected the name of
their accuser, it paraded their images before a mass audience and made them
national pariahs.
This is a particularly ugly case, but the new racism reflected in its details has
become institutionalized. At colleges and professional schools across the
country, privileges are routinely granted to individuals officially designated as
members of so-called “under-represented minorities” and withheld from others
who belong to so-called “over-represented minorities.”
The result is that if you are an impoverished and discriminated-against Asian
student, universities will deny you financial aid available to wealthy African
Americans and you will have to score much higher on your graduate
achievement tests just to be able to apply to medical and law schools.
Forty-five years after the civil rights revolution, we have taken a giant step
backwards in our efforts to create a society where the rules are color-blind and
individuals are rewarded on their merit.
Taking a personal view of these developments, I note that when we entered
Columbia in 1955 we understood that there was a quota system for Jewish
applicants. It was masked as a geographical diversity program, as deceptive as
the one I’ve just described, and rationalized as an attempt to create a student
body drawn from all parts of the country. Its architects had figured out that that
the pool of Jews in states such as Arkansas and Nebraska was likely to be small.
Still, the overall quota was rumored to be 48 percent of the entering class,
which seemed generous to us then. The Nazis’ “Final Solution” had recently (but
only recently) given anti-Semitism a bad name, and it seemed as though things
were changing for the better for the Jews. I was privileged, for example, to have
taken a class with Lionel Trilling, the first Jew ever to be hired by an Ivy League
English Department. From this perspective, a 48 percent quota persuaded us we
were making real progress.
Today, even though there are many Jews on the Columbia faculty and Jews
even sit on the board of trustees, there are also overt and unapologetic anti-
Semites lecturing in Columbia classrooms, which would have been unheard-of
in our day. There are now tenured bigots on the Columbia faculty whose classes
are an assault on the only existing Jewish state—a tiny nation under continuous
attack from an Arab world determined to extinguish it from the day of its
creation more than 60 years ago.
More than six decades after Hitler’s demise, an Islamic death-cult in the Arab
world has made very clear—and in so many words—that it is determined to
finish the job he started. A state leader of this cult whose government is about to
become a nuclear power and who has declared his intention to wipe both Israel
and America from the face of the earth was not too long ago invited to speak to
students by Columbia’s president.
It is true that President Bollinger was rude to the dictator when he came, and
criticized him as a tyrant—an act of minimum decency (which notwithstanding
elicited protest from Columbia’s radical faculty). But why was a genocidal
maniac whose declared goal is to kill the Jews so honored in the first place?
When we arrived at Columbia 54 years ago, America was engaged in a world
war with another totalitarian ideology seeking to put an end to the West. Today
we are faced with yet another that seeks our extinction. Plus ça change, plus
c’est la même chose.
What is this chose anyway, this thing that doesn’t change? It is the human
desire to fill the emptiness that is our fate, which is unchanging and
unchangeable: that we are born alone and we die alone and we are forgotten.
Over this emptiness human beings drape their mythic causes and impossible
dreams, their hopes for an earthly redemption—for a change that will fill the
emptiness by creating a world that is holy or just. It is this hope that allows us to
forget who we are. It is this vision that inspired the ideologues of communism;
and it is this vision that drives the Islamic radicals who believe they are making
the world safe for Allah by purging it of infidels, and the unfaithful, and
especially Jews.
In these visions we Americans are seen as the party of Satan, as the
unbelievers who stand in their way with our pragmatism and tolerance, our
devotion to enterprises and pleasures that are bourgeois and mundane; and our
hope that is reserved for individual lives and not for grandiose social collectives
and schemes.
2

Reflections of a Diaspora Jew on Zionism, Israel and

America

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to be invited to this podium by the

Zionist Organization of America and Mort Klein, its courageous leader. For
decades Mort Klein and the ZOA have stood on the frontline defending the state
of Israel and American Jews, and they are doing it now in what is certainly one
of the darker periods for the Jewish people—darker all over the world—in our
5,000-year history. I applaud you for supporting Mort Klein and his team. I am
touched by the recognition of an organization like this for the modest work I
have done in behalf of Israel and the Jewish people.
Still, there is a paradox at the heart of this honor awarded me by the Zionist
Organization of America, which will take me a moment to explain. It is true that
I am widely attacked by anti-Semites and Jew-haters and the enemies of Israel as
a Zionist—and an arch Zionist at that. I have been called variously a Zionist Jew,
an “Israel Firster Zionist Jew,” “a rabid Zionist” (by Julian Assange no less), a
“radical right-wing Zionist,” an “extreme Zionist,” an “extremist Zionist
stalwart,” an “un-repentant Zionist,” an “ultra Zionist” and, inevitably, “a Nazi
with a Zionist face.”

Speech given before the Zionist Organization of America, September 6,

2012

Today, anti-Zionism is the cause of Jew-haters and anti-Semites the world
over, and for Jews embarrassed by the fact that they are Jews and that others fear
and despise them for that reason. Even the rare Jewish magazine of the left that
is actually a supporter of Israel, is uncomfortable with the connotations of the
Zionist label, and with what it means for Jews to defend themselves. In a recent
unflattering profile, Tablet magazine described me as touring the country
“making the case for a muscular Zionism.”
I plead guilty to this charge. I plead guilty though I have never actually been a
Zionist, or made a case for Zionism in the sense that Herzl and traditional
Zionists understand it. Yes, I want muscular Jews and a muscular Israel. I want
Jews proud of the extraordinary nation-state Jews created in 1948 out of the
ruins of the Ottoman Empire. I want Jews who are armed, and Jews who will
defend themselves with arms if necessary. Muscular in every way. Yes.
I want more than just individual Jews armed. I want a Jewish nation-state
possessing in its arsenal the most advanced modern weapons available, a state
that can be counted on to defend Jews from their global enemies, and
particularly from their enemies in the Muslim world who are legion and who
have sworn our destruction, and who are openly planning to complete the job
that Hitler started. I want a Jewish state, armed to the teeth, because Islamic
Nazis, who are the storm troopers of a second Holocaust, are already mobilized,
and because—as we discovered during the first Holocaust—there are not enough
non-Jews in the world who are willing and prepared to defend us.
I am glad that Israel exists. I am glad that there is a country that will preserve
Jewish culture, and be a model to the world of what Jews can do when they are
given the chance. Today Israel is per capita the world’s leading scientific and
technological innovator and contributor to human advancement. As a Jew I am
proud of that.
I am also thrilled that in the creation of Israel Jews have regained their
birthright. After 2,000 years of exile, the oldest surviving indigenous people in
the world has won the right to some of its stolen homeland. I look forward to the
day when Judea and Samaria, the historic centers of Judaism become part of the
Jewish homeland as well.
That homeland is now occupied by Palestinian Arabs who are at war with
Israel, who have proclaimed their Jew-hatred to the world, and who have
forfeited any right to the territories by conducting five unprovoked, armed
aggressions against the Jewish state. The official policy of the Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank is to make Jerusalem and the entire region of
Palestine Judenrein. No other country in the world is expected to suffer such
genocidal assaults without securing borders that are defensible, and Israel should
not be expected to either.
Nonetheless, there is a paradox in this honor given to me, a Jew who has
never been to Israel and who has never considered himself a Zionist in the sense
that its founders intended. Theodore Herzl and his followers embraced the
Zionist idea because they believed that the creation of a Jewish nation would
provide a solution to the “Jewish Question”—the fact that Jews had been a
homeless people for nearly two thousand years and were ghettoized and
persecuted in the alien lands to which they were driven.
 Herzl’s Zionist idea was grounded in the belief that the establishment of a
Jewish state on Jewish land would finally “normalize” the Jewish people and end
their persecution. The Zionist idea was that by including Jews among the
nations, Jews would become like other peoples—that their inclusion would
finally “solve” the Jewish problem. That was the meaning of Zionism as Herzl
understood it, and indeed as it was understood until the Holocaust and the actual
creation of the Jewish state.
But Herzl’s dream proved to be a fairy tale, as delusional in its way as the
dreams of socialism, communism and progressivism, whose believers hoped
would provide solutions to the conflicts and sufferings that blight our human
state. All these isms took hold in the 19th century, and became forms of modern
faith. The traditional religions they supplanted had trusted in a Divinity for such
a solution, but were forced into retreat before the advance of Darwinian theory
and modern scientific developments. All the messianic visions of the modern age
were driven by the desire for an earthly redemption that would resolve our
human dilemmas and achieve what the heavenly redemption could no longer
convincingly offer.82
Among these fantasies of a better world than the one we inherited, Zionism
was the most conservative, and the most practical. The quest for a socially just
future is based on no human reality but on the expectation of a human miracle, a
transformation of who we are and what we have been into something
wonderfully different. Zionism by contrast was based on the experience of actual
peoples who had already taken their place among the nations. It was a quest for
normality. Not for a world transformation but for an integration into the existing
world of others.
But even this modest hope of the Jews has proved an impossible dream. It is
true that half of Herzl’s goal has been realized, and in an astounding way. Yet its
very realization has proved the hope that inspired it to be a folly. By all
standards of civilization and modernity Israel should be admired and emulated
by the rest of the world. Instead, the Jewish state is hated and is a pariah among
the nations, just as Jews themselves are pariahs in most of the world outside
America today.
Far from creating a refuge, Israel has become the focal point of all the
genocidal intentions against the Jews, which have never been more overt or
more global. Today Israel is the site of a Holocaust for which the Islamic world
openly yearns, and which the rest of the world—with the possible exceptions of
America and Canada—will not lift a finger to prevent. This sobering reality has
changed the meaning of Zionism, and has made it a more comfortable fit for me.
Call it the Zionism of Survival.
 In the household I grew up in, I was not brought up to be a Zionist because my
parents were Marxist progressives who looked to a socialist future to provide an
earthly salvation, and an end to the persecution of the Jews. My parents and their
comrades believed that mankind’s conflicts would be resolved by a universal
class whose revolution would abolish all nations and unite all peoples, and thus
remove the distinctions that made them Jews.
My realization that this was not going to happen occurred through my
relationship with a Marxist mentor named Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher had
written a book called The Non-Jewish Jew, by which he meant Marxists like us
—Jews who were of Judaism but not in it. By the time I came under his
influence in the 1960s, he had become a defender of Israel and had been one
since the Second World War. Deutscher viewed Israel as a “raft-state”—a refuge
that Jews could cling to after they had been shipwrecked in the storms that
periodically engulfed them. The particular storm he was referring to was Hitler’s
“Final Solution.”
During the interwar years, a debate had raged in Europe’s leftwing circles,
which carried momentous consequences for those who participated in it. The
debate was about how Jews should respond to the looming fascist threat. The
Zionists were urging Jews to flee the continent and take refuge in the Palestine
Mandate. Marxists like Deutscher argued that the Jews should stay in Europe
and fight for the socialist revolution. But as Deutscher ruefully acknowledged
later, the Jews who listened to the Zionists were still alive, while those who
listened to Marxists like him were dead.
Under Deutscher’s influence, I became a quasi-Zionist, a believer in the raft
state. Israel should exist and be defended until the socialist transformation
abolished nation-states and solved the problem of the Jews once and for all.
Don’t think for a moment that this is some quaint Marxist delusion now
consigned to the historical dustbin. The idea of a world without borders is alive
and well in the international left and among liberals and progressives in
America. It is the idea that animates the Democratic Party’s attacks on American
sovereignty, and it is a vision whose intellectual leaders are Jews.
One of its canonical articles is called “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”—for
the latter and against the former. It was written by Harvard philosopher Martha
Nussbaum. According to Nussbaum, the cosmopolitan ideal which progressive
people should aspire to is “the person whose primary allegiance is to the
community of human beings in the entire world.” This attitude—that we are not
Jews or Americans but “citizens of the world”—explains why people on the left
are so uncomfortable with—or simply hostile to—issues of national security and
patriotism. It explains why progressive Jews can be indifferent to the survival of
the Jewish state.
Even as I absorbed Deutscher’s lesson about the raft state, my belief in the
progressive fantasy was rapidly eroding. I had begun to doubt the possibility of a
redeemed future, a future fundamentally different from those with which we
were historically familiar. As these doubts grew, they were changing my view of
the unredeemed present. By the middle of the next decade I no longer believed
in a new world order. This had immediate and profound consequences for my
attitude towards Israel and my identity as a Jew, and as an American as well.
There was not going to be a future in which there were no longer nations or
peoples in conflict; there was not going to be a future in which Jews would cease
to be the objects of envy and resentment, and virulent hatred. There was not
going to be a future in which a refuge—a raft-state—was no longer useful.
Then came 9/11 and the Islamic attack on the World Trade Center. It was an
event that made millions of people aware of the Islamist movement in the
Muslim world and the fact that they were conducting a holy war against infidels
in general, and Jews in particular. The incubator and leading force of this holy
war is the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by an admirer of Hitler
and a godfather of the call to push the Jews of Palestine into the sea. Today, the
spiritual leader of the Brotherhood is the Egyptian imam, Yusef al-Qaradawi,
who has publicly prayed that the Muslim believers will finish the job that Hitler
started.
Millions of Jews are in denial when it comes to the determination of Islamists
to kill them. In part, this denial is psychological and familiar as when people
face a prospect that is too terrible to contemplate. There are a billion-and-a-half
Muslims in the world today who worship a prophet who has told them that “the
day of redemption will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,
when the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and the trees
cry out, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.’” For
a billion-and-a-half Muslims that is the word of God. Denial is one convenient
way of dealing with this fact.
This particular death-warrant for the Jews can be found on the official website
of the University of Southern California, where it was placed by the Muslim
Students Union, which is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. When I asked a
leader at the Wiesenthal Center to demand that this genocidal incitement be
removed, his initial response was, “But it’s a religious statement.” Well, yes, but
it is also a summons to kill the Jews. Such is the force of denial.
One of the chief instruments of the Muslim Brotherhood is the Muslim
Students Association, which sponsors “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” at universities
across America and throughout the western world calling for Israel’s destruction.
Muslim Students Association members chant “Palestine will be free from the
river to the sea”—that is from the eastern boundary of Israel to the western one.
It is a call for the liquidation of the Jewish state because it is Jewish. Yet all
across America, campus rabbis hold ecumenical dialogues with the Muslim
Students Association, and defend it against its critics.
I have traveled to many universities to oppose these Jew-haters, and
everywhere I go I am protested against and defamed by the Muslim Students
Association and by their Jewish enablers. I have met with numerous campus
rabbis and asked them to set conditions for their ecumenical outreach: first, that
their Muslim counterparts desist from sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Weeks, and
denounce those who conduct them; and second, that they only hold dialogues
with people who publicly support the right of a Jewish state to exist in the
Middle East.
For these efforts I have been attacked by Hillel rabbis at Yale, the University
of North Carolina, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University
of Florida, and by Hillel student leaders at the University of Pennsylvania and
other schools. For voicing these concerns, I have been called a bigot, a racist and
an “Islamophobe,” which is a smear invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to
silence its critics.
Last year I published a full-page ad in the Yale Daily News whose headline
read: “The Palestinian Case Against Israel Is Based on a Genocidal Lie.” The
genocidal lie is the claim that all of Israel—or any of Israel—is occupied Arab
land. It is a claim used to justify all of the murderous acts committed against the
Jews of Israel. In fact, Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire,
as were Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The Turks are not Arabs, and Israel
does not occupy any Arab land.
The Middle East conflict is not about land or a Palestinian state. It is a 60-year
war of aggression first by the Arab League and then by Sunni and Shi’ite
Muslims to destroy the Jewish state and push the Jews into the sea. This war is
now a religious war, an expression of Islamic Nazism.
To be perfectly clear, I am not referring to all Muslims as Nazis. I am
referring to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic forces now ascendant in
Egypt and the Middle East who are actively promoting a second genocide of the
Jews, along with their supporters in America and their secular allies on the
political left.
When my ad about the Palestinian lie appeared in the Yale paper, the Slifka
Center, the focus of Jewish life on campus, was outraged. They were not
outraged by the Palestinian lie but by my ad, which told the truth. They were
outraged because the truth offended the Muslim Students Association, with
whom they wished to be friends. To counter my ad the Slifka Center published
its own full-page statement. It affirmed the Slifka Center’s “respect”—and I
quote their words—“for the Muslim Students Association, which does not
spread hateful lies about Israel.”
The Slifka statement then attacked my ad as the purveyor of “hateful ideas,”
which it said would “lead to tragic rifts between the Jewish and Muslim
communities,” as though campuses across the country were not already
reverberating to the chants of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” or
as though Muslim masses were not already chanting “death to Israel” at the call
of Hizbollah and Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having made its
commitments clear, the Slifka ad then invited students to an evening with the
Ground Zero Mosque imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, hosted by Slifka Center director
James Ponet, the celebrity rabbi who officiated at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.
The suicidal tendencies of the intended victims of Islamic supremacy are
tragically familiar. They recall the sad delusions of members of the Judenräte—
the Jewish Councils in the Nazi ghettos—who organized the Jews for Hitler’s
death camps, while pretending to themselves that the Germans were too civilized
to kill them.
Delusions about Islamic Nazis are hardly confined to Jews, however. In the
eyes of the Islamic fanatics, Israel may be the “Little Satan” but America is “The
Great Satan,” the arch demon that must be destroyed in the name of Allah. In his
fatwas Osama bin Laden identified Islam’s enemies as “Jews and Crusaders,”
America being Christian and therefore the “Crusader Nation.” Every Islamist
leader and organization from Ahmadinejad to Qaradawi, from the Muslim
Brotherhood to Hizbollah and Hamas has promised death to Israel and America
as the necessary means to their malignant ends.
Meanwhile, the Crusaders—like the Jews—are asleep. It is an old story. Just
before the Second World War, Whittaker Chambers, a Communist defector,
attempted to warn Roosevelt that a White House advisor named Alger Hiss was
a Soviet agent and that his administration had been penetrated by Communist
operatives. When Roosevelt was informed of Chambers’ charges he laughed and
dismissed them. Hiss then accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta where he helped
conclude the deal that delivered Eastern Europe to the Soviet Empire and
triggered the Cold War.
Here is a story that may prove worse than that of Alger Hiss. In a series of
foreign-policy disasters the Obama Administration has assisted the Muslim
Brotherhood in transforming the Arab Spring in the Middle East into an Islamist
winter; beginning with the toppling of an allied regime in Egypt and the
accession to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its expansion throughout the
region. In August, the new Egyptian president sacked his military commanders,
abrogated the Constitution, and assumed dictatorial powers greater than those
possessed by his predecessor, transforming Egypt into an Islamist state.
Opponents of the dictatorship were crucified—literally nailed to crosses—in
front of the government headquarters. It was the Brotherhood’s way of
dramatizing its intentions to turn Egypt into a medieval totalitarian state.
This was exactly what the American State Department had assured the world
the Muslim Brotherhood would not do as it paved the way for the Brotherhood’s
accession to power. The intelligence chief of the Obama White House had
officially described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” and “secular”
organization, which had embraced democratic and constitutional government.
The betrayal of these promises, and the violation of every principle the
American government claimed to be supporting in the Middle East’s most
important state, took place without a word of protest from the American
government or the American Secretary of State.
As it happens the chief adviser on Muslim affairs to the American Secretary
of State is Huma Abedin, one of whose mentors was the Nazi imam, Yusef
Qaradawi. Abedin is an operative for the Muslim Brotherhood and a lifelong
servant of its agendas. In the twelve years directly proceeding her hiring by the
U.S. Government, where she became deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton,
Abedin worked for Abdullah Omar Naseef, one of the principal financiers of
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and a Muslim Brotherhood eminence. Huma
Abedin’s mother and brother are Muslim Brotherhood leaders, as was Huma’s
father.
In its work for the Brotherhood, the Abedin family was specifically tasked
with running Abdullah Omar Naseef’s jihad operation, the Institute of Muslim
Minority Affairs. The title sounds innocuous enough until you understand that
the express goal of the Institute is to transform the Muslim minorities in non-
Muslim countries into Muslim majorities as part of the Islamic jihad, with the
express intent of creating Islamic states—in short, to conquer those countries for
totalitarian Islam. To accomplish this goal Muslim minorities must be prevented
from assimilating into non-Muslim societies and also be indoctrinated in Islamic
supremacist ideas. That was and is the mission of the Abedin family. In addition
to the network of Saudi-funded mosques in target countries like the United
States, the chief organizations for accomplishing this goal are the Muslim
Students Association, on whose Executive Board Huma Abedin served, and its
offshoot, the Islamic Society of North America, which is now the principal
source of advice on Muslim affairs for the Obama administration.
In other words, at the right hand of the American Secretary of State and the
center of American foreign policy, is a woman whose family-members are
leaders of what the Muslim Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad”—its plan to
infiltrate non-Muslim societies and “destroy the Western civilization from
within”—in those exact words. And what people do these jihadists regard as the
chief obstacle to their sinister designs? The Jews.
In the words of their own manifesto: “The greatest challenge that faces
Muslims in America and Canada are the Jews, who take advantage of their
material ability and their media to distort the image of Islam and Muslims
thereby spreading lies in the minds of the people of these countries.” The Jews
also “serve Zionist interests in the Arab regions.”
In the hands of the Islamists and their allies, Zionism has become the name of
all the opponents of Islamist supremacy and its holy war against infidels, against
Jews and Christians, Israel and the United States. Americans and Israelis, Jews
and Christians have their backs to the same wall. One cannot be defended
without defending the other. Supporters of freedom are all Zionists now. And
that includes me. That is the way this war of the civilizations, or—as I prefer it
—this war between Islamist barbarism and civilization, will continue until it is
finally concluded, and the next conflict begins.
I say this because, as a conservative, I understand that conflicts are endless
and these battles are without end. To be a conservative is first to understand that
there is no solution to the dilemmas of the human condition. Second, it is to
understand that to escape these dilemmas, human beings will inevitably embark
on desperate quests for redemptions in this life. These redemptions, in turn, will
require holy wars to purge the world of demons—of those who do not share their
faith, and who stand in their way. In this regard, totalitarian Islam is really no
different in its heart from totalitarian socialism or progressivism, even though
the latter are secular and the former is pursued in the name of a vengeful and
malignant God. Both seek to cleanse mankind of its irreparable imperfections.
To remain free beings, we are continually forced to defend ourselves and our
breathing space, against the efforts of the redeemers to perfect us—against the
armies of the saints who are determined to make the world a better place than it
can ever be. That is how I see the political wars we face, and why they will
never end.
On a personal level, and to answer the question I raised at the beginning of
this talk about my identity: I am comfortable being a Diaspora Jew, both in this
present struggle with the enemies of America and Israel, and beyond. Diaspora is
the name of our Jewish exile, but exile is also the name of our human condition.
We are thrust into this life, and remain here for a while, and then we are gone. If
there is a home for us that is truly permanent, it is not of this time or of this
place.
My country, America, and the country of my people, Israel, share a common
destiny. They are the gathering-places of exiles, of those who understand better
than others that we have no permanent abode in this world. It is because of this
that we cherish the freedoms and the homes we do have, and we are not afraid to
fight for them.
 1
One consequence of this was the large number of conservatives who voted in
2008 for Barack Obama, a man whose political outlook was shaped in the same
radical crucible as mine—first Communist, then New Left. “Exit Polls Reveal
Conservatives Abandoned McCain.” Newsmax, November 9, 2008,
http://www.newsmax.com/InsiderReport/Conservatives-
Abandoned/2009/12/14/id/342127. On Obama’s career in the radical left, see
Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief.
2
See my autobiography, Radical Son (1997). Several shorter autobiographical
testimonies that can be found in other books I have written: Destructive
Generation (1989), The Politics of Bad Faith (1998), The End of Time (2005), A
Cracking of the Heart (2009) and A Point in Time (2011).
3
My reasons for concluding this are laid out in Radical Son, pp. 221–250.
4
Cf. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief
5
This is a prominent theme of the essays contained in Volume 5 of this series,
9/11 and the “War on Terror.”
6
http://discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511
7
See “Defending Christopher” and note, Volume 2; also “The Two Christophers”
in David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.
8
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
9
Baez had written an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam” to protest the
post-peace repression in Vietnam. Even though the ad blamed the United States
for its role in the war, she was denounced as a CIA agent by Tom Hayden and
Jane Fonda for her efforts (Radical Son pp. 302–3). Later I appeared on a
television talk-show with Baez to discuss the Vietnam War. During the
discussion she peremptorily dismissed my views, saying, “I don’t trust someone
who’s had second thoughts.” Stern and Radosh had published an article, based
on FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, suggesting that
Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy. There was an uproar in the left and
the two of them came under vitriolic attack from their (now) ex-friends. My role
in the genesis of this article and the subsequent book by Radosh and Joyce
Milton (The Rosenberg File) is described in Radical Son, pp. 300–302.
10
The Nation’s Richard Falk was one of the outspoken promoters of the idea that
the Ayatollah’s revolution would be a “liberation” for Iran.
11
This was obviously wishful thinking.
12
Chomsky’s extreme adverse reaction to this reference, which is described in
Radical Son (he wrote me two six-page single-spaced, vituperative and
personally abusive letters in response), caused me to begin a reassessment of his
character. For my second thoughts on Chomsky, see the articles in Volume Two
of this series, Progressives.
13
Chomsky ignored this obvious criticism and went on to elaborate the same
preposterous thesis in his most famous book, Manufactured Consent, co-
authored with Edward S. Herman.
14
Another, by Gareth Porter, however, did admirably deal with Vietnam’s invasion
of Cambodia.
15
Years later Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, came to the conclusion that the
Panthers had murdered her mother. With the help of friends, she hired a private
detective who had worked regularly for leftwing defense attorneys to investigate
the case. His report concluded that the Panthers were responsible for the murder
of Betty Van Patter.
16
I never asked or learned what connection allowed him to simply place her in this
exclusive private institution.
17
Many years later Gwen Goodloe contacted me. She was then working as an
executive in the finance department of Hughes Aircraft, a defense contractor.
How did you get your clearance, I asked her? “I told them the truth,” she said.
18
Many years after the publication of “Black Murder Inc.,” a member of the
Squad, whom the police believed to be Betty’s probable killer, Flores Forbes,
described its criminal activities, in particular its shakedowns of the afterhours
clubs, while omitting the murders it committed in the course of the shakedowns,
in a memoir called Will You Die With Me?, July, 2006
19
After the Party disintegrated in the mid-Seventies, Heard continued his criminal
career and was eventually convicted of a non-Panther related homicide.
20
The assassination attempt is described in Flores Forbes’ book, Will You Die With
Me? In the book Forbes claims, implausibly, that this plot was his own initiative,
unauthorized by Newton.
21
A chapter in Destructive Generation, 1989
22
Mercifully, this never came to pass.
23
In politics, Baez never did anything else as worthy and remained a leftist. Years
later, on one of the anniversaries of the fall of Saigon, I appeared with her on a
television show discussing the events. She dismissed my views with hostility,
saying, “I don’t trust people with second thoughts.” My response—which I did
not get a chance to express on camera—was: “I don’t trust people without
them.”
24
See chapter 5, above.
25
Marcus Foster. I have written about the SLA killings in “Pardoned Bombers,”
which is a chapter in my 2012 book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive
Passion. Also see “Mercy for a Terrorist?” in Progressives, the second volume
of this series.
26
September 12, 2007, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?
ARTID=28040
27
Monday, October 13, 2008, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?
ARTID=32665
28
See the fourth volume in this series, Progressive Racism, which contains my
writing on slavery and reparations.
29
https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=5DGIXYHTR-FJI
30
October 13, 2008, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?
ARTID=32665
31
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey
32
“Clinton’s Pardoned Bombers” in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey
33
http://www.salon.com/writer/david_horowitz/
34
Peter and I were not enthusiasts of Kim Il Sung (even if our Ramparts editor-in-
chief Robert Scheer was). Nor did we share all of the New-Left attitudes
summarized in this paragraph. In making our statements, we simply felt we
should step up and own these kinds of excesses on behalf of the many in our
generation, including ourselves, who had committed them.
35
Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait With Fidel, 1984
36
Authors’ interview with Don Francis of the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta
37
At present Bawer is actually a writer for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
38
In fact the “antiwar” movement disappeared as soon as Nixon replaced the draft
with a lottery and announced that he was winding it down. There were virtually
no antiwar demonstrations during the last four-and-a-half years of the war,
because there was no draft.
39
See Stephen Talbot, “Days of Rage,” September 1, 1998,
http://www.salon.com/1998/09/01/newsc_3/
40
See Stephen Talbot, “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously,” July 22, 1998,
http://www.salon.com/1998/07/22/news_83/
41
Paul Berman, Two Utopias, 1997
42
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 1922
edition, p. 182
43
Aileen Kraditor, “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the Rank and File
Communist 1930–1958, Praeger, 1988
44
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Politics/Waltzer.htm
 45
Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or
Anti-Slavery?” a speech delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, March 26,1860;
emphasis added
46
Cuba, Tragedy In Our Hemisphere, Grove Press, 1963
47
Argiris Malapanis, “L.A .Symposium Debates Che and the Cuban Revolution,”
The Militant, November 24, 1997
48
See the www.frontpagemag.com issue of March 30, 2003.
49
Thomas Bartlett, “The Most Hated Professor In America,” The Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 18, 2003
50
Noam Chomsky, 9–11
51
Cf. David Horowitz, The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate, a pamphlet of the
Center for the Study of Popular Culture, Los Angeles, 2001
52
http://discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1540
53
Klare teaches in rotation at Hampshire, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and
the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).
54
Argiris Malapanis, “L.A. Symposium Debates Che and the Cuban Revolution,”
The Militant, November 24, 1997
55
From Maurice Zeitlin to Elizabeth Ruiz, April 22, 2003
56
“Calibrating the Culture War” in The Collected Conservative Writings of David
Horowitz, Volume 3
57
Ramparts, April 1969
58
http://www.michaelberube.com/
59
One of the “moderate” leftists included in the database was then Senator Barack
Obama. Little was known about him at the time. For documentation on Obama’s
lifelong career in the radical left, see Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief, 2010.
60
This section of the book is included in Volume 2, The Left, of this series.
61
This battle is now over. The ouster of Joseph Lieberman was one milestone, the
presidency of Barack Obama another, in the transformation of the Democrats
into a leftwing party
62
And recently, anti-Islamophobia
63
http://discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/The%20European%20and%20American%20Left.htm
64
“The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz” referred to in “Why I Am No
Longer a Leftist” in the present volume.
65
See “The Serial Distortions of Sid Vicious,” Chapter 4 below.
66
The incident referred to was an attempt by leftists to keep Radosh from a faculty
position at George Washington University. Judis generously and courageously
provided testimony in Radosh’s behalf. Radosh was eventually allowed to teach
at the school. 2See “In Defense of Matt Drudge,” Chapter 2 above.
67
Michael Kelly was editor of The New Republic at the time.
68
Los Siete de La Raza (The Seven of the Race). A group of Chicanos accused of
murdering a policeman. They were a cause célèbre of the Sixties left and
Ramparts, the magazine that Peter Collier and I edited. Los Siete were acquitted
and subsequently several of their members were rearrested and convicted of
other crimes, including murder. (See my autobiography, Radical Son.)
69
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=29401;
http://campusprogress.org/archives/index.php/rss/rss/P4780/
70
http://campusprogress.org/tools/155/know-your-right-wing-speakers-david-
horowitz
71
See “Left Illusions” in this volume.
72
See “Guns Don’t Kill Black People, Other Black People Do,” in Volume 4 of
this series, Progressive Racism.
73
I have described in detail what took place in Reforming Our Universities, which
was published after the above rebuttal was written. Volume 6 of this series, The
Left in the University, recounts the campaign for an “Academic Bill of Rights”
and deals with these issues.
74
See Volume 6 of this series, The Left in the University.
75
See “Discover the Networks” in this volume.
76
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=522. See also,
David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, One-Party Classroom, 2009
77
Laksin’s rebuttal is an appendix in Volume 6: The Left in the University, of this
series.
78
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?
fndid=5210&category=79
79
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-21/us/columbia.noose_1_plagiarism-teachers-
college-noose?_s=PM:US
80
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
81
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Listpercent20ofpercent20Gangpercent20ofperce
82
This is the subject of my book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in
This Life and the Next, 2011.