JOURNEY ROUND HIS FATHER

Between the years 1917 and 1956, at least a million Americans joined what came to be known to them, and to every literate person, simply as “The Party.” This nickname was the first lie. As a political party strictly speaking, the Party — the Communist Party of the United States of America, that is — was a colossal failure. It failed here as it failed nowhere else on earth; only two candidates running on the Communist party ticket were ever elected in the United States (both to the New York City Council in the early 1940s).

It is, instead, as victims (and spies) that American Communists have found their only victories. A relentless effort to romanticize the persecution of Party members, their travails during the McCarthy period especially, has borne fruit in countless books and movies that make up an unparalleled American martyrology. The American Communists, we are instructed, may have been foolish to seek revolution in a country that did not really need one, but they are to be forgiven, even hailed, because they understood things about America others did not. They saw injustice as their countrymen could not see it, to blacks especially. They could not stand around and do nothing.

Buried deep in innumerable self-serving memoirs and hagiographic accounts are the questions their authors cannot bear to ask straight out, much less try to answer. They happen to be the very questions that still make the American Communist experience an important part of this nation’s intellectual and spiritual journey. How did communism manage to turn so many Americans into intellectual traitors to the freedoms they enjoyed and (in far more cases than most people realize) into literal traitors to their country? What led so many thoughtful and intelligent people to join a political movement whose real purpose was not to change their own country, but to further the goals and aims of a gigantic and distant empire run by mass murderers?

Few books offer honest answers to these questions. By far the most distinguished of them is Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. It is often said that Chambers was like a character out of Dostoyevsky — from his Underground Man-like espionage to his Svidrigailov-like homosexual urges to his Raskolnikov-like salvation through Christ. But Chambers deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as Dostoyevsky for better cause: Witness is one of the few American works that justify comparison to the great Russian novelist.

And now, almost 50 years after the publication of Witness, comes the publication of David Horowitz’s Radical Son. With the exception of a few ill-advised concluding chapters, Radical Son inhabits the same high plane as Witness, which may be the great American memoir of this century. Like Chambers, Horowitz is an apostate who has made it his mission to call the Left to an accounting for its ideas. And like Chambers, he has written a memoir that testifies to the undying leftist impulse to remake the world, and to the Left’s perpetual surrender to monsters who claim they know how to do it — monsters as titanically diabolical as Joseph Stalin or as pettily thuggish as Black Panther pooh-bah Huey Newton.

Horowitz reveals just how undying the impulse is by showing how it has lasted through the generations of his own family. For his father, the American Communist party was life’s mission and life’s blood. Although he rebelled by refusing to submit himself to the Party, David did follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a passionate believer in a worldwide Marxist revolution with the United States as its chief target. And it is his key insight that just as Phil Horowitz’s Communist ideology was the animating force behind David’s “New Left” ideas, so too was American communism the true father of the New Left.

Born in 1939, Horowitz was a “red-diaper baby.” His parents met through the Communist party; before their marriage both had made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union to see paradise in action. In the stunning opening sections of Radical Son, Horowitz uses his father’s diaries and correspondence to draw a vivid portrait of a desperately alienated, frightened, and lonely soul who found in communism the promise of release from his spiritual ills.

Phil Horowitz was a talented writer and an intelligent man but, paralyzed by self-doubt and self-loathing, felt he was wasting his life as a New York City high-school teacher. On his one trip to the Soviet Union, he met with teachers there who bragged about their nation’s industrial productivity. (Must have been a fun evening.) “It inspired in my father a flight of self- pity,” Horowitz writes, and then quotes from Phil’s journal:

All this made me feel isolated, reduced — the poor teacher looked down on in America, the poor slave, owning nothing, looking to nothing but his pay, unable to be proud of anything. For nothing in America was his, no, not the children whom we were training to become able, skilled slaves for those who owned and possessed what belonged to all Russians from now on, but which only a handful owned in America.

Today, after the collapse of Soviet communism, it seems almost unbelievable that someone could write these words. But David Horowitz understands that it was not his father’s belief in Russian collective ownership that explained his passion for communism, but rather Phil’s own dislike of self. Spiritual alienation made Phil Horowitz susceptible to the idea that America was making him a slave, that America was responsible for the fact that he was “looked down on.” By promising to abnegate the American way of life, communism offered Phil Horowitz a miracle cure for his crippling nihilism.

Phil Horowitz actively courted his own feelings of powerlessness. He submitted himself to a discipline that required blinding himself to every Soviet crime, and to a wife far stronger and more determined than he. “My father thought of himself as a revolutionary,” Horowitz writes. “He looked forward to the day when the world would be transformed through a singular act of collective will. But when I look at [his writings], what I think about is how he could not, in the course of an entire lifetime, take charge of his own fate, or alter his own character, to the slightest degree.”

Despite their detestation of bourgeois America, Phil and Blanche Horowitz led an exemplary bourgeois life themselves. Alongside fellow Party members, they raised their two children in a middle-class Queens neighborhood called Sunnyside. David idolized Joe DiMaggio, listened to The Lone Ranger, watched Ed Sullivan, worshiped Marlon Brando.

But I had another, secret world that was lit by different stars, the likes of whom none of my friends outside of our progressive circle had ever heard of: the folk singers Pete Seeger and Martha Schlamme, the writers Albert Maltz and Howard Fast. . . . Above them all was the enduring hero of my political youth, Paul Robeson, the Negro singer. . . . After the formation of the NATO alliance, Robeson told news reporters that Negroes wouldn’t fight if the United States found itself at war with the Soviet Union. After Robeson’s statement, there was a riot at a concert he gave in Peekskill, New York. Sugar Ray Robinson, the middleweight boxing champion and a hero of my other world, told the press he would punch Robeson in the mouth if he met him.

“The incident left me feeling embarrassed,” Horowitz concludes dryly, “for Sugar Ray.”

Horowitz felt none of the alienation that defined his father’s passion for communism. He was a good son and learned his lessons well: “My task in life, as I understood it, was to point myself in the direction that would realize the socialist ideal, and to point others in that direction as well.” And when the Communist party ceased being a viable option for the American Left, Horowitz sought to further his family’s goals by helping to found a ” New Politics” at Berkeley, where he had gone to study and teach in the early 1960s.

Over the course of the next two decades, Horowitz participated in many of the great leftist dramas. His first book, Student, helped give rise to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. His second, The Free World Colossus, founded the “revisionist” myth of America’s criminality in the Cold War and established the litany of American anti-Communist crimes around the world — coups in Guatemala and Iran, the Bay of Pigs, and, of course, Vietnam.

In Radical Son’s most amusing passage, he describes his involvement with the very, very old Bertrand Russell, who became an anti-American icon in his last years. Russell had fallen into the Rasputin-like clutches of an American named Ralph Schoenman, who ran Russell’s “Peace Foundation.” Schoenman set up a meeting between Russell and Joan Baez for fund-raising purposes, and then left Horowitz to serve as host:

When the introductions were made, it became apparent that neither one of them really knew who the other was. Communication was further complicated by Russell’s hearing aid, which kept whistling, much to his annoyance, so that the proceedings had to pause at intervals while he took it out for adjustment. . . . I had to look on helplessly while she babbled on about her experiences with transcendental meditation and a Santa Cruz guru named Ira Sandperl, all this to the last surviving exponent of nineteenth-century rationalism — a man whose disciples included Wittgenstein and Moore, and whose godfather was John Stuart Mill.

Baez stiffed the author of Principia Mathematica.

It was Schoenman’s idea to stage a “War Crimes Tribunal” modeled on Nuremberg to condemn the United States for its conduct in Vietnam. But there was no money for the tribunal until Horowitz came up with the idea of selling Russell’s memoirs for a large advance. The advance came to $ 500,000, and the war-crimes tribunal was on, even though it was so jury-rigged against the United States and in favor of the North Vietnamese that the radical historian Staughton Lynd refused to participate. Jean-Paul Sartre, however, did agree to serve as the tribunal’s version of Telford Taylor, as did James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, and others, “declaring that the Communists were by definition incapable of committing war crimes: ‘I refused to place in the same category the actions of an organization of poor peasants . . . and those of the immense army backed by a highly industrialized country.'”

And so it went for years and years, until the ends-not-means philosophy of the Left finally cost a life close to Horowitz. In the 1970s, Horowitz became intimately involved with the Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., and their leader, Huey Newton. Horowitz’s portrait of Newton is a brilliant one: You can understand how this murderous, coke-addled thug nonetheless managed to seduce an entire generation of American leftists.

When the Black Panther party needed someone to help manage its finances, Horowitz suggested a woman named Betty Van Patter, who had worked with him on Ramparts magazine. One Friday night, Betty disappeared. A month later her body was found in San Francisco Bay, her head caved in. For reasons still unknown, someone in the Panther leadership had found it necessary to kill her.

Horowitz had seen enough, and known enough, about the Panthers to have understood what a dangerous situation he was encouraging Betty to join. And yet he refused to acknowledge the evidence of his own eyes because clarity would mean confronting the real truth about everything he believed in.

Betty’s murder sent Horowitz into an emotional free-fall that led to the dissolution of his marriage of two decades and his repudiation of Marxism — the twin anchors of his life. He thought back to his parents and how he had sought to avoid the practical consequences of their Stalinist views: “Their political ideals had embarrassed them, making them complicit in others’ crimes. I had resolved that I would not repeat their mistake. Now I was guilty myself.”

The story of his conversion from leftist ideologue to rightist ideologue takes up the last third of the book and features some wonderful writing on how Horowitz made the final spiritual leap from progressivism to conservatism:

Because the outlook of progressives was based on the idea of a liberated future, there [was] no way to disagree with them without appearing to oppose what was decent and humane. To criticize the radical project [placed] one in opposition to a world in which social justice and harmony would prevail. . . . But in America’s democracy, social injustices — and other evils which leftists decried — [were] caused primarily by humanity itself. The problem of controlling humanity’s dark side [was] what necessitated institutions of constraint — the economic market and the democratic state.

In the book’s first 300 pages, Horowitz manages to summon up imaginative sympathy even for those he condemns, at times with the eye of a novelist. But when he comes to describing his life as a conservative, he loses perspective. The concluding sections of Radical Son are regrettably shot through with his desire to settle scores with ideological adversaries. Horowitz gives in to the temptation that besets every memoirist: He inveighs against negative reviews of his work and casts aspersions on the authors of those reviews. Alas, the fact that his book Destructive Generation (written with the estimable Peter Collier) received unfavorable treatment in the New Republic does not have the larger ideological meaning he wishes to ascribe to it.

In fact, his complaints against writers like Paul Berman and Sidney Blumenthal suggest that despite Horowitz’s ideological conversion, he has yet to find emotional distance from his one-time brethren on the left. They have the capacity to wound him as surely as if he were their brother still. Horowitz cannot help but desire their approbation, just as he sought his father’s until the day of Phil Horowitz’s death.

Whittaker Chambers died thinking that by throwing in his lot with liberal democracy against commnism, he had joined the losing side of history. The capacity of the Left to inflict psychic damage on its apostates years after they have forsworn allegiance to the progressive creed is the truest sign that, in this respect at least, the Communist spirit is indeed undying.

John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.