Another Country, Review of David Horowitz's Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times (New York: The Free Press, 1996), and Roger Rosenblatt's Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1997).
Guenter Lewy

On May 1, 1997, the Nation Institute sponsored a meeting at Town Hall in New York City billed as "a look back at the most celebrated and controversial decade of the century"--the 1960s. The program featured some of the decade's most ardent participants, including former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Kathleen Cleaver, formerly communications secretary for the Black Panthers and now a law professor at Cardozo Law School. Not surprisingly, in view of the sponsorship of the meeting, all of the participants celebrated what they regarded as a decade of great promise that unfortunately had not achieved its lofty goals. Transnational corporations, "devoid of life-affirming values", Bella Abzug argued, had succeeded in defeating the Sixties spirit of hope and youthful dynamism. Some suggested that the movement, in a mistake of tactics, had wanted too much too soon; others felt that it had not been radical enough.

The authors of the books under review here represent two more voices of the Sixties, but they provide us with a rather different picture of what undoubtedly was a fateful decade. David Horowitz was born in New York City in 1939. His nonobservant Jewish parents were members of the Communist Party, and he grew up absorbing a special sort of family values. After Nikita Khrushchev's 19th Party Congress speech of 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin, the older Horowitzes, like many of their contemporaries, withdrew from the party in disillusionment--though they continued to cling to the belief that a new socialist world of equality and justice would eventually triumph. For the seventeen year old son, on the other hand, the communist debacle became a challenge. How had it happened? How could such disasters be avoided in the future? How could the socialist vision be reconstructed free from the taints that Stalin had placed on the movement? Eventually, Horowitz, together with other "red diaper babies", became a prominent figure in what became known as the New Left. It was to be a movement that set itself the task of learning from the mistakes of the Old Left, to which an earlier generation of radicals had devoted their lives, but which had failed so miserably.

The birth of the New Left out of the Port Huron Statement of 1962, composed by Students for a Democratic Society (SDs), an affiliate of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, has been recounted many times. What Horowitz adds is an intimate and fascinating portrait of many of the New Left's leading players in California, where he began his political activism as a graduate student of English literature at Berkeley and soon became a full-time activist. There is Tom Hayden, who became obsessed with ending America's "imperialist war" against the people of Vietnam, and who after a visit to North Vietnam proclaimed that he had seen "rice roots democracy" at work. He soon emerged as one of the confidants of the North Vietnamese Communists. There is Ramparts, where Horowitz became one of the editors. The staff also included Bob Scheer, the radical who ostentatiously traveled first class and stayed in the finest hotels, and Warren Hinckley, a flamboyant Irishman who had similar tastes, despite his rebelling against the system that provided the luxuries he craved. Above all, Horowitz gives us an informative and highly instructive account of life inside the Black Panther Party, which Ramparts promoted in the late 1960s as the vanguard of the nation's revolutionary struggle. It was alarm over the vicious violence promoted and practiced by these darlings of the New Left that contributed to Horowitz's disillusionment and eventually led to his abandonment of the movement he had helped bring into being.

The close relationship that Horowitz developed with Panther leader Huey Newton grew out of the creation of a model school, the Oakland Community Learning Center, in which Horowitz played a central role. It was not to be a Black Panther Party institution, even though almost all the 150 youngsters were children of party members. When Newton was charged with murder for shooting an eighteen year old prostitute, he fled to Cuba. Several of his close associates also disappeared from view, among them the party's treasurer. There now was no one to run the party's finances, so Horowitz suggested someone who had done accounting work for Ramparts and the Oakland school. Betty van Patter was a woman of forty-two, sympathetic to the movement, but also scrupulous in her work. On December 17, 1974, van Patter was seen alive for the last time. As Horowitz learned, she had asked too many questions about party finances and Newton's successor had ordered her killed. One month after her disappearance, her body was found at the far end of San Francisco Bay.

This was not the first murder attributed to the Panthers, but Horowitz had always believed the other charges to have been manufactured by the police. To think otherwise was to be on the side of the enemy. But this time the evidence was all too clear. Moreover, since Horowitz had been instrumental in van Patter's employment by the Panthers, he now felt a special sense of guilt over her brutal killing. The soul searching that set in did not stop with the Panthers. Disquieting reports were coming out of Vietnam of tens of thousands held in "re-education camps", and thousands of others were risking their lives on the high seas to escape their communist liberators. Horowitz began to entertain the proposition that there was something in Marxism, or in the socialist idea, that was at the root of all of the problems that had begun to plague him. And yet giving up the socialist idea was still unthinkable. "It had been the standards by which I judged right and wrong", he recalls. "The pursuit of the ideal had made me what I was, until I had no conception of myself without it. When I thought of leaving the socialist movement, the feeling was the same as leaving my own life."

Horowitz's friends in the movement sought to keep him in the fold. When he told Michael Lerner, today the editor of the left-liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, of his doubts about the viability of the socialist idea, Lerner answered, "Even to raise such questions is counter-revolutionary." Yet once the process of disillusionment had set in it could not be halted. In the spring of 1985 Horowitz and his friend Peter Collier wrote a Washington Post article entitled "Lefties for Reagan", in which they explained what had made them vote for Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1984. They had "come out."

Today David Horowitz is a conservative activist. His Center for the Study of Popular Culture boasts a yearly budget of $2 million and more than twenty employees; it publishes books as well as four magazines, among them Heterodoxy, which at times has had a press run of 100,000 copies. Horowitz compares himself to Whittaker Chambers; like Chambers he has become the most hated ex-radical of his generation. He, too, has had to face savage personal attacks by former comrades. Those who know Horowitz agree with this appraisal: Driven by a sense of guilt over the havoc and long-lasting damage he feels he and his fellow New Leftists have caused to the American polity, Horowitz now is a man with a mission. The transformations he has experienced have at times been agonizing. There have also been personal tribulations, such as the breakup of a long and happy marriage and two unsuccessful subsequent marriages; Horowitz bares these trials with Rousseau-like candor and fervor, in the process intruding upon the privacy of others. Still, the book ends on a note of optimism. The nation, he feels, has recovered from the radical decade and its destructive agendas. "What I learned, one way or another in the course of my journey, other Americans seem to have learned as well"--or knew all along.

Roger Rosenblatt's account of the tumultuous events at Harvard during the year 1969 is a different sort of book, by a different sort of author. Rosenblatt never was part of the New Left. He admired what he considered the moral courage of the students engaged in antiwar protests, but soon came to resent their fanaticism and violent tactics. Never having been a Sixties radical, Rosenblatt's memoir has none of the passion of those who converted from one side of the ideological divide to the other. Besides lacking sharp emotion, the book's analysis of events, actors, and motives is often shallow and superficial--a less forgivable failing.

By his own account, Rosenblatt was drawn absentmindedly into what he calls the "Harvard Wars of 1969." He was then a young instructor in the English Department and resident dean of one of the Harvard dormitories; he did not consider himself a "political" person. "Like most everyone at Harvard", he writes, "I opposed the war, but that was it. I rarely read a newspaper or watched TV news." His detached attitude came to an end on Wednesday, April 9, 1969, when about three hundred protesters seized University Hall, Harvard's administrative offices. Most of the occupiers were students and members of SDs--although some were lumpenstudentariat, hangers-on from outside the university. Several deans were roughed up and hustled out of the building. Then came the announcement of "Six Demands"--and in the spirit of the times, these demands were put forth as non-negotiable. The four most notable of these were that Harvard abolish ROTC (its army, navy, and air force officer training programs); that ROTC scholarships be replaced with regular scholarships; that no more Harvard-owned buildings in slum neighborhoods be torn down to make way for new university structures; and that rents in these houses be rolled back. With this last demand SDs sought to ally itself with blue-collar workers in Cambridge, though these workers had nothing but scorn for their would-be champions.

Less than twenty-four hours later, four hundred local and state policemen in riot gear entered Harvard Yard and lined up outside University Hall, in a show of determination ordered by President Nathan Pusey that was by then already rare in the academic world. When the occupiers refused a demand to leave within five minutes, the assembled police force charged the building. One student protester threw an empty Coke bottle at the policemen and others hurled heavy brass knobs they had pulled off University Hall doors, but the police probably did not need an excuse to use their clubs. Little love was lost between the police, who represented the real working class of Cambridge, and what they saw as the spoiled young elite of Harvard. Forty-one students were injured, and many score others were carried off to Cambridge city jail and charged with trespassing.

Most Harvard students had been critical of the University Hall takeover, but the forceful expulsion of the occupiers by the police changed many of their sentiments. A large rally attended by 1,500 students protested the police "bust" and declared a three-day boycott of classes. The students also voted to demand amnesty for the protesters, and demanded as well the creation of a full-fledged Department of Black Studies--until then, Harvard had only a "committee" rather than a department.

The faculty, too, met in several long meetings. Criticizing those who had decried the forceful clearing of University Hall and who had called the police "storm troopers", Dean Franklin Ford declared, "Storm troopers have indeed entered University Hall, but they didn't do it Thursday morning--they did it Wednesday noon." A majority of the faculty, however, condemned Pusey's action and were ready to give in to the demands of the students. In a meeting held amid the presence of black students who predicted dire results if their demands were not heeded, the faculty voted to establish a Department of Black Studies. In a unique step, it also gave black students the right to join the new department's executive committee and to vote on tenure appointments. One professor, John V. Kelleher, called this day "the most shameful in Harvard's history." The faculty also voted to create a special committee to review and act on the disturbance that had taken place. Known as the Committee of Fifteen, it was charged to write an account of the event, to make recommendations for future governance, and to discipline the students responsible. Rosenblatt was one of two junior faculty members elected to the committee. Two reporters from the New York Times, he recalls, called him the "fair-haired boy, beloved by students and colleagues." Rosenblatt does not contest this characterization.

The 135 students identified as having been in University Hall were asked to come before a tribunal of the committee to explain their actions, but they refused to appear. Eventually the committee proposed and the faculty ratified the suspension and conditional separation of thirty students. No student was expelled permanently, a victory for the self-declared liberal caucus to which Rosenblatt belonged. Yet his views of the radical students were beginning to change. Watching fanatics at work, he recalls, "had greatly reduced my admiration for them, no matter how much I believed in at least some of their causes." He even had come to the conclusion that ROTC was a useful institution, for "who would not want to be led by a more thoughtful and educated first lieutenant?" However, as he admits, at the time he would never have said this in public. "I thought that being loved was the most important thing in life."

While both Rosenblatt and Horowitz have had second thoughts about the 1960s, their assessments of this fateful decade are strikingly different. Rosenblatt concedes that the "victory" of the antiwar movement had several less than admirable effects. For a time at least, it undermined respect for the military; it also contributed to a new isolationism. On the whole, however, he is glad that the student protesters helped bring an end to a "costly, wasteful, ill-inspired venture" and he defends their motives. Horowitz, on the other hand, draws attention to the humanitarian disaster that followed the American defeat in Vietnam and assigns part of the blame to the antiwar protesters who, he feels, helped bring about that defeat.

Altogether, Horowitz takes a far less benign view of the 1960s: Pointing to the use of violence and terror by the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, he argues that a criminal-intellectual outlook was central to the vision of Sixties radicalism and that such an attitude has indeed been a core tradition of earlier radicalism going back to Bakunin, Sorel, and Lenin. From its beginnings, Horowitz maintains, the New Left was not an innocent experiment in American utopianism, but a self-conscious effort to rescue the communist project from its Soviet fate. This assessment is probably a bit harsh, for, innocent or not, a strong utopian sentiment, fed by compassion and moral concern, was undoubtedly present in the New Left. And yet Horowitz is, of course, right in his basic point: Good intentions are never enough. A responsible political outlook must take account of foreseeable consequences, and the attempt to build paradise on earth is the surest road to tyranny.

Essay Types: Book Review