Customer Reviews

Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times from Left to Right

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It is no surprise that David Horowitz is viciously despised on the left. He now attacks the left with the same persistence and self-righteousness that he once employed in service of radical causes. I can't help but notice, however, that many of his leftist critics choose to explain him in personal, psychological terms rather than discussing the truth of his claims about the left. Perhaps Horowitz leaves himself open to such an interpretation by including so much non-political material--his estrangement from his parents, his broken marriages--in his story. I believe the more important issues of contention are his various claims about the intentions and integrity of the leaders of the New Left, such as Tom Hayden, or their complicity in despicable acts of violence. His charges about the death of Betty Van Patter at the hands of the Black Panthers have brought a bitter exchange with some of his former comrades at salon.com. Say what you will about Horowitz, he is at least no coward and does not shrink from the most difficult issues. This book is important, because it is a necessary antidote to all the romanticized and hagiographic presentations of the sixties and its leaders stuffed down our throats by some of the Baby Boomers--too many people my age seem to swallow the myth that the sixties were about a bunch of idealistic, naive young people fighting against an oppressive system.

(...) Radical Son is much more than an autobiography. It is a first-hand chronicle of the roots of the modern progressive movement, from one of the people who helped create it. His fascinating account of his parents in a communist cell in 1940’s New York will keep the thoughtful reader spellbound, and his insider account of the radical movement in sixties Berkeley is fascinating, enlightening, and highly entertaining. From Paul Robeson to Tom Hayden, from Bertrand Russell to Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, many of the famous, almost fabulous, names that have come to represent the sixties radical culture appear in this book, stripped of their half-mythical trappings and presented as the often deeply flawed people they really were.

Read this book. You’ll learn a lot that you didn’t know before, and you’ll enjoy the ride.

This book was so absorbing that I found it difficult to put down, reading several chapters before even leaving the bookstore. The amazon.com review of "Radical Son" does the author, David Horowitz, an injustice since every autobiography will potentially subject its author to accusations of self-absorbation, self-importance, or denial. However, contrary to that critical review, Horowitz is as painfully honest about himself and his own mistakes and personal shortcomings, as he is about those of his parents, friends, and former comrades in the New Left.

"Radical Son" is much more, however, than the political mea culpa of a former Berkley radical turned Reagan conservative. It is an invaluable political history of the Sixties' New Left Movement. Horowitz chronicles how his intellectual parents and their friends-- mostly immigrants or first-generation Americans --were drawn to the Communist Party in the 1920's and 1930's; how they passed their idealism and radical beliefs on to their children before becoming disillusioned themselves after Stalin's crimes were revealed in the Khruschev Report in 1956; and how those children-- including himself, Peter Collier, Todd Gitlin, Bob Scheer, Jerry Rubin and many others --established the New Left in the early 1960's, to replace the discredited "Old Left" of their parents' generation and to rehabilitate the Marxist idea.

Horowitz further points out why the revolution sought by the New Left never materialized-- the fantasy of utopian marxist-socialism could not overcome the reality of the bloody, totalitarian communist regimes. Revelations of the blood bath in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, following the communist victories there, soon reached the West. More directly, with the end of the Vietnam War, the protests and mass demonstration on campus came to an abrupt halt. The "people" were never really with the New Left after all.

Still, as Horowitz writes, the New Left remains capable of inflicting damag! e. Within its "bases" in the academic and literary worlds, as well as in Hollywood, the New Left has become a sort of counter-establishment in America with the ability to rewrite history (such as Todd Gitlin's "The Sixties" and the writings of Noam Chomsky, not mention the films of Oliver Stone) and to indoctrinate-- or at least attempt to indoctrinate --college students with one-sided lectures, textbooks, and various forms of hypersensitive "political correctness".

One of the best, if not the best, books ever written about the"new left". Horowitz reveals the depths of his own personalagony as he awakened from the tunnel vision dreamworld of leftism to the brutal reality of communism internationally and of so called "progressives" here at home. The book is written with great humility and frankness which does not seek to hide his own frailties and mistakes (nor, to the dismay of people like the one who wrote the amazon review, review, doesn't hide the self serving duplicity, lies and dogmatism of many of the left's "leading lights" such as Tom Haydem, Tod Gitlin, Angela Davis, Julianne Malveaux, Paul Berman,Bob Scheer, etc. Just as notable as its revelations about what these people knew and have kept quiet about (to this day) is Horowitz's own development from a rigid, orthodox "red baby" devoted to a cause above all other ends into a passionate, but humane advocate of the rule of law and process as the only real defense we have against oppression --- a "beourgeiose" concept despised by the people who hunger to be our oppressors: the liberal left.

Horowitz was a red-diaper baby raised in NYC, his parents active Communist Party members who lost their jobs because of it in the 1950s. He became a leading Marxist intellectual, writer and scholar, influential with the budding New Left of the 1960s, and then the editor of the radical "Ramparts" Rolling-Stone-style magazine. He was one of the founders of SDS. A lot of left leaders found his early work inspirational, including the founders of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964 which began the radicalization of college campuses with numerous demonstrations. He became disillusioned with the left in the 1970s after the Black Panthers, who were lionized by the left, murdered one of his colleagues, a bookkeeper he'd recommended to them when he was their premier white adviser.

Horowitz became a conservative and has devoted his life since to debunking the popular left-approved version of what happened in the 1960s. He says that SDS was the effort to revive Communist organizing in the US, while detaching it from connections to the Soviet Union and the discredited US Communist Party, and was entirely begun by red-diaper babies like himself, young people raised as Communists by their Communist parents. The sole exception, he says, was Tom Hayden, whose raison d'etre as a socialist seemed to be the bottomless anger he felt for his father having been a drunk. Hayden confided to Horowitz that police brutality was the exact goal sought in radical disturbances such as the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago in 1968; having their heads beat in, he said, would radicalize people. I wonder how many easily-led college students of that era realize their leaders wanted them hurt?

Horowitz is the Whittaker Chambers of our generation. Chambers was the more compelling writer and had a more dire message which was utterly new when he wrote it: that we faced a worldwide epic battle between Communism and God, that God seemed to be losing, that the U.S. didn't seem to realize the world around it was slowly slipping away, and that American liberals were the "useful idiots" empowering a revolution that would ultimately consume them. But Horowitz, a good enough writer whose story intersects with many of the noted personalities and events of the 1960s and 1970s, is more relevant to the more recent New Left. He had a fabulous vantage point to recount how destructive it was and how hypocritical in rationalizing the crimes of those like the Panthers and the Weathermen. It dawned on him that a society permitting even revolutionaries such liberties, didn't deserve the contempt the Left heaped upon it. His own card-carrying parents ultimately had their firings reversed and pensions reinstated, after losing teaching jobs just shy of retirement, by the very fascist state they had worked so hard to overthrow.

Horowitz's entire education and writing career focused on worshipping the now dead God of Marxism; when he left it, he was leaving everything he had ever known. A brave move it was and here he tells the tale.

This is one of the most interesting and powerful books I have ever read. David Horowitz lays his soul bare for all to see in this heartrending account of his political transformation.

Horowitz's upbringing as a "red diaper baby" is fascinating. His days at camp Wo-Chi-Ca (Workers Childrens Camp) illustrate the early indoctrination communists parents put their kids through. They sang the praises of Red October and were taught of the supposed evils of capitalism. In short, this portion of the book illustrates how thoudands of children were brought up to be strangers in their own country.

From there he reveals how the Left's world was shattered when Krushchev announced that Stalin's crimes were indeed true. That's when the New Left was formed, and naturally he was a part of it. From there he toiled with the New Left's cadres to work out ways to practice communism without committing the crimes of Stalin and others. Then came Vietnam.

Of course he was against America's involvement in the war. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual is his honesty about those days. Many radicals now claim that they merely opposed America's involvement in Vietnam. Horowitz shows that they did have a horse in that race and it wasn't the south. In fact he and they wanted the communists to win.

It was also during this time that his radical politics brought him into the circle of the Black Panthers. The Panthers were the darlings of the New Left, with their Marxist platitudes and violent ways. He brought in an old friend to help with the books at a community center he and the Panthers sponsored. A few months later she was missing and a few weeks after that her beaten body was found in the SF Bay. Contacts inside the Panthers told him that she was murdered by the Panthers.

He began to realize that his radical politics had turned moral norms upside down, making heroes out of thugs, bombers and murderers and demonizing ordinary decent Americans. This caused many years of soul-searching. When he re-emerged, his whole worldview had changed. Like I said, powerful. Read it and cry for a lost generation.

When I was a kid my dad only gave me one bit of political advice. He said, "Democrats care about the poor and Republicans only care about the rich." Fortunate it was that my father never lived to witness the development of my own political views--ones which turned out to be diametrically opposed to his own. The same cannot be said for David Horowitz whose autobiography, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey , showcases a father and son relationship that once thrived, but nearly died, over the issue of politics. The author was a prodigy of governance and began his first civic project at the age of ten. He remains just as passionate about this subject today.

Horowitz was born in the enclave of Sunnyside Gardens in Long Island City. In public, its natives termed themselves "progressive," but the denizens of the block were actually, for the most part, communist. They held secret neighborhood cell meetings, and the Horowitz family hid their copies of The Works of J.V. Stalin and The Little Lenin Library in their basement. The radical son had an ardently radical childhood. His experiences were steeped in the ways of Marxism. In the summers he spent two weeks at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca; a facility that was about as American Indian in tradition as the city of Vladivostok. The name was but a communist deception. What it really stood for Workers Children's Camp.

It was from this radical pedigree that Horowitz's career sprung. He became a most unusual activist intellectual; one as devoted to scholarly rigor as he was the need for change. Given this eventuality, in retrospect his departure from the left was probably inevitable. No one devoted to the pursuit of truth can last very long in the swamps of postmodernism.

Radical Son is thoroughly a political memoir. The author's personal history is essential to the plot, but, without his political associations and remembrances, the story could not be told. The chapters are just as much a psychological study of the progressive mind as they are a study of the author's. The personal always was political to those people. The phrase was more than a vapid sixties cliché; it was the entire justification for a political movement.

Radical Son's scope is monumental as it encompasses some of the most tumultuous years in American history. Few writers could have successfully duplicated his feat as they would lack Horowitz's technical skills along with his passion for examination. A girl he once dated said of him, "You don't live an experience, because you're too busy analyzing it." Thank God for that or the undeniably hateful nature of these extremists would have gone undocumented.

Radical Son turns 10 this year and should be prized chiefly for the dividend the mental anguish of its author paid out. His battles and alienation from the left eventually delivered to the right a conservative son who now serves conservadom more faithfully and effectively than its own progeny. In How to Beat the Democrats and The Art of Political War he expounds on how to counteract the political theatre and papier-māché idols of the left, but, sadly, few rightists appear to have studied his missives.

Radical Son is a personal story, but one whose ramifications benefit our country to this day. Yes, second thoughts are often best.

`Radical Son' by David Horowitz is a stellar thought provoking work and a poignant first hand account of a life in many ways, dominated by non-conformity. Horowitz weaves the story of his life beginning with his formative New York years being raised in a strict Communist household through his Marxist revolutionary days in the counter-culture epicenter that was Berkeley, CA right up to his current status as a devoted fighter for academic freedom and honest intellectual dialogue. His life story is as compelling as any you'll find; from the relationships with former comrades including Tom Hayden, Bob Scheer and Black Panther leader Huey Newton to his long friendship and ultra-successful writing partnership with Peter Collier.

Sneak behind the scenes of the politically supercharged decade that was the `60's straight through the anti-communist Reagan dominated `80's. You'll experience the pain of loss and disillusionment with a life spent fighting the wrong battles and coming to grips with his own participation in the `destructive generation'. Mr. Horowitz also allows you insight into the highs and lows of thorough self-examination and in a way challenges you to assess your own belief system. `Radical Son' is an inspiring look at the idealistic pursuit of revolution from both sides of the political and ideological spectrum.

Read this book and I promise you'll be better for it. It's honest, compelling, thought provoking, passionate and possesses all the requisite qualities of a best-selling piece of fiction - but it's all real and the more amazing for it. Take yourself through the idealistic struggle of a life committed to zealously pursuing honesty and introspection. Experience this journey with David Horowitz and before you know it, you'll find yourself reading everything he puts out - he's just that good.

"Radical Son" is a very interesting book. The author's parents were life-long Communists and he was a New Leftist/Socialist for the first 40 years of his life. Slowly he was forced to admit to himself the nihilism of socialism. The murder of a friend by the Blank Panthers crystallized his thinking.

If only this book could be read by high school students and again when they attend college, there might be some hope of ending the untrue and dangerous myths of socialism perpetuated by left-wing politicians, the mainstream media and college elites. Horowitz states, "It was what I thought was 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. . . . The lesson I had learned from my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst deeds. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised; I had learned to judge it by the evil it had done."

(...)

This is truly an autobiography, and one in which the author spends the time and the courage to face down many of his inner demons and past wrongs. There is no other book which I have read which better relates why the left as it existed in the 60's and 70's was truly evil. No matter how prejudiced you may considered yourself in either direction of the political spectrum the story will certainly make you reconsider what you thought you knew. Betrayal would be the overarching theme to the work, personal and political and often the two are intertwined such that they are not distinguishable from each other.
The reason I rate this 4 instead of 5, is that I think that often times the author convieniently paints himself out of the picture, whenever he reports truly questionable or disturbing radical activities, that I believe he must have surely been involved in.
If you consider yourself a political animal, no matter your stripe, pick up this book, either as ammo or to prepare your defense.