Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

TO David Horowitz's comparison of himself with Whittaker Chambers in the Prologue to this absorbing memoir, I found myself reacting with irritation. Who did this New Left apostate and former editor of Ramparts think he was? But the further I read in his book, the more I was persuaded that the comparison is fair enough. It was not that I came to believe that a life spent among overgrown children playing at revolution bore the same moral weight, either of guilt or of penitence, as one spent in the Communist underground between the two world wars. Nor was there anything in Horowitz's life to compare with Chambers's personal agony -- quite independent of the venom with which he was treated by his former comrades -- at turning informer. Indeed, there is an unintendedly comic aspect to Horowitz's account of his hapless personal life, as when someone expects strangers to accord his private misfortunes the same seriousness that he himself does. A little humor, a little ironic distance, would have done this book a world of good.

But Horowitz does have something of Chambers's quality of soul. For the immense seriousness with which he takes himself -- a quality common to both Left and Right versions -- does have its good side, from the reader's point of view. This is the tremendous political honesty and sincerity he is able to bring to his self-examination. Here is the testimony of a genuine penitent which avoids, to a remarkable extent, the self-serving disingenuousness of most autobiographies without sacrificing any of the self-dramatization. In this it is a kind of post-modern version of Chambers's Witness or even of the Confessions of Saint Augustine. And if the events and personalities with which Horowitz was involved loomed less large on the world-historical stage than the great tragedy of the century, the Communist illusion, to which Hiss - Chambers was a subplot, the part Horowitz played in the Panthers 'n' Weathermen Follies was a bigger one.

The subtitle also points up the extent to which Horowitz regards his lineal connection to the earlier struggle as being central. His parents were both Communists, and he was raised in the faith in a "progressive" enclave of Queens called Sunnyside Gardens. His political education started when he was still in elementary school, and he was in junior high school when his father lost his job as a schoolteacher under New York's Feinberg Law (which sought to exclude Communists from the teaching profession) in 1952. His mother also lost her job, and the sense of his parents as victims of the "McCarthyite witch-hunt" was of great importance in marrying the political to the personal in his own life. After the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and Columbia University, he found himself as a young man in the midst of "the radical upsurge of the Sixties," during which "'old Reds' like my parents became the heroes of the Cold War 'repression."'

For several years of his early manhood, when he was starting a family, he lived in those socialist halfway houses, Sweden and Britain, but he never set foot in the countries of the Soviet bloc until after his conversion to conservative beliefs in the 1980s. The young radicals of his generation "wanted to be in the radical tradition, yet escape implication in its crimes." It was at this time that Horowitz wrote his first book, Student, which was to become one of the seminal documents of the New Left. But when in 1968 he returned from Britain to Berkeley, where he would go to graduate school and work at Ramparts, this bourgeois revolutionary intellectual with a wife and four children found himself an alien presence in the hippie culture of sex and drugs that prevailed in parts of California at the time. Though in other respects he joined in "the quest for authenticity" of other white radicals, this spiritual distance between him and the others provided a space in which his widely advertised "Second Thoughts" could later grow.

By the early Seventies, the antiwar movement had collapsed, which opened his eyes to its self-interested character, but the Communist version of the Cold War was becoming a part of our "national myth." It was a myth that it cost him dearly to stop believing in. One of his early political memories was of demonstrating against the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953, and it marked an epoch in his conversion from his leftist beliefs when he learned in the late Seventies, to his great shock and amazement, that the couple were in fact guilty. The attitude of surprise is characteristic. It can also be seen in his reaction to the most important event in his conversion, the murder of a friend by Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. Again and again we see him reeling from the impact of learning that Newton or George Jackson or Elaine Brown was not an innocent idealist framed by the police but guilty, in fact, of far more than any of them was ever charged with, or that those who knew of their guilt continued publicly to defend them.

There is a kind of childishness about this surprise which is itself surprising, as when Horowitz confides in a neighbor his first suspicions that his friend Betty Van Patter has been murdered by his own political allies:

When I told my neighbor Joel Clark what I suspected about Betty's death, he shrugged and recalled what Dick Gregory, the black comedian and activist, had said after meeting with Huey and Eldridge: "They're thugs." He knew. Anger welled inside me. Why hadn't Joel said anything before? Why hadn't Charles? Or Troy? Why hadn't they warned me? The answer was clear: They did not want to be accused of betraying the Left. But there was another factor as well: They saw that I was blind, and therefore dangerous to trust.

Even now he does not consider the possibility that, so far from seeing him as blind, they had simply assumed that he knew what virtually everybody else knew about the Panthers from the start. Who could have supposed that he was so naive as to have believed the Party line? That he was consistently so naive is his most endearing and exasperating quality throughout the period when he was in the unwitting service of monstrous tyrannies, real or potential. It is as if either his intellectual bent or his Communist background made it necessary for him to learn everything about the real world from scratch. This learning process was, of course, a great nuisance to him, but it is the making of his book.

Another way in which the generational theme is important emerges in his account of the lifelong tension in his relationship with his father, who was one of those parents that set arbitrary standards their children can never meet. In a moment of candor late in his life, his father confesses to him that "I was jealous of you since the day you were born." This is not the only time when the Oedipal note is struck between them, and it suggests a personal counterpart of the political naivete which it takes David Horowitz so unnaturally long to grow out of. It may be that it takes someone who is himself recovering from an epic case of arrested development really to understand the essentially infantile quality in the New Left -- a quality still to be found in such now-respectable remnants of the movement as Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden.

Horowitz here says of Destructive Generation, the book on the same theme which he co-wrote with Peter Collier, his longtime collaborator on both Left and Right:

It was a call to our peers to grow up, finally, and undertake an accounting of what they had done. But it was just this reckoning that proved impossible. "One of the strongest holds the Sixties had on our generation," we explained in our introduction, "was its promise of eternal youth, a state of being that would never require a balance sheet of one's prior acts."

And he ends on the same note: "What radicals wanted was to be midwives to a world that was different from the one in which they were going to die. To be present at the creation and, in that way, forever young. It was time to grow up." But it is only he and not his fellow radicals who grows up. The others are left to dream up all the varieties of politically correct silliness and stultifying ideology that Horowitz's recent career, as editor of Heterodoxy, has been devoted to sniffing out. There is something sad about such a fate for one whose youthful ambition it was to be a political philosopher, an adapter of Marx, who could change the world with his ideas. And it is a measure of the times we live in that just growing up can be turned into such an epic tale. But what Andre Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers can also be said of David Horowitz: that he is "one of those who did not return from Hell with empty hands."