David Horowitz - Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey

Radical Son is the most remarkable testament of its kind since Whittaker Chamberss Witness. A riveting work of literary distinction from first page to last.

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

RADICAL SONis an intimate, uncompromising account of personal and political transformation, documenting David Horowitzs journey from 1960s radical to 1990s conservative. As he explores his painful estrangement from his radical parents and former political collaborators, Horowitz forms the framework for an incisive critique of the evolution of the American Left and a scathing indictment of the legacy of the 1960s.

Radical Son is the single most important book Ive ever read about modern American history and politics.

MARY MATALIN

The first great American autobiography of this generation.

GEORGE GILDER, AUTHOR OF WEALTH AND POVERTY

A courageous book, full of self-revelation.

RICHARD GID POWERS, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A powerful corrective in a compelling chronicle of his life and times an engrossing memoir.

DANIEL J. SILVER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

DAVID HOROWITZ, Co-author of the bestsellers The Rockefellers and The Kennedys, is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and editor of the journal Heterodoxy. He fives in Los Angeles.

Cover design by Marc Cohen
Cover photograph by Julie Dennis

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TOUCHSTONE
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New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1997 by David Horowitz
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

FIRST TOUCHSTONE EDITION 1998

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are trademarks
of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by Carla Bolte

10 9 8 7 6

eISBN: 978-1-439-13519-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horowitz, David, 1939

Radical son: a generational odyssey / by David Horowitz.

p. cm.

1. Horowitz, David, 1939. 2. Political activistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. United StatesHistory1945. I. Title.

E840.8.H67A3 1997

973.92092dc20

[B]

96-27127
CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-84005-5 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-684-84005-7 (Pbk)

This book is for

My childrenJon, Sarah, Ben, and Anne
Who lived this story with me;

My grandchildrenJulia, Mariah, and Sophia
Who will one day read it;

And for

AprilWho has already made the next chapter
a happy one.

A N AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS NOT THE COMPLETE RECORD OF A LIFE, BUT AN effort to make sense of one. Accordingly, I have left out of this account some people who were close to me and some who were important. I want to take this opportunity to apologize to any of them who might feel slighted by not being included in this book. I ask them to think of others who may not have wanted to be included but who appear because they are integral to the narrative I have written. My apologies to them as well and particularly to my family who, having had to put up with being part of my public life, now find themselves characters in my public story.

My family read this book in manuscript and was helpful in their comments and, even more, in their support. Others who read it in whole or in part and commented usefully on the text are Ron Radosh, Sol Stern, Bob Kaldenbach, Constance Miller, and Peter Collier. My daughter Sarah helped me to set the tone and to correct a number of mistakes.

I am grateful for all the affection and encouragement my children and friends gave me in the writing of this book and in the life it seeks to represent. I am especially grateful to Elissa, who never wanted to be part of any public document and for whom some of this narrative is a memory of unwanted pain.

I am also grateful to Mary Collier, not only for her own friendship but for the support she has given to her husbands friendship with me, the most important bond, beyond family, of my life.

I want to thank Adam Bellow for inviting me to write my autobiography and for taking time as an editor, rare these days, to make line edits in my text. I am grateful to my production editor, Loretta Denner, and my copy editor, George A. Rowland, for making the text as good as it could be. I also want to thank Georges Borchardt, my agent, for all the help he has given me throughout my writing career.

My only regret comes from thinking of all those young radicals just entering the arena who, if they were to consider this story, would benefit most from its lessons, but who unfortunately will not read it at all.

Note to the Paperback Edition: Only a few changes have been made to the hardcover text to correct typographical errors and some minor errors of fact that were pointed out by readers (e.g., B-29s were only used in the Pacific theater of the war, and therefore the planes I saw in 1944 must have been B-17s or B-24s). One emendation, however, requires an explanation. The anecdote about Ann Colloms that appears on page 76 has been altered in light of new information from the recently published Venona transcripts, the deciphered communications between American agents and their Soviet controllers. The information was brought to my attention by Professor Harvey Klehr, co-author of The Secret World of American Communism. Thirty years ago, Ann Colloms told me her story in the veiled manner of progressives that I have described in this book, referring only to the fact that she was involved in the Trotsky assassination. Since Ann Colloms has been deceased for more than twenty years, and there was no one else that I could question about this incident, I had to reconstruct it for my text. As a result, I mistakenly attributed to Ann a role in the actual assassination. Now Professor Klehr has kindly corrected this mistake and I have revised my account accordingly. However, the point of the anecdote, namely the availability of American communists for Soviet agendas, remains the same.

I N THE AUTUMN AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I VISITED THE CEMETERY WHERE I had buried her alongside my father in the Long Island earth. The soil on her grave was grown with grass and had begun to be almost indistinguishable from his, joining them again, a couple in death as they were in life. Picking some pebbles from the path beneath me, I placed them on their headstones, tokens of remembrance, according to the Jewish custom. My mothers bore the inscription Always, a song which had become her favorite in her last years in California, and which symbolized to me the steadfastness with which she had stood behind her family and especially myself. My fathers, which I had put up five years earlier, was already beginning to weather. I had directed the mason to inscribe it with the words Life Is Struggle, a favorite quote from his mentor, Karl Marx. It was a struggle he had lost long before we finally laid him to rest.