Radical Son

Right Turn

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

Reviewed by Ramesh Ponnuru

David Horowitz is the most prominent member of his generation to have made the political trek from left to right. He has become, no doubt because of his radical background, one of the right’s most effective agitators, concentrating on issues that conservative activists generally neglect, like the politicized corruption of higher education and the federal “culture” bureaucracies. He has also, with his frequent collaborator and fellow ex-radical Peter Collier, challenged the left’s self-serving accounts of the 1960s and their legacy in Destructive Generation, Deconstructing the Left, and other works.

Now he has written a memoir integrating his political critique of the left with his own life story. That story is told with an honesty painful to himself and, sometimes, to the reader. It is a tribute to Horowitz’s moral seriousness that revelations about his troubled relationship with his father and disorderly romantic history are never presented as a therapeutic exercise, nor exploited for titillation; his missteps are neither excused nor minimized.

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The Left He Left Behind
Review of Radical Son By Richard Gid Powers
Originally published in The New York Times
February 16, 1997

A former editor of Ramparts reflects on a life after radicalism

David Horowitz’s warmly human and abrasive memoir, ”Radical Son,” carries on its jacket the phrase ”A Generational Odyssey.” As with the rest of this fine autobiography, the choice of phrase is artful. Born in New York City in 1939, the child of Communist parents, Mr. Horowitz moved to England after attending Columbia and Berkeley, drawn by the quality of Marxist intellectual life. There, he completed ”The Free World Colossus,” which he calls here ”the first account of the cold war written from a New Left perspective,” a book whose toxic impact on attitudes toward anti-Communism and containment Mr. Horowitz now regards as pernicious. After the book came out he was approached by a Russian agent to spy for the Soviet Union. Back in Berkeley in 1968, he joined the New Left’s leading magazine, Ramparts, and later produced (with Peter Collier, also of Ramparts) best-selling biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families. He is now a so-called ”second thoughts” conservative, a militant foe of 60’s radicalism in its academic, entertainment and news-media strongholds.

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Commentary Magazine: Review of Radical Son by David Horowitz

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL / JUNE 1, 1997 Originally printed in Commentary Magazine

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey
by David Horowitz

In the mid-1980’s, at a rally in support of Nicaragua’s Communist government, David Horowitz was for some reason invited to speak. Whatever the organizers may have had in mind, Horowitz did not tell the crowd what it wanted to hear. For Horowitz, a prominent radical in the 1960’s, had recently broken with the Left. Instead of denouncing the United States and singing the praises of the Sandinistas, he proceeded to warn those in attendance at the Berkeley, California, gathering that if they were “to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.”

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Many Intellectuals have made the voyage from Left to Right in recent decades. But few have come from as deep inside the hard Left as Horowitz, and none has retained more of the 60’s style. Horowitz, in fact, prides himself on his determination to continue speaking “in the voice of the New Left—outraged, aggressive, morally certain.” This quality is conspicuously on display inHeterodoxy, the broadsheet which Horowitz edits and which presents the conservative case in the most willfully incendiary way—its cover photos have sported Karl Marx in drag, Charlie Chaplin in Nazi garb, and, for a Clinton reelection issue, a bullet-riddled American flag. Horowitz also runs an institution in Los Angeles called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which monitors political correctness and serves as a watchdog against extremism on the Left.

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