Howdy Penners
It was some time ago that the much-missed Jim Craven penned a memorable
screed highlighting how with ultra-radicals and ultra-conservatives, it was
most often the "ultra" that was the guiding influence, given whatever
personal quirks belonged to the individual in question. There seems to be no
better example of Jim's observation than David Horowitz, ex-Ramparts
editor...
The Nation, July 3, 2000
David Horowitz's Long March
by SCOTT SHERMAN
On October 19, 1959, Frederick Moore Jr., a freshman at the University
of California,
Berkeley, climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and began a hunger strike to
protest the university's
compulsory military-training requirement through ROTC. "I am a
conscientious objector," Moore
declared. "I object to killing and any action aiding war." David
Horowitz, a 20-year-old graduate
student in the English department, was so moved by Moore's stance that
he volunteered to
defend him at a campus debate. Horowitz's opponent, a young military
veteran, insisted that
ROTC's detractors simply lacked the guts to fight the Communists;
Horowitz disagreed.
"Wearing a uniform with a million other guys is easy; hiding behind a
gun is even easier," he
proclaimed. "All you do is what you're told; you and a million others."
Concluded Horowitz,
"Was not patriotism of this sort questionable?"
Many years later, in the fall of 1987, Horowitz received a phone call
from the office of Elliott
Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State. It was time to fight the
Communists. "Are you willing to
serve your country?" one of Abrams's young assistants jauntily
inquired. A few weeks later,
Horowitz found himself in Managua, Nicaragua, where, at the expense of
US taxpayers, he
offered tactical advice to anti-Sandinista labor unions, politicians
and journalists, and, in the
dining room of the Intercontinental Hotel, thundered, "For the sake of
the poorest peasants in this
Godforsaken country, I can't wait for the contras to march into this
town and liberate it from
these fucking Sandinistas!"
* * *
These days, not much remains of the student who stood up to defend a
conscientious objector in
the twilight of the Eisenhower era. The years have transformed Horowitz
into a steely gladiator,
an indefatigable pugilist in the culture wars, the right's very own
Ahab. "Lapsed radicals like
ourselves are always condemned to regard the left as their Great White
Whale," Horowitz and
Peter Collier confessed in their 1991 anthology, Deconstructing the
Left. "This book is a
record of our sightings of the beast. We may not yet have set the final
harpoon, but we have
given chase."
Throughout the nineties, Horowitz spent much of his time combating
"political correctness" in
American universities. His weapon in that crusade was Heterodoxy, the
tabloid-sized monthly he
founded with Collier in 1992 and which, Horowitz has written, "is meant
to have the feel of a
samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC university." But the
spirit of Havel and Michnik is
noticeably absent; Heterodoxy is a garish, surreal compendium of
Horowitz's obsessions and
demons, neatly packaged for right-wing consumption. There are lists
("The Ten Wackiest
Feminists on Campus"), odd cartoons (Karl Marx in drag) and admiring
letters from the next
generation ("I am 11 years old and I cannot thank you enough for
publishing this wonderful
paper...my schoolmates are a bunch of feminist, liberal, PC, vegetarian
multiculturalists"). In
1993, when the literary critic Catharine Stimpson told a reporter that
frequent attacks in
Heterodoxy had transformed her into the magazine's "centerfold," the
editors replied with a
pornographic pastiche of her in its April 1993 issue, under the caption
"ms. april."
But the PC "gulag" is just one of Horowitz's targets. His
self-appointed mandate is to sniff out
and expose leftist chicanery--real and imagined--wherever it may exist.
He is a busy man. "One
has to stigmatize the left and segregate it," Horowitz told Insight
magazine in 1989. Last year,
when the anthropologist David Stoll challenged the veracity of
Rigoberta Menchú's
autobiography, Horowitz rushed to purchase advertisements in six
college newspapers
announcing: rigoberto menchu nobel laureate and marxist terrorist now
exposed as an intellectual
hoax.
Such crusades have hardly damaged his career. He has a column in the
online magazine Salon,
he contributes Op-Ed pieces to leading newspapers and rarely a day goes
by when he doesn't
appear on television or talk-radio. He is currently involved in efforts
to create a conservative talk
show on PBS. His funders admire that tireless spirit. "He's an
extremely articulate man and a
very determined fighter. I think he brings a great deal of intellectual
power and energy to his
work," says Michael Joyce, president of the Milwaukee-based Bradley
Foundation, which has
given Horowitz more than $3.5 million since 1988.
Lately, Horowitz has stepped into a new role: Republican Party
theoretician. His pamphlet The
Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win, is causing a
stir on the right:
Thirty-five state Republican Party chairmen have endorsed it, the
Heritage Foundation sent
2,300 copies to conservative activists and House majority whip Tom
DeLay provided copies to
every Republican Congressional officeholder, with a cover note praising
its contents. On April 5,
Senators Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, plus a dozen
members of the
House, hosted a soiree for Horowitz in Washington, at which $40,000 was
raised for his
activities.
In addition to political alchemy, Horowitz has another new fixation:
race, exemplified by his
recent book, Hating Whitey and Other Progessive Causes. Last August, in
a piece titled "A
Real, Live Bigot," Time columnist Jack White took issue with an essay
Horowitz wrote for
Salon. In that piece, Horowitz excoriated the NAACP's class-action suit
against gun
manufacturers and wondered, "Am I alone in seeing this as an absurd act
of political desperation
by the civil rights establishment? What's next? Will Irish-Americans
sue whiskey distillers, or
Jews the gas company?" White, who is African-American, retorted that
Horowitz's column was
so repellent that it "made the anti-black rantings of Dinesh D'Souza
seem like models of
fair-minded social analysis."
* * *
When you enter Horowitz's office, in a tony highrise on the West Side
of Los Angeles, the first
thing you notice on the wall is the New York Times's framed and
weather-beaten front page for
March 6, 1953. stalin dies after 29-year rule, reads the six-column
headline. Welcome to the
Center for the Study of Popular Culture, Horowitz's burgeoning empire,
which generates a
remarkable range of products and services. There is Heterodoxy. There
is his daily online
journal, FrontPageMagazine, whose features include a "Left Alert"
("Chevy Chase Says
Socialism Works" was one recent item) and an "Intellectual Rogue's
Gallery" with unflattering
articles about Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Eric Alterman. There is a
publishing imprint,
Second Thoughts Books, which brings forth titles like P.J. O'Rourke's
Why I Am Not a
Conservative, pamphlets like Liberal Racism: The College Student's
Common-Sense Guide
to Radical Ideology and How to Fight It, and collections of essays
by...David Horowitz.
That's not all: There is Horowitz's legal arm, the Individual Rights
Foundation, which represents
police officers and college professors who see themselves as victims of
affirmative action
policies; there is the Wednesday Morning Club, which brings speakers
like Newt Gingrich,
George Will and William Kristol (plus the occasional liberal) to a
monthly networking lunch
hosted by Horowitz at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There is the Matt Drudge
Defense Fund, which
raised $50,000 for the online gossip columnist's defense against a
libel suit and which provided
him with two pro bono lawyers. To burnish the center's image, there is
even a charity
organization.
The center's annual budget is approximately $3 million, roughly a third
of which comes from the
Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations. But Horowitz also has 30,000
small donors who send
checks of varying sizes. The center is his war room: His direct-mail
campaigns, his endless media
appearances (he employs a full-time publicist), his forays to college
campuses, his charity
work--all of it is coordinated under this roof. Of the fifteen people
employed here, some are
reluctant to communicate with a visiting reporter; others speak their
mind. When I phoned the
office a few weeks before my arrival to inquire about its proximity to
public transportation, I was
informed by one of Horowitz's young assistants, "The bus system is
awful, but you don't want to
ride with those people anyway."
* * *
Horowitz occupies the corner office, which affords a stunning view of
downtown Los Angeles
from the twelfth floor. It is a cluttered, cramped space, overflowing
with unruly piles of books,
pamphlets and magazines. Photographs of Horowitz with Bob Dole, Colin
Powell and Henry
Hyde adorn the walls, along with an admiring 1986 letter from Richard
Nixon. Stout and
compact, attired in a chic navy-blue suit, Horowitz appears relaxed and
cheerful as he ruminates
on his favorite themes: leftist domination of Hollywood, the press and
higher education.
"Hollywood keeps celebrating Communists," he grumbles, in reference to
the recent film The
Hurricane. "Where's the Hollywood film about Whittaker Chambers?"
Academia, too, is suspect: "I want to know," he snaps, "how many
reading lists have von Hayek
on them as opposed to Chomsky." But what about the UCLA survey of
35,000 professors cited
by Robert Hughes in his book Culture of Complaint, which revealed that
only 4.9 percent
called themselves "far left," while 17.8 percent put down
"conservative." Horowitz's voice rises
to a shout. "Norman Podhoretz cannot retire and be a professor
anywhere! Clancy Sigal, the
novelist, is a fucking professor at USC! He has no degrees. He's
written books that nobody
reads, and he's got a sinecure."
Is the fractured, demoralized US left really the colossal monolith
depicted in Horowitz's
voluminous writings? "Leftists will always think of themselves as
powerless," he replies
cryptically, adding, "The actual views of Nation readers are reflected
in the White House today,
and in the DNC." Still, those who find themselves on the receiving end
of his wrath should not
take it personally. Says Horowitz with conviction: "I harbor no ill
will toward leftists."
Some Horowitz-watchers beg to differ, and they attribute his rancor to
a complex ideological
journey that began in Sunnyside, Queens, in the fifties. His parents
were Communists who taught
Negro history in their spare time, and he recalls a boyhood home filled
with prints by William
Gropper, back issues of the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker
and books like
Stalingrad and Scottsboro Boy. In 1952 his father, a high school
English teacher, came under
attack for his political views. When he refused to answer the question
of whether he was a
Communist, he was fired for "insubordination," despite his twenty-eight
years of service to the
school system. His relations with the party were poisoned, and he quit
shortly thereafter. But he
remained a fellow traveler, and David grew up in a milieu of red summer
camps, Paul Robeson
concerts and May Day parades. In 1953, at the age of 14, he was present
at the Union Square
Park death vigil for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When the execution was
announced, mounted
police moved in to quell the demonstration. In his compelling,
infuriating memoir, Radical Son
(1997), Horowitz recalled, "I scrambled with the others to avoid the
hoofs of the oncoming
beasts, thinking: This must be fascism."
Following his graduation from Columbia University, Horowitz began
graduate work at
UC-Berkeley, arriving just in time for the anti-HUAC protests in San
Francisco, which ended in
massive police violence against the demonstrators. Horowitz chronicled
those events in a slender
1962 book titled Student, which was one of the first texts of the New
Left. It begins with a line
from Ingmar Bergman's The Magician: "I have prayed just one prayer in
my life: Use me."
Student contained some Howl-like riffs against the conformity and ennui
of the fifties, and it sold
25,000 copies. In 1982 Mario Savio, leader of Berkeley's Free Speech
Movement, told
Horowitz that he devoured the entire text standing in a New York
drugstore, and it inspired him
to go to California because "Berkeley is the place."
In 1962 Horowitz and his young family moved to Europe, spending most of
the next six years in
London. He became affiliated with the Bertrand Russell Peace
Foundation; fell under the spell of
Ralph Miliband, the socialist intellectual, and Isaac Deutscher,
Trotsky's biographer; and wrote
several bombastic and forgotten volumes whose ambition was "the
reconstruction of socialist
theory after Stalin."
In 1968, at the behest of his old Berkeley comrade Robert Scheer,
Horowitz returned to
California to work at Ramparts, which, under Scheer and Warren Hinckle,
had become one of
the New Left's most vibrant publications. But internecine conflict
quickly erupted, and Scheer
was ousted by Horowitz and Peter Collier. Today, Scheer attributes his
removal to the fact that
he wasn't "left enough" for the fiery insurgents. In Radical Son,
however, Horowitz argues that
Scheer was expelled in a popular revolt by beleaguered staff members.
In the fall of 1969
Horowitz and Collier took over Ramparts, but they lacked their
predecessors' journalistic and
literary imagination, along with their ability to raise funds from
wealthy individuals. The magic was
gone, and the New Left's flagship publication perished in 1975.
* * *
In early 1974 the French writer Jean Genet phoned the Ramparts office
and got Horowitz on
the line. Genet, who had taken up the Black Panther cause in the Bay
Area, needed a translator.
Might Ramparts provide one? One thing led to another, and it wasn't
long before Horowitz
found himself in the Oakland penthouse of Panther leader Huey Newton,
who had just returned
from China. A heated argument about the revolutionary virtues of Maoism
erupted between
Horowitz and Newton, and the latter concluded the debate on a
conciliatory note. Horowitz was
delighted: "I had found a political soul mate," he recalls.
Horowitz's intellectual seduction by Newton constitutes some of the
most fascinating pages in
Radical Son. Newton made Horowitz his confidant, took him to glitzy
parties and published his
essays in the Panthers' official newspaper. When Newton asked him to
raise money for a new
Panther school in Oakland, Horowitz eagerly obliged by creating a
tax-exempt foundation that
eventually netted more than $100,000 for the project.
Attaching himself to the Bay Area Panthers in 1974 was, it turns out, a
colossal mistake: Their
heyday was over, and the leadership had become increasingly violent and
deranged. The
educator Herbert Kohl, who was then involved in several Panther
education projects, warned
Horowitz that Newton was abusing cocaine. ("He had a cold," Horowitz
replied.)
Uncomfortable being a white man in the upper ranks of the Panther
hierarchy, Horowitz
attempted to recruit qualified blacks to replace him, so he invited
Troy Duster, a sociologist at
UC-Berkeley, to meet Newton. But Duster was suspicious of Newton's
mercurial behavior and
fled. Horowitz then denounced Duster as something of a bourgeois "Uncle
Tom." "I must have
been insufferable," Horowitz says, reflecting on his younger self.
* * *
On July 22, 1974, Huey Newton shot a young prostitute, after which he
fled to Cuba. "I should
have left [the Panthers] then," Horowitz says. In fact, many of his
black friends in the party did
depart at that very moment--a turn of events that enraged Newton's
successor, a striking,
charismatic and voluble young woman named Elaine Brown, who, according
to Horowitz, said
the party was under attack and "the rats were leaving the ship."
Horowitz says he felt trapped.
When Brown asked him to recommend someone to oversee the party
finances, he suggested
Betty Van Patter, a 42-year-old bookkeeper who had worked at Ramparts.
Van Patter, who
was white, eagerly accepted the position. On December 13, 1974, she
vanished. A month later,
her body, with a massive head wound, was discovered in San Francisco
Bay.
It is a case, according to veteran Panther-watcher Kate Coleman, that
has "haunted the Bay
Area left for two decades." A lengthy investigation by Coleman revealed
that Van Patter had
discovered questionable activity--rackets, dope, prostitution--at a
Panther-run bar in Oakland
called the Lamp Post and had reportedly complained about it to Brown,
who then fired her.
Van Patter's death plunged Horowitz into "a really clinical
depression," he says today. "For a
good year, I woke up in tears every day because of Betty." What
inspired the guilt was not
simply that he'd recommended Van Patter to the Panthers but that he'd
been too frightened to
warn her about the dangers she faced. But he was in a bind: Van Patter,
delighted to be
employed by the Panthers, was completely enamored of Brown and wary of
Horowitz, whom
she did not trust. So he let her proceed with the job.
"Today I can't even justify it," he says wearily. "I have no idea why I
did it." Horowitz and I are
seated in his office. The room is tense and completely silent, except
for the sound of his hand
nervously striking the table. His voice, normally firm and confident,
sinks to a barely audible
mumble.
"It was inconceivable to me that the Panthers would kill Betty Van
Patter," he whispers. "I was
nervous about what was going on there, but if I told Betty what I
actually felt, I was afraid that
she would tell Elaine, and that Elaine would harm me or my children. I
was completely
unprotected."
If he could do it over again, what would he say to Van Patter?
"I would tell her flat out--get out of there," he replies. "But the
consequences for me would have
been awful. I didn't have any money. How was I going to move my
family?"
Today, Tamara Baltar, Van Patter's daughter, does not consider Horowitz
in any way
responsible for her mother's death. "David didn't kill my mother, and
David didn't participate in
the killing of my mother," says Baltar, breaking a long silence on the
case. Is there something
curious about the fact that he holds himself responsible? "No," she
replies. "I think I would, too,
if I were him." Not until 1984, however, did Baltar, who was a leftist
and a supporter of the
Panthers, accept the view that they committed the crime. "David
Horowitz kept at it from the
beginning," she says. "And I was mad at him for keeping at it. But he
kept at it."
In the late seventies, relying on his old Panther contacts, Horowitz
quietly began to reconstruct
the crime, and he was a primary source for a lengthy exposé on Newton's
criminal activities that
Kate Coleman published in New Times in 1978.
"I stayed on the story," he says. "It's a minimal atonement."
For her part, Elaine Brown vehemently denies Horowitz's accusation that
the Panthers were
involved in the murder. "I didn't have anything to do with this woman's
death," Brown insisted in
a recent telephone interview, noting that no arrests have ever been
made in the case. "White
people," says Brown, "always want me to tell them about fucking Betty
Van Patter, but not
one person from The Nation has ever called to ask me who I think killed
George Jackson."
From her point of view, Horowitz and Coleman have waged a relentless
vendetta against her.
But the available evidence strongly suggests Panther involvement in the
death of Betty Van
Patter. In 1984, when Van Patter's family engaged the services of the
renowned private
detective Hal Lipset, he reported back, "You should have no doubt that
your mother's death was
Panther-related--that they killed her."
* * *
In the wake of Betty Van Patter's death, Horowitz's life came apart.
Surrounded by "personal
darkness," he began a series of affairs, which led to the collapse of
his marriage. He launched a
new career, with Collier, as a dynastic biographer; eventually they
would produce thick histories
of the Rockefeller, Ford and Kennedy families. "Without question, David
Horowitz was
extremely traumatized by what happened with Betty Van Patter, as I
think anyone would be,"
says Hugh Pearson, author of The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and
the Price of
Black Power in America. "As a result, David just totally went berserk
with regard to the
left-liberal community."
In 1979 Horowitz published an article in The Nation ["A Radical's
Disenchantment," December
8] lashing radicals for their supposed moral indifference to repression
and genocide in Vietnam
and Cambodia. Old friends from the New Left began to fall away. In 1984
he cast a ballot for
Ronald Reagan. In 1986 he informed a Berkeley audience: "You are in
fact in league with the
darkest and most reactionary forces of the modern world, whose
legacies--as the record
attests--are atrocities and oppression on a scale unknown in the human
past." By 1989 Horowitz
was comparing himself to Gifford Maxim, the Whittaker Chambers
character in Lionel Trilling's
novel The Middle of the Journey, an ex-Communist who confronted the
radical tendencies of
his time "with what he knew, from his experience, of the reality which
lay behind the luminous
words of the great promise." Horowitz had arrived at the final
destination of his journey. Now,
he ridicules the idea of utopia: "Every leftist should watch the Jerry
Springer show," he says
today. "How are you going to make a new world out of that material?"
Horowitz spent the nineties securing funding for the Center for the
Study of Popular Culture,
coming to grips with his family history, writing his memoirs and
consolidating his status as a
conservative pundit. That was accomplished with freewheeling attacks on
homosexual
promiscuity, multiculturalism, the ACLU, Angela Davis, the Russian
Revolution, John Kenneth
Galbraith, postmodernism and Winnie Mandela, to name but a few targets.
* * *
By the end of the decade, however, Horowitz had more or less exhausted
his arsenal, and the
political world beckoned. He was not a complete stranger to the
corridors of power: In 1988 he
and Collier wrote speeches for Bob Dole and had the pleasure of dining
with Ronald Reagan,
William Bennett and Newt Gingrich. Later, Horowitz was part of the
brain trust that launched
anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California. Last summer, he
released The Art of
Political War, printing 80,000 copies. It argues that the Republicans
have been utterly
vanquished by a President who has mastered the art of triangulation. In
the public's mind,
Horowitz writes, "the Clinton Democrat Party is now the party of
economic vibrancy, anti-crime
laws, welfare reform laws, budget surpluses and free trade. That's what
the American people
want."
To regain the political initiative, says Horowitz, Republicans must
overturn the public perception
that they are coldhearted and beholden to the rich: "'Tax breaks for
the wealthy on the backs of
the poor.' This is the Democrat sound-bite that defines Republicans as
mean-spirited fat cats and
enemies of the poor. What is the Republican chant? There is none." He
proposes his own
mantra: taxes for bureaucrats out of the pockets of the people.
Republicans, in his view, must
aggressively depict their opponents in starkly different terms:
"Democrats label Republicans
right-wing. But Republicans have no label to pin on Democrats to fight
back." Horowitz to the
rescue: "Here, then, is a label for Democrats: Leftists. The Democrat
Party is a party of the Left."
Finally, Horowitz argues that the Republican Party must, through a
massive legislative push for
school vouchers, reposition itself as "champions of working Americans
and minorities," the "party
of the underdog." The Art of Political War appears to be having an
impact: A recent letter from
the head of the Missouri Republican Party reported that Horowitz's
suggestions proved decisive
in a recent Congressional election in the state's 32nd District: "We
prevailed," she wrote, "by
implementing 'political war' a la Horowitz."
Horowitz's other current project is rather more controversial. No
longer content to hammer
away at the usual suspects, he has trained his sights on a new target:
Afro-America. Hating
Whitey's thesis is that contemporary black leaders--ranging from Louis
Farrakhan and Al
Sharpton to Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond--have "squandered" the moral
legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr. by their "restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a
radical cause" with policies
like affirmative action and multiculturalism. "Whereas the civil rights
movement under Martin
Luther King's leadership," he writes, "achieved its aims with the
support of 90 percent majorities
in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans--roughly 70
percent--oppose the current
civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences." The "moral
abdication" of black civil rights
leaders can be explained, he insists, by "their close association with
a radical left whose
anti-white hatred is a by-product of its anti-Americanism."
Consequently, "ideological hatred of
whites is now an expanding industry not only in the African-American
community, but among
white 'liberals' in elite educational institutions as well."
Hating Whitey is filled with assaults on leading black thinkers
(Harvard Professor Cornel West
is dismissed as "an intellectual of modest talents whose skin color has
catapulted him into
academic stardom with a six-figure income") and giddy celebrations of
the American past: "The
establishment of America by Protestant Christians...was historically
essential to the development
of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to
all minorities than those of
any society extant."
The book is littered with inaccuracies large and small. Writing about
the annual Los Angeles
Times Festival of Books, Horowitz says he saw Nation columnist
Christopher Hitchens, who
was "showing his parents around the event." (Hitchens's parents are
deceased.) More troubling is
the way Horowitz wields statistics. "In 1994," he writes, "there were
twenty thousand rapes of
white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by
white men"--a
statistic he lifted from Dinesh D'Souza's book The End of Racism.
D'Souza's assertion,
however, is based on a gross misreading of Justice Department figures.
Hating Whitey was rejected by Horowitz's regular publisher, the Free
Press, who told him they
would never publish a book with that title. Spence Publishing, a tiny
outfit in Dallas, was pressed
into service. To propel sales, the author purchased more than 100
advertisements, but sinister
forces derailed the campaign. In October the Center for the Study of
Popular Culture issued a
press release titled horowitz book on race hits roadblock despite
public demand, which
proclaimed that some bookstores were reluctant to stock it, while
others mistakenly listed the
book as Hating Whitney. His media appearances have been turbulent. In a
debate with Michael
Eric Dyson on Black Entertainment Television, Horowitz seemed
overwhelmed by Dyson's
rhetorical finesse, and by his repeated insistence that, given
escalating levels of intermarriage,
"black folks are loving whitey!"
* * *
Hating Whitey and The Art of Political War offer sharply divergent
strategies on how to wage
political combat. The latter insists that the Republican Party "can
only win" by linking its agendas
to the downtrodden, and it laments the GOP's unwillingness to "reach
out to African Americans."
In Hating Whitey, however, Horowitz whips up a frenzy about a multitude
of black rapists. Is
that the way to entice black voters into the Republican Party?
"Sometimes my tactical agendas
conflict," Horowitz shrugs.
As a young man, Horowitz was enamored of socialist revolution and the
Black Panthers. His
leftism has vanished; but the fervor remains. In that sense, he is not
so different from the
ex-Communists whom Horowitz's mentor, Isaac Deutscher, dissected in his
famous 1950 review
of the anthology The God That Failed. The apostate from Communism,
Deutscher wrote,
"continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are
differently distributed."
The most dignified attitude for the ex-Communist, Deutscher believed,
was "critical sense and
intellectual detachment." But many apostates found that an impossible
road to follow, and, in
Deutscher's phrase, ended up doing "the most vicious things."
* * *
Critical sense and intellectual detachment have never been Horowitz's
forte. As he embarks on a
new set of battles, the stakes are somewhat lower than in the past.
Lives are not on the line; only
jobs and reputations are. Take Horowitz's campaign against China expert
and writer Orville
Schell, dean of the UC-Berkeley Journalism School. In 1998 Horowitz's
legal arm, the Individual
Rights Foundation, filed suit against the Regents of the University of
California on behalf of
Michael Savage, a conservative radio commentator who had applied
unsuccessfully for the
deanship. Schell got the job, but the IRF suit contended that since he
was selected through an
old-boy network of New Leftists, his appointment constituted political
patronage and was
therefore illegal under California labor law.
Why was Schell, whom Horowitz has labeled a "Gucci Marxist," unfit for
the position? "Although
he has written several books on China and authored some op-ed pieces,"
Horowitz affirmed in
Hating Whitey, he is "not a working journalist." Schell's curriculum
vitae lists twelve books
and 206 articles, including contributions to The New York Review of
Books, The New Yorker
and Harper's Magazine. The case eventually collapsed when Savage
refused to be deposed.
Horowitz's crusade against Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles
Times Book Review,
was conducted with similar methods. When Wasserman arrived at the LA
Times in 1996
Horowitz spread rumors about his youthful relationship with the "Red
Family" commune, "a
group of Berkeley urban guerrillas." In an interview with Buzz magazine
Horowitz repeated a
story he says he heard in the sixties--that Tom Hayden taught the young
Wasserman how to
manufacture explosives. Horowitz later withdrew the charge in a letter
to Buzz: "Steve now
informs me that the story is untrue and I have no reason to disbelieve
him." (Wasserman says he
was never a member of the Red Family.) Subsequently, Wasserman asked
Horowitz to
contribute a 250-word essay to a symposium on Marx's Communist
Manifesto, but he
shortened the piece for reasons of clarity and coherence. When Horowitz
saw his tiny essay
alongside a lengthy commentary by Eric Hobsbawm, he dispatched a letter
to Times publisher
Mark Willes, lecturing him about Hobsbawm's Communist past and
insisting that "Wasserman
has an agenda in defending Marx." Willes passed the letter to
Wasserman, who communicated
his displeasure to Horowitz. That prompted Horowitz, writing in Salon,
to once again dredge up
the old charges about the rifle-toting Red Family: "They hoped to
launch a 'war of liberation' in
America, and Wasserman was one of their foot soldiers."
For Horowitz, it's not only journalism schools and newspapers that
harbor subversives; the
Democratic Party itself has been invaded. One of the many people
pilloried in Hating Whitey is
Carlottia Scott, who was an aide to former Representative Ron Dellums
and is currently political
director of the Democratic National Committee; Horowitz labels her a
"communist." Is Scott a
member of the CPUSA? "I don't know that she's a member of the CPUSA,"
he replies with
irritation. "Small 'c,' please."
In leveling such charges, Horowitz knows he is being outrageous, but
it's all part of the
high-stakes game he is playing. He seems to accept the fact that
something in his character
propels him toward the edge, wherever it may lie, and it's a risk he
accepts wholeheartedly. He
is a man willing, maybe even eager, to play with fire. Perhaps that is
the surest way of saying to
the Olin, Scaife and Bradley foundations, "Use me." At one point, in
discussing his long campaign
against Elaine Brown, he confesses that for a while he was afraid to
turn on the ignition of his car
in the morning. I asked him if he meant that seriously. He does.
"Hating Whitey has returned the
apprehension," he admits. "But when I am out there," he says, "talking
about the violence that is
committed against whites in America by blacks--which is huge and
largely unreported--I know
there are black people out there who see me as...somebody standing in
the way of justice for
them. And that means they hate me. And I need to just recognize that."
Thus far, he hasn't
received any threats.
* * *
In an article in the New York Times Magazine last November about the
new cold war
scholarship, Jacob Weisberg interpreted Horowitz's career as a "fierce
Oedipal struggle
entwined with radicalism." That is ultimately a question for
psychohistorians, but what is certain is
that Horowitz craves approval, and that underneath the fiery demeanor
is an insecure human
being. More than anything, he wishes to be taken seriously as an
intellectual and an apostate. In
1998, when Smith College Professor Daniel Horowitz published a
biography of Betty
Friedan--one that delved into her political affiliations in the forties
and fifties-- Horowitz tore into
the book in Salon, demanding that Friedan come clean about her
"Stalinist Marxist" past. But he
also purchased an advertisement in a Smith College newspaper that
proclaimed: "An Invitation to
Professor Daniel Horowitz (No Relation) or Any Member of the Smith
Faculty or Administration
to a Debate on Any One of the Following Subjects: 1. The Fibs of Smith
Alumna Betty Friedan.
2. Smith's Political Hiring Practices that Result in a Liberal Arts
Faculty Overwhelmingly on the
Political Left. 3. What has happened to Students' Academic Freedom? (As
in the Right Not to
be Ideologically Indoctrinated in the Classroom) --David Horowitz." No
one accepted his offer.
He talks openly about his quest for intellectual respectability. Here
is Horowitz on The New
Republic: "[Literary editor] Leon Wieseltier, for some reason, hates
me. I have no idea. They
not only don't ask me to write for them, but they don't review my
books." On lunch with Steve
Wasserman, months before his invitation to the Marx symposium: "I found
myself wondering
whether a leftist writer of reputation comparable to mine would have
been invited to lunch by
Wasserman and not asked to write a review for his magazine." On being
snubbed by the
sociologist Alan Wolfe at a conference: "I invited him to breakfast. I
wanted to speak to Alan. I
think a lot of what he does is good work. He was afraid to get near me.
I could see him drawing
back. I think he's afraid of the taint. I ate alone."
* * *
At 61, Horowitz shows no signs of exhaustion; indeed, Hating Whitey is
his most incendiary
work to date. His guilt over Betty Van Patter is an unrelenting source
of anguish, and
consequently there is every reason to believe that his crusade against
the "Great White Whale"
will continue, in all its peculiar sound and fury. Horowitz strenuously
rejects allegations that he is
a neo-McCarthyite. But his zeal and righteousness, his passion for
lists and old political
affiliations, his use of gossip and innuendo, his endless feuds and
vendettas make him a creature
of the fifties--not Whittaker Chambers, as he would have it, but
something closer to Walter
Winchell. "Stigmatizing" and "segregating" the left has brought him
financial security in addition to
a host of other benefits. His beloved column in Salon is a platform
from which he can launch
guerrilla raids deep into enemy territory; his recent marriage to a
much younger woman has finally
brought him some domestic tranquillity; and his burgeoning reputation
in the Republican Party
reduces the likelihood that he will have to eat alone, at least in
Washington.
http://past.thenation.com/cgi-bin/framizer.cgi?url=http://past.thenation.com
/issue/000703/0703sherman.shtml
