Scenes from a Radical Life
By David Horowitz

David Horowitz, who grew up in New York City as the son of two lifelong Communists, was a founding member of the New Left. During the 1960s he was a prominent editor of Ramparts, the leading radical journal. In his memoir Radical Son, just published by The Free Press, Horowitz provides a stark record of radical life in the ’60s. Following are some first-hand snapshots from his book. They depict the Black Panthers, Tom Hayden, the Weathermen, the sex and drug revolutions, and other aspects of the ’60s "Movement" as they really were.

Berkeley’s New World

As a grad student, I had been active in the New Left that was forming at Berkeley in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but I moved my family to Europe in 1962. When we returned to Berkeley in January 1968, the change was everywhere evident. Peace symbols and crystal pendants had become the emblems of religious conviction. Clothes were tie-dyed and bucolic, colors psychedelic, and hair long. To liberate themselves from the old sexual order, women were going bra-less, a protest whose immediate effect was to raise the libidinal pulses of everyday life. At the south end of campus, hippie craftsmen had transformed Telegraph Avenue into a street fair, where musicians and jugglers "doing their thing" attracted crowds for the tradesmen. It all had the air of a medieval pastoral, like the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where there were no menacing creatures, or hungers that could not be satisfied.

When I took my son Jonathan to hear a band called Purple Earthquake, I had my first encounter with electric instruments in a live setting. Booming through huge amplified speakers, the sound produced an effect something like entering a new dimension. I looked around at the dreamy faces of the audience. They were wearing the insignias and uniforms of the new counterculture that had blossomed while we were gone, and I experienced an unmistakable, strong kinship with them: A new world is possible.

Rioting at the ’68 Democratic Convention

As principal architect of the Port Huron Statement in 1962, Tom Hayden had helped launch Students for a Democratic Society (sds), which soon became the largest student organization of the New Left. When he called for a demonstration at the 1968 Democratic national convention to protest the Vietnam War, everybody knew it meant a confrontation with the Chicago police that could prove bloody. Ramparts editor-in-chief Warren Hinckle decided to participate by publishing a "wall paper," as Mao’s Red Guards had done during the cultural revolution in China.

During the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Chicago’s Mayor Daley had recently ordered his police to shoot looters. A radical street protest would put people’s lives at risk. Because of such considerations, Hayden’s plans attracted only two or three thousand people to Lincoln Park. But that was enough to generate trouble—Hayden’s real agenda.

The ensuing melee changed the shape of American politics. The now-famous pictures of demonstrators being bloodied by police, and the chaos on the convention floor, destroyed the presidential chances of Hubert Humphrey and moved the Democratic party dramatically to the left. Four years later, Hayden and the protesters provided the push and the party rule changes that pushed the antiwar candidacy of George McGovern and propelled the party’s left wing into power.

When the dust cleared in Chicago, Hayden and seven other radicals, including the Black Panthers’ Bobby Seale, were indicted for conspiring to create a riot. During the trial, the defendants created a near-riot in the courtroom itself. Seale was so obstructive that the judge ordered him bound and gagged. The picture of a black man in chains was a made-to-order script for the radical melodrama. One of the conspirators, Jerry Rubin, admitted a decade later that the organizers had lured activists to Chicago hoping to create the riot that eventually took place. This fit with the general strategy Hayden had laid out in private discussions with me. When people’s heads are cracked by police, he said more than once, it "radicalizes them." The trick was to maneuver the idealistic and unsuspecting into situations that would achieve this result.

Sid Peck, a member of mobe, the pacifist group that issued the call to the Chicago demonstration, later told me with some bitterness that Hayden had been "extremely deceptive" in outlining his agenda for the gathering, assuring everyone that his intentions were nonviolent. Hayden’s duplicity continued throughout the event, causing the radical historian Staughton Lynd to comment that "on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday [Hayden] was a National Liberation Front guerrilla, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, he…was on the left wing of the Democratic party." Anyone who knew Tom knew that the bombthrower was the real Hayden.

Having secured pacifist cover, Hayden then went to the most radical elements in the Left—those who actively advocated violence as a political tactic—and proposed that they provoke a conflict with the police who would be at the demonstration. According to Hayden’s own retrospective account, he warned one group in New York that "they should come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood," and he told his co-organizer, Rennie Davis, that he expected 25 people to die. He recruited the Yippies, a group organized by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who alarmed Chicago officials by immediately threatening to put lsd in the Chicago water supply.

Hayden also met before the convention with the Weatherman faction of sds, which had issued a call for "armed struggle" in American cities. As one of the Weather leaders told me later, Hayden proposed to them that "It might be useful if someone were to fire-bomb police cars."

At the event, Hayden gave Bobby Seale a platform in Lincoln Park, and Seale addressed the crowd with the suggestive exhortation that "If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself. We’re gonna barbecue us some pork!" Once the violence started, Hayden defiantly incited the crowd to "make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city."

Homelife

While an editor at Ramparts, I discovered I liked working at home near my wife, Elissa, and around the children, despite the distractions. And I spent weekends at parks, playgrounds, zoos, and other children’s entertainments, while my Ramparts colleagues were at political meetings or hanging out in rock clubs. The plants, animals, and children with which Elissa had filled our lives answered a need in me. Her focus was life-centered, present-oriented, and outside herself. This provided a discipline and counterpoint to my own impulses, which were interior, intellectual, and relentlessly toward the future.

When I conveyed the news of our third pregnancy to my father, his reaction was unexpectedly negative. "You’ve broken the mold," he said cryptically. It took me a while to decipher what he meant. Roz Baxandall, a historian of the Left and a friend, observed that in our parents’ generation no progressive had more than two offspring. In the ’20s, U.S. Communist Party members considered it reactionary to have any children, since they would be obstacles to the revolutionary mission. When years passed and there was no revolution, people became frustrated and began to start families. But even then, two children were regarded as a practical limit. More than two indicated a lack of political focus, a surrender to the forces of self-indulgence.

But even the chores generated by our toddlers and pets, which sometimes seemed endless, created a bond between Elissa and I. I felt integral to the fabric of the life we had created, and not only in emotional ways. Elissa did not know, for example, how to drive—and wouldn’t learn. Yet we lived a mile from any stores, and driving was a necessity. In this and other practical ways she made me indispensable. As a result, I was also needed in a traditional sense as the man of the house. The idea was politically retrograde, but it resulted from Elissa’s choices.

Like a dutiful Leftist, I pressed my wife to attend a "consciousness-raising" women’s group that included Berkeley’s feminist elite when this became a radical fashion. To distinguish their radical outlook from merely liberal groups, they called their agenda "women’s liberation." Elissa came home from the first session in a state of agitation, vowing never to return. "They hate me because I’m a mother," was all she said. Years later I learned that they had berated her for allowing me to "oppress" her by "making" her assume the housewifely role. I also found that within a year of the group’s formation, every marriage in it had dissolved.

Few of my radical colleagues had much connection to family or real community. A friend with a Freudian bent observed of Ramparts editor Bob Scheer that he "projected onto the socialist future the human connection he had failed to achieve in his own life." I had the same intuition about Tom Hayden, who was not on speaking terms with his father, and seemed to have no fixed home address. But it was the radical Michael Lerner—later famous for his "politics of meaning" which attracted the Clintons’ admiration during their first term in the White House—who illustrated the syndrome best. The cake at his first wedding was inscribed with a Weatherman slogan: Smash Monogamy. Soon he and his wife had a child, and the young family went east. When the couple separated shortly thereafter, mother and son went to live in Boston. Lerner, however, returned to Berkeley. "Michael," I said, "how can you leave your son in the east to come to Berkeley? He needs you." Without hesitation, Lerner answered: "David, you don’t understand. I have to be here. Berkeley is the center of the world-historical spirit."

Lerner also made me understand that drugs were central to the consciousness of the Movement. On discovering that I had never taken lsd, he was incredulous: "You have to take lsd. Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is."

Elissa and I anxiously watched many of our friends’ children fall to drugs and other destructive influences around them. The permissive attitude toward marijuana took a particular toll. Harmless as it may have seemed to adult radicals, its impact on adolescents was difficult to control. Many a youngster in our circle who "tripped out" on marijuana went on to harder drugs, or psychosis, and never came back. The responsibility for other, more vulnerable, lives separated us from our childless peers.

An American Vietcong

When Bernadine Dohrn became president of sds in 1968 she announced that she was "a revolutionary Communist." With calculated pride, her vice president, Billy Ayers, declared that he had not read a book in a year. In the Movement, anti-intellectualism was becoming a revolutionary badge of honor. Shortly after their election, these new leaders dissolved sds into the "Weathermen," Dohrn’s political cult which preached a Marxist version of race war. They issued a manifesto inspired by the Maoist doctrine of "people’s war" and predicted the coming of a global Armageddon in which the Third World would take revenge on "Amerika" by "bringing the war home." American radicals could atone for their "white skin privilege" by serving as a fifth column inside the enemy camp.

Weathermen and the Black Panthers were the vanguards of the hour. Even Hayden, one of the few radical leaders able to engage serious ideas, had surrendered to the "Vietnam Metaphor"—the prism through which the New Left had come to interpret all events. In articles for the Berkeley Barb, he called the Panthers "America’s Vietcong" and advocated guerrilla warfare and the creation of "liberated zones" in American cities through armed force. He established a Berkeley Liberation School with its own "Minister of Defense" who trained students in the use of weapons and explosives. At one point, Hayden and his activists even conducted a training session in an emergency clinic in Los Bańos, posing as doctors and paramedics, practicing on unsuspecting patients.

"Fascism is coming," Hayden announced on a visit to our Ramparts offices. "By the end of the year they’re going to put us all in jail." About this time, Michael Lerner suggested I should buy a gun. "Michael," I said in disbelief, "The people aren’t with us. You couldn’t even describe a scenario in which there was a shoot-out with the police that we could win." Hardly pausing, he said, "Then you have to buy a hand gun and give it to someone else for use in assassinations."

On election eve the year before, the Peace and Freedom Party had nominated Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Rubin for its presidential ticket. They held a "Pre-Erection Day" (sic) celebration in the Berkeley Community Theater, and Rubin came on stage wheeling a live pig in a shopping cart. This was "Pigasus," the Yippie mascot, he informed the crowd. Then he announced he was turning over his vice-presidential spot on the ticket to the pig, and lit up a joint. Eldridge took the microphone and began a rant in which he said the Left had to unite with the Machine Gun Kellys and John Dillingers of the world. He talked about "p*ssy power" and said that he would kill San Francisco Mayor Alioto and his children and grandchildren.

Mob Justice

Without a formal hierarchy at Ramparts, every issue that came up had to be debated. The need to justify decisions was not only time-consuming for us, but at times cruel to others, as I discovered when we attempted to reduce the mailroom budget at Ramparts and were met with a political revolt. The mailroom was staffed by members of Newsreel, a "collective" of radicals who had made promotional films for the Black Panthers and the Vietcong. They had no respect for our publication. The revolution’s pecking order had again shifted to the left, and we could not overcome the view that Ramparts was part of the power structure that needed to be overthrown.

Originally, we hired just one Newsreeler to do the mailroom work, but he took on more and more part-time help, featherbedding for his revolutionary comrades. When the mailroom budget exceeded that of the editorial department, we decided that things had gone far enough and that we had to cut their hours. But no appeals to the common good made any impression. The Newsreelers saw Ramparts as their gravy train rather than their cause, and refused any cuts at all. To them, we were the ruling class and they our rebellious peons.

Because every decision had to be justified collectively, we assembled the entire staff and in an all-day session hammered at the recalcitrants’ deficiencies and derelictions, summoning other staff members to testify against them. The session went on for eight hours, escalating as the embattled mailroom crew resisted. Their obstinacy made it necessary to expand the charges and sharpen their personal edge. What had begun as a move to institute economies that would save all our jobs turned into a prosecution. Accusations of laziness, dishonesty, and exploitation of fellow workers were hurled at the hapless defendants. In the end, they were made to feel so bad about what they had done that firing them was almost a mercy. This episode was a collectively supported, brutal exercise, necessary for us to prevail, but it made me recognize the utility and compassion that lay in the principle of hierarchy we had cast aside.

Meanwhile, as we ran out of funds at Ramparts, we developed schemes which were border-line criminal, but which the reigning rhetoric of the Left encouraged us to think of as civil disobedience. We had printed an excerpt from Abbie Hoffman’s anarchist bible Steal This Book in which he argued that "ripping off the system" was a revolutionary act. Abbie outlined various scams and justified them as prefigurings of the communist future in which everything would be free. His idea was that people should take according to their needs. But like most radicals, including Marx himself, he gave no thought as to how things would be provided. Our own solution at the magazine was to put half the Ramparts staff on unemployment, so that they could collect their "paychecks" from the government. When the government allowance expired, we would put them back on the payroll and lay off the rest.

Life and Death with the Panthers

Inside the Black Panthers, Huey Newton had created a group of enforcers he called the Squad. He used it to intimidate Black Panther members, who were subject to beatings with bullwhips and chains for disciplinary infractions. It was also available for his personal vendettas and criminal ventures, accompanying him on the drive-by shootings at the "after hours" clubs. Squad members often acted out of their own sadistic impulses as well, so no one was safe from their terror. When one of them was inadvertently insulted by the vice president of the Black Students Union at Grove Street College, the Squad retaliated by executing the offender. The murder was never prosecuted.

Big Bob, a Squad member, confided to a former Panther that in the three years he had been in Oakland, the Squad had killed a dozen people. A friend of mine—Betty van Pater, who I had connected with the Panthers to do their bookkeeping—was one of them, he admitted. When I eventually pieced this together it was a blow that began my retreat from the Left and the radicalism I had until then promoted all my life.

At one point, Huey Newton killed young prostitute Kathleen Smith and Los Angeles police officer John Frey. After shooting Smith, he was driven to the Zen Center in Marin, whose guru, Roshi Baker, gave him refuge. From there, he went to the Beverly Hills home of Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (who co-produced the Oscar-winning pro-North Vietnamese film Hearts and Minds). Later, a film director who had been present described the scene to me: "Huey was sitting on Bert’s couch, shoving drugs up his nose, and sniveling, ‘Get me more coke. I want some p*ssy.’ He whined that it was the first time he had killed someone for reasons that were ‘non-political’—which was typical Huey bullsh*t."

I also learned, later on, why Brenda Bay was in tears when I last saw her at the Panther’s Learning Center. In a gesture to revolutionary theory, the Panthers frowned on marriages. All the women in the Panthers were to be available for Huey Newton’s pleasure. He had merely to summon any of them—which he did, sometimes several at a time. Brenda had been secretly married to Newton’s bodyguard, and when she found herself in Newton’s bed, she told him about her marriage. Newton wanted her to tell her husband about their affair, because he felt it would be dangerous for his bodyguard to discover it behind his back. When Brenda refused, Newton arranged to have her husband summoned to the penthouse when he and Brenda were in bed. The discovery wrecked the marriage.

An episode involving Bobby Seale revealed the wide latitude the Panthers had come to enjoy in public life. After being beaten by Huey Newton and threatened by Panther Elaine Brown, Seale, the former chairman of the Panthers, had completely disappeared in 1975. Amazingly, no one seemed to care that one of the most prominent political figures in democratic America had simply vanished—not the press, not his political supporters in the Left, not his former followers. It turned out that Seale was in hiding, in fear for his life. A year and a half later, Charles Garry, the Panther lawyer, told me that Seale had fled because of Elaine’s threats, and no one knew where he was—not even his mother.

Seale was easily the most public and popular of the Panther leaders, personally known to most of the prominent figures on the left, including his codefendants in the Chicago conspiracy case, Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman, and their lawyer, William Kunstler. In all the time he was missing, not one of these champions of the oppressed raised his voice to ask where Seale was, and thus provide him with some protection—because Seale’s persecutors were the Panthers themselves. In the end, because the Panthers had limited influence, Seale survived. But what would have happened if the Panthers, or radicals like them, had had the kind of societal power we in the Left were trying to hand them?

As radicals, we were impatient with order and had contempt for process. We wanted "direct rule" and "revolutionary justice" unconstrained by legalisms and the hierarchies they required. As a result, we had no means to redress the crimes committed by the Panthers or other tribunes of "the people." Looking back, we had no law to govern us other than that of the gang. The injustice of America’s radical vanguards was as brutal and final as Stalin’s. It was mercifully smaller in scale only because we were unable to undermine America’s "bourgeois" society as much as we had hoped.

The Love of Malice

Working years later on a history of the Weather Underground for Rolling Stone, my longtime collaborator Peter Collier and I interviewed Mark Rudd, who had led the "uprising" at Columbia in 1968 and been purged from the Underground after an effort at bomb-building went awry, killing three members. A large, affable man, Rudd alone among the New Left leaders I have known or interviewed had a basic honesty about himself and was feeling genuine remorse for the wasted and destructive years he had spent in the Weather army. He told me that the bomb that killed the three activists had been intended for a service-club dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

The three bombers were SDS veterans; their intended target—young people at a dance—showed just how malevolent the Movement had become. Later, Bernadine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin—who had narrowly escaped the earlier explosion—planted a bomb in a ladies room of the U.S. Capitol building.

Rudd also helped us piece together the bizarre final acts of the Underground, which had initiated a series of purges in its ranks, complete with confessions and recantings. The purist remnant that conducted the purges subsequently joined elements of the Black Liberation Army to form the May 19 Communist Organization—celebrating a date which marked the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. The goal of these revolutionaries was to create a "New Afrika" in America’s southern states through a campaign of guerrilla war. To finance this war, the group held up a Brink’s armored car in Nyack, New Jersey. This led to a gun battle in which three policeman were killed, including the only black officer on the Nyack police force. The perpetrators were given 20-year sentences, ending their political careers.

Other New Left radicals proved less contrite with age. When Bernadine Dohrn surfaced after nearly a decade underground, she was interviewed from jail on the Phil Donahue show. I watched with Jim Mellen, a handsome, square-jawed friend with a subdued personality, as if he nursed some subtle grievance toward life.

Jim’s career was a case study in the opportunities that America offered. His father was an alcoholic who had left the family; his mother had worked as a soda-fountain clerk to support them. Jim was bright enough to earn a Ph.D. and win a Fulbright scholarship to Tanzania as an agricultural expert. On his return to America in the late ’60s, he dropped his academic career for the revolution. He abandoned his two children at infancy. He marched with the Weathermen in their "Days of Rage" in Chicago, trashing downtown businesses to protest "Amerikan" racism and the "imperialist" war. He became the group’s "theoretician," writing their famous declaration of race war: "You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."

Jim got off the revolutionary train during a famous "War Council" held in Flint, Michigan, when Bernadine Dohrn praised Charles Manson and spread her fingers in the infamous "fork salute." "Dig it!" she cried to the assembled warriors. "First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!" It was not the nasty rhetoric, but her call to actually begin the war he had only theorized, which caused Jim to quit. Later, he tormented himself with the idea that he was a coward unable to stomach the risks his own ideas invited.

After leaving politics, Jim first made solar heaters for hot tubs, then became a carpenter, a contractor, and finally a developer. By the time we sat down to watch the Donahue show, he had mortgaged the two-story house he had bought with his carpentry earnings to finance the construction of condominiums he had designed and built. With the profits he bought a small plane and was preparing to enter a new career by going to law school at night.

Given his humble origins and outlaw status, Jim’s business success demonstrated how rich in opportunities and how politically tolerant the system he had declared war on actually was. Yet somehow this success failed to satisfy the radical hungers that gnawed his soul. On TV, Bernadine was justifying her life as a political terrorist by attacking "Amerikan injustice" in the most lurid terms, picturing the country as a vast concentration camp for minorities and the poor. And Jim was hanging on her every word and shouting encouragement. "Jim," I said, incredulous, "you’re still with her! If she went out and bombed the Capitol tomorrow, you’d probably say ‘right on.’" He smiled at me with a look of utter self-satisfaction: "Nothing would delight me more."

My former-radical colleague Peter Collier had long maintained that malice played a larger role in the motives of ’60s activists than I had been willing to accept. The more I thought about the moral posturing of the Left, the more I saw that its real interest was less in making reforms than in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions.

Marx had once invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." When the Left called for "liberation," what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Marxism was a form of idolatry. And the Creator/Destroyer that the Left worshipped was itself.

David Horowitz is now the president of the Center for the Study of Political Culture.