Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Commies A Journey Through the Old Left the and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh Commies. A Journey through the Old Left the New Left and the Leftover Left. The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the traumatized the Communist American Left as much as the assassination of President Kennedy devastated the country ten years later. “Red-diaper baby” Radosh was inflamed by their deaths and would remain so until he published The Rosenberg File in 1983. Co-authored with Joyce Milton, the book intended to prove their innocence but actually demonstrated their guilt. Radosh was ostracized for tarnishing the image of these two martyrs of the Left, and he started to question his own beliefs. This chronicle is a fascinating insider’s view of the isolated, surreal world of American Communism, where dogma and indoctrination supplant individuality and free expression. The book also tells the story of the author’s political journey from the extreme Left to the Right. Radosh has written two other books, including the well-received Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964?1996 . The most fascinating chapters describe his childhood and education, from his days at P.S. 173 in New York, where as a young Jewish boy he had to run home to avoid beatings from Italian gangs, to his years at the University of Wisconsin. He chose Wisconsin because it was the only university with a recognized chapter of the Labor and Youth League and it did not have a math requirement. Summers were spent at “Commie Camp,” Camp Woodland, in upstate New York, where young Communists were sent to be indoctrinated and to escape Redbaiting. The emerging folk music movement soon swept up Radosh, who could claim and Bob Dylan as friends. After receiving his Ph.D. in history from Wisconsin, Radosh began teaching at the City University of New York, where he remained for thirty years. During the sixties he was drawn to the anti- movement and was left by his first wife. Depressed, Radosh descended into a bleak period of drug use and sexual experimentation. Once he regained his balance, he grew increasingly disenchanted with the Left until his final break over The Rosenberg File . Today he wages his battles with the “leftover Left,” the advocates of political correctness whom he regards as the dominating force in higher education. Radosh’s autobiography will not likely win new friends from the Left—something he is quite used to—but this engaging, perceptive tale of his personal search for political moorings should appeal to open-minded liberal, conservative, and centrist readers. Reviewed by Karl Helicher September / October 2001. Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. Books: Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days: A Memoir and Ronald Radosh's Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left. Mr. Heineman is a Professor of History at Ohio University-Lancaster and the author of four books, including A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh. In August 2001 Beacon Press's publicity machine geared up for the release of Bill Ayers's memoir, Fugitive Days ."Gonzo [anti-] Journalist" Hunter S. Thompson heralded the arrival of"A wild and painful ride in the savage years of the late sixties. A very good book about a terrifying time in America." Oral historian and radio fixture Studs Terkel said of Ayers's tome,"A memoir that is, in effect, a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves." Academician Edward Said effusively praised Fugitive Days , concluding that,"For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary reading." Finally, Publishers Weekly came forth with this forecast,"With advance praise from Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Turow, Studs Terkel and Rosellen Brown, plus a 20-city author tour, this ringing account should attract considerable review attention and solid sales."1. Although I cannot speak to the sales figures for Fugitive Days , I can say that Dr. William Ayers, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), and a former leader of the 1960s-era terrorist group the Weather Underground, has attracted considerable attention. That attention, however, has not been as universally favorable as Publishers' Weekly and Beacon Press had anticipated. For advance publicity stills Ayers had posed with a sorry-looking American flag at his feet. In a glowing author profile by the New York Times Ayers said of his 1972 bombing of the Pentagon--among other such protest activities--that,"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."2 The gods of synchronicity must have been looking over Ayers's shoulders. His first New York Times' profile ran September 11-the day horrified Americans watched helplessly as Islamic extremists slammed three commercial airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers killing thousands. Several days later, the New York Times carried another glowing story on Ayers-this one written, historian Ronald Radosh noted,"by a writer whose parents were comrades of Ayers in the Weather Underground."3. John Earl Haynes, a distinguished historian of twentieth-century America at the Library of Congress, condemned Ayers for his unrepentant radicalism and sharply rebuked UIC for cheering him on in its official webpage. Author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Tanenhaus, after recalling what the New York Times described as the"daring acts" of resistance undertaken by Ayers's associates, wondered,"how many alumni of the Weather Underground acknowledge today the part they played in fostering a culture of terrorism in which assaults on the U.S. and its citizens are wreathed in the glory of 'daring acts'?"4 New York Post columnist and neo-conservative activist John Podhoretz pulled no punches, calling people like Ayers evil, horrific and deluded, and suggesting the reason he was given sympathetic treatment by the New York Times had to do with opposition to the Vietnam war.5. Perhaps the greatest irony about Fugitive Days is that the controversy surrounding the book is more informative and interesting than the actual memoirs. In large part the problem with Fugitive Days stems from Ayers's claims that his memory is foggy and that"the fingerprints [have been] wiped away" from many incidents in his life. He also curiously notes that,"Memory is a motherfucker."6 Ayers's claims that he has a foggy memory are belied by the detail he gives regarding his first meeting with a black ministerial civil rights recruiter-a meeting which took place nearly four decades ago: Reverend Gabe Star was red-faced and middle-aged-in his late thirties at least or early forties-his hair salt and pepper, tossed and disheveled, his dress careless. His office was crowded with papers and books, the desk unevenly stacked with precarious piles, two telephones perched uneasily on the ones nearest hi chair, and a large Royal typewriter peeking out from another. On a far corner, an ignored and partially eaten hamburger of indeterminate age. On the wall next to his desk, an enlarged aerial photo of the March on Washington. And, of yes, he'd managed to use the words"fuck" and"goddamn" in the first minute of our acquaintance, ingratiating himself, I supposed, to youth.7 Given Ayers's eye for detail, it is more likely that fingerprint removal, not a foggy memory, drove the writing of Fugitive Days . Even in recounting his pre-New Left youth, Ayers makes great efforts to conceal more than he reveals, while, paradoxically, revealing more than intended. On the one hand, readers are treated to the specter of a normal middle-class suburban Chicago upbringing in the 1950s. But every now and then a few bits of information dropped along the way indicate that his family's social status would not have led anyone to confuse them with the middle-class Cleavers and Nelsons. There is the black servant. There is his father whom Bill Ayers wrote,"worked for Edison." His father was president of Consolidated Edison of Chicago. There is Lake Forest Academy--Ayers's prep school north of Chicago.8 In an effort to dissociate himself from his upper-class background, and to anticipate his countercultural activism to come, Ayers recounts that he hung out with ethnic Italian kids who owned zip guns, smoked cigarettes, and cursed. Later, Ayers met a truck driver as he hitched a ride to New Orleans where he sought to join the civil rights movement. The truck driver's racist monologue and brandishing of a pistol which he called a"N----- Neutralizer," along with Ayers's fear-stricken demeanor, is the most interesting part of the book.9. One point does come through clearly in Ayers's memoirs: he has a lot of rage. Seemingly this rage is tied to his always-smiling mother and, by extension, to President Harry Truman. In Ayers's mind, he was born at the dawn of the Atomic Age, with Truman being the first great American terrorist. But according to Ayers, Truman was more than a terrorist; he was a sociopath seeking sexual relief."Harry Truman is drooling now," Ayers writes."He's excited. He's fetishizing and eroticizing. And why not? Explosive power, newborn, stirring, dangerous, and overwhelming, A breathtaking discharge. He loves this bomb." In Ayers's mind, there could be no military justification for using atomic bombs on the Empire of Japan, while, of course, there would be plenty of moral justification for Ayers to take up arms against a government of homicidal Truman's, Johnson's, and Nixon's.10. There is no shortage of 1960s memoirs that are far more interesting than Fugitive Days . Twenty years ago Jane Alpert, whose upper-class upbringing was similar to Ayers, wrote, Growing Up Underground , a compelling story of her bombing career in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Alpert was also honest enough with herself to allow that she really had no idea why she tried to blow up the Whitehall Induction Center, the Marine Midland Bank, Chase Manhattan, and several other government and corporate offices. She seemed more confused, self- consciously awkward, and desperate to fill a void in her life, than enraged.11. In the 1980s, erstwhile SDS founders Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden produced their own respective accounts of their youths, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage , and Reunion: A Memoir . One-time New Leftist observed that Gitlin wanted to salvage the reputation of"The Movement" and Hayden sought to build a platform for his political career. Without addressing the merits of Horowitz's points, it is safe to say that Gitlin and Hayden are more engaging than Ayers. It is also true that if Gitlin and Hayden did"spin" their stories, at least there is something of substance to spin.12. Recently, David Horowitz wrote a searing memoir, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey , while Ronald Radosh penned a memoir with the eye- catching title, Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left . Both memoirs are, in their own ways, rebuttals to Gitlin and Hayden, but are quite different in tone. Horowitz is full of regrets and he has an almost missionary zeal to right the wrongs that he feels he committed in the past. Understandably, there is an air of tragedy and sadness that hangs over Radical Son .13. Although there is tragedy in Commies-how could any discussion of an American leftist Radosh met defending Fidel Castro's practice of lobotomizing political opponents not be tragic-there is a spirit of exuberance as well. If Horowitz is the Whittaker Chambers of his generation, then Radosh is a post-World War II Odysseus or, at the least, a very high IQ Forrest Gump. What reaction other than wonderment can a reader have to someone who"jammed" with Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, watched classmate Mary Travers (later of"Peter, Paul, and Mary") be expelled from their"Little Red Schoolhouse for Little Reds," jousted with Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, and, through scrupulous scholarship, proved that atomic bomb spy Julius Rosenberg was, contrary to Old Left and New Left mythology, a Soviet operative?14. Commies ' critical reception, as is the case with Fugitive Days , has not been muted. On the Right, one commentator in the Online thought that Radosh was not repentant enough about his days as a New Left activist. Radosh's response was forthright. As he observed, although in retrospect some of his former beliefs may seem peculiar, one must appreciate the blue-collar, immigrant Jewish milieu from which he sprang. America before World War II had its large pockets of anti-Semitism and exploitative labor conditions. In response, most supported the New Deal; a small minority embraced socialist politics and others joined the Communist Party USA. Radosh does not present this argument as an excuse, but as a sociological, cultural, and historical explanation.15. The response to Commies by the Left has been, in the main, unkind. Walter Goodman, writing in the New York Times , headlined his review of Commies ,"Don't Steal This Book," a play on the title of a classic tome written by the late Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book . Goodman's review went downhill from there.16. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , a seemingly more"mainstream," middle-America newspaper than the New York Times , columnist Dennis Roddy penned a blistering attack on Radosh. Using as his jumping point an incident in Commies in which an enraged Joni Rabinowitz, daughter of Communist attorney Victor Rabinowitz, cursed Radosh for writing about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg, Roddy fired his salvos. Roddy noted that Joni Rabinowitz, who is now a Pittsburgh activist, is an admirable figure who had protested"when Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that stopped two paces short of using the poor as lampshades. . ." Having associated Clinton, Radosh, and Republicans in general with the specter of Auschwitz, Roddy concluded that Rabinowitz was"a daughter worthy of her father," implicitly chiding Radosh for purportedly betraying his own father. (Actually, Commies gives the impression that Radosh had less tumultuous family relations than was the case for Ayers, Hayden, and Horowitz.)17. What is most remarkable about Commies is Radosh's lack of rancor. He mentions briefly and without a lot of detail how his professional career has been thwarted by academics hostile to the historical arguments he has made. (Radosh, one of the most intellectually productive historians in the United States, spent his career in a community college dealing with legions of students and heavy course load.) The worst incident occurred when Radosh in the early 1990s was, as he puts it,"blackballed" by some academics from receiving a position in the history department at George Washington University. It is telling that Radosh does not linger on this incident. ( 's John Judis, who is certainly no right-winger, laid out the affair in all its sordidness a few years ago. Judis, unlike Radosh, named the blackballers.)18 There is just one problem with Commies -- the book is too short. For instance, I would have liked to have learned more from Radosh about his graduate sojourn at the University of Iowa. Historian Samuel P. Hays, who taught at Iowa before moving to the University of Pittsburgh, recalled decades later with warmth and amusement at how disoriented Radosh was when he arrived as a master's student in" cosmopolitan" Iowa City. If the publication and subsequent arguments surrounding Commies and Fugitive Days indicates anything, it is that the culture wars were going strong right up to September 11. As America enters another era of crisis-one in many ways far deeper than the one of the 1960s-it will be interesting to see how the culture wars play out. Forty years hence it will be fascinating to see what memoirs are written and if the mistakes of the past are repeated. 1. All quotes in this paragraph come from the Beacon Press Publicity Release, August 2001. 2. Dinitia Smith,"No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protestor Talks of Life in the Weathermen," New York Times , 11 September 2001. 3. Ronald Radosh,"Don't Need a Weatherman: The Clouded Mind of Bill Ayers," The Weekly Standard , 4 October 2001 (On-Line). 4. John Earl Haynes,"Academia's Complicity in Terror," FrontPageMagazine.Com , 18 September 2001 (On-Line); Sam Tanenhaus,"Terrorism Chic: How Do Those 'Daring Acts' of the '60s Radicals Look Now?" Wall Street Journal , 21 September 2001 (On-Line). 5. John Podhoretz,"A Reckoning for the Noisemakers," New York Post , 13 September 2001 (On-Line). 6. Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), fronts piece, 7. 7. Ayers, Fugitive Days , 43. 8. Ayers, Fugitive Days , 23. 9. Ayers, Fugitive Days , 12, 45. 10. Ayers, Fugitive Days , 17-18. 11. Jane Alpert, Growing Up Underground (New York: William Morrow, 1981). 12. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: , 1988); See Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60s (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 243-274. 13. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 14. Ronald Radosh, Commies: A Journey Through the Old left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 34, 40, 77, 127, 189. 15. Ronald Radosh,"Should We Ex-Leftists Be Forgiven?" FrontPageMagazine.Com , 5 June 2001 (On-Line). 16. Walter Goodman,"Don't Steal This Book," New York Times , 24 June 2001 (On-Line). 17. Dennis Roddy,"To Leftists, His Radical Departure Just Wasn' t Right," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , 30 June 2001 (On-Line); Radosh, Commies, 167-168. 18. Radosh, Commies , 201-202. This review first appeared in ConservativeNet. CONSERVATIVEnet permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, and CONSERVATIVEnet. Ronald Radosh. Ronald Radosh is the author, co-author or editor of fourteen books, including Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (Encounter Books,2001); Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the (with Mary Habeck) (Yale University Press, 2001); The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton), (Yale University Press, 1997); Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964- 1996 (The Free Press, 1996.); and The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (with ) (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in such publications as Partisan Review , The New Republic , The New Criterion , The New York Times , Times Literary Supplement , The Journal of American History , The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Radosh has served as a Senior Research Associate, the Center for Communitarian Studies at George Washington University; as Professor of History in The Graduate Faculty, City University of New York; Research Director for the United States Information Agency, and as Associate Director of the Office of the President, the American Federation of Teachers. Topics. Policy Centers. Publications. Amerasia Spy Case. Harvey Klehr & Ronald Radosh. Divided They Fell. The Rosenberg File: Second Edition. Ronald Radosh & Joyce Milton. Commies: A Journey Through The Old Left, The New Left And The Leftover Left. Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left. Ronald Radosh & Allis Radosh. Hudson Institute: Promoting American leadership and global engagement for a secure, free, and prosperous future. Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left the New Left and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh. The ASL fingerspelling provided here is most commonly used for proper names of people and places; it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment. There are obviously specific signs for many words available in sign language that are more appropriate for daily usage. Report Image. We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe. If by any chance you spot an inappropriate image within your search results please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. Book Review: Anti-Commies. WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 -- "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (Encounter Books, $24.95)," by Ronald Radosh, is the latest and perhaps one of the last, additions to the long bookshelf of books by ex-communists turned anti-communists. Radosh is most famous for a book which he co-authored two decades ago, which pretty definitely established the guilt of Julius Rosenberg. I should acknowledge that I know Radosh, although not well, and know many of the people he writes about in this book, so my perspective on what he has written has the advantage and disadvantage of some personal connections to the events he writes about. My sharpest political memory of Ron Radosh is his comment to me when two of us were on the way to the 1979 convention of the New American Movement, when he told me with amazement in his voice: "You know those stories about the Communist Party getting Soviet gold? They were true!" To which I replied with some asperity "I knew THAT!" That interchange between Radosh and me shows Ron in his best and his worst side -- his earnest true believer personality. Like many of his fellows, the same personality that led him to become a faithful adherent of communism has now led him to become a faithful adherent of anti- communism. Although, in a world essentially without communists, it is a strange adherence. One can question why such anti-communists are still so violent about the subject. If they have won, as they often proclaim, why are they so bitter about it? Usually it is the defeated and not the victorious that are angry. But, in truth, the "victory" these anti-communists have won is an unacknowledged victory. In the academic institutions and even in the media world in which these critics live, there has been no acknowledgement of defeat at all. As a recent example, consider the tribute to Camp Kinderland, one of the three camps discussed by Radosh in chapter two of his book, "Commie Camp," in the august pages of The New York Times, written by no less than a grandchild of the Rosenbergs. No one who didn't know what was going on would have recognized that it was a camp for communist Jews, affiliated with the International Worker's League. Ironically, the failure to acknowledge defeat is a typically American phenomenon. Several decades ago, the historian Erick McKitrick wrote "Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction," in an attempt to explore why the bitterness of the Civil War lasted so long, as compared to, for example, how Germany and Japan were so quickly reconciled with the United States after World War II. His partial answer was that in the authoritarian societies of the defeated nations falling to one's knees in the face of defeat was normal, and a behavior which acknowledged victory, while in democratic America, no such behavior could be expected. Everything the South did growled "you may have my body, but you don't have my soul." And such behavior guarantees no peace. The case between Left and Right in America remains harder because the post-World War struggles are so ambiguous. There never was a great war with the Soviet Union, the same Right that became noted for all-out support of the Cold War was dubious about it for several decades, and many of the strongest anti-communist figures of the last half-century were glaringly wrong about the most important domestic issue, race. Ronald Reagan was no more likely to say that he was wrong about race in the 1960s than George McGovern was to say he was wrong about diplomacy in the 1970s. The greatest strength of Radosh's book is his inside view of the life of convinced communists and their fellow travelers in the 1950s and 1960s. His greatest weakness is the assumption that this was a world-view shared by what he calls "the" Left. In fact, foreign policy has not been the primary concern of most on the American Left, nor on the American Right, for that matter. Tip O'Neill argued that "all politics are local," but for these converts, both as communists and anti-communists, all politics are international, and they retain the totalitarian habit of mind -- in which everything is grist for the struggle. Nuance is not a strength of the book, and Radosh's single-minded self preoccupation leads in odd directions. It becomes clear that his conversion from Left to Right rested on two episodes -- the reception given to his book on the Rosenberg case, and the Nicaraguan Civil War. In the case of the Rosenberg book, his history of his relations with Michael Harrington and Irving Howe and their Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, from the perspective of one who was very close to Harrington, seems to be inaccurate in its largest point. Since Harrington and Howe (and myself) always regarded the Rosenbergs as guilty, Radosh believes it was duplicitous of them not to write a blurb for his book and for DSA not to pass a resolution endorsing its findings. It could, of course, be said that most people think that blurbs are favors done for friends, not political obligations. But Radosh was still, in his deepest heart, a party-liner. He felt that "the party" should endorse his historical conclusions. It was the position of DSOC from the beginning that democratic political organizations did not pass resolutions declaring "historical truths." That was the task of the type of organizations from which Radosh came. Harrington and Howe were arguing that one did not have to agree with Radosh's position on the Rosenbergs to be a member of DSA, but Radosh has turned this argument on its head, suggesting that it was more important for these two men to mollify former communists than to stand for the truth. This is inaccurate and unfair to both Harrington and Howe, and it passes over, may I say, the fact the New York DSA local recruited dozens of its members to attend Radosh's 1983 confrontation with Rosenberg's defenders. In order to "justify" his switch to the Right, Radosh, like many others who traveled the same path, has to retrospectively argue that everyone to the Left of center "hated America" and shared his rather unusual childhood. His vision of history is a straight line from Old Left to New Left to "Leftover" Left, one without any touch of nuance or complication, missing, for example, the way that the New Left was as much a rebellion against the Old Left as a continuation of it. In fact, of course, much of the left has always been patriotic: the DSOC convention which voted to merge with NAM, spontaneously burst into two songs in a row, "the Internationale" and "God Bless America." As Warren Sussman, briefly mentioned in this book, pointed out in a brilliant essay some three decades back, the "popular front" culture of the 1930s became the "basic culture" of post-war America. The ideas of a bunch of left wing left coast New York Jewish exiles were as much the basis of Ronald Reagan's thought as they were of Ronald Radosh's. Most of the wolves who put on sheep's clothing became sheep. The fact that a weirdly deformed version of the New Left lingers on in academia is not of importance to anyone but academic careerists, and damages academia more than it damages the rest of the United States. And it provides useful polemical ammunition for the Right without adding any strength to the Left. Radosh can't get a job in academia, which is now dominated by various kinds of leftists. But the academic left is just a xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, a sort of blurry copy of what was once powerful. When Whittaker Chambers or Arthur Koestler took on Stalin, they were risking life, limb and exile, fighting a vast centralized organization run from Moscow. For Ronald Radosh to be fighting the history department at George Washington University is just a tad less dangerous. This book is most valuable for its account of the important strand of the New Left that came directly from the Old Left; it is weakest in accounting for the varying strength of the various lefts over time, and in its lack of emotional understanding of the wide variety of positions and attitudes that have always characterized American politics.