THE
FORMULA
Like
any form of genre literature, the ex-Commie confessional
consists of a single formula endlessly repeated in all
its variations and levels of quality: a young ideologue
devotes himself to the zealotry of his youth with single-minded
passion, until some catalytic event opens his eyes, and,
like
Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, he suddenly sees
the anti-Communist light. Not that there isn't plenty
of foreshadowing, at least in the best of them: a series
of clashes with the Party leadership that underscore the
dogmatic rigidity of a totalitarian cult and the author's
own growing doubts. Although these authors exhibit varying
degrees of repentance, and offer a wide range of reasons
why they served a master they now see as evil, the ending,
in any case, is usually pretty unambiguous: his rejection
of Marxism leads to the hero's redemption, and a new beginning
as an ideologue of the Right – but not always.
TRANSFERENCE
OR TRANSCENDENCE
The
best of these God That Failed books display at least some
ambiguity, not in their abhorrence of Communism but in
what comes to take its place. Some merely transfer the
fanaticism and knee-jerk reactions to their new loyalties,
and become an inverted version of their former selves.
(David Horowitz, author of Radical
Son, and now a right-wing activist, comes to mind.)
Others, like Arthur
Koestler, more chastened by their disillusionment,
and less willing to be seduced by ideology, maintain a
stance that is chiefly critical, rather than affirmative:
their future development remains a question mark, and
their politics take on the tentative quality of a work-in-progress.
The former tend to be insufferably self-righteous, hectoring
their former comrades while revealing their secrets, and
making themselves look good – or as good as possible,
under the circumstances. On the other hand, the Koestlers
and Chambers', the stars of this subgenre, are not only
unsparing when it comes to themselves, but they are also
invariably better writers, who often succeed in transcending
the formulaic character of their by-now-familiar narratives.
I am relieved and pleased to report that Radosh's volume
falls into the second category.
DESTINY'S
CHILD
One
common characteristic of these ex-Commie confessionals
is that the protagonist seems almost destined to play
the role of the disillusioned idealist, the acolyte whose
God turned out to be a demon. In most cases, the author
is simply born into a left-wing milieu, and this was the
case with Radosh. Both his parents were among a wave of
Central European and Russian immigrants who came to the
United States in the decade before World War I and whose
baggage contained a commitment to socialism and, it seems,
little in the way of material possessions. It was they
who inculcated him in the doctrines of the Left, who sent
him to Commie summer camps, and they who embarrassed him
to no end with their (and the other parents') seemingly
endless confrontations with the Irish Catholic teachers
of PS 173: over "Negro History Week," over the playing
of a Paul Robeson record, over an award given to the school
by the politically incorrect Daughters of the American
Revolution. His portrait of them is loving, but there
is an undercurrent of resentment – annoyance, really –
that runs throughout Radosh's early chapters, as he details
the effect this kind of upbringing had on his life.
THROUGH
THE LOOKING GLASS
This
is not bitterness, however, or condemnation, but an ability
to see through the illusions of youth with the pitiless
clarity of a fully-matured and slightly bemused adult.
And there is that essential ingredient, humor –
largely missing from this generally grim literature –
albeit of an ironic, even puckish sort. Writing about
life at Commie summer camp, Radosh comes up with this
insightful and funny anecdote that captures the sense
that Communists were (and are) aliens in their own land:
"At
Woodland, the competitive teams were divided into different
nations. Of course, everyone vied for the honor of being
with either the USSR or the People's Republic of China
(never called Red China in our camp). The losers who were
given the USA team could only sulk over their bad luck."
What
a strange, upside-down sort of world to have been born
into!
THE
LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE
Radosh's
smooth narrative flow takes us easily from Commie kindergarten
through summer camp and the "little Red schoolhouse" of
the Elisabeth
Irwin School in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. EI,
as he calls it, was the only school where teachers could
be hired without an extensive background check and without
having to take the "loyalty oath" required by New York's
Feinberg
Law. It was only natural that our young Red – who
had by this time been lured into the youth section of
the Communist Party, the Labor
Youth League (LYL) – should enter this milieu. His
tenure there – 1949-55 – defined the darkest days of the
Cold War, and we get a sense of that here, as Radosh relates
the decision to rescind an invitation to W.
E. B. Du Bois to speak at his graduation. Unlike some
other ex-Commies, who write approvingly of the political
repression of those years, Radosh never endorses repressive
measures, but merely notes them, quoting from his FBI
file and informing us that he was targeted for indefinite
detention in case of a "crisis" involving the Soviet Union.
SONGS
FOR JOHN DOE
We
get a sense, also, of the importance of music to the Communist-"progressive"
milieu in those days; the songs that were sung at Commie
camp (Radosh retains enough of his objectivity to describe
one Chinese Communist anthem as "wonderful") were an important
aspect of the left-wing movement, and this was especially
true of folk music. Mary Travers, of Peter,
Paul, and Mary fame, was one of his classmates, and
he recalls hanging around the Village and going to gatherings
where Pete
Seeger strummed his guitar for the enjoyment of the
assembled comrades. Seeger, described by Communist Party
hack writer Mike Gold as "the Karl Marx of the teenagers,"
was, for the youthful Radosh, a hero. Disdainfully citing
a Washington Post piece describing Seeger as "America's
best-loved Commie," he notes that his youthful hero received
a Kennedy Center Honors award in 1995, as well as a Medal
of Honor in the Arts from Bill Clinton. He goes on to
bitterly remark:
"But
somehow, the award makers forgot to tell everyone about
Seeger's most famous record . . . Songs for John
Doe. Released during the week in June 1941 when
Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR,
the antiwar album was filled with hard-hitting songs that
called for no intervention in European battles on behalf
of British imperialism, and condemned Roosevelt as a warmongering
fascist who worked for J. P. Morgan. "I hate war,' went
a rollicking verse to the tune of 'Jesse James.' Another,
written to the melody of an old country tune, 'Cripple
Creek,' proclaimed 'Franklin D., Franklin D., you ain't
gonna send us 'cross the sea.'"
WHICH
PARTY?
"It
was," he concludes, "pure party-line propaganda" – but
then again that depends on which party you belong to.
For those lyrics get my toes a-tappin', as they
would any right-wing
America Firster then or now. The story Radosh tells
of the fate of Songs
for John Doe really underscores the utter hypocrisy
and cynicism of the pro-Soviet Left, in this country and
around the world. For when Hitler attacked the Soviet
Union, the party line changed instantly and suddenly "The
Yanks Are Not Coming" was transformed, on their
picket signs, to "We're On Our Way – the sooner the better!"
Radosh relates how the now politically incorrect album
was recalled, and "all pressings were destroyed, leaving
only a few for posterity."
A
SONG
Ah,
but due to the miracle of the Internet, this song is not
lost to posterity: the lyrics are available right
here, and it makes me want to sing out loud:
Franklin
D., listen to me,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea.
You
may say it's for defense,
But that kinda talk that I'm against.
I'm against, I'm against,
That kinda talk ain't got no sense.
Lafayette,
we are here,
we're gonna stay right over here...
Marcantonio is the best,
but I wouldn't give a nickel
for all the rest...
J.
P. Morgan's big and plump,
eighty-four inches around the rump...
Wendell
Wilkie and Franklin D.,
seems to me they both agree,
Both agreed, both agreed,
Both agree on killin' me.
A
MYSTERY (I)
Why,
that kind of music has a whole new kind of market: the
legions of people, many of them on the Right side of the
political spectrum, who don't hold FDR up as some sort
of saint, have come to question the mythology of the "good
war," and consider themselves latter-day descendants of
the old America Firsters. This is a tradition of which
Radosh is perfectly well aware: he is, after all, the
author of Prophets
on the Right: Conservative Critics of American Globalism
(1976), in which he recalls the America First movement,
recounts the story of such Old Right "isolationist" heroes
as John
T. Flynn, and includes even a sympathetic sketch of
the much-maligned Lawrence
Dennis. Yet nowhere is the existence of this book
acknowledged in the present work, not even in the short
list of his works on the flyleaf. This is a bit strange,
if only because the wisdom contained in that book seems
to hold the answer to so many of the political points
raised by Radosh in his present incarnation as a (sort
of) neo-conservative.
A
MYSTERY (II)
I
say "sort of" because, unlike the rest of that rather
warlike species, whose shrike-like cries can always be
heard above the din of any international crisis, shrieking
for war, Radosh regrets his role in the antiwar movement
without really coming out for the Vietnam war.
He recounts his youthful reaction to Norman
Thomas, who made a speech against the war in which
he declared that he had not come to burn the American
flag but to cleanse it: "But for radicals like myself,
that proved he was a sellout," since the US was inherently
evil and the terrorism of the Vietcong inherently "virtuous."
In retrospect, the older-and-wiser Radosh can view his
younger self's anti-Americanism with the disdain it deserves,
but how Radosh views the issue of the war from his new
vantage point remains somewhat mysterious.
SOCIALIST
LOBOTOMIES
The
beginning of Radosh's disillusionment with the socialist
faith was clearly his visit to Cuba, in which several
disturbing aspects of Cuban society became readily apparent.
This is vividly dramatized, in the book, when Radosh and
his Commie friends visit a Cuban mental hospital. One
of their group remarks to a doctor that the patients seem
unusually well-behaved, even serene. Have they, perhaps,
been heavily tranquilized? The doctor declares that this
serenity is due to a great medical innovation made possible
by integrating the science of mental health with the science
of Marxism-Leninism: lobotomies! "We are proud,"
proclaimed the Cuban Dr. Mengele, "that in our institution,
we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have
been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the
world"! Afterward, the American comrades got into a heated
discussion, with one horrified American therapist noting
"It's exactly what we're working against at home!" Castro
loyalist Suzanne Ross – then with the Indochina Peace
Campaign, who later went on the found the Committee in
Solidarity with the Peoples of El Salvador (CISPES) –
glared at the dissenters, and said: "We have to understand
that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies
and socialist lobotomies."
COMMIE
BILE
Radosh
failed to see any difference, and went home to write an
article in which his doubts and dissent were expressed:
what seems to have struck him with force equal to the
"socialist lobotomies" conundrum was the viciousness and
bile of the attacks that followed the publication of his
piece in Liberation. "There is some good in everything,"
went a typical letter to Liberation. "The blockade
of Cuba kept the intellectual paws of Professor Ronald
Radosh off the Cuban people for fifteen years." The other
members of his delegation published a reply in the following
issue, "Some of Us Had a Different Trip," filled with
nothing but praise for "the first Free Territory of America."
Cuba, they averred, is more democratic than the US. Radosh
was shocked by this mindless apologia, but not enough
to make his break, at least not yet. . . .
DRIFTING
INTO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
After
the Vietnam war ended, the Left was in a quandary: what
now? What next? Radosh and his friends on the Left seemed
to drift: the short-lived "New American Movement," which
he and his less dogmatic friends in the former New Left
organized, went nowhere. Eventually, Radosh joined the
group led by Michael Harrington, the Democratic
Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), when the two
groups merged, and this was a big step: for a self-styled
radical to make the leap into the Social Democracy was
a kind of coming of age, a stopover for many on their
journey from Left to Right. Some lingered there for many
years, never giving up the appellation "socialist" – although
their militant "anti-Stalinism" had by this time become
a commitment to an aggressive foreign policy of "rolling
back" the Soviet Union in cooperation with the US State
Department and its intelligence apparatus. (Thus the phrase
"State Department socialist.") But Radosh, it seems, did
not tarry long.
THE
ROSENBERG FILE
Radosh's
revisionist book on the celebrated case of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, The
Rosenberg File, forever exiled him from the world
of his youth – the world of the Left, where the Rosenbergs
were innocent, the victims of anti-Communist hysteria
and anti-Semitism, martyrs who deserved to be honored.
In his youth he had believed this myth, and he still believed
it when he undertook to write a lengthy piece for the
New York Times Magazine on the case. The occasion
was the release of the FBI's Rosenberg files, documents
which led Radosh to one inescapable conclusion, one that
has
been verified by the opening of the Soviet archives:
the Rosenbergs were guilty as hell.
TRUTH
VS. IDEOLOGY
Radosh,
committed to truth over ideology, compiled the facts,
wrote the story, got it approved by the editors and the
editorial board – only to see it quashed by A. M. Rosenthal,
the Times' editor-in-chief. Since Radosh criticized
the death sentence handed down in that case, Rosenthal
was afraid that this would enrage Judge Irving R. Kaufman
– who had handed down that decision – who just happened
to be the Court of Appeals judge who usually heard press
cases. "The Hidden Rosenberg Case: How the FBI Framed
Ethel to Break Julius" appeared in the June 23, 1979 issue
of The New Republic, and, again, it was the reaction
of the Left that left its lasting impression on the author.
One of the people mentioned in the article sued Radosh
and his co-author, along with TNR, for defamation.
The case was thrown out of court, but the sheer viciousness
of the response must have been shocking. His old friends
on the Left turned against him almost to a man and woman:
and when the article was expanded into a book, the response
was even more frenzied. An element affiliated with the
Communist Party accused him of "apologizing" for anti-Semitism,
and his social democratic friends were likewise none too
pleased with The Rosenberg File. DSOC was supposedly
anti-Communist, but when approached for support none of
them would have anything to do with promoting or endorsing
the book. Irving
Howe declined all appeals for support. So did Michael
Harrington, who explained "I always knew they were
guilty, but we're trying to get former Communists who
have left the Party but are still pro-Soviet into our
organization, and I can't do anything to alienate them."
Yes, but he could and did alienate Radosh – whose membership
in DSOC lapsed, if it wasn't terminated.
TURNING
POINT
Radosh
had come a long way since his days as a college organizer
for the Labor Youth League: from the New Left to a vague
anti-Stalinism that owed more to Isaac
Deutscher than Leon
Trotsky, to an idiosyncratic social democratic sensibility
that defied easy categorization. His last fling with the
Left was the "solidarity" movement that sprung up in response
to US intervention in Central America in the 1980s, not
only in El Salvador but also in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas
were lionized on the Left, much as Fidel Castro and his
ragged guerrilla army were upheld as the new symbols of
a revolutionary generation in the heyday of the radicalized
1960s. The repression against domestic dissidents, Miskito
Indians and trade unionists, was ignored by the Left or
else rationalized as "revolutionary." Radosh writes that
he wanted the Sandinistas to succeed, and hoped that a
"welfare state" would grow out of their movement, and
not a replica of Stalinist Cuba. But the Rosenberg case
had taught him, he says, to be skeptical of the Left:
they had been wrong about the Rosenbergs – why not about
the Sandinistas, too? He traveled to Nicaragua with representatives
of the Puebla
Institute, and on his return his press conference
at which Sandinista human rights violations were documented
and exposed, was completely blacked out. Acerbically noting
that the Sandinistas were engaging in "the same kind of
resettlement policy that the Left had accused the United
States of using in Vietnam," Radosh notes that the big
difference this time was that "the Left was completely
silent."
THE
CONTRAS
It
is one thing to oppose whitewashing the crimes of the
Sandinistas, and quite another to advocate aiding the
so-called contras – the US-supported-and-subsidized
armed force that was engaged in overthrowing them. Radosh
explains his transition from a principled noninterventionist
to an advocate of contra aid as follows:
"As
a result of what I observed on the trip, I eventually
became a firm supporter of contra aid. While congressional
liberals were waging a campaign to cut off all such military
aid, I had come to understand that it was only the threat
of a fully capable contra army that made the Sandinista
leaders even contemplate any internal loosening up."
NO
THIRD FORCE?
As
to why such an army could not arise indigenously, and
overthrow the Sandinistas without being turned into the
sock puppet of the Americans, is a question that contra
aid supporters could not answer then, and will not address
today. For the answer is that there was, indeed, such
an army, one led by Commandante Eden
Pastora, the leader of the original army that overthrew
the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Pastora was a
popular hero who sought to use his political weight to
organize a third force, one committed to political pluralism
that would be independent of both the US and Moscow. For
his trouble he was targeted by the CIA and marked for
assassination, barely escaping with his life to Costa
Rica, where, today, he is a fisherman. But for Radosh,
it was and is a black-and-white issue, the contras versus
the Sandinistas, with no room for a third force.
RADOSH
GOES INTERVENTIONIST
Radosh,
by this time, was looking at the world through a Cold
War lens. He writes that "Indeed, not only hard leftists
but also Democratic liberals favored [the Sandinista]
regime on the ground that it was immoral to intervene
in Nicaragua's internal affairs." Only the Republicans,
he muses, were sympathetic to the cause of human rights
in Nicaragua. So Radosh returned to the US and wrote another
article, this time openly supporting contra aid.
The Sandinistas had declared that even if they lost an
election they would never give up power: this, says Radosh,
was the final straw, and his stand was now clear: contra
aid was a "precondition" for peace in the region.
AN
ARTICLE OF FAITH
What
Radosh leaves out, however, is that the Sandinistas did
not keep their promise: they did lose an
election, and they did give up power. So, was contra
aid still justified? Radosh does not bother to answer
such an obvious question, but instead goes on to write
that the Sandinistas fell into the trap of believing their
own propaganda: they thought they could win an election
because the people supported them. Of course, the election
was held, say interventionists, only because of military
pressure, and that pressure could only have come from
the United States, but this must remain an article of
faith, and an especially tenuous one at that, considering
that the US did its best to squelch anti-Sandinista elements
it could not control, such as Pastora.
A
JARRING NOTE
Radosh
has been the recipient of admiring reviews from nearly
everyone on the Right, with only
one jarring note, and that from National Review.
Roger Clegg, general counsel of something called the "Center
for Equal Opportunity" (sounds like a neocon outfit
to me!) wrote in an otherwise admiring review:
"Laughing
at one's foibles and youthful mistakes is fine, but it's
hard to expect others to laugh along with too much enthusiasm
when the foibles were treason and the mistakes nearly
ruined the country and the world. I don't think Radosh
would disagree with my assertion of his perfidy or the
high stakes: His reaction at the time to the collapse
of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was, "We had won in Vietnam!,"
and he later concludes that "the only accomplishments
[of the Left] were famine, gulags and mass death. Suppose
a Nazi wrote a light-hearted memoir about the amusing
hijinks within the Third Reich, but how he ultimately
became disillusioned with mass murder. That's harsh, I
know, and Radosh is no mass murderer. But he did take
the side of the mass murderers. And, as Stephen Schwartz
writes in his review of Radosh's book in a recent print
issue of National Review, Radosh 'evinces something
close to nostalgia for the enthused innocence with which
he once embraced the Leninist cause.' It was springtime,
for Stalin, in America."
