by Wes Wynne

David Horowitz's Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey

First published: 1997

468 pages

Available at local bookstores

Believe it or not, there are still some people - you can probably find a few in the English department here , at Democratic Party precinct meetings, or over at Quack's - who still don't believe there ever was a Communist conspiracy in the United States. Or, if there was some such movement, they believe it wasn't really a conspiracy to overthrow the US government, but rather just a misunderstood attempt by a marginalized band of red-blooded socialists to improve American democracy. If you, reader, fall into either of these categories, then stop here, because you're either in such a state of denial that nothing written now will disabuse you of the lie, or the revelations in David Horowitz's new book might simply be too much for you to bear in one sitting.

No one who's familiar with the history of the American left will be surprised by the description of the world of David Horowitz's youth in New York City from the Thirties to the Fifties. The true nature of the Communism in America was first documented publicly by Whittaker Chambers in 1952, and in case anyone slept through the remainder of the Cold War, documents revealed since then from behind the Iron Curtain have confirmed the story for anyone whose been listening.

David Horowitz was a red diaper baby. That's what the sons and daughters of American communists used to call themselves. His mother and father attended Communist Party meetings much like devout believers of another sort would attend religious services. And much like those parents would educate their own children into the belief system of Catholicism or Judaism, the parents of little David Horowitz exposed him to the litany of Marxism from an early age. But make no mistake , these folks weren't just talkers. Horowitz recalls, "Newspapers reported on American spy rings working to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet state. When people read these stories, they inevitably thought of progressives like us. And so did we ourselves. Even if we never encountered a Soviet agent or engaged in a single illegal act, each of us knew that our commitment to socialism implied the obligation to commit treason too."

The American media over the years have made much of the supposed inhumanity of the anti-Communist black list of the 1950s, yet Horowitz describes a similar mechanism used to punish violators of Party discipline. He relates one incident where a Party member's son brought a recording of Paul Robeson (a popular singer before he announced his communist sympathies) to kindergarten to share with classmates. The teacher refused to play it. The mother of the child was instructed to go to the teacher and demand that the record be played. She refused to do so,fearing the effects the move would have on her child. For this act of minor insubordination, the woman was expelled from the Party. As the author tells it, "In keeping with Party rules, this meant not only that the woman would no longer be a member of the Party, but that no Party member could speak to her, on penalty of also being expelled. In her heart the woman was still a Communist, and believed in the Party's cause and its truth. But now, at the height of the Cold War, with no

Summing up the politics of his upbringing, Horowitz recalls, "My parents and their comrades were indeed conspirators, as anyone could see who cared to look. Their secret names and secret organizations, the elaborate network of front organizations they created to camouflage their agendas, their practice of infiltrating and subverting liberal organizations, and the disingenuousness with which they presented themselves as "progressives" all added up to a suspicious case. And in their hearts they were indeed loyal to the Soviet state."

place of refuge in sight, she was cast out with her family, and cut off from her closest friends and political comrades. It was a fate worse than losing one's job, a nightmare greater than any the McCarthyites could inflict."

Mario Savio, who led the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, was inspired to move there by Horowitz's 1962 book, Student, the first book published about the New Left. Savio, living in New York at the time, saw it on a rack in a drugstore, read most of it on the spot, and told himself, "Berkeley is the place" to be. After his own stint as a graduate student at Berkeley, Horowitz and his wife moved on to Europe for a spell. In 1965, he published another noteworthy tome, The Free World Colossus, which he describes as "the first left-wing history of the Cold War that could not be tainted as the work of a Soviet apologist."

After returning to the United States, Horowitz again settled in California, where he remained a leading figure in the New Left. He served for a time as editor of Ramparts, the flagship publication of the hard left in the 1960s. Most important to the later turn of events in his life was his involvement with the Black Panthers, the most celebrated radical group of the generation. The Panthers were first organized by a street thug by the name of Huey Newton. Newton gained an international reputation in the Sixties and early Seventies for what appeared from the outside as a strong ideological commitment to justice. But in truth, as time has revealed, the Black Panthers never strayed far from their street gang origins.

Behind the various charities that were run in the Panthers' name existed a black mafia involved in drugs and characterized by murderous discipline. Horowitz unknowingly recommended a friend, Betty Van Patter, for a job helping the Panthers with the accounting work for their various organizations. She started asking questions. Too many. One day she disappeared, her body being found weeks later after having been murdered.

Slowly the reality of the leftist program began to dawn on Horowitz as he began to recognize the indifference with which Van Patter's murder was regarded by his revolutionary colleagues. The increasing evidence that the Panthers were responsible for the murder was ignored and dismissed, often with hostility.

Over a period of years, Horowitz began to re-evaluate his own life and the political ideals he embraced against the political realities they had created. In 1984, concerned with the continuing spread of Communism, he voted for Ronald Reagan. Speaking to a group of leftists, he announced, "I make no apologies for my present position. It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now."

Horowitz's transformation is far too complex to be adequately described in a short review, but the book is worth the read on that count alone. His story is personal as well as political. Running through it entirely is his lifelong struggle with a father disillusioned by the radicalism of his own generation and jealous of his son's success. Yet Horowitz laments that his own disregard for conservative values led to misery in his own family. Perhaps his book will provide the wisdom to prevent others from repeating his mistakes.

by Wes Wynne

Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus

First published: 1993

180 pages

Available at Half Price Books

The first indication that Katie Roiphe might have anything interesting to say is the perfectly dismal reception her 1993 book received from radical feminist reviewers. Written with irreverence and subtle scorn for current feminist dogma, The Morning After is a volume of thoughtful, penetrating impressions about the feminist movement's influence on sex and college life in the '90s. Its author, who at the time of publication was a twenty-five year old Harvard graduate studying English literature at Princeton, emerged as a committed renegade.

The book is shelved under "Women's Studies" but upon seeing it the first time one immediately suspects that Roiphe is not someone who would go on to teach in a women's studies department: the blurb inside the cover proves that she would not be hired in such a setting. Roiphe, an astute and articulate mind, does not march in step with the fads of academic feminist folly.

Marching, incidentally, is part of what the book ex-

Make no mistake, Roiphe is a feminist, but she is puzzled and bothered by what she sees parading itself as feminism in the 90's.

amines. To begin her analysis the author investigated what has become almost a holiday on many elite college campuses, the "Take Back the Night" rallies held each spring. During these annual rituals, which first appeared in the early '80s, students and others join in solidarity to denounce date rape and to tell their stories of victimization. They rally to fight fear, patriarchy and low self esteem. As the author describes the events, they must be a religious experience for those who participate. But it is a very angry religious experience, and a very odd one considering who the marchers are; one doubts whether a caste of woman ever lived that was more privileged or more secure than the students of elite American colleges.

The thesis of Roiphe's book is that something has gone very wrong with American feminism in the past decade or so, and all the sound and fury swirling around date rape and sexual harassment signify the existence of the crisis. Make no mistake, Roiphe is a feminist, but she is puzzled and bothered by what she sees parading itself as feminism in the 90's. The feminism she grew up with and embraces is something that most people in their twenties accept as a normal way of life. It holds that women should be able to have careers and run for office, and receive equal pay for the work they do. Such garden variety stuff, however, is not the leading edge of the women's move

ment, which views American society as a culture of rape and unrelenting oppression, rotten to its misogynistic core.

To put it plainly, Roiphe sees no evidence of a rape crisis, other than an imaginary one dreamed up by ideologues, some of whom believe that literally all sex is rape. For instance, the author exposes one highly respected date rape study which affirmed that 25 percent of college women are victims of rape or attempted rape. But in that study, it so happens that 73 percent of the women categorized as victims by the researcher (a committed feminist) did not define what happened to them as rape. 42 percent of those classified as victims went on to again have sex with the alleged "offender."

Why such willing distortions? And why so much indignation these days over unwanted looks and dirty jokes? The answers are complex, but the marches, inflated statistics and frenzied protest all mean something, Roiphe maintains. They fulfill a need, and we should listen less to what the activists say than why they say it. Emerging sexuality is a terrifying thing to deal with in the first place but students on the cusp of adulthood today are barraged by more mixed messages than ever. "Warnings about sexual harassment and sexual disease compete with wanton images of sexual freedom," the author notes. With such schizophrenic signals, it is no wonder the confusion surrounding sexuality creates anxiety.

The new feminism offers young women a satisfying way to put into perspective all their sexual doubts and anxieties, Roiphe believes. The date rape "crisis" provides a manufactured danger that serves to justify the fears of one's own sexuality. And the idea of sexual harassment provides an enemy on which to blame the emotional discomfort.

The author ventures that "sexual harassment offers an ideology that explains `uncomfortable' in political terms. [It] displaces adolescent uneasiness onto the environment, onto professors, onto older men." In a society in which being victimized has become a source of status, feminist claims of victimization become a source of authority and power.

Sexual apprehension has not been dissipated by contemporary feminism, however; it has merely become institutionalized. College administrations have been hopelessly collusive in generating the climate of fear, Roiphe observes. The endless sex-ed workshops, the solemn warnings at orientations, the installation of campus emergency phones with blue lights on top - all receive the stamp of administrative approval. "People may have always been scared walking around campuses late at night," Roiphe reflects, "but now, bathed in blue light, they are officially scared." She worries what happens to some women who spend four years in the cloistered atmosphere of the rape-sensitive, harassment-sensitive college campus. Perhaps they become needlessly embittered and fragile through it all, and far less prepared to deal with the post-college world.

To Roiphe, what is worst about the contemporary feminism is that it unwittingly recreates the very stereotypes that her mother tried to escape. The movement has begun to infantilize women, reinforcing the image of the naive, innocent woman-child. It reinvigorates the Victorian perception of women as helpless creatures who need protection from the wiles of the male sexual beast. Indeed, driving this point home, the author compares modern feminist pamphlets on dating to passages from 19th century manners guides for young ladies. The parallels are obvious and comical.

I don't recall whether the phrase "political correctness" is even mentioned in the book, but it is clear that such is precisely what the author encountered at Harvard and Princeton. She recalls, " . . . I was surprised at how many things there were not to say, at the arguments and assertions that could not be made, lines that could not be crossed, taboos that could not be broken." Wonderfully, Roiphe proceeded to break those rules with relish by publishing an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which she frankly questioned the existence of the date rape crisis. Her feminist comrades responded by jointly writing and posting a tract denouncing her views. Further, "Even though we all had classes together, they had decided that to look at me or speak to me would be to betray the cause." Hooray for Katie Roiphe!

The book includes a delightful series of vignettes of the various kinds of feminist students whom the author encountered in her college years. There are self-absorbed dieters who gossip about boys yet rant about patriarchy. There is a careerist graduate student for whom feminism is more a professional stepping stone than an ideological commitment. There is a sensitive, awkward young man who like a penitent sinner left the world of sexism behind to spread the feminist gospel with a group of activists.

Most touching is a sullen, waifish girl at Harvard named Sarah. Sarah is infuriated when a male professor compliments her hairstyle; she is ever-disappointed that the reading lists contain too few women authors; she is tortured daily over the idea that somewhere in the world, at this moment, animals are being injured and children molested. What Roiphe portrays in Sarah is a psychologically inflexible, miserable, young woman - almost a stereotype of the hard-core neurotic with whom Woody Allen populates the backdrop of his films. To the psychiatrically inclined the question about Sarah may not be whether she will ever be hospitalized, but when.

One wonders just how many Sarahs today's distorted feminism is producing. At least there are women who unafraid to challenge its orthodoxies. The Morning After is brave and incisive, and more illumination shines from this slender volume than from all the candles lit at Take Back the Night. The work is still timely, and potentially healing. I hope that it will continue to have impact. Katie Roiphe's feminism is a feminism we can live with. It is a feminism of common sense.