Marxism to Reaganism: Odyssey of a Turnabout

Forget former yippie Jerry Rubin’s modern love affair with stock-marketing. Forget Eldridge Cleaver’s born-again conservatism. David Horowitz--the ex-1960s New Left intellectual, not the TV consumer-rights crusader--is “the leading defector” of his generation, Frank Browning says in Mother Jones.

Horowitz’s ideological conversion is pretty amazing. Raised by parents who were unswerving Communist Party members, by 26 he had written books on Marxism and the origins of the Cold War that were greatly influencing young 1960s radicals. By 1967 he was an editor at muckraking Ramparts magazine and an ardent ally of the Black Panthers.

But through the ‘70s, when he co-wrote two successful biographies on the Rockefeller and the Kennedy families with Peter Collier, he grew increasingly critical of the Soviet Union and the American Left. Today he supports President Reagan and the Nicaraguan contras and admonishes his former comrades for being “self-righteous and blind” in their belief that they “are part of a movement to advance human progress and liberate mankind.”

Browning does a good job of tracking Horowitz’s odyssey and trying to understand how a man of such “broad reading and intelligence” could “subscribe to the simple nostrums of Ronald Reagan.” The political and psychological content is high. But there’s plenty of spice too, including a Russian agent, a murder, sex, cameos by Tom Hayden and Huey Newton and provocative quotes from Horowitz, his mother and other witnesses to various stages of Horowitz’ strange and interesting odyssey from Marxist to Reaganite.

THE WORLD

It’s 2 1/2 times larger than the Glendale phone book--700 richly illustrated pages virtually unspoiled by an ad. It costs $10 an issue and it means business with its subtitle--”A Chronicle of Our Changing Era.”

The Washington Times puts out the oddly named World & I, which means that the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon lurks somewhere in the background (though with no direct financial or editorial connections, assures magazine Executive Editor Michael J. Marshall).

Part news magazine, part National Geographic, part encyclopedia, its politics are solidly conservative and religiously anti-communist. April’s special report devotes 35 pages to discussing various aspects of the stirring of democratic economic and political reforms in China.

A report on the Philippines and interviews with its major political figures by editor Morton Kaplan consumes 18 pages. Two experts debate welfare reform. There’s an analysis of the war between Chad and Libya. Commentaries. Beautiful photo spreads. Long pieces by experts and scholars on such things as the cave dwellers of the Tunisian desert.

The 118-page book section includes a 26-page excerpt from Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife.” Currents in Modern Thought argues about lessons of the Vietnam War for 80 pages. Global in view and overwhelming in scope, the World & I is aimed at the educated reader and is designed to be kept.

BITS AND PIECES

U.S. News & World Report is the first of the major print media to mark the bicentennial of the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Its spread includes a story written as if a major newsweekly had covered “the Miracle at Philadelphia” (where 55 delegates deliberated in absolute secrecy that spring and hot summer of 1789) and an essay by Harold Evans of Britain. Evans, quite astutely, believes the government gridlock that often results from our Constitution’s system of checks and balances is not a bad thing at all. It’s saved us some “domestic turmoil and foreign misadventure, and protected minorities from oppressive majorities.” The spring Wilson Quarterly’s more scholarly approach tosses in the original text and its amendments. . . . U2, which seems to be the unanimous choice of rock critics as the band of the ‘80s, hasn’t hurt its case by landing on the covers of Rolling Stone, Musician and Time. . . . Nemo: the Classic Comics Library, a bimonthly (4359 Cornell Road, Agoura, Calif. 91301), is an intelligent work of love dedicated to preserving the Golden Age of the comic strip. “Twelve Angry Men,” a survey of the most influential radical cartoonists of the Red-tinged era of 1905-1935, includes black-and-white reprints of their bitter, highly partisan cartoons. Nemo’s current issue also examines the long and multifaceted career of Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist whose drawings of absurdly complicated machines designed to accomplish simple tasks put him in the dictionary. Among the reprinted Goldberg cartoons are 10 pages of Boob McNutt strips from the 1920s. . . . Glamour’s survey of contraceptives explains how liability lawsuits have caused the disappearance of virtually all IUDs from the U.S. market and why experts are worrying that pressure from lawsuits may mean birth control “may ultimately become too professionally hazardous for American doctors to have anything to do with.” . . . The top 10 city and regional magazines by circulation, according to the industry’s Audit Bureau of Circulation: Southern Living (2.2 million), Sunset (1.4), Yankee (1.0), New York (428,000), California (358,000), Texas Monthly (283,000), Chicago (202,000), San Francisco Focus (198,000), Los Angeles (173,000) and Alaska (170,000). . . .