A Rebel Reborn

Scene 1. Berkeley the mid-’70s. Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. A short man is facing a large wall of titles but seeing only an abyss: A life lived according to the verities of Marxism has just turned into a menacing question mark, a sinking feeling that three decades of idealistic devotion might be no more true than a few books on a single shelf in an enormous store crammed with competing ideas. Blinded by a vision of creating a utopia in Oakland’s ghetto, he had introduced a friend to a group of thugs he had considered the revolutionary vanguard and now his friend is dead. Fade to black, the midnight of an uncertain soul.

Scene 2. Pacific Palisades in the present. A three-bedroom, sun-filled house with a view of the sea. His pretty young fiancee makes coffee; a plumber puts the finishing touches on a remodeled kitchen. The only thing disturbing this tableau of bourgeois bliss are the thick fingers thumping on the kitchen table.

“As a conservative, I believe we are the problem”--whack!--David Horowitz said, spittle flying from his mouth. “Government is the problem”--whack! “You have to have checks and balances everywhere to frustrate human orneriness”--whack!

“My basic change is my view of human nature,” the hoarse, Brooklyn voice continued, machine gun-like. “I see the left as being at war with human nature. The left thinks you can change people profoundly. The liberal culture is now the oppressor of minorities and the poor. . . . I believe in individual responsibility. Philosophically, I’m comfortable on the right.”

The certainties are back.

In the ‘60s, David Horowitz, who had been suckled on the milk of revolution by his Communist Party parents, was a theorist of the New Left; he hid a Black Panther wanted by the cops in his garage and decried U.S. imperialism. Then he converted. In the ‘80s, Horowitz came out for President Reagan, blamed ‘60s radicalism for shredding the social fabric of American society and launched a holy war against the left.

Since then, Horowitz, 57, has become a right-wing ancient mariner, stalking Hollywood to bring his born-again conservative message to the country’s counterculture capital. The ex-Marxist missionary now invites sitcom writers to lunch to listen to Robert Bork, the gloomy failed Supreme Court nominee, lecture them on how liberalism is ruining America. While his mother once branded him “megalomaniacal,” supply-side economics guru George Glider lauded his change of heart as “a new dawn in American intellectual life.”

Horowitz’s long, strange, torturous trip is the subject of his absorbing new memoir, “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey” (Free Press). The book is an intensely personal and painful chronicle of Horowitz’s utopian strivings, disillusionment and rebirth.

His conservative colleagues have been falling over one another to praise the book, with fellow former radical P.J. O’Rourke comparing it to Friedrich Hayek’s capitalist manifesto, “The Road to Serfdom.” In Reason magazine, Steve Hayward was not quite so impressed, noting that the odyssey “provides the key to understanding the fierce countenance of Horowitz’s current ventures, which even many of his ideological allies do not fully comprehend or approve.”

The book abounds in scathing portraits of New Left flamethrowers who went on to careers inside or close to the establishment: state Sen. Tom Hayden (“an angry man who seemed in perpetual search of enemies”), Tikkun magazine publisher and sometime Hillary Clinton advisor Michael Lerner (“intellectually slovenly” who once claimed, “Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is”) and L.A. Times contributing editor Robert Scheer (“the talented cynic, he explored the good life on the money he made decrying the evils of wealth”).

Among the firecrackers Horowitz tosses out is the contention that the New Left was at heart destructive radicalism. “From its beginnings,” he writes, “the New Left was not an innocent experiment in American utopianism, but a self-conscious effort to rescue the Communist project from its Soviet fate.”

To his many critics, Horowitz is less an insightful survivor from the shipwreck of the ‘60s than a bitter graybeard loon.

“Ridiculous, awful history; it’s simply laughable,” said New York University professor Todd Gitlin, author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage” (Bantam Books, 1987). “Horowitz is off the wall. Let him deal with his father but stop making things up. What Horowitz has done is to remain the same while changing his costumes; his style of thinking remains that everything is always black and white.”

“He was scary then and he’s scary now,” Lerner said. “The irony is that David was much more of whom he is criticizing than those around him. David lionized the Panthers in a fashion that was way out of proportion to others. He was committing the sins he’s now reviling other people for. The mass movement that most Americans encountered he had virtually no connection with.”

And, Scheer, who alleges a factual inaccuracy in virtually every sentence about him in the book, says that Horowitz drastically overstates both his own import and that of Berkeley to the New Left.

“Horowitz is basically a self-promoter,” Scheer said. “He can’t quite find the enemy. He’s fighting battles that most people don’t care about anymore.”

*

As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, David Horowitz and his father, Philip, would stroll through the neighborhood, the elder Horowitz pointing out streets named after businessmen and other enemies of the masses that would be renamed in honor of the people’s heroes after the revolution. Young Horowitz was baseball crazy; his Communist Party father derided the American pastime as capitalist exploitation.

Phil Horowitz was fired in 1952 for insubordination when he refused to talk about his political allegiance. He had been a teacher for 28 years and lost his pension. Blanche Horowitz, also a teacher and a party member, took a disability retirement and, at 60, went back to school, joined Planned Parenthood and founded a research library. At her retirement she was given the first Margaret Sanger Award, which today sits in her son’s study. Although both parents drifted out of the party, they remained true believers, and their son dedicated himself to their vision of a better world, an idealism he took with him after graduating from Columbia and driving his VW bug to Berkeley in 1957 for grad school.

Arrogant, shy and puritanical, Horowitz married his first love, Elissa, when he was 20. Although he shunned the sex and drugs that defined ‘60s liberation for many, he took part in one of the first protests against Vietnam. In 1962 he went off to England, where he lived until 1968, working with Bertrand Russell at his Peace Foundation.

Returning to the States, Horowitz became an editor at Ramparts, the flagship publication of the New Left, where he grew close to another editor, Peter Collier. Horowitz soon led an office coup against Scheer, then the top editor. To stretch the editorial budget, Horowitz put half the staff on unemployment until benefits expired, then rehired them and fired the other half. Eventually, the magazine floundered.

But Horowitz had found a new object for his political passion: the Black Panthers. He poured his energy into fund-raising and helped them build an alternative school in Oakland--even as the group’s reputation turned to that of a violent shakedown gang.

In 1974, a white bookkeeper whom Horowitz had helped to get a job at the Panther school disappeared: Betty Van Patter’s bludgeoned body was found a month later in the San Francisco Bay.

No one was ever charged in the killing, but Horowitz was convinced that the Panthers had killed her, which he said he heard from a disaffected member of the group. He began carrying a gun and smoldered over writers such as Gitlin, whom he views as an apologist for the Panthers.

“Here are people who get exercised about killings in East Timor, which they couldn’t find on a map,” he said. “But here was someone they knew. Nothing.”

He gave up on politics and on his lifelong habit of abnegation, discovering, in midlife, easy love and fast cars. With his old friend Collier, he wrote “The Rockefellers” (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), a best-selling saga that was followed by similar dynastic biographies on “The Kennedys” (Summit Books, 1984) and “The Roosevelts” (Simon & Schuster, 1994). His ever-stern father told him to stop wasting his talent and write a book about the coming revolution. Phil Horowitz died in 1984, followed by his wife in 1993; they were buried in a plot reserved for members of the International Workers Order.

Horowitz’s marriage, which had been strained by an affair with a Rockefeller heiress, fell apart after almost 20 years; he moved to L.A. and married twice more--the last time to a woman who, he writes, was a secret crack addict.

Soon Collier and Horowitz were out of the conservative closet, supporting aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and a hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union.

“I thought I would end up in the center but there was no center,” said Horowitz, who with graying but longish hair and goatee could pass as one of his reviled Marxist professors. “In politics you have to bite the bullet.”

Eventually Horowitz and Collier decided that if they couldn’t get the dominant liberal culture to listen to them, then they would have to change the culture. So they founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in an office in Horowitz’s house.

“In an odd way,” Collier said, “we are in the position in the ‘90s that we were in the ‘60s, in the counterculture kicking the culture in the shins.”

*

These days, Horowitz, who went 15 years without wearing a tie and then had to borrow one to interview a member of the Rockefeller clan, dons a suit and works in a glass office building on Pico Boulevard, where individual contributions and conservative foundations such as Bradley and Olin underwrite a staff of 17.

“When the center started it was something of a personal vehicle for Peter and me,” Horowitz said. Some might say it still is: The center’s newsletter reprints Horowitz’s op / ed pieces, articles about him and advertises his books. His six-figure salary gives him an institutional base and allows him time to compose polemics against affirmative action.

Although his enemies accuse him of following the prevailing wind, Horowitz said his apostasy has actually cost him money and influence. The New York Times Book Review, which once raved about his work on its cover, started burying his books in the back, he complained.

Last year the center helped put on an all-day conference at Paramount Studios, where 300 industry types listened to professional moralist William Bennett exhort them to be more responsible. The center also sponsors a monthly Wednesday Morning Club where participants, which have included actor Tom Selleck and “Cheers” writer-producer Rob Long, meet policymakers.

“My mission in Hollywood is just to create a civilized dialogue,” Horowitz explained. “Hollywood needs a two-party system because it needs to protect itself from government. You have to have voices that are not attached umbilically to Washington. I’m not on a crusade against Hollywood leftists. I’d like to create more toleration in Hollywood for conservatives.”

At the same time he fulminates that the Republican Party is too tepid in going after the left. “The right doesn’t understand the battle lines. They don’t have a mentality for battle.”

In “It’s a War Stupid,” a pocket-sized tract that a mogul could read while stuck in traffic, Horowitz and Collier urge the GOP to get mean. “The only party that has vocal racists among its elected officials is the Democratic Party,” they fume. “ . . . Republicans’ battle cry should have been: We seek to dismantle the death camps you have constructed in America’s inner cities.”

The center’s Individual Rights Foundation crusades for the First Amendment, defending, for example, fraternities that have run afoul of university speech codes. The center also publishes Heterodoxy, a zesty newsprint tabloid that Collier edits from his home in Nevada City.

Things seem to be looking up. Horowitz gets along well with his four children from his first marriage, although he doesn’t talk politics with them. He is engaged to a skin-care specialist he has been dating for two years, and has a full schedule of interviews to promote his memoir and a book contract for another installment on the Kennedy clan.

But Collier said his old friend just can’t stop storming the ramparts.

“I don’t want to make it melodramatic, but there’s a burden,” Collier said. “I think that weighs heavy on David. He likes the combat. I think he likes it doubly that he’s in combat with what we were. He has a desire to put his thumbprint on the world that’s fairly awesome.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

David Horowitz in the Cross-Fire

* “Horowitz is off the wall. Let him deal with his father but stop making things up.”Todd Gitlin: Author and New York University professor

* “He was scary then and he’s scary now.” Michael Lerner: Tikkun magazine publisher and sometime Hillary Clinton advisor

* “He can’t quite find the enemy. He’s fighting battles that most people don’t care about anymore.” Robert Scheer: Journalist