A New Left and old memoriesIn his...

A New Left and old memories

In his April 6 review of “Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent” by Gerald Sorin, Ronald Radosh associates me with those members of the presumptuously self-titled “New Left” of the 1960s who rejected excluding Communists from membership, and who also “identified with Third World Marxist revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro” as well as rejecting “any form of anti-communism, including Howe’s left-wing variety.”

Radosh writes that when he “stormed out” of a debate between Irving Howe and Tom Hayden on Howe’s anti-communism, I joined Radosh in indignant protest of the “obstinacy and irrelevance of the old social democrats.”

Having grown up during the Depression in a Boston neighborhood where the conservatives were FDR Democrats and members of the Communist Party abounded, at 15 I read Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” Forevermore, I knew the irrevocable connections between means, ends, politics and freedom. As an implacable anti-Communist henceforth, I opposed Castro from the onset of his ascendancy when he summarily put his opponents before a firing squad.

And later, meeting Che Guevara when he was in New York, I was pleased to irritate him by asking whether he foresaw any time in the future when there would be free elections in Cuba. He did not.

Furthermore, as a compulsive civil libertarian from age 15 on, how could I have ever disagreed with Irving Howe for sharing my conviction that democratic socialism’s mortal enemy was communism.

I do not remember storming out of any place with Ronald Radosh, but if I did, it wasn’t out of comradeship with Radosh’s then anti-anti-communist views. I was glad he changed those views, as I have told him, and I hope his memory of the old wars on the Left improves.

Nat Hentoff

New York