faith is to invite expulsion from its utopia and the fellowship of its community, and forever after to be shunned as a person morally unfit for decent company. This is a daunting prospect that discourages challenges to its orthodoxy and keeps its adherents in line. This reality makes the narrative of one who departed its ranks not only a deeply personal document but also a political text.
Part I
In December 1974, my life was forever altered when members of the Black Panther Party murdered a bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter whom I had recruited to keep accounts for a Panther school I had helped to create. The tragedy threw me into a personal crisis, creating an ideological turmoil that was compounded five months later by the bloodbath in Southeast Asia following the Communist victory in Vietnam. The state of distress into which I was thrown by these events was such that for more than a decade I did not engage in any political activities. During this period I took time to reflect on the beliefs that had guided me and then betrayed me, and I tried to figure out how I was going to function without them. In 1979, I had dinner in Berkeley with the leftwing author E. L. Doctorow, whose novel about the Rosenbergs had referenced one of my books. I told him of my concerns about the left, and he suggested I write them up for The Nation on whose board he sat. The result was an article I called “Left Illusions,” which The Nation retitled “A Radical’s Disenchantment.” It put my doubts before a community with whom I still identified but was getting ready to leave, though I was still reluctant to concede that, even to myself.
My formal departure came in 1985 with the publication of our divorce-notice in The Washington Post. The following year I wrote “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist,” a more personal explanation of the events behind my turn. It was published in another progressive venue, The Village Voice, and is included as the second chapter in this volume. The decision to write the article was a particularly difficult one because it was the first public statement I had made about the murder. In publishing it I was concerned first of all about the safety of my family since the killers were still at large (as they are today). The fear was great enough that I did not name the individuals I believed responsible. This was something I would eventually do seven years later in a lengthy autobiographical article “Black Murder, Inc.,” which is included as chapter five in the present text.
My intention in publishing “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist” in a leftwing paper like the Voice was to encourage its readers to have second thoughts and to warn them about the dangers of failing to have them. What I elicited instead was an anathema upon myself—an excommunication from the progressive community. The anathema was pronounced in the form of an article that appeared in the same paper shortly afterward called, “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.” It made clear that my words were not going to be taken as an attempt to retrieve a bitterly earned truth about what we leftists had done, but as the betrayal of a noble cause by a person who had gone over to the dark side. The author was the socialist writer Paul Berman; he began by praising me as an intellectual leader among New Leftists in the Sixties and concluded by damning me as one who now consorted with monsters, in particular with a homicidal member of the Nicaraguan contras whose nom de guerre was Suicida. This was, in point of fact, an individual I had never heard of, and whom the contras themselves had executed for his crimes, which were indeed heinous. This kind of reckless assault on my character was to prove typical of the left’s responses to my work in years to come.
A year after the Voice article appeared, Peter Collier and I organized a “Second Thoughts Conference” in Washington to which we invited others who had taken steps along the path we had chosen. Two years later we held another Second Thoughts event in Cracow, Poland, just months before the collapse of the Communist regime. The speech I gave, “Reality and Dream,” whose text is included as chapter three in this volume, was an effort to tell my story and summarize the case against socialism for an audience whose members were still prisoners of the Soviet occupation.
While focusing on the left, I also felt the need to define the new “conservative” outlook at which I had arrived. The article “My Conservatism” is a statement of the views I had developed, along with the reasons I did not regard this new perspective as parallel to the one I had abandoned but different in its very nature. I addressed the same subject in The Politics of Bad Faith, which was published in 1998, and which contains the fullest statement of the rationale for my political change.
The event that forced me to look at the reality of what I and my comrades had done is the subject of the memoir “Black Murder, Inc.” At the time the crime was committed, the Black Panther Party was regarded as a progressive vanguard and its leader Huey Newton was being compared in The New York Times to Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. Even today, in respected academic texts like Henry Louis Gates’s African American National Biography, the Party is portrayed as a noble vanguard, victimized by a racist government. This is a reflection not of the facts but of the way the left dominates and has corrupted the academic culture—the subject of the sixth volume of The American Left, titled The Left in the University.
After the publication of the Post and Village Voice articles, liberal venues were for all intents and purposes closed to me as a “renegade” from their ranks. “Black Murder, Inc.” first appeared in a publication that Peter Collier and I had created, called Heterodoxy. We published it on the front page with a “Wanted” poster of Elaine Brown, the Panther most directly responsible for the murder, although I have no doubt that it was Huey Newton who ordered the execution from his exile in Cuba.22 One of the most unpleasant responses of the left to the article was to attempt to place the blame for Betty’s death on me. “Letter to the Past” is my reply to one of these accusations made by a lifelong friend of mine who had remained on the left and was obviously a friend no more. Our exchange reflects the raw emotions I felt at the time.
My reasons for concluding this are laid out in Radical Son, pp. 221–250.
In retrospect, it is clear to me that the failure of the political culture and major media to take note of the Panthers’ crimes and be horrified by them, indeed the support the perpetrators received from the progressive ranks, was a small but ominous sign of the profound change that the Sixties left had worked on the American political landscape. The resurfacing in the 1990s of a violent radical like Weatherman leader Bill Ayers as the intimate political ally of a future American president is a parallel phenomenon. It indicates just how far the influence of the left has reached.33
Cf. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief
Progressives are necessarily forced to choose between the future they desire and the reality they inhabit. The primary moral obligation of a revolutionary is to destroy the existing social and political framework in order to prepare the revolutionary future; and radicals perceive America as the principal defender of the capitalism they hate all over the world. Consequently, a radical politics generally leads to uncertain loyalties to country and community. Yet leftists have succeeded in making the issue of their loyalties the most taboo of political subjects, deploying blanket charges of “McCarthyism” and “witch-hunt” as a way of silencing their critics. As someone who experienced the conflict between principles and country directly, I have inevitably made them a focus of my work. “Treason of the Heart,” an article written to promote my autobiography Radical Son, includes the accounts of three episodes, described in the book, which dramatize this conflict.44
This is a prominent theme of the essays contained in Volume 5 of this series, 9/11 and the “War on Terror.”
Having rejected the left, I quickly discovered that the political center where I expected to find a home had vanished, while outlets for my work that I had expected to be available had shut their doors to me. “A Political Romance” was written at the request of an editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine, who wanted a piece for the weekly “Lives” feature located at the back of the issue. I undertook the assignment
