By Steve Wasserman / Original to ScheerPost
The death on April 29 of my old nemesis, David Horowitz, at age 86 after a long battle with cancer, prompts these recollections of a man I knew 55 years ago when he edited Ramparts magazine in its senescence, and later sought to have me fired when I was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
I was enamored of his early books written in the 1960s when I read them as a teenager, including Student, published in 1962, a vigorous and well-reported account of the efforts at UC Berkeley to resist capital punishment, the House Un-American Activities Committee, compulsory ROTC , and to participate in other assorted progressive causes, especially the rising movement for civil rights, spearheaded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and peace movement seeking to ban the atomic bomb.
Then in 1965 he published a fierce critique of American foreign policy in the Cold War called The Free World Colossus, which book was largely cribbed from Howard K. Smith’s 1949 The State of Europe and D.F. Fleming’s great two-volume 1961 The Cold War and Its Origins. He also went on to write Empire and Revolution, published by Random House in 1969, which Alice Mayhew, his editor, described in the book’s flap jacket copy as “the first comprehensive reinterpretation of the Marxist worldview from the vantage of the New Left.”
It was a well-written analysis that in its day was influential, especially, as Horowitz argued, that the movement for self-determination within nations, particularly among African Americans and the poor within the United States, coincided with the global movement for self-determination.
A joint biography with Peter Collier of the Rockefeller dynasty hit the best-seller list in 1976. The following year, Horowitz wrote a now forgotten but excellent book called The First Frontier: The Indian Wars & America’s Origins: 1607-1776, published by Simon & Schuster, also edited by Alice Mayhew, now at S&S. Among the people thanked in his acknowledgments was Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.
Horowitz was enthralled by the Black Panther Party and, for a time, was under the spell of its leader, Huey P. Newton, but later broke with him when he learned that the Panthers had very likely murdered Betty Van Patter, a white woman who had loyally served as the party’s bookkeeper and had discovered suspicious irregularities in the accounting ledgers. Horowitz felt responsible, for it was he who had recommended Van Patter for the job. Ever since her body was fished out of the San Francisco Bay, Horowitz was at pains to atone for the blood he felt had irredeemably stained his hands.
Soon he was renouncing even his dead parents’ memberships in the Communist Party when they were raising him in Queens. He began a hard turn toward the right. His denunciations of his former comrades devolved into a bitter resentment, and his scorched-earth tactics remained rooted in a Trotskyite Manichaeism that continued to mark his worldview.
He found rich backers to fund his fulminations. He excoriated America’s colleges and elite universities as Trojan Horses harboring diehard Marxist professors who, in his view, had bent the pedagogy to the inculcation of ideological biases in their young charges. He mentored Stephen Miller, now Trump’s Gauleiter of immigration. In many respects, Steve Bannon could be said to be Horowitz’s Frankenstein.
Horowitz lived long enough to become the godfather of MAGA and its standard-bearer, Donald Trump. His son, Benjamin Horowitz, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen/Horowitz and a billionaire backer of Trump, made sure to tell Trump about his father when he met the president last year, recalling that “President Trump’s face immediately lit up and he insisted that Benjamin get David on the phone immediately. Hospitalized and weak, David was still delighted to speak with the President.”
When, in 1996, I was appointed editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, I was stunned to find Horowitz quoted in a profile of the newspaper in a glossy magazine of the time called Buzz as saying that in my youth I’d learned how to make bombs from Tom Hayden. The reality: I spent the summer of 1969 reading my way through the works of C. Wright Mills with Hayden who taught me never to check my critical faculties at the title page. This was a calumny I couldn’t let go unanswered.
Gary Bostwick, one of the more prominent libel attorneys in the country sent a stern letter to Buzz calling for an immediate retraction. Horowitz, for his part, in perhaps the only instance of an apology, asked the magazine to print his confession, writing in the issue of September 1997 that his account was hearsay, and he admitted it was untrue and further that “Under Wasserman’s direction, the Times’s Book Review is already an improved section of the paper, and this is one conservative who wishes him well.”
I later reached out to Horowitz, and we had a perfectly pleasant lunch at Michael’s restaurant on Third Street in Santa Monica. I invited him to participate in a symposium I was organizing to mark the centenary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto. He readily agreed but, in the event, was dismayed to see that his piece was shorter than Eric Hobsbawm’s. He was furious. He wrote a lengthy letter to Mark Willes, then the CEO of Times Mirror, the owner of the Los Angeles Times.
Willes summoned me to the executive suite located on the sixth floor of Times Mirror Square. He showed me the letter, which all but called for my sacking as an unreconstructed Red. He then said that I was welcome to reply to Horowitz myself, but he was simply going to tear the letter in half and drop it into the wastebasket. Which he promptly did.
The whole business quickly became fodder for The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town. In the issue of Sept. 27, 1999, Jane Mayer wrote under the heading “L.A. Postcard: The Cold War thrives in sunny California,” an account of the whole contretemps, quoting me as saying “It’s very tedious to deal with what should rightfully be called by its proper name: Red-baiting. David Horowitz never lets the facts stand in the way of a good rant. The old categories of left and right have been exploded by events in the closing years of this century and have very little meaning today. But his eyes are on the rear-view mirror.”
He forsook the dream of a revolution from the left for the seductions of a counterrevolution from the right. From a would-be Lenin he became a Svengali of reaction. It pains me to admit that, at least for now, Horowitz, perhaps, owns even in death the historical moment.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.