Red Diapers, Red Faces
Ronald Radosh offers an inside view of his ex-friends in the Loony Left.

By Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
June 2-3, 2001

Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh (Encounter, 216 pp., $24.95)

n his memoir Commies, historian Ronald Radosh recounts his life's journey from left to right. The breezy style and amusing anecdotes jar with the deadly seriousness of the Left's aims and actions over the years, and the book is ultimately more scary than funny. It is frequently asked how twentieth-century Germany, with its advanced learning and culture, could have embraced Nazism. And it might also be asked how so many twentieth-century American intellectuals, likewise cultured and learned, could have become Communists, pledged to destroy the last best hope of mankind.

The book begins when baby Ronald, one and a half years old, was "bundled in a stroller" and "paraded down Fifth Avenue in the yearly Communist Party celebration," on May Day 1939, his "baptism into the world of Jewish radicalism." Radosh's father "served as a leader in one of the earliest Communist fronts," the Trade Union Unity League, and his mother was also involved in the trade union and radical movements. One uncle was an anarchist who became buddies with Trotsky in Mexico after both fled there; another was a Communist and commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

Young Ronald was sent to a summer camp (where Pete Seeger led the sing-alongs) created by Communists and fellow travelers for their "Red-diaper babies," and then went to Elisabeth Irwin high school, "the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds." As an undergraduate and graduate student in the Midwest, he helped found the New Left, and continued his radicalism as a professor, joining the Students for a Democratic Society's faculty auxiliary and participating in countless protests and demonstrations. He and his first wife (another radical, naturally) got divorced — "Everyone gets divorced nowadays," she told him, "It doesn't hurt children at all" — and he became an enthusiastic pot smoker and participant in the sexual revolution.

But then, in the early seventies, Radosh's outlook started to change. He and his new girlfriend (whom he married a couple of years later and who was, guess what?, a radical graduate student) "seemed to find shrill and almost pathologically crazy behavior wherever we looked on the left." Imagine that. He was appalled when, on a trip to Cuba, a doctor at Havana General Psychiatric Hospital announced, "We are proud that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world," and was not reassured when his fellow visitor explained, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."

The real break came when Radosh co-wrote a book documenting that, contrary to an article of faith on the Left, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were not martyrs but spies (Radosh began the project thinking the book would exonerate the Rosenbergs). Radosh further infuriated his former comrades when he concluded that it was the contras, not the Sandinistas, who deserved U.S. support in Nicaragua.

In recounting the decades of Left lunacy he observed firsthand, the book is frequently funny, and piquancy is added by the cameo appearances of various celebrities — not only Pete Seeger but Bob Dylan and Bianca Jagger, Joseph Heller, Tom Hayden (of whom Irving Howe says, he "gives opportunism a bad name"), Abbie Hoffman, Ed Asner — even Professor Irwin Corey — and fellow activists and writers like David Horowitz, Sidney Blumenthal, Alan Dershowitz, Michael Lerner (remember the "politics of meaning"?), Michael Harrington, Al Shanker, Marty Peretz, Joe Klein, and I.F. Stone. The city clerk who performed Radosh's second marriage was none other than David Dinkins, later mayor of New York City.

So, this is an entertaining and interesting book, and this is a favorable review. Still, the book bothered me in a couple of important respects.

Laughing at one's foibles and youthful mistakes is fine, but it's hard to expect others to laugh along with too much enthusiasm when the foibles were treason and the mistakes nearly ruined the country and the world. I don't think Radosh would disagree with my assertion of his perfidy or the high stakes: His reaction at the time to the collapse of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was, "We had won in Vietnam!," and he later concludes that "the only accomplishments [of the Left] were famine, gulags and mass death."

Suppose a Nazi wrote a light-hearted memoir about the amusing hijinks within the Third Reich, but how he ultimately became disillusioned with mass murder. That's harsh, I know, and Radosh is no mass murderer. But he did take the side of the mass murderers. And, as Stephen Schwartz writes in his review of Radosh's book in a recent print issue of National Review, Radosh "evinces something close to nostalgia for the enthused innocence with which he once embraced the Leninist cause." It was springtime, for Stalin, in America.

Radosh acknowledges that, during the sixties, he and others "tried to bring [America] down," but believes, "The country is stronger for having encountered and withstood us." That last part is not so clear. The damage done by the Left to our institutions, culture, and social fabric is still with us, and may be permanent. That which doesn't kill us does not necessarily make us stronger.

The Left is less forgiving of Strom Thurmond's candidacy as a Dixiecrat than the Right is of erstwhile Communists and traitors. This is surprising, given the popular stereotype that liberals are compassionate, sympathetic, and nonjudgmental, while conservatives are unbending, insensitive, and cold-hearted. Perhaps it is explained, in part, by conservatives' low expectations of mankind — their belief in original sin and modest hopes for this world — versus the Left's Immanentization of the Eschaton and insistence on human perfectibility. Or perhaps it only seems that conservatives are more forgiving, since they are asked more often to forgive. The movement of converts is generally left to right, rather than the other way around. Recall George Bernard Shaw's declaration that a young man who is not a socialist has no heart, but an old man who is a socialist has no brain. Who, besides David Brock, has grown disillusioned with the right and gone left? And perhaps this willingness to accept apostasy is quintessentially American. We can reinvent ourselves, light out for the territory, start over again. In any event, we are all sinners and we want to encourage people to break with a wrongheaded past, and forgiveness encourages this and holding a grudge discourages it.

But we also want to discourage treason in the first place, and wasn't the non-prodigal son entitled to be at least a little disgusted? How could Radosh and others have gone so wrong? Someone once wrote that it would be impossible to place the story of Cyrano de Bergerac in a modern setting because the hero would have to have read the story already. It's a little odd that a memoir of this sort could be written without mentioning Whittaker Chambers, and that the lessons of that man's life were ignored by so many of the next generation.

Which brings us to the other problem I had with the book, alluded to at the outset. The milieu of Commies is overwhelmingly Jewish and intellectual, suggesting the question: Why were so many Jewish intellectuals Communists and otherwise enamored of the hard Left? Radosh does not address this obvious and intriguing question, even though he is well situated to do so given his own journey.

Jewish intellectuals have also made, and are making, invaluable contributions to conservatism, and there are plenty of gentile Communists in and out of Radosh's book. Still, the disproportions are manifest, and none of the commonly suggested reasons are completely persuasive. Is it the fault of the Right, for harboring anti-Semites? But there are plenty of left-wing anti-Semites, too, and plenty of places where the Right is not anti-semitic. Is it because the persecution of Jews over the centuries has led them to champion the underdog? But government persecution ought to drive people to classical liberalism, libertarianism, and support for a limited state — not totalitarianism. Is it because Jewish secularization has left a void all too easily filled by a god that failed? But that would not explain why this particular god was chosen.

The closest that Radosh comes to addressing this question is his explanation of why he decided to join the Labor Youth League, the Communist party's youth movement: "The reasons had little to do with politics, and a great deal to do with the need to find an identity. Strangely, belonging to the LYL served that purpose. It provided the camaraderie of a tight-knit group of ready-made friends, along with a sense of moral superiority, of being on the right side of a good fight most people didn't even know about. And it offered the possibility of what every teenage boy seeks: a girlfriend. God bless the Communist movement for giving me my first sexual experiences from among a group of 'liberated' girls."

This is obviously a highly personal explanation, with tongue set at least partly in cheek (especially the last sentence), but it is intriguing — and the question is important and interesting. Answering it would be wonderful topic for Ronald Radosh's next book.