I’d forgotten that David Horowitz’s Radical Son opens with something breaking:
My only clear recollection of my grandfather Morris—a memory forever sharpened by remorse—is that when I was six he sat on my favorite record of the Seven dwarves singing “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho (It’s off to work we go…)” and broke it. And that I yelled at him, protesting the injustice with all the force my small lungs could muster, as if my yelling could make the record whole. And that, shortly afterward, they took my grandfather to the hospital—and I never saw him again.
It’s a remarkable opening passage, assuring readers they’re in the hands of a uniquely gifted writer who, we learn as the story unfolds, has here foreshadowed the key themes of the tale to come: family and fathers, protest and injustice, redemption and loss. Horowitz’s 1996 masterpiece is one of the greatest autobiographies in American literature. It’s a story about things that break—parents, children, marriages, politics. But in the following years, he seemed to have gotten stronger, since—as he shows in his books and public life—his purpose was to understand more about himself and what he loved, including his country.
He was born Jan. 10, 1939, and died April 29 at the age of 86. But his life story covers hundreds of years, for the material that shaped him constitutes the full sweep of American history, from the Middle Passage and the Pale of Settlement through Vietnam and the fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and the Donald Trump presidency. Both sides of Horowitz’s family escaped Russia, though it seems his mother and father never really got far enough away, even in Queens, New York, where they devoted themselves to the communist cause, Josef Stalin, and their son, David.
Their red-diaper baby became one of the stars of the New Left, as a writer, publisher, and organizer who protested against the war in Vietnam and racism and worked with the Black Panthers, becoming friends with the group’s founder, Huey P. Newton. Then, in the early 1980s, he made an about-face and supported Ronald Reagan. He started the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1998 and became one of the leading voices of the American right. He was so successful as an activist, and so prolific in promoting younger conservatives, that his public gifts tended to overshadow his contributions to American literature and historiography. He wrote many dozens of books—memoirs, polemics, histories—and told me that he considered the nine-volume The Black Book of the American Left, an encyclopedic chronicle of left-wing radicalism, one of the cornerstones of his legacy.
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