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I first met David Horowitz back in 1984 when he and Peter Collier brokered their departure from the left for a Washington audience. David explained how the left distorts language in the style of criminals, so that “bad” means good and so forth. I quoted Orwell’s Animal Farm that for the revolutionary critters, “rats are comrades.” David knew exactly what I meant.

In the summer of 1987, at his house in Los Angeles, David asked me what I did in the sixties. I told him I was most interested in getting stoned, but like many others I raised my voice against the war in Vietnam. David invited me to the Second Thoughts Conference, a gathering of ex-leftists in Washington that October. As Peter wrote in the foreword to my Bill of Writes, the participants differed on many issues, but they shared one central conviction:

The god of the New Left had failed them personally during its nihilistic strut on the stage of the 60s and they were ready to testify against the smelly little orthodoxies they had once affirmed. In the future, some of these Second Thoughters went on to be conservatives, but they would always have a more profound identity as “ex-leftists,” who knew that the utopia they (we) had been building had never really been anything more than a Potemkin waste site, and that while leftism might try to disguise itself as “liberal” or “progressive,” totalitarianism by any other name would smell just as rancid.

For Joshua Muravchik, the speakers’ differences were rather small compared to the areas of agreement. Therefore, Muravchik concluded, “be fraternal, promote democracy, off the commies, power to the people.” The conference got us talking about the Hollywood left. That led David to launch the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, where we took on NPR, Bill Moyers and such.

David brought me aboard as a journalism fellow, a boost to my career.  He once toned down my description of Lillian Hellman as a “Stalinist swamp sow” but for the most part we were on the same page. I worked with Peter Collier on Heterodoxy, which over time transformed into Frontpage.

Like Peter, David Horowitz never wrote a dull page. Some months ago I re-read Radical Son, still enlightening after all these years. For example:

Of the 130 members of the Party’s Central Committee who had attended its 1934 conference, all but 40 had been shot by 1938.

Trotsky had described the Communist parties of the world as the frontier guards for the Soviet Union. Their function was to explain away Stalin’s crimes, but obstacles in the path of those who resisted his policies, and discredit witnesses who testified against them. The New Left had formed a similar frontier guard around the Panthers and their crimes.

1966 Stokely Carmichael and the leaders of SNCC had expelled whites from the civil rights organization, accusing them of being a fifth column inside the movement. Since Jews were a near majority of the whites in these organizations and had played a strategic role in organizing and funding the struggle, it was clear to everyone that they the primary target of the assault.

I reviewed David’s account of the Black Panthers, the founding of their school in Oakland, and the murder of Betty Van Patter, which triggered David’s exit from the left. I also revisited what David wrote up front: “To Lloyd, comrade-in-arms who joined us at Second Thoughts.” That meant more than I can say. So farewell, brave warrior for truth, and thanks for the memories.