VARIETY
David Twersky
THE SECOND LIFE OF LEON TROTSKY
Watching the film
Reds,
reading Orwell,
I
have been
thinking about those who made a mark on their time early in their
lives and then left the scene, abandoning the political culture to twist
its way onward. Their lives-not-Ied impoverish us down the decades,
leaving us contending, like distant relatives laying rival claims to a
last will and testament, over the unsolvable riddle at the heart of
their legacy: what would they have become?
John Reed's good friend, Max Eastman, whom Leon Trotsky
had the great fortune to acquire as his English-language translator,
fled rightwards, ending up as a contributing editor to that Bible of
Babbitry,
Reader's Digest .
Eastman also wrote for a while in the fifties
for William Buckley's
National Review,
eventually breaking with that
engaging conservative coterie over God : Eastman might be as anti–
communist as the next guy, the next guy at the
Review
being fellow
onetime Trotskyite James Burnham, but still clinging to the atheism
of his heady Greenwich Village days, he would not believe in God .
John Dos Passos, another former left-wing radical turned con–
servative, anticipated Joni Mitchell christening the sixties genera–
tion the "Woodstock Nation," when he split America into "two
nations" in protest at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti . The same
Dos Passos described the difference between communists and
socialists as the difference between beer and near-beer : the "com–
munists really mean it ." By 1964, however, Dos Passos, as Daniel
Bell once pointed out, had abandoned alcohol altogether and was
pushing for prohibition: that was the year he enthusiastically en–
dorsed Barry Goldwater for President.
In
this illustrious list, one
should not neglect Walter Lippman, Reed's Harvard classmate, who
graduated rather quickly from university socialism to the Olympian
heights of the Washington establishment.
The rightward drift of so many of Reed's friends is suggestive,
if not absolutely convincing proof, of the directional flight of the
zeitgeist. Reed might have followed the well-travelled route from
