Ronald Radosh and Michael Harrington
AN EXCHANGE
No one can fail to admire Michael Harrington's personal
courage , the strength of his commitment to the fight for social
justice, and, against many odds, the energy he has expended in pur–
suing his lifelong devotion to building a democratic socialist move–
ment in America. Portraying himself as a long-distance runner who
moves towards a set goal without any assurance that he will be able
to reach it, Harrington sets out to recall major political episodes in
his life during the past twenty years. He recounts his political choices
in his usual lucid and compelling style. As readers of
Partisan Review
undoubtedly know, his autobiography appears after he has con–
fronted a grave illness . Harrington has set out to produce a series of
books that are meant to be a summation as well as a legacy for his
followers .
The recent publication of his book,
The Long-Distance Runner: An
Autobiography
(Henry Holt and Co .), has merited interviews on
The
CBS Morning News, The MacNeil-Lehrer Report,
and editorials of praise
in both
The New York Times
and
The New Republic. Newsweek
chimed
in with a full-page profile , proclaiming that Harrington is both "a
staunch anticommunist and committed patriot, [who] has strongly
resisted the utopian and totalitarian strains that inevitably surface in
a movement, like socialism, dedicated to transforming society."
Others, such as
Village Voice
writer Paul Berman, have given un–
critical accolades to Harrington, using the occasion to fortify one's
faith in the old bromides. Strangely, since Harrington espouses a
political ideology that is still that of a small minority in the United
States, few of the reviewers or discussants have had much of
anything critical to say about what he has written.
While Harrington does take up questions directly unrelated to
politics-such as teaching, publishing and book reviewing, and the
reasons for his move to the suburbs - his book is essentially a com–
pendium of his political activities in the two organizations he has
headed since the mid-1970s, the Democratic Socialist Organizing
Committee, and its successor, Democratic Socialists of America.
(For the bulk of the years touched upon by Harrington in his book, I
was an active member of both of these organizations. By 1984, I had
