MICHAEL HARRINGTON
83
ment, progressive taxation, and national health . We had to reach
out to him on those issues even as we fought him on foreign policy
questions.
Lipset's analysis is shoddy enough, but Radosh's gloss on it
becomes hilarious . The Social Democrats, he says , were actually
antiwar because they were part of Negotiations Now and I was, and
am, as unfair to them in charging them with supporting our involve–
ment in Vietnam as the New Leftists who said that I was not
"really" against the war. In fact , by 1972 the Social Democrats were
frankly aligned with Meany's support of the war. More to the point,
my disillusionment with comrades whom I loved and respected
began precisely when I realized that they were using Negotiations
Now as a front for effective sabotaging of efforts to end American in–
tervention in Southeast Asia. In the immortal words ofV.1. Lenin,
they supported Negotiations Now the way a rope supports a hanging
man .
I grow old , as the poem says . My basic point is made, and
there is no need to apply it to all the other possible examples. If I
have not discredited Radosh's methodology by now, further cases
will hardly do the job. I wish only to add a personal note.
In 1978, we held a DSOC fund-raiser tied to the organization's
fifth anniversary and my own fiftieth birthday, inevitably referred to
as the "Five and Fifty" event. Ron, who had come to DSOC via the
communist and New Left movements and, at that point, appreci–
ated a desire for reconciliation that has been with me since the Cath–
olic Worker days of my youth , organized a rather imaginative seg–
ment of the program which presented songs I had referred to in my
books with some brief reference to their context.
One of them was a Pete Seger version of an Mrican folk song
about a lion. I had referred to it in
The
Vast Majority,
my analysis and
journalistic account of an encounter with the third world. I was in
East Africa when that song had come to mind, and I told of all the
ambiguities I felt about the culture of the Popular Front which was
part a facade for Stalinist trickery and part the expression of genuine
antifascist feelings. I did not hide my ambivalencies , my contradic–
tions ; I tried to speak of them honestly and candidly, and it seemed
to me ,that Ron Radosh had understood my moral project . That is
why I am so disappointed in his present explanations of my - and
the Socialist International's - political complexities in terms of a sim–
ple conspiracy theory. I am saddened by his change of heart, of
