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control than they were in redressing specific instances of social injustice.
Horowitz, in short, became a mirror image of the very father he had so con–
fidently rebelled against: "As a result, I was constantly blindsided by events,
until pain and disappointment eventually confronted me with our common
fate. There is no inevitable reward for our virtues, and no authority to whom
we can safely appeal."
Horowitz faced his
Kronstadt
at a time when many of his cronies would
have been hard pressed to identify the allusion. For them, history, even
socialist history, was so much bunk. Michael Lerner, currently hewing a pol–
itics of caring and religious renewal
in
the pages of his magazine,
Tikkun,
took a very different position during the late sixties. As he (presumably) told
Horowitz back in the heyday of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, "You have to
take LSD. Until you've dropped acid, you don't know what socialism is."
Small wonder that Irving Howe got so infuriated by the know-nothings on
the New Left. At the same time, however, they were in tune with the
Zeitgeist
in ways that he wasn't; and their relentless assault on everything that smacked
of authority-variously identified as "the System," "the Establishment," or
"Amerika"--struck especially responsive chords on college campuses.
The romantic embrace of the Black Panthers was a case in point.
Ramparts,
the flagship magazine of those contentious times, pleaded the
Panthers' case and brought them wide visibility if not universal acceptance.
To their credit, many recognized early that Bobby Seale and company were
longer on militant posturing than on practical politics. What even these peo–
ple didn't quite realize, however, is how deadly their hustle could, in fact, be.
Horowitz, an editor at
Ramparts,
finally did-that is, when Betty Van Patten,
the Panthers' bookkeeper, turned up dead. From that point onward,
Horowitz went into a disillusioned funk. How could he turn against those
who had shaped his very sense of the world? And how could he expose the
darker side of what passed for youthful idealism? The personal stakes were
high, because
if
he "came clean" about his doubts, he would surely earn
widespread dismissal and angry contempt for his trouble:
I thought about the way I had become a stranger to them political–
ly, joining the other side in a cold war against a faith they had
embraced as humanity's best hope. I was like Whittaker Chambers in
their generation-a young man inspired by the high-minded passions
of the Left who had broken though to the dark underside of the rad–
ical cause. Like Chanlbers, I had encounters with totalitarian forces
that involved betrayal and death, and even a Soviet spy. Like
him,
I had
been demonized for my second thoughts by a culture sympathetic to
the Left and hostile to its adversaries. I, too, had to face the savage per–
sonal attacks by my former comrades that were designed to warn
others to remain in the fold.
