When Lloyd Met David

In memory of 'Radical Son' author David Horowitz, 1939-2025.

In 1984, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, co-authors of The Kennedys: An American Drama, showed up at the Heritage Foundation to explain their departure from the left. There I met David, who agreed that for the left, as with the revolutionary critters in Orwell’s Animal Farm, “rats are comrades.”

In the summer of 1987, with filmmaker Jack Hafer, I visited David at his Los Angeles home, where David asked me what I did in the sixties. I told him my primary interest was getting stoned, but I also raised my voice against the war in Vietnam. That was enough for David to invite me to the Second Thoughts Conference that October in Washington. As Peter Collier explains in his foreword to Bill of Writes, the participants 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.

The ex-leftists, myself now among them, were eager to take on Hollywood, a generator of leftist hagiography such as Warren Beatty’s Reds. David founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and brought me aboard as a journalism fellow. In that role I once described Lillian Hellman (The Chase) as a “Stalinist swamp sow.” David agreed that this was accurate but toned it down in a way that now escapes me. For the most part we were on the same page.

David has been criticized as humorless but that wasn’t my experience. He threw great parties, jostling with people such as Marie Windsor, Jane Russell, Fawn Hall, Robert Sonntag, and Steven Hayward his own self. In 1988, I procured a bootleg copy of SNL’s “Dukakis After Dark,” and that had David literally on the floor.

David and Peter helped me out on what would become Hollywood Party. I worked with Peter on Heterodoxy, covering political correctness before it was rebranded as “woke.” In due time, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture became the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Heterodoxy transformed into Frontpage Magazine, where I write to this day.

As C.S. Lewis said, when a new book comes out, best to pick up an old one. In that spirit I recently re-read David’s Radical Son. This book belongs on the shelf with Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, Out of Step by Sidney Hook, and The God That Failed, by a group of ex-Communists including Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, and Richard Wright. As David explains:

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

In 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.

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.

Few people in the Left believed she [Angela Davis] was innocent but the jury acquitted her. This did not prevent here from touring the capitals of Communist dictatorships to receive political awards, while condemning American justice as racist and a sham.

We didn’t listen and we didn’t couldn’t see. Like all radicals, we were intoxicated by our own virtue.

Conservatism was an attitude about the lessons of an actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives was directed toward an imagined future.

I reviewed David’s doings with Black Panthers Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown. I retraced the founding of the Panthers’ school in Oakland, and the murder of Betty Van Patter. But as it turned out, I had forgotten what David had written up front:

“To Lloyd, comrade-in-arms who joined us at Second Thoughts.” That meant more than I can say.

David now rejoins Peter Collier, who passed away in 2019. The torch has been passed, so as Joshua Muravchik said at the Second Thoughts Conference: “be fraternal, promote democracy, off the commies, power to the people.”