A host of specters is haunting Peter Collier and David Horowitz, and in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ’60s, they attempt to banish, or at least to come to terms with, four of the ghosts. By my count, they succeed with one and a half, for about a .375 average; that’s not bad for baseball, and may be as good as can be expected in life, at least in lives like theirs.
Horowitz was not so lucky. His father was an orthodox New York communist, a secularized Jew who remained loyal to his Stalinist faith until his last breath. But David was one of those “red diaper” babies who decided as a teenager that the revelation of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev in 1956 made it necessary to leave the Communist Party and reinvent the revolution, to create a “new Left.”
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There is an equally deep lack of resolution, or rather expiation, in relation to the third of the authors’ ghosts, that of Betty Van Patter, a young innocent who was the bookkeeper at Ramparts magazine in the early 70s, when Collier and Horowitz were in command of that revolutionary redoubt. Ramparts was for a few years an outstanding radical rag, which broke repeatedly into the headlines with a series of sensational investigative disclosures, such as the secret funding of the National Students Association by the CIA. It also moved history in less visible ways: in early 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw a Ramparts photo spread on “The Children of Vietnam,” and the stark, horrific pictures crystallized his determination to become a major voice of protest against the war. C & H now repudiate their investigative coups, in particular one major piece about the supersecret National Security Agency, as “no-fault treason.”
Horowitz fell for this new con hook, line, and sinker. He raised money for the Panthers and even bought the building for their new Community Learning Center, which was to be the centerpiece of their new domain.
Still more offensive than their effort to smear the whole of that generation with the blood on their own hands is the conceit betrayed by the effort. Their feckless Ramparts radicalism is paraded as if it were the essence and guiding spirit of everything meaningful that fits under the 60s rubric. And that is simply bullshit.
Well, they can have it. As an old peacenik, I don’t claim that the peace movement did much more than restrain the U.S. government from wreaking even more senseless destruction on Southeast Asia; the North Vietnamese kicked ass and won the war on their own. And contrary to the C & H version, there were many more besides me who did not celebrate this outcome, nor make excuses for the Khmer Rouge.
The final ghost in this corner of C & H’s private Sheol provides yet another unintended measure of the absurdly inflated self-estimate of their radical careers. It is the looming, spectral figure of Whittaker Chambers.
