My first acquaintance with David Horowitz, who died Tuesday at the age of 86 following a battle with cancer, was as Peter Collier’s co-author on “The Kennedys: An American Drama,” published in 1984. That year in Washington, I heard Peter and David explain their departure from the left, which had people talking.
In 1987, when I met David at his Los Angeles home, he asked me what I did in the 1960s. I told him my primary interest was getting stoned, but like many others, I raised my voice against the war in Vietnam. David promptly invited me to the Second Thoughts Conference in 1987. As Peter Collier explained in the foreword to my “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 ready to take on Hollywood. They prompted David to found the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and bring me aboard as a journalism fellow. David once toned down my description of Lillian Hellman as a “Stalinist swamp sow,” but for the most part, we were on the same page. I worked with Peter on Heterodoxy, and both colleagues helped me out on the work that would become “Hollywood Party.” Heterodoxy transformed into Frontpage, where I write to this day.
Photo by Lloyd Billingsley
David considered Peter the better writer, but David never wrote a dull page. Consider, for example, “Radical Son,” which belongs on a 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.
I recently reviewed the account of the Black Panthers in “Radical Son,” the founding of their school in Oakland, the murder of Betty Van Patter, and a lot more. 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.”
David Horowitz now joins Peter Collier, who died in 2019. Farewell, brave warriors for truth and freedom.
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