By Stephen Goode. Insight
Magazine. Posted Nov. 23, 2001.
Historian Ronald Radosh is one of the great demolishers of the myths of the
Old Left. He was coauthor of The Rosenberg File (second edition, 1997), which
destroyed the notion that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent of the
charges for which they were executed in 1954: turning U.S. atomic secrets over
to the Soviet Union.
In this year's Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War,
Radosh and coauthor Mary Habeck took on one of the biggest legends of the
American and European left: that the Soviet Union in the 1930s courageously and
disinterestedly ed the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War against Gen.
Francisco Franco. Far from being disinterested, the book proves through ample
documentation that the Soviet Union planned to turn Spain into a Soviet
satellite and had no desire to preserve the Spanish Republic.
Radosh should know of which he speaks. A former left-wing activist, he
ed the Communist Party in the mid-1950s but quit a couple of years later.
Radosh knew and worked with many prominent American leftists, from Mary Travers
(with whom he went to Manhattan's radical Elisabeth Irwin High School) to Tom
Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society and Michael Harrington of the
socialists. He's now on the right of the political spectrum, describing himself
as a "moderate conservative." Radosh tells the story of his move from
left to right in his excellent and recently published Commies: A Journey Through
the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.
Insight spoke with Radosh at his home in Maryland where his next project is
a book on the 1950s and Sen. Joe McCarthy. He is "trying to put together
what happened in the context of a very real threat that America faced."
Insight: You've looked at the world as a man of the left and now as a
conservative. How would you describe the difference between those two ways of
looking at things?
Ronald Radosh: I now look at the world as a er and defender of
American democracy and the American system of government. I realize the country
has imperfections, but our political system is geared to correcting those
imperfections on a democratic basis. I concentrate on its strengths rather than
its weaknesses, whereas a man on the left concentrates on its weaknesses. Those
on the left look at the weaknesses of America and say they can only be solved
through a complete, total overhaul of the system; that only through cataclysmic,
monumental social change and revolution can those weaknesses be overcome.
By being geared toward correcting imperfections through democratic change, I
mean that in a 25- or 30-year period the success of the civil-rights revolution
has been phenomenal. There may be some minor problems of racism, but anybody who
believes that blacks in America haven't made progress doesn't live in this
world. And the strength of the civil-rights movement was that it tried to
realize the promise of American democracy in a country that was amenable to
change because it is a democracy. Despite the presence of very disgruntled black
radicals, the civil-rights movement was not a radical revolutionary movement. It
was a democratic movement.
Insight: How did the recent terrorist attacks affect the left in America?
RR: Since Sept. 11, the left really has been ruptured. The most-sensible
elements on the left now are ing the war and the istration, having
realized that this was an unparalleled attack on America. They may have thought
that [Al] Gore won the election and [George W.] Bush didn't, but now they're
ing Bush and the istration and they're being very tough-minded about
it. Eric Foner [a Columbia University historian, president of the American
Historical Association and longtime prominent leftist] writes in the New York
Times, saying he proudly flies the American flag from his balcony. He wouldn't
have been caught dead doing that before Sept. 11.
Those on that part of the left are still reluctant warriors, but they're not
going off the deep end. Others are. Noam Chomsky made a big speech at MIT
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on Oct. 18 going through the standard
hard antiwar, anti-American routine, and he does have followers. Two thousand
came out to hear him. He's a cult figure on a lot of campuses.
And the antiglobalization movement clearly showed its true face after Sept.
11. In my book Commies I call it the "leftover left." What they showed
is their nihilism and that they aren't really interested in the issue of
globalization. After Sept. 11, the people running that movement immediately
switched gears and tried to move the antiglobalization forces into an antiwar
movement. It was just the same group of people out to resurrect the left,
confirming that globalization was really nothing more than a code word for
attacking the United States.
Insight: It is the same old familiar left then, with the same dog-eared
message?
RR: Right. They are trying to assert that the cause of all the evil in the
world is still the United States and its expansionistic ways.
Insight: Then there is the left on American campuses?
RR: Yes, and it's the worst, most ridiculous example of what the left has
become. It's always the elite colleges that are the worst. Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island. Wesleyan in Connecticut. Vassar in Poughkeepsie
[N.Y.]. It's those schools — their student bodies, their istrations,
their faculties — that are the most politically correct and the most
offensive when it comes to curtailing the speech of anybody who has a position
that they consider conservative. It's at these schools that s
prevent people who favor the war from speaking out even as they allow antiwar
actions.
Insight: Any theory on why it is the elite schools that indulge in
anti-Americanism and are so enamored of the left?
RR: They're where you have a student body whose parents are well off.
They're the ones who can afford to be full-time radicals and revolutionaries.
They don't have to worry about jobs or income, so they can rebel against their
parents and the system at the same time.
Also I think the faculties of these colleges, particularly the humanities
faculties, have been taken over by the left. They target English faculties. The
history departments are filled with lefties. And look at the courses that are
taught — the kooky, far-out courses in the college catalogues that are
geared in a very narrow way toward gender, class and race.
A friend of my son's just graduated from an elite college. All of his
courses were so radical it was amazing, which in turn reflects the faculty. They
hire each other and they try to create radical departments. The departments are
politicized, and they're all politicized in the same way.
Insight: When you were a young leftist historian did you ever believe or
hope that the field of history would become as dominated by the left as it has
become?
RR: Thirty years ago everything was the reverse. When I was a young man in
the New Left the history departments were filled with a traditional generation
of historians. Radical historians were few and far between and were not
represented in the history departments or the historical associations.
Now, 30 years later, they are the departments and they are the associations.
Both the American Historical Association [AHA] and the Organization of American
Historians [OAH] now have presidents who are pro-communist Marxists, who gave
politicized, left-wing speeches [upon assuming their presidencies]. Thirty years
ago many leftists were traditional in the sense we believed that history was a
very serious, scholarly undertaking with standards. Now you have whole fields of
history which are totally politicized in the craziest ways.
Insight: Politicized in what way?
RR: I dropped my subscriptions to the journals of the two leading
associations. I stopped the Journal of American History [published by the OAH]
when the lead article was about Jack Benny. As a kid I grew up listening to Jack
Benny. That interpretation of Jack Benny was from the viewpoint of queer theory,
which was then just coming into its own. According to this interpretation Jack
Benny was a secret, closet homosexual who was defending homosexuality in his TV
appearances and show. I read the whole article. It was preposterous. It was
crazy. I said, "Gee, we all thought he was just a great comic."
Earlier this year, the American Historical Review [journal of the AHA] had
an article called "Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the
Same Place." It, too, was incredible! It compared a KGB-settled town in
Kazakhstan with Billings, Montana. The Kazakhstan town had seen forced labor,
but Montana had seen much the same thing, you see, so no difference. Really
nutty stuff.
Insight: The politics isn't just disguised as scholarship. Sometimes it's
more, isn't it?
RR: There was an article in the 1980s in the Journal of American History
about the Leo Frank case, the lynching of the Jewish merchant Leo Frank in
Atlanta in the 1920s. It was by a feminist historian. But at the end of the
article there were three paragraphs attacking Ronald Reagan and the Reagan
presidency. This was the lead article in the journal.
What did Reagan have to do with the Frank lynching? Nothing! But there it
was, confirming that anything is possible if you're on the left. If a
conservative historian wrote an article on the Leo Frank lynching and put in a
defense of Reagan at the end, it would never have run. They would say, "This
is irrelevant. What's the point? It has nothing to do with the article."
All of which showed how far the whole profession had moved.
Insight: What were the significant events that turned you from the left into
a conservative?
RR: There were three big things. First, my monthlong trip to Cuba in the
mid-1970s. Then there was my work on the book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And
there was my experience in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, in the
1980s.
Insight: What was eye-opening about Castro's Cuba?
RR: It was a great shock to me to get a close look at the socialist
paradise. The New Left felt that the Soviet Union long ago had become an
ossified, bureaucratic society and no longer should serve as an example. But
Fidel Castro was, what, in his early thirties when he took over? He was a young
man, just a few years older than we American radicals. Here he was, rebelling
against his own homegrown dictator. We saw him making this autonomous revolution
against the old Cuban communists. We saw him as building an equivalent New Left
in Cuba, a new kind of independent, autonomous and authentic left.
We nothing short of extolled Cuba and Castro. Not only had Cuba broken out
of the hated American sphere, it was our model. Different. A vibrant, fresh,
humanist revolution. Of course the mid-1970s was pretty late in the game for any
such awakening to the truth about Cuba, but I still expected it to be somewhat
different [from the other "socialist experiments"].
So I got there and it was a rude awakening. The repression. The frequent use
of lobotomies in mental hospitals. In my book I call the chapter on Cuba "Socialist
Lobotomies." When I returned home I wrote an article, "Cuba: A
Personal Report," for Liberation. My intention was to argue that the Cuban
revolution could be strengthened by abandoning its repressive practices. Almost
all the reaction to the article was hostile.
Insight: There was a lot of similar hostility on the left to your book on
the convicted Soviet spies, the Rosenbergs, wasn't there?
RR: Yes. I was a member of the Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case.
Robert and Michael Meeropol [the Rosenberg children who had been adopted by
radicals after the execution of their parents] wanted to vindicate their
parents. I thought I could write the definitive book proving their innocence.
The Rosenberg case had been my first entrée into politics when I was in
high school in the 1950s, and I was heavily involved then. Now, 20 years later,
I was heavily involved again and went to weekly executive-board meetings of the
committee.
But it became very clear from just the first week or two into the research,
just as soon as we [Radosh and co-researcher Sol Stern] started looking at the
files, that this was not a clear-cut case. Marshall Perlin [the attorney for the
Meeropols] kicked me out and wouldn't let us work in the files in his office
anymore when we started asking questions. We had to go to Washington and look at
files there at great expense.
In the introduction to the original edition, I was still on the left and I
went out of my way to say that I didn't want the book to serve the Cold War or
Reagan's policy. But the book was unanimously condemned by the left. The truth
about the Rosenbergs had nothing to do with it. Most of the people on the left
pleaded with me not to write this, even the ones who suspected that the
Rosenbergs were guilty, because it would hurt the cause.
Insight: What experience did you have in Central America that turned you
against the left?
RR: Again, I started out opposing U.S. policy in Central America. For
example, I bought the line that the Salvadoran revolutionaries were noncommunist
Christians when in fact a lot of them were controlled by Moscow. When I went to
Nicaragua the intent of the Sandinistas became very clear to me. The signs of
repression under the Sandinista government were pervasive. From being for the
revolutionaries, I moved to ing the Contras and their attempt to end the
Sandinista government.
Still, the left really believed that the Sandinistas had the of the
populace and that when there was an election they would be overwhelmingly
elected. Of course, it was the reverse and Violetta Chamorro won, defeating the
Sandinistas in a democratic election.
All of these things had an impact on me. In my book I say that they helped
to end "my long exile from America."
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Personal Bio
Ronald Radosh: A
one-time leading left-wing intellectual.
Currently: Author, most
recently, of
Commies:
A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.
Professor emeritus of history, City University of New York.
Born: Nov. 1, 1937; New
York City.
Family: Wife, Allis;
two children from previous marriage, Daniel and Laura; one son from the
second marriage, Michael.
Education: University
of Wisconsin, B.A., 1959; M.A., State University of Iowa, 1960; and Ph.D.,
University of Wisconsin, 1967.
Publications: With
coauthor Joyce Milton,
The
Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (first edition, 1983, second
edition, 1997);
Divided
They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996 (1996); with
coauthor Mary Habeck,
Spain
Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (2001).
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Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc. | 
