David Horowitz - Career in The New Left

Career in The New Left

The Horowitz family broke with the American Communist Party after the publication of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956. According to Horowitz,

"The publication of the Khrushchev Report was probably the greatest blow struck against the Soviet Empire during the Cold War. When my parents and their friends opened the morning Times and read its text, their world collapsed -- and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false. Their secret mission had led them into waters so deep that its tide had overwhelmed them, taking with it the very meaning of their lives."

In the early 1960s, Horowitz lived in London as an employee of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. He regarded himself as a serious Marxist intellectual. In 1966, Ralph Schoenman persuaded Bertrand Russell to convene a war crimes tribunal to judge American involvement in the Vietnam War. Horowitz developed serious reservations about the process when the tribunal's judges, who included Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Dedijer, degenerated into a feuding rabble. See Russell Tribunal.

While in London, Horowitz was a close friend of Deutscher, of whom he published a biography in 1971. He also wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War.

In January 1968, Horowitz returned to the United States and became editor of the New Left magazine, Ramparts.

During the early 1970s, Horowitz developed a close friendship with Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. In Horowitz's subsequent writings, Newton is depicted as equal parts gangster, terrorist, intellectual, and media celebrity.

As part of their work together, Horowitz helped raised money for Newton and assisted with the running of a school for the children of Party members. He further recommended that Newton hire a bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, who was then working for Ramparts. In December 1974, Van Patter's murdered body was found floating in San Francisco Harbor. Horowitz, who was certain that the Panthers were responsible, had his suspicions confirmed by several Party members. He has cited that experience as the catalyst which led him to reject Marxism completely.