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An admirable trait of our challenged species is that we suffer in silence a lot. And it's sad when a person once devoted to ameliorating this suffering concludes not that they've done their best and the job was just too big, but that all along their radical politics were wrong. Possibly, it was Ronald Radosh's being brought up in bourgeois "red diapers" by loving parents that instilled a softer commitment to Left-wing ideals than others' fiercer commitments, instilled differently.
If such a thing can be, Radosh's book "Commies" is kind of a lite version of Whittaker Chambers' famous "Witness." (It was ex-Communist and Time editor Whittaker Chambers who, in 1948, provided the most damaging testimony leading to Alger Hiss' conviction for perjury regarding his associations with communists; Chambers' subsequent book "Witness" (1952) not only recounted his role in Hiss' conviction, but broadly renounced communism and condemned the American Communist movement, to which Chambers had contributed from 1932 to 1938.)
And thank god for "lite," because books of ex-communists' expiations run to the superficial, ego riddled, infantile and stinky. The lite-er the better, I say.
Rabid American flag-wavers will love this book. Many if not most others will find it superficial, egomaniacal, infantile and stinky, as I did.
Good ole USA vs. Red Commies, by phooandevi at Flickr (2008)
Consider. Radosh writes
on p151 of the "Commies" paperback edition I read, that since he was
"a historian" when the government released the FBI's Rosenberg files, he figured he was "the
perfect person to undertake a serious effort to examine them and write a
book." But just two pages later he
demonstrates an inattention to his own factual narrative that would embarrass
an undergraduate history major. In the second paragraph on p153, Radosh writes
that what "stunned" him reading the FBI files was that the bureau's
prison informant (who presumably had talked only to Julius Rosenberg) confirmed
a story previously told to Radosh by Jim Weinstein about how he (Weinstein)
"had (driven) Julius...from Ithaca to New York."
Further on in that very paragraph, however, Radosh elaborates on what the informant told the FBI and comments on it, "(the informant)...told the FBI (that a communist party recruit, Max Finestone) had borrowed (Jim Weinstein's car) to drive Julius to Ithaca.....This of course is precisely what Jim Weinstein had related to me." No, not even close to "precisely," Ronald Radosh. The drivers and the destinations differed in the two versions of the story.
The explanation for
these inconsistencies may be trivial, especially if one believes the Rosenberg case itself was
fairly trivial, beyond the personal tragedies involved. (Of course the USSR
had spies in America in the
1940's targeting American research on the atomic bomb, just like the US had spies in the USSR at that time targeting Soviet
research on the atomic bomb. Both
countries would have been insane not to have had them.) But in "Commies," author Radosh stresses the
fact that his Rosenberg case research
disenchanted him with the Left in America in general; and he had
previously published a book titled "The Rosenberg File." What we have in Ronald Radosh is a
self-proclaimed expert on Rosenberg Case minutia, and his failure to even
notice two glaring inconsistencies in one short paragraph in
"Commies" - about what he says had stunned him in his Rosenberg case research - makes one wonder if his claim to be "a historian" is just plain silliness.
On the next-to-last page of the book, Radosh muses: "Our history should have been a cautionary tale, but as the causes of yesteryear collapsed, my old friends found it hard to reevaluate their experiences or acknowledge that they were wrong." Not true again, Ronald Radosh. And especially not true of the cause you say finally convinced you that left politics were wrong - the New Left's opposition to Ronald Reagan's promotion of the Nicaragua-San Salvador war of unprecedented murderousness and devastation, ultimately funded illegally and in secret by Reagan with money raised by the sale of arms to the Iranians. The New Left's opposition to Reagan's funding and furthering murder and torture in the civil war in Nicaragua, you write, was wrong because Daniel Ortega was insensitive to personal freedoms there.
How grotesque.
No, your old lefty friends were not wrong, Ronald Radosh. On the contrary, although as prone to overzealousness and impatience as to long and debilitating periods of quiescence, we American Lefties have never been wrong.
And could it be that now after eight long years of King George the Second, even you are beginning to get the picture?
*Footnote: Ronald Radosh (b. 1937) is an American writer, whose primary work on the Cold War espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg was published in 1993 and titled The Rosenberg File. He published the book under review, Commies: A Journey Through The Old Left, The New Left, and The Left Over Left eight years later, in 2001. Radosh's latest book, co-authored with his wife Allis Radosh, is "A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel."
