Radical Son by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

Horowitz was born to Communist Party parents in New York, and grew up in a world that believed in a coming revolution. In the 1960s he became a leader of the New Left in Berkeley, edited the magazine Ramparts and worked with the Black Panther Party, whose bookkeeper Betty Van Patter was murdered in 1974. He came to believe the Panthers were responsible, and that experience led him to question the left's moral claims.

The book describes his break with his former allies, his rethinking of his father's and his own ideals, and his emergence in the 1980s as a supporter of Ronald Reagan, then as a critic of the left in universities and the press. He frames the change as a moral rather than a merely political conversion.

The account is passionate and one-sided, and his former friends dispute some of his claims.

Why it matters

It belongs to a tradition of ex-radical memoirs that runs from Chambers to Koestler, and it helps explain the intensity of some conservative critiques of the left. It should be read with that bias in mind.

About the author

David Horowitz (born 1939) was a writer and editor and later the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles. He and Peter Collier wrote a series of generational books, including The Rockefellers and The Kennedys, and then Destructive Generation, a critical account of the sixties left. Radical Son was published in 1997.

Who should read it

Readers who like political memoir and the story of an ideological change of mind.