In 1985, Peter Collier and David Horowitz stunned the world of anticommunist conservatism by joining forces with it. The annunciation came in an article in Washington Post Magazine titled "Lefties for Reagan," in which the editors of the most distinguished leftist-radical magazine of the sixties, Ramparts, revealed that they had voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election and were firm supporters of the Reagan efforts to fight communism in Central America and elsewhere by supporting prodemocratic freedom fighters.
It was an act of political courage, as they certainly knew; after all, Collier and Horowitz had made their career on the American Left, and in turning against their old comrades and constituency they were, in a very real sense, endangering their livelihoods. Successful free-lance writers like Collier and Horowitz depend on the good opinion of the people in control of the printing press, and those were the very people most likely to be offended by their challenge to the prevailing morality of those who had been radicals or radical fellow travelers in the sixties and seventies.
Collier and Horowitz may have suspected but could not have known exactly what they were getting themselves into. In the pages of Destructive Generation they explain how surprised they were at the sheer abruptness with which lifelong friendships came to an end because of their decision to air their apostasy. "I can understand how you might have done something like voting for Reagan," they quote a friend of two decades as complaining, "but why didn't you have the decency to keep it to yourselves?"
Their old alliances and friendships decimated, Collier and Horowitz proceeded to produce a series of fiery articles, conferences, and now two books scoring the American Left with a ferocity that can only be summed up as the aftermath of a failed relationship--in this case, their divorce from a marriage to an idea about how to rearrange the world and the character of humanity. "I haven't exchanged one ideology for another," Horowitz writes in one of the chapters reprinted here. "I have freed myself from the chains of an Idea."
I have read most of Destructive Generation over the years, in one magazine or another. Piece by piece, the Collier and Horowitz articles seemed angry, occasionally wildly so, but when collected, they actually take on an elegiac tone--rather like the masterfully sad spirit animating their best-selling book on the Kennedy family and its legacy's catastrophic impact on Bobby's and Teddy's children.
The Kennedys builds toward its conclusion with the inevitability of a well-conceived tragedy. At its best, Destructive Generation has the same force--and is, moreover, written and told in the same spirit of imaginative sympathy. That accomplishment seems all the more remarkable in light of the coiled fury with the past that suffuses every page.
What the book makes clear is that Collier and Horowitz were participants, slightly off center focus but nonetheless ever present, in a continuing tragedy--the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the sixties. Rather, let us say tragedies, for the ideological journey they took is littered with the bodies of old friends and former colleagues.
The most devastating death for them (and,
...
Read Full Article
|
