The Black Book of the American Left
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David Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.”When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ generation and his own had been confined. Today, it has become the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, electing a president and achieving a position from which it can shape America’s future. How it achieved its present success and what that success portends are the overarching subjects of Horowitz’s conservative writings. Through the unflinching focus of one singularly engaged witness, the identity of a destructive movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its identity and mission becomes disturbingly clear.Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country, collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.
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Acknowledgments
The essays and articles in The Black Book of the American Left and the project itself would not have been possible without the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the dedicated individuals who staff it. Foremost among these are Mike Finch, who is the operating head of the Center, its fundraiser, and an informed counselor in all we do, and Peter Collier who has been my literary collaborator and friend for nearly fifty years. Mike Bauer gathered and helped to edit all the articles contained in these volumes, and John Perazzo and Elizabeth Ruiz helped with the research on many of them. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the love and support of my wife April through the years of writing and editing these volumes, and to thank her for being there for me.
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Many years after the publication of “Black Murder Inc.,” a member of the Squad, whom the police believed to be Betty’s probable killer, Flores Forbes, described its criminal activities, in particular its shakedowns of the afterhours clubs, while omitting the murders it committed in the course of the shakedowns, in a memoir called Will You Die With Me?, July, 2006
I learned about the personalities in the Squad, and about their involvement in Betty’s murder. One of them, Robert Heard, was known as “Big Bob” because he was 6'8" and weighed 400 pounds.44 Big Bob told friends, whom I talked to, that the Squad had killed Betty and more than a dozen other people, in the brief period between 1972 and 1976. The other victims were all black, and included the Vice President of the Black Student Union at Grove Street College, whose misfortune was to have inadvertently insulted a member of the Squad.
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