I join John in noting the death of our friend David Horowitz at the age of 86. I knew and admired David for more than 35 years, from the time he first came through town with Peter Collier to talk about the invaluable Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.
I counted David a friend for roughly the same length of time. He was a friend with deep insight about the threat posed by the left. To the Leninist question what is to be done?, David had the answer. He spoke and wrote from his own personal experience on the left. We were proud to publish the columns he occasionally sent to us on Power Line.
No one told his own story better than David did himself in Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. It is a wrenching memoir and classic American autobiography.
Reviewing Volume V of David’s Black Book of the American Left: Culture Wars, Jay Nordlinger observed:
For some 35 years, he has been screaming at us, “These people really hate you!” (“These people” being the Left.) “They are intent on destroying you. Don’t you realize that?” I realize that, yes, and one of the people who helped me to, many years ago, when I was learning about the world, was Horowitz.
Reading Volume V of his magnificent collection made me sad, for two reasons. First, I thought, “Those who need to read this, won’t. Those who need to know this, won’t. David is preaching to the choir. I wish he could preach to the nation at large.”
But then I remembered that I found him – as I found Norman Podhoretz, Bill Buckley, and many others. No teacher or professor assigned them to me. But I found them. And maybe other people will find David, and these volumes?
The second thing that made me sad was this: Après lui, qui? After David, who? Who gets the Left like this, who has its number, who remembers everything that happened, who remembers where the bodies are buried (literally, in the case of the Panthers’ victims), who will scream at us, when we need screaming? Who? But at least we have The Black Book of the American Left, a repository of vital information and thought, indeed of truth.
After David, who? As a friend of Samuel Johnson said upon his death: “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. — Johnson is dead. — Let us go to the next best: — there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.” So it may be said of David. RIP, my friend.
