Culture Watch

David Horowitz, Ex Radical

Bill Ayers's Future Days, reviewed in HNN a few weeks ago, has provoked myriad heated responses from the leading figures of the Sixties. Among the most enraged is David Horowtiz, whose comments appeared on Conservative Net. Horowitz, an erstwhile leader of the New Left, now takes a more conservative approach to politics and culture, as is evident from his exchange with list member John Morello.

JOHN MORELLO

As someone who 'came clean for Gene' in 1968 and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, Ayers unrepetant memoir is just another reason why the anti-war movement fell into such ill-repute. On the one hand kids like me were going door to door asking people if they would vote for Gene McCarthy, while Ayers' work was getting all the headlines and discrediting our work in the process. People took one look at us and saw people like Ayers, but only with shorter hair.

Furthermore, as someone who also happens to be Italian, I don't remember a single kid in my neighborhood who owned or even knew what a zip gun was. That leads me to believe that Ayers' book is less of a memoir and more a bad rip-off of an Elmore Leonard mystery. And to hear him boast how he escaped serious consequences for his actions or even acknowledge that he did anything wrong tells lots about his character, or lack of it. Gitlin was right. Ayers screwed it up for all of us.

DAVID HOROWITZ

Good for starters. Now get down to the nitty gritty. Ayers didn't ruin it for all of us. It was ruined from the beginning. The New Left was about reviving Stalinism as a respectable leftism. I remember standing next to Todd Gitlin in 1969 when these Weather Idiots came to Berkeley with their criminal agendas to recruit bombers. Todd was speechless. He didn't have the guts to stand up to Linda Evanas and Ted Gold (soon to blow himself up mercifully instead of innocent others). The worst aspect of the Sixties is the continuing bad faith of people like Todd who refuse to own up to their own responsibility for what happened, for what they did, for they encouraged, for what they failed to opposed and want to blame it all on juvenile delinquents like Ayers who get too much press (Gitlin is quoted in today's NY Times in much this vein). This is all bullshit. Billy Ayers was elected VP of SDS (Bernadine was president). Now how is Todd (and I'm merely using him as a symbol) proposing to escape responsibility for what happened to an organization of which he was once President, and above all his silence, his unwillingness to fight and expose them, his unwillingness to this day to praise all those decent Americans, conservatives, Republicans, FBI men ordinary cops who fought valiantly to stop new left fascism--which is what it was--from doing even more damage and who are still getting nothing but shit for their efforts from the sophisticated intellectuals who think their shit doesn't stink.