David Horowitz, 1939-2025

I’d forgotten that David Horowitz’s Radical Son opens with something breaking:

My only clear recollection of my grandfather Morris—a memory forever sharpened by remorse—is that when I was six he sat on my favorite record of the Seven dwarves singing “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho (It’s off to work we go…)” and broke it. And that I yelled at him, protesting the injustice with all the force my small lungs could muster, as if my yelling could make the record whole. And that, shortly afterward, they took my grandfather to the hospital—and I never saw him again.

It’s a remarkable opening passage, assuring readers they’re in the hands of a uniquely gifted writer who, we learn as the story unfolds, has here foreshadowed the key themes of the tale to come: family and fathers, protest and injustice, redemption and loss. Horowitz’s 1996 masterpiece is one of the greatest autobiographies in American literature. It’s a story about things that break—parents, children, marriages, politics. But in the following years, he seemed to have gotten stronger, since—as he shows in his books and public life—his purpose was to understand more about himself and what he loved, including his country.

He was born Jan. 10, 1939, and died April 29 at the age of 86. But his life story covers hundreds of years, for the material that shaped him constitutes the full sweep of American history, from the Middle Passage and the Pale of Settlement through Vietnam and the fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and the Donald Trump presidency. Both sides of Horowitz’s family escaped Russia, though it seems his mother and father never really got far enough away, even in Queens, New York, where they devoted themselves to the communist cause, Josef Stalin, and their son, David.

Their red-diaper baby became one of the stars of the New Left, as a writer, publisher, and organizer who protested against the war in Vietnam and racism and worked with the Black Panthers, becoming friends with the group’s founder, Huey P. Newton. Then, in the early 1980s, he made an about-face and supported Ronald Reagan. He started the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1998 and became one of the leading voices of the American right. He was so successful as an activist, and so prolific in promoting younger conservatives, that his public gifts tended to overshadow his contributions to American literature and historiography. He wrote many dozens of books—memoirs, polemics, histories—and told me that he considered the nine-volume The Black Book of the American Left, an encyclopedic chronicle of left-wing radicalism, one of the cornerstones of his legacy.

In 2016, I visited David at his home in the desert north of Los Angeles. He said he’d never traveled to Israel—he didn’t like flying—but with the late summer light breaking over the mountains and illuminating the valley behind him, it struck me the patriarch of the right had re-created a Jerusalem of sorts in his own backyard.

I asked him about the upcoming election, Trump, and the global paranoia his campaign had given rise to. He asked of his fellow Republicans, “Don’t they understand the seriousness of this election?” He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”

Radical Son is a narrative driven by crimes and lies. He’d helped his friend Betty Van Patter get an accounting job with the Panthers, and Newton had her murdered. That kept Horowitz out of politics for a while, as he wondered if the left could “take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals.” He wrote, “I already knew the answers, although I wasn’t ready yet to draw the appropriate conclusions.”

His parents had not wanted to ask those questions, so when it became impossible to ignore or excuse Stalin’s crimes, they were crushed—they’d nurtured lies great and small for decades. In the Tablet article recounting my afternoon with David, I wrote that, with his parents’ failed political commitment in mind, he’d “resolved not to be played for a sucker.” Now I see that was a coarse formulation, and false. There was nothing calculated about his reevaluation of his place in the political realm. He lived by his sense of what was true and what was good, as he records in Radical Son. It’s a work of profound psychological acuity, whether he’s describing Newton, his parents, the character of an ex-wife, or his failure to see his own faults as clearly as he sees others’.

The fact is that throughout his career, first on the left and then on the right, Horowitz’s main theme wasn’t really politics; rather, it was family. Along with fellow former leftist turned conservative Peter Collier, he wrote several histories of great American families, including the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Many consider A Cracking of the Heart, his memoir of his late daughter Sarah, to be his best book. Conservatives generally argue, with good reason, that leftist policies are designed to break the traditional family structure. But David believed that failures at home generate the psychological chaos at the heart of the leftist project to undo civilization and remake it in the image of barbarism.

“The perennial challenge,” he wrote in Radical Son, is “to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. My own life, which has often been painful and many times off course, is ultimately not discrete—a story to itself—but part of the narrative we all share.”

It’s true: Almost everything we love breaks. May we, too, earn the wisdom David Horowitz sought and found and shared with family, friends, colleagues, and readers.