David Horowitz

David Horowitz was a New Left activist in the 1960s, the son of radical parents, who underwent a political conversion and became an conservative activist. He started what is now the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation, originally targeted at popular culture. Activities of the foundation are argued, from the right, as preserving academic freedom, and from the left, as attacking academic freedom. One coalition, Free Exchange on Campus, has gone to the extent of building a "Horowitz Checker" into its webpage.

Activities on the Left

Horowitz was an assistant to Bertrand Russell, and wwrote several books of political theory, such as The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, which attempted to examine the origin of the Cold War and define the conflict through the lens of the New Left. With Peter Collier, he wrote three biographies of dynasties, on the Rockefellers, Kennedys and Fords/

His views began to change, however, with the death of his friend Betty Van Patter, in December 1974 a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers, was killed. Horowitz, who had supported Pather leader to Huey Newton and had recruited Van Patter, contends that she was killed by the Panthers to prevent her from disclosing financial corruption ("Who Killed Betty Van Patter?" Salon.com, December 13, 1999). He subsequently came to revile the left, which he felt had protected the Panthers from being brought to justice.

He was an editor of Ramparts magazine. After the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of the extreme leftist Khmer Rouge, he lost faith in leftism. But then, in a "Second Thoughts" project with Collier, wrote "looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s. He wrote an individual book in 1996 book Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

Education

• Columbia University: BA (1959)
• University of California-Berkeley: MA, English (1961)