Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left
by Ronald Radosh

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Book Reviews of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left

Book Review: Actually, There Were Commies Under the Bed
Summary: 5 Stars

Summary of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left

There's a certain amount of score settling on these pages, much of it amusing. What makes Commies fascinating, however, is Radosh's virtual banishment from left-wing politics for publishing The Rosenberg File, a book that definitively showed Julius Rosenberg was not the innocent martyr of liberal mythology but a traitor to his country. Radosh actually started the book believing he could vindicate Rosenberg; through the course of his research, however, he concluded the man was guilty, and set about saying so. This was too much for many of his friends, who soon refused to be seen with him in public. Here is a man who viewed the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as very possibly a portent of "extreme reaction, if not fascism," suddenly blacklisted by the Left. He became disenchanted with how he had spent his life and "started to question the whole project of the Left." He even suffered professionally: in 1993, Radosh was denied a job in George Washington University's history department. "If I had still been a Communist writing left-wing history, I probably would have breezed in. But faculty members practicing a politically correct version of McCarthyism blackballed me."

Radosh is not a left-winger who has become a right-winger, like David Horowitz, but he is clearly a person who has had second thoughts about what he once believed. America, he writes, is "a country where I was born but didn't fully discover until middle age." Commies is a valuable document describing radicalism in the 1950s and 1960s from the inside. --John J. Miller

General Books

• Books on Cassette > Nonfiction
• History > General
• General
• History > Americas > United States > 20th Century > 1945 - Present
• World > General
• Nonfiction > Politics > Ideologies > Communism & Socialism
• Radical Thought