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

If you have ever wondered what life growing up within the Communist movement was for those misguided souls of the Left during the 1940s and 1950s, you might be interested in Ron Radosh's personal memoir, full of anecdotes and famous names. He started his life as a baby paraded by his Communist parents down Fifth Avenue in the 1939 May Day demonstration. He celebrated his wedding at the annual proletarian Labor Day parade in downtown New York.

In the 1970s, Radosh was hit personally by the way the Left coalesced with the radical feminists who heaped scorn on "bourgeois" relationships such as marriage. His wife joined a feminist "consciousness-raising group," embraced "liberation," embarked on a series of affairs, and then left him for a man he had considered a friend. In his humiliation, Radosh began to realize that "the Marxist revolution we had hoped for was stillborn; but the sexual revolution was alive and well. Movement women could be counted on to jump into bed immediately."

Part of Radosh's awakening occurred on a trip to Castro's Cuba. Visiting Havana's Psychiatric Hospital, he heard the doctor in charge brag that they have a larger proportion of inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world. Radosh was shocked by the self-deception of his Commie friends who rationalized, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."

Radosh's final awakening from his radical faith came when he wrote a book called The Rosenberg File, which he originally planned to prove that his heroes, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had been framed by the U.S. government. When the evidence was overwhelming that, indeed, the Rosenbergs were Communist spies, Radosh began to question his lifetime of commitment to the Left and its anti-Americanism. Sadly, he had to face the hypocrisy and enmity of his former comrades who could not deny the evidence, but disdained and insulted him for daring to write the truth.

Facing the evidence about the Rosenbergs finally made Radosh consider what he called "the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else."