Soviet-front group) in the nuclearnfreeze; hence the fact that when Colliernand Horowitz last appeared at thenUniversity of Colorado, the picketingnagainst them was led by the ancientnSender Gariin, current guru of thenColorado left—and the man who recruitednWhittaker Chambers for thenparty back in 1925.nIndeed, in the end Collier and Horowitznargue that if there ever was suchna thing as a New Left—the openlynanti-Stalinist left of “participatory democracy”nand “Mississippi FreedomnSummer” (1964) — its span of life wasnextremely brief, and it has long sincendisappeared. What has replaced it—nand had already replaced it by, say,n1966—was simply the old Hard Left,ntotalitarian in sentiment, and dedicatednto the destruction of American powernand influence.nThe first essay in the book (and thenbest) is the heartrending story of thenradical lawyer Fay Stender. Brilliant,nforceful, a concert-level pianist as wellnas formidable legal mind, Stender wasnmoved by sincere compassion for thenunderprivileged, and became morenand more drawn to the issue of “convicts’nrights” — a movement that hernenergy helped make national in scale.nEventually she became the head of anradical law firm closely associated withnthe Black Panther Party. She ended upndefending the thug George Jackson, anPanther “Field Marshal” accused ofnmurdering a prison guard. Jackson wasnportrayed in his “autobiography”n(which Stender cleverly edited) as ansaintly revolutionary, the type of personnwho would create the new Americanfor which Stender herself longed;nthe book, Soledad Brother, became anbest-seller, and George Jackson becamenfamous.nBut by the summer of 1971 Stendernhad also become convinced that innreality Jackson was a very violent andnuncontrolled personality — too dangerousnto deal with. She withdrew fromnhis legal case when it became clear tonher that Jackson was going to attemptnan armed break-out from San Quentinn(six people died in the resultingnbloodbath); eventually she withdrew,ndisillusioned, from convict law altogether.nShe became instead an innovativenadvocate of women’s rights (andnhas a fair claim to be seen as thenoriginator of the concept of “palimo-nny”). But in 1979 Stender’s past connectionnto “The Revolution” camenback to destroy her: a brutal hanger-onnof George Jackson’s invaded hernBerkeley home and shot her five timesnat point-blank range, leaving her paralyzednfrom the neck down and innconstant pain. Her last appearance in ancourt of law was to testify for thenprosecution. And then the horrific painnshe was under (mostly physical, butnalso psychological — “I structured mynentire existence around trying to donsomething about racism; and nownthis”) led her to commit suicide.nIf the story of Fay Stender has all thenelements of tragedy, the essay on thendecline and fall of SDS and the WeathernUnderground has all the elements ofnblack comedy. Here you have an organizationnthat in the autumn of 1968nhad close to 100,000 members andnstood on the threshold of real nationalnpower; within two years that organizationnhad been reduced to just 600npeople—but at least they were alln”pure revolutionaries”! The cause ofnthis fiasco lay in the psychotic revolutionarynfantasies of the SDS leadership,nwho persisted in thinking they were innthe position of the Bolsheviks in 1917.nWhat a crew they were: BernadinenDohrn (the Red Queen of the Revolution,nfamous for her technique of “horizontalnrecmitment”); John Jacobs, thenever-ingenious, hyperenergetic propagandist,nliving on drugs; the tiny, sinisternbomber Terry Robbins; the confusednand increasingly wary Mark Rudd. Nornshould one forget Tom Hayden, “thenAmerican Lenin”: by 1970 reduced tonmilitary leader of “The Berkeley RednFamily,” convinced that he could ignitenthe Revolution by getting the BlacknPanthers to shoot down an AlamedanCounty sherifFs helicopter (“Just likenyou, Tom, to get someone else to pullnthe trigger”). Some sort of nadir herenwas reached in Dohrn’s famous speechnto the SDS leadership in which shenproclaimed the crazed mass murderernCharles Manson as a revolutionarynhero.nBut amid all these savage hallucinations,na new mood was established innwhich some real treason could be committed:nmeetings with the North Vietnamese,nin Havana and Prague, toncoordinate anti-American propagandanand “military” actions around thennnworld. (Collier and Horowitz show hownthey themselves partook in the new,novertly anti-American culture, printingnin Ramparts secret information thatnthey knew would compromise the USndefense posture in regard to the SovietnUnion; all that happened to them wasnthat they became celebrities.) Andnsome people were really killed, too.nThe most spectacular case: three soldiersnof “The Weather Army,” whonblew themselves to bits while constructingnan antipersonnel bomb — anbomb, by the way, whose intendednvictims were ordinary enlisted men andntheir dates at a dance in Ft. Dix, NewnJersey. The left is furious with Colliernand Horowitz for revealing (for the firstntime) the hideous nature of the explosivendevice here, and its working-classntargets: it made the Weather bombersnlook so bad. The latter’s “martyrdom,”nhowever, is still ceremonially commemoratednevery year.nAnother outstanding article is Horowitz’sn”Letter to a Political Friend.”nThis is a meditation on the philosophynof socialism, called forth by the deathnof Horowitz’s father (an old-line Communist),nand the failure of one ofnHorowitz’s childhood friends to attendnthe funeral on the grounds that he nownviewed Horowitz as someone who hadn”betrayed the Revolution.” Horowitz’snfather had devoted his life to the causenof “socialism,” and in the early 50’snhad allowed himself to be cruelly usednby the party in an “America is Anti-nSemitic” campaign — an experiencenfrom which he never fully recovered;nHorowitz now sees in the behavior ofnhis childhood friend the same lack ofnhuman feeling, the same lack of ordinaryn”bourgeois” decency, that hadncharacterized the Old Left, and fromnwhich the “New” Left had originallynsought to distance itself That effortnwas ultimately in vain, however, becausenthe Hard Left is always just thenHard Left: always subject to the tyrannynof the Idea, as opposed to thenordinary truths of everyday human life.nWhat else but emotional shallowness,nfor instance, can explain thenbreak-up of decades-long marriages asna result of the 1956 Khrushchevnspeech against Stalin? What else butnemotional shallowness, a horrid loneliness,ncan explain lives that find theirncenters not in true personal relationshipsnbut in violent sectarian politics ofnAUGUST 1989/31n