Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969.

• Author: Lewy, Guenter

On May 1, 1997, the Nation Institute sponsored a meeting at Town Hall in New York City billed as "a look back at the most celebrated and controversial decade of the century" - the 1960s. The program featured some of the decade's most ardent participants, including former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Kathleen Cleaver, formerly communications secretary for the Black Panthers and now a law professor at Cardozo Law School. Not surprisingly, in view of the sponsorship of the meeting, all of the participants celebrated what they regarded as a decade of great promise that unfortunately had not achieved its lofty goals. Transnational corporations, "devoid of life-affirming values", Bella Abzug argued, had succeeded in defeating the Sixties spirit of hope and youthful dynamism. Some suggested that the movement, in a mistake of tactics, had wanted too much too soon; others felt that it had not been radical enough.

The authors of the books under review here represent two more voices of the Sixties, but they provide us with a rather different picture of what undoubtedly was a fateful decade. David Horowitz was born in New York City in 1939. His nonobservant Jewish parents were members of the Communist Party, and he grew up absorbing a special sort of family values. After Nikita Khrushchev's 19th Party Congress speech of 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin, the older Horowitzes, like many of their contemporaries, withdrew from the party in disillusionment - though they continued to cling to the belief that a new socialist world of equality and justice would eventually triumph. For the seventeen year old son, on the other hand, the communist debacle became a challenge. How had it happened? How could such disasters be avoided in the future? How could the socialist vision be reconstructed free from the taints that Stalin had placed on the movement? Eventually, Horowitz, together with other "red diaper babies", became a prominent figure in what became known as the New Left. It was to be a movement that set itself the task of learning from the mistakes of the Old Left, to which an earlier generation of radicals had devoted their lives, but which had failed so miserably.

The birth of the New Left out of the Port Huron Statement of 1962, composed by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an affiliate of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, has been recounted many times. What Horowitz adds is an intimate and fascinating portrait of many of the New Left's leading players in California, where he began his political activism as a graduate student of English literature at Berkeley and soon became a full-time activist. There is Tom Hayden, who became obsessed with ending America's "imperialist war" against the people of Vietnam, and who after a visit to North Vietnam proclaimed that he had seen "rice roots democracy" at work. He soon emerged as one of the confidants of the North Vietnamese Communists. There is Ramparts, where Horowitz became one of the editors. The staff also included Bob Scheer, the radical who ostentatiously traveled first class and stayed in the finest hotels, and Warren...