Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.

• Author: Hertzberg, Hendrik

They once opologized for communist atrocities. Now they apologize for anticommunist atrocities.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor of The New Republic.

* Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. Peter Collier, David Horowitz. Summit, $19.95.

No political stereotype is more banal than the youthful radical who turns reactionary in middle age. What Peter Collier and (especially) David Horowitz bring to this tired genre is an unusually vigorous strain of arrogance. The result is a book* that is almost, but not quite, as gruesomely fascinating as it is despicable.

Collier and Horowitz-or rather Horowitz and Collier, since Horowitz, though the less graceful writer of the pair, is obviously the dominant partner-are products of a small but influential section of the massive political uprising of the 1960s. From the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, they moved through civil rights activism to the proHanoi branch of the anti -Vietnam war movement and from there to Ramparts, which they coedited during its extremist "revolutionary" decline, from 1969 until the magazine folded in 1973. When the New Left's disintegration accelerated during the midseventies, they gradually drifted away from it to write best-selling dynastic biographies of the Rockefeller and Kennedy families, though they continued to think of themselves as part of "the Left" until well into the present decade. In 1985 they created a minor stir in Washington with an article entitled "Lefties for Reagan" in the Post's Sunday magazine. And now the present volume, a full selection of the Conservative Book Club.

In Destructive Generation, Horowitz and Collier are a good deal harder on their former comrades than they are on themselves-their tone is accusatory, not confessional-but from incidental remarks, offhand admissions, and, above all, from their attacks on people whose actions and beliefs at the time were identical to their own, one can piece together a bill of particulars. During their radical years Horowitz and Collier, according to Horowitz and Collier, were guilty of treason. They were motivated "not by altruism and love but nihilism and hate"-specifically, hatred for their country, their parents, themselves, God, and all humanity. They were willfully blind to the nature of communist totalitarianism and eagerly embraced its Third World variants. As journalists, they knowingly suppressed and distorted facts that were inconvenient to their political views. Finally...