The last leftist: the late Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, puts today's lefties to shame.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus
• Position: Book review

Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, by Martin Duberman, The New Press, 344 pages, $26.95

THERE WAS ONCE a radical left in the United States. Back then, it was common to hear on college campuses and in respectable left-wing publications that liberals and the Democratic Party were the enemies of freedom, justice, and the people. Democratic politicians who expanded welfare programs and championed legislation that aided labor unions were nonetheless regarded as racists, totalitarians, and mass murderers for their reluctance to defend the civil rights of African Americans, for their collusion with capitalists, for their use of police powers to repress dissent, and for their imperialist, war-making policies. There was widespread leftwing rejection of the liberal claim that government was good, and many leftists spoke of and stood for a thing they called liberty.

There was no better exemplar of that thoroughgoing, and-statist left than Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States, whose death in 2010 was preceded by a life of activism and scholarship devoted to what could be called libertarian socialism. It is difficult to read Martin Duberman's sympathetic but thoughtful biography, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, without lamenting how different Zinn and his ilk were from what now passes for an alternative political movement in this country. And for those of us with an interest in bridging the left and libertarianism, the book will also serve as a painful reminder of what once seemed possible. Howard Zinn's life was a repudiation of the politics of the age of Obama.

At the age of 21, Zinn eagerly enlisted in the Army Air Forces to serve in World War II, but soon became one of very few Americans who questioned "the good war." Thereafter, Zinn accumulated impeccable anti-war credentials, capped by his characterization of Obama's foreign policy as "nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike."

Following his service as a bombardier on B-17 Flying Fortresses, Zinn found out that what he had dropped on French towns were 100pound canisters filled with a new invention called "jellied gasoline" later known as napalm. By the end of the war he had come to believe that "modern warfare, being massive, indiscriminate killing of people, is a means so horrendous that no end"--not even the destruction of fascism--"can justify it." Though he never considered himself to be a pacifist, the 60 million deaths caused by the war against the Axis caused him...