"Winston Churchill once said, “If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.� I first read it as a thoroughly conservative 17 year old. And I thought, "Hmm." And filed it away. Nobody had yet actually called me heartless, but most teenagers aren't that articulate. Mostly it was about how much I didn't care about other humans.

Horowitz's autobiography cum memoir takes the same path, although with the added benefit of understanding that his liberalism, or more accurately, his revolutionary radicalism on behalf of a Marxist ideal, was not something he found organically and adopted. Rather, he was born into and knew no life other than the The Party: its ideals, its goals, and its secrets. His first major memories are of marching in protest of the Rosenberg conviction and feeling powerful, a small child making a huge splash in an uncaring world. Revelation of the Rosenbergs' guilt did nothing to change that feeling of power, because young Horowitz had already internalized, even if he couldn't articulate it, that the ends justified the means.

Horowitz traces his childhood in suburban New York and his parents', then eventually his, inclusion in the Communist Party, including cell-meetings and stories of housewives that agreed to deliver letters to Mexico, but never returned. He married young and moved to Europe to experience true socialism by living first in Sweden, then in England, where he was recruited by the USSR as an informant or agent. He declined recruitment, but made all the contacts one could possibly make to be a major figure in the radical Left.

Post-Europe, he settled in Berkeley, the epicenter of the countercultural revolution. He arrived as beatniks were transitioning to Yippies and eventually hippies and helped found several radical publications, where he was known as an editor, writer, and all-around dude who could get funding. His ability to raise money led to his integral involvement with Huey Newton after the formation of the Black Panther party. It was that involvement that sowed the first seeds of doubt.

As Horowitz continued to work with Newton and, as Newton became less and less able to lead the party, Elaine Brown and others, he noticed that much of activity of the party was actually low-level thuggery and an attempt to control the Berkeley-Oakland criminal underground. When a secretary he specifically recommended Brown hire goes missing and is then found murdered, the facade cracks.

Disillusionment with the discrepancy between the ideals and actions of leading Leftist revolutionaries and the dissolution of his marriage and his most productive writing partnership brought Horowitz low. With little else available to him, he began to question. He identified his primary commitments: equality and justice. And he looked for the ways in which the people and organizations he works with actually seek those things. And concludes that he does not. At the conclusion of the Vietnam war, Horowitz realizes that nobody that he as actually protested with cares at all about the Vietnamese people or the government to institute communism in the country. They simply wanted to get out of the draft and protest the government.

And so Horowitz enters a period of deep contemplation where he must contemplate his involvement in any political philosophy. He continues to write as a biographer, having restored his writing partnership, but removes himself from activism and fundraising as he sees a greater and greater number of 60s radicals betraying their stated ideals to live in luxury and snicker about their involvement in murders.

He concludes that he's a conservative only insofar as he has gained an idea of history and what does and does not work. I was particularly pleased to see his remarks on the ever present statement that socialism does work, it's just that nobody has really tried it yet. Every attempt to employ the ideology on a wide scale has lead to what David Mamet called an efficient toll for "...bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death." Horowitz was not nearly so succinct, but his final chapters outline a history, and future, of death, death, death, misery, and death. He realizes, almost a priori, that freedom and equality are impossible. Reality constrains resources and the only way to maximize one is to maximize the other, or else minimize them both to the point where all humanity lives impoverished under the central control of an authority with no respect for life.

It's a remarkable book, not in the least for its utter humility and apology, which never seems self-serving or disingenuous. Horowitz must be considered one of America's great thinkers and, luckily for us, is still thinking and writing."