The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz

Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.

      It was the bloodbath that our opponents, the anti-Communist defenders of America’s role in Southeast Asia, had predicted. But for the left there would be no looking back. Baez’s appeal proved to be the farthest it was possible for them to go, which was not very far. The appeal did not begin to suggest that antiwar activists needed to reassess the role they had played in making these tragedies inevitable. Ironically, it was Hayden who eventually came closest to such self-recognition: “What continues to batter my sense of morality and judgment,” he wrote in Reunion, “is that I could not even imagine that the worst stereotype of revolutionary madness was becoming a reality. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge became the Stalins and Hitlers of my lifetime, killing hundreds of thousands of people for being ‘educated’ or ‘urban,’ for attracting the paranoid attention of a secret police who saw conspiracies behind every failure of the grand plan to be achieved. Most Western estimates settle on 1.5 million killed.” But having acknowledged those facts and his confusion over them, he could go no farther, and had no genuine second thoughts. The terrible result, which he had worked so hard to make possible, failed to prompt a reassessment of the people who had predicted the bloodbath if the Communists were to win and whose anti-Communist policies he had opposed: “None of this persuades me that Nixon and Kissinger were right.”

      Nixon and Kissinger were right, but the Democratic Party had been persuaded by its left wing to abandon the Vietnamese to their fate. This prompted other second thoughts about the way the left regarded America itself. As a student at Columbia, I had read Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, which was inspired by his countrymen’s conquest of the small island of Melos. Euripides had intended for his play to arouse the moral sense of his fellow-Athenians about the war they had conducted and the suffering they had inflicted. When the Athenians saw Euripides’s play, they wept for the people of Melos. In the eyes of my professor, Moses Hadas, this show of conscience was a tribute to Athenian civilization. How much greater, I thought, was the civilized response of America’s democracy to the tragedy in Vietnam. I could not think of another historical instance where a nation had retreated from a field of battle it had dominated, because the conscience of its people had been touched. And yet, America had withdrawn for precisely that reason. The left believed that American policy was controlled by giant corporations, and that the war was being prosecuted for their imperial interests, which they would not relinquish. But the left had been proven wrong about this too. American democracy was not the “sham” we had said it was. When the American people turned against the war, there was no greater power to make it continue.

      This is from an article based on my autobiography Radical Son, published in Heterodoxy, January 1997.