David Horowitz Assails David Brock’s History of ‘The Republican Noise Machine’

David Brock has written a new book called The Republican Noise Machine: How It Corrupts Our Democracy. In it, he purports to expose the vast right-wing media conspiracy, a menace Brock claims to know first-hand as someone who was once a cog in its malignant machine. First-hand knowledge is an important claim for Brock because, as a famous self-confessed prevaricator, he is aware that he stands on shaky ground as he attempts to extend the successful career he has made out of his confession of malfeasance and the political reversal it announced. A similar dilemma haunts the postpartum lives of other reborn prevaricators like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. Brock’s advantage over them in finding a readership willing to believe his stories again is that he is selling a message his new political allies are eager to hear.

I do not intend to examine the thesis of Brock’s book, which I admit I find preposterous – that unscrupulous, partisan conservatives have invaded arenas previously governed by impeccable standards of fairness and objectivity, and thereby corrupted American journalism and politics in the process. Only the ideologically blinded will be persuaded by special pleadings like this. As a conservative writer and publisher, I have the dubious privilege of appearing as one of the culprits in Brock’s profile of what he claims is a vast right wing media conspiracy. In a dozen pages of The Republican Noise Machine, Brock offers readers an account of my career as a cabalist of the Right and polluter of the nation’s journalistic airwaves. What I propose instead is to use Brock’s account of my attitudes and deeds as an occasion to assess his reliability as a reporter of facts (rather than as an interpreter of their significance). In other words, I will use this opportunity to examine the reliability of Brock in providing the evidentiary basis he offers his readers to make a judgment about my work or anyone else’s.

I am an exceptionally promising subject for such an exercise because I have published a lengthy autobiography and left a clearly defined trail in many books and articles readily available on the web (at www.frontpagemag.com and www.Salon.com). Therefore a comparison of Brock’s version to this published record offers a unique and fairly precise way for readers to gauge his accuracy as a journalist and his reliability as a guide to the evidence, quite apart from any political conclusions he draws from it. In sum, if David Brock wanted to get the bare facts of what I have done and what I have said correct by checking the sources, he could easily have done so. He would not have to undertake the arduous task of tracking them down or conducting interviews with people who knew me, or with myself. Nor would readers have to weigh the veracity of his account of such interviews where only he and his subject were present, which is often the most problematic aspect of assessing the fairness and accuracy of a writer’s work. In order to measure Brock’s regard for the evidence, I will attempt (without unnecessarily boring the reader) to cover every factual statement about me that he makes in this book.

Brock begins his account of my career inauspiciously with a reference exaggerated to the point of distortion. “In the 1960s, Horowitz had been an editor of Ramparts, one of the most violently radical organs of the New Left.” (Brock, p. 100) While Ramparts was indeed a radical organ, it was hardly “one of the most violently radical organs of the time.” Among these one might include Prairie Fire (the publication of the terrorist Weather Underground), The Black Panther, the Revolutionary Worker, the Berkeley Barb and other vanguard publications of movements actively organizing for terrorist and revolutionary agendas.

By contrast, movement activists generally regarded Ramparts as a “sellout” publication because the magazine was published in a slick four-color format for newsstands, as opposed to the “underground” style of truly “movement” papers. Moreover, its staff members were conspicuously not activists themselves. During the 1968 riots at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, for example, Ramparts’ staff was roundly criticized for setting up headquarters in the “Pump Room” of the Hilton instead of joining other radicals in the dangerous streets. In 1971, Ramparts published an article condemning the violence of the Weather Underground and in 1974 an editorial appeared in the magazine condemning the violence of the SLA. I wrote both pieces myself, a fact reported in my autobiography, Radical Son, which is a text readily available to Brock.

Brock continues: “Horowitz was the author of a book, The Free World Colossus, an influential New Left text indicting U.S. foreign policy. His thinking was shaped by his friend and mentor Isaac Deutscher, a Marxist historian and a biographer of Leon Trotsky” (Brock, p. 100). Isaac Deutscher was indeed my friend and mentor but, as explained in my autobiography, our personal relationship had no influence on The Free World Colossus because I hadn’t even met him at the time I wrote the book in Sweden in 1962-3. I only met Deutscher afterwards when I moved to London, where he resided. The account of our meeting in Radical Son, moreover, refutes Brock’s specific claim that my thinking in the book was shaped by Deutscher. In my autobiography I describe our first encounter in the living room of a mutual friend where I eagerly presented him with one of theses I had advanced (and was most proud of) in The Free World Colossus. This was the notion that Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons was a principal cause of the Sino-Soviet split. Deutscher was so contemptuous of my idea that he rudely turned his back on me and refused to speak to me for the rest of our meeting....