Ronald Radosh

"Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to a May Day demonstration on Fifth Avenue by his Communist parents. His boyhood heroes were his uncle Irving Keith (his Communist Party name), who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother's cousin Jacob Abrams, a famous Jewish anarchist who lived in "exile" in Mexico City and was a friend of Trotsky's.". "Radosh has been called "the Zelig of the American Left - seen everywhere and knowing everyone." Indeed, Commies is filled with memorable portraits of the people he has met in his unique journey - schoolmate Mary Travers, later of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger, who taught him the banjo and the Communist Party's musical line; young Bob Dylan, who played folk music with him at Radosh's apartment in Madison. Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden, Michael Lerner, William Appleman Williams, Irving Howe, and all the others who made "the Movement" are also actors in Radosh's drama." "But if Commies is an intimate social history of the American Left over the past half-century, it is also a compelling story of a crisis of radical faith."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1983, Ronald Radosh's co-authored book The Rosenberg File established once and for all that the celebrated "victims" of McCarthyism were, in fact, guilty. As an anticommunist Democrat, Radosh has for decades focused his historiographic laserbeam on both foreign and domestic affairs, from Latin America to Washington. Now, in this startling history, Radosh takes a close look at his own party. Drawing on original archival materials concerning key Democrats such as Scoop. Jackson, Eugene McCarthy, and Allard Lowenstein, Radosh challenges conventional wisdom at several points. He argues that the Student Nonviolent coordinating Committee was wrong in its allegation that white liberals sold out the black freedom movement in 1964, an allegation that has become a touchstone of civil-rights history. He reanalyzes the evidence surrounding the infamous 1968 Chicago Convention riots, arguing that yippie leaders intentionally provoked violent. clashes with the police. And he resurrects Scoop Jackson's 1972 candidacy, showing how Jackson's positions might have held together the party's vital center - if only the apparatchiks had not united behind a hopelessly unelectable George McGovern. The second half of the story, from the wilderness years of Reagan-Bush to the plurality victory of Bill Clinton, reveals a widening fault line in the party's traditional liberal-labor coalition. With labor in disarray, with. suburban voters turning Republican, the party has lost its New Deal "have-not" base, exchanging it for an urban minority. In the tumultuous 1994 elections, not a single incumbent Republican lost, while dozens of Democrats were turned out of office. Since then, over two-hundred officeholding members have changed parties. Bill Clinton may well manage to win reelection, and the Democrats may temporarily recapture state Houses or even Congress, but they have lost their. definition, their purpose, and their majority support.

Based on extensive research in government files, papers, unpublished memoirs, and numerous interviews this account chronicles the history of the Rosenberg spy case.

Rothbard, M. N. and Radosh, R. Preface.--Williams, W. A. Introduction, a profile of the corporate elite.--Sklar, M. J. Woodrow Wilson and the political economy of modern United States liberalism.--Rothbard, M. N. War collectivism in World War I.--Rothbard, M. N. Herbert Hoover and the myth of laissez-faire.--Radosh, R. The myth of the New Deal.--Eakins, D. Policy-planning for the establishment.--Gilbert, J. James Burnham: exemplary radical of the 1930s.--Liggio, L. P. American foreign policy and national-security management.--Suggested readings (p. -262).

Using material from the papers of Dalton Trumbo, Dore Schary, Melvyn Douglas and other Hollywood insiders, Ronald and Allis Radosh trace the growth of the Communist Party from the 1920s, when stars like Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx toured the Soviet Union and came back converted, through the 1930s and the war years, when the Party achieved critical mass in Hollywood. The Radoshes’ most controversial discovery is that during the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while others were lionizing them as blameless victims of a vicious blacklist, the Hollywood Reds themselves were beset by doubts and disagreements about their disloyalty to America and their treatment by the Communist Party. Red Star over Hollywood opens up the cells and discussion groups that defined Hollywood radicalism.

On May 14, 1948, under the stewardship of President Harry S. Truman, the United States became the first nation to recognize the State of Israel—just moments after sovereignty had been declared in Jerusalem. But it was hardly a foregone conclusion that America would welcome the creation of this new country. While acknowledging this as one of his proudest moments, Truman also admitted that no issue was "more controversial or more complex than the problem of Israel." As the president told his closest advisers, these attempts to resolve the issue of a Jewish homeland had left him in a condition of "political battle fatigue."Based on never-before-used archival material, A Safe Haven is the most complete account to date of the events that led to this historic occasion. Allis and Ronald Radosh explore the national and global pressures bearing on Truman and the people—including the worldwide Jewish community, key White House advisers, the State Department, the British, the Arabs, and the representatives of the new United Nations—whose influence, on both sides, led to his decision.Impeccably researched, brilliantly told, A Safe Haven is a suspenseful, moment-by-moment re-creation of this crossroads in U.S.-Israeli relations and Middle Eastern politics.

In The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, world-renowned scholars of Bolshevism and world communism analyze the human costs of the Bolshevik Revolution, its contribution to the spread of totalitarianism, and the responses it inspired among American and Western intellecturals--back cover.

Spain Betrayed provides full documentation of the Soviets' activities during the Spanish Civil War. Documents in the book reveal that the Soviet Union not only swindled the Spanish Republic out of millions of dollars through arms deals but also sought to take over and run the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession, thereby effectively destroying the foundations of authentic Spanish antifascism. The documents also shed light on many other disputed episodes of the war: the timing of the Republican request for assistance from the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of the International Brigades; the internal workings of the Comintern and its influence on Spain; and much more.

The party line is a historical drama. Using real and fictional characters, it intermingles the story of Walter Duranty -- the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1930s -- with the more contemporary story of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn who was assassinated in 2002, on the eve of becoming prime minister.