Explanatory note. The Desk Drawer series is not a category of general interest. It is a place to put the lies and omissions of the Book Burners as I find them.
In the last installment (Desk Drawer 3), I noticed that David Horowitz in his own "formal departure" from the Communist conspiracy against this nation in 1985 claimed to be by 1973 "in a state of kind of shell shock and sitting on the sidelines" when in fact he was still deep into his Black Panther period and, for example, yet to push back against Solzhenitsyn.
In the installment before that (Desk Drawer 2)before that, we see him describe the seditious radical, Bob Avakian, as someone notable for having pulled a flag down at a demonstration -- not, as he was far more notoriously known, for publicly soliciting funds to buy guns for the Black revolution. This same installment includes the interesting factoid that Don Rothenberg, a notorious Communist Party operative and organizer (identified before the House Un-American Activities Committee by FBI informant Mary Markward), had worked at Ramparts as an assistant to the publisher. Such a fact warrants a closer look at the so-called clean break between the old Left and the "New Left."
Before that (Desk Drawer 1), we see Horowitz divorcing his parents from their Communist Party activities over the revelations of the Kruschev Report in 1956, when, in fact, the FBI is still marking down parental CP activity in 1958 and 1960.
Then there is the previously unreported fact -- i.e., breaking news -- that David Horowitz's father, Philip Horowitz, a secret Communist, taught English at the high school where and when five -- count em, FIVE (5) -- members of the Rosenberg Ring went to school: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ruth Greenglass, Anne and Mike Sidorvitch, plus a sixth i.d.'d by ex-Communists as a Communist agent, Harry Hyman.
Bonus: Harry Hyman testified during Sen. McCarthy's investigation into espionage at Fort Monmouth (pleading the Fifth Amendment at least a half a dozen times in answer to questions about stealing radar secrets and turning them over to Julius Rosenberg and the like).
Oh, and don't forget it was his parents' friend, Daily Worker editor Joseph North, a "lookout man" for the Russian intelligence, among other things, who tapped a very young David to be that Kremlin-messaging-board's "youth editor."
North is infamously known as a KGB "lookout man" for referring William Remington to the KGB's Golos network, for which Elizabeth Bentley worked.
Elizabeth Bentley described North in sworn testimony thus: "By lookout I mean he was always on the lookout for good Communists who could be used on Russian intelligence work. That is why he was in touch with [Jacob] Golos, who was a Russian intelligence agent. ... Every person they [Russian intelligence] picked up came from the Communist Party via these lookouts. Joe North was one; Grace Granich was one; Intercontinent News was another lookout; the American League Against War and Fascism was another; people like Earl Browder, and so."
The omissions of such monumental biographical context and insights into the workings of Moscow-directed Communists' war against our country becomes particularly intriguing in someone, like Horowitz, who is endlessly writing and speaking about his life and times behind the enemy lines of that Moscow-directed war. See, for example, how Horowitz coyly explains the impact of the Rosenbergs' arrest and execution on his young life:
"It was the famiilarity of the Rosenbergs that made their fate so terrible to me. They were a little Jewish couple who looked like everyone else we knew ..."
Might that "familiarity" have come from the distinct possibilty that his father knew them and their co-conspirators from school? Maybe Horowitz pere even taught some of them in English class! Maybe he helped them along into the Communist conspiracy in the first place. Who knows -- David? Ron? Perhaps. But they ain't telling.
Meanwhile, Rosenberg Ring flotsam was washing up all around the Horowitz family.
Here's a new bit.
The leader of the Horowitzs' Sunnyside "cell," whom H mentions in his memoir the context of Stalin's death in 1953, was one Morris Pasternak. Horowitz, who was friends with Morris's daughter, Carol, described Morris in the 1997 memoir only as "a small humorless man who exercised his authority as though he was a real commissar in a Communist state."
What Horowitz did not mention was that Pasternak was also an uncle of Morton Sobell, a central figure in the Rosenberg Ring, who was sentenced to 30 years for espionage.
I guess he forgot.
Another forgotten fact that adds still more color to the story of the Sunnyside CP "cell" (which his mother, per FBI surveillance, is observed hosting in 1958, the year before David graduated from Columbia) is that Nathan Sussman, another longtime spy for Julius Rosenberg with a Venona code name of his own, was also a Sunnyside cell member, transferring in for a year between 1944 and 1945.
Trying to close the drawer for now, although it's getting pretty full.
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Desk Drawer 5 is here.