IN COMMIES: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, Ronald Radosh has written a sweet-tempered, thoughtful, mordantly funny account of his reluctant and protracted farewell to the Left -- a movement that provided him with girls, pot, LSD, folk songs, identity, and a hell of a good time. Radosh was the prototypical red-diaper baby. He has a picture of himself in 1939, bundled in a stroller for the annual May Day parade sponsored by the Communist party. In Commies, he lays out his life in the Left from that beginning: the Jewish-Communist subculture of upper Manhattan's Washington Heights, "progressive" high school, Communist summer camp, and on to college at the University of Wisconsin, where he became a founder of the New Left. Throughout his memoir, Radosh lets his now anti-Communist head prevail, while not denying the murmurs of his old Communist heart in dealing with the sweet idiocy and childlike innocence of his springtime for Stalin. There are captivating stories here. He writes elegiacally of Pete Seeger concerts and campfire sing-alongs and, more comically, of a trip his high-school class took to a Pennsylvania coal mine. The affluent students, dressed in carefully chosen proletarian garb, travel down a mine shaft to serenade (under the hand-waving direction of their choral director) a bunch of grizzled, bemused coal miners. The students sing progressive odes boo-hooing their oppressed state, "Dark As a Dungeon" and "Which Side Are You On?" Seeger was an early idol: Radosh wanted to be a folksinger and banjo picker like him. At Communist summer camp, Seeger would sing "Goodnight Irene" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" at breakfast: The camaraderie one felt in sitting with friends and singing the beautiful words and melodies produced a belief that all would be good in the world....Seeger woke us early in the morning, singing the old holler "Wake Up Jacob," with its line "sun's abreakin', peas in the pot and hoecakes bakin'," as he proceeded to grill bacon and eggs for us on the campfire he had built. Songs were weapons, Seeger often said. But what were those weapons in the service of? No longer starry-eyed, Radosh writes that Seeger's "peace" songs materialized during the Hitler-Stalin pact and became war songs after the Soviet Union was invaded. Even later, the harshest words Seeger had for Stalin was that he was a "hard driver" and that the Stalin era contained an "awful lot of rough stuff." Seeger composed a song about the Nazi camp at Treblinka, but would never pen a single line about the Soviet Gulag. Indeed, a leitmotif of Commies is the double standard applied to the struggle for sunny tomorrows. If the Right did wrong, it was unforgivable. If the Left tortured and maimed and killed, it was, one, untrue; two, understandable; and three, due to pressure from the Right -- all at the same time. By 1956 the body counts of the murdered under "Socialism" were horrifying. Khrushchev had detailed Stalin's crimes in his famous speech that year, triggering a mass exodus from the American Communist party. Radosh joined just as everyone was leaving. Every Stalinist icon is here, including party historian Herbert Aptheker, with his blazing red hair and blazing eyes. In a hilarious scene, Radosh is accused of white chauvinism and expelled from the Jefferson School by Aptheker for having a "chocolate baby" candy bar in his class. Later appearances are made by every famous figure of the New Left, from Michael Lerner to David Dallinger to Bianca Jagger (who keeps buttoning and unbuttoning her blouse when Radosh interviews her in Nicaragua). At first Radosh moved effortlessly from the old Stalinist Left to the New Left -- SDS, the antiwar movement, Cuba, Nicaragua -- without any sense of inner crisis. Radosh's readers will quickly see what he confesses it took him years to see: The line that ties it all together, from the old Communist party to the more confrontational New Left, is hatred of the United States. As the old heroes and models of anti-Americanism proved unworthy, there were always new ones to replace them: Castro instead of Stalin, Nicaragua instead of the Soviet Union. It is the double standard of the Left that begins at last to undermine Radosh's belief. Visiting Havana General Psychiatric Hospital in Cuba, Radosh notices the glazed and drugged-out expressions on the faces of the patients. The doctor in charge boasts, "We are proud that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world." Radosh is shocked, but one of his comrades explains harshly, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies." On the same trip he sees the incarceration of homosexuals as mental patients and infuriates his comrades by writing about it. In the early 1980s he began to write his book about the Rosenbergs and discovered irrefutable evidence of their guilt, though he had previously been a passionate believer in their innocence. Publication of The Rosenberg File, which he coauthored with Joyce Milton, elicited a hailstorm of condemnation from the old and new Left. He also discovered that for most of the Left, it wasn't even a question of the Rosenbergs' innocence: "I always knew they were guilty," Michael Harrington told him when Radosh solicited his support. Harrington said he didn't want to offend pro-Soviet types in his socialist organization and refused to help. Irving Howe, once an outspoken anti-Communist, was even more succinct: "I can't get involved with that," he said and walked away. And for the Stalinist Left, the honest response came from a lawyer, who slammed his fist on his desk and bellowed: "Of course they were guilty. But you can't quote me. My public position is that the Rosenbergs were innocent....What's wrong with what they did? If I were in their place, I would have done the same thing." Writing about the Rosenbergs was the catalyst for Radosh's long journey away from the Left and toward the real world. He was pummeled badly. "Those who told the truth," he writes, "became the victims of an unprecedented smear attack, one that sought to rescue the myth by blaming the messengers who brought bad news about it." Most significantly, the reaction to The Rosenberg File made him move on "to consider the ultimate heresy: Perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else." Wrested by the Rosenberg case out of his protracted innocence, Radosh experienced an unfolding of his personality. At the same moment that he was branded an apostate, a sellout, a coward, and a creep, he was actually acquiring his maturity. The ultimate answer of the Left to his questioning of every horror was the same: moral abdication. "You may be right about what you say about the Sandinistas," a comrade told him, "but while they are under attack by the American empire, we have a responsibility to extend our solidarity to them." Radosh translates; "The time, in other words, was never right." Anti-Americanism, the Left's most precious heirloom from the Vietnam War, "had to be preserved at all costs." Once all of Radosh's myths had fallen apart -- Stalin, Spain, the Rosenbergs, Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador -- nothing remained. The Left "always looked the other way. The only law [it] obeyed was Don't Look Back -- for if it did, the only accomplishments it would see were famine, gulags, and mass death." He came to understand, with Arthur Koestler, that "clinging to the last shred of the torn illusion is typical of the intellectual cowardice that prevails on the Left." Through his baptism under fire, he became a conscientious historian and, in a post-moral politics, an uncommonly honest man. David Evanier is the author of Red Love, a novel of the Rosenberg case, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story. May 21, 2001; Volume 6, Number 34