RIP: Remembering David Horowitz
1st May 2025
While I never met Horowitz, I did have the opportunity to read his autobiography “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey” for a college final paper. Somewhat ironically, the book had been recommended by a famous left-wing professor at my university whose class on the history of the American Left I was taking.
Reading the memoir would become a highlight of my college career. Horowitz was, at heart, a superb storyteller.
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Horowitz also became acquainted with the Black Panthers during this period, in particular cultivating a friendship with the group’s founder, Huey P. Newton. As Horowitz would tell it, he even helped facilitate getting a bookkeeping job for a former Ramparts colleague named Betty Van Patter at a school run by the Black Panthers in 1974.
A few months later, Van Patter would disappear, and her severely beaten body would be fished out of the San Francisco Bay. An article published in the East Bay Express in 1989 contended that Newton took credit for ordering the death of Van Patter after she refused to lie on the bookkeeping and threatened to go to the police.
Van Patter’s slaying was a point of no return for Horowitz’s relationship with the American Left.