David Joel Horowitz was born January 10, 1939 to Phil and Blanche Horowitz in Queens, New York. David was raised in Queens along with his sister Ruth. Phil and Blanche were high school teachers and members of the American Communist Party. Their lives included secret meetings, secret identities, and a secret revolutionary plan. As such, they steeped David in Marxist philosophy and world affairs. We sometimes joked that he was the “Tiger Woods of Communism” as he was raised to be the Party’s next great player. He thought that was funny, because like Tiger he never had a choice in the matter. The impact of his upbringing was profound, but David’s life would prove to be shaped by his own self-described irrational desire to “save the world.” While this impulse began as a highly abstract concept, David would spend a lifetime refining it, sharpening it, completely revising it and ultimately making it his life’s mission.
David attended Bryant High School in Queens, NY. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1959, majoring in English. He then earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1959, he instantly fell in love with and married Elissa Krauthamer. They would have four children: Jonathan Daniel; Sarah Rose; myself, Benjamin Abraham; and Anne Deborah. In 1962, at 23 years old, David wrote and published his first book, Student, which detailed the political activities of students on the UC Berkeley campus. While at Berkeley, David became frustrated with his Shakespeare professor, so he wrote his own lecture series which he delivered and which was widely attended by students all across the campus. He eventually published the series in his second book: Shakespeare: An Existential View. This superhuman confidence and ability to back it up would become thematic throughout David’s life.
Later David and Elissa moved to London, England where David studied under Ralph Miliband and became close friends with Isaac Deutscher. Later David would write Deutscher’s biography.
Also while in London, in 1965 David wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, which became the book that made him a force on the New Left.
In 1968, David and Elissa moved the family back to the United States and purchased a home in Berkeley, California where they would raise their four children.
In his continued mission to save the world, in 1968 David became co-editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts. While at Ramparts, David developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. As part of their work together, David helped raise money for, and assisted the Panthers with, the running of a school for poor children in Oakland. He later recommended that Newton hire his friend Betty Van Patter as bookkeeper; she was then working for Ramparts. In December 1974, Van Patter’s body was found floating in San Francisco Harbor; she had been murdered by the Panthers for knowing too much. The murder forced David to confront a truth that he had long suspected. It made clear to him that the pursuit of a Marxist utopia was a false and unachievable goal. Diabolically, the goal created a religion. The religion then cloaked the movement’s leaders with an invincible moral standing enabling them to commit atrocities with impunity for their own gain. He was horrified that he had been part of it and it caused him to rethink his entire life.
The decision was not easy. His family, friends, and career were all deeply tied to “the movement.” If he were to make this change, he would essentially need to start from scratch. So, he stayed away from politics for a while and changed to a neutral career. He became a biographer and journalist. It was a hugely risky move to change careers at 34 years old with a family of 6 in tow.
In a testament to David’s supreme confidence, indomitable will and massive talent, he was an instant success. His first biography The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty – written with his best friend and long-time colleague Peter Collier – was a blockbuster bestseller. Their next biography The Kennedys: An American Drama was an even bigger success, becoming a number one New York Times bestseller.
All the while, David kept an eye on and a hand in politics. While he needed a break to sort out his life, nothing in life would deter him from his mission. In 1981, San Francisco Chronicle writer Randy Schiltz tipped David and Peter to a potential epidemic known as AIDS, which was rapidly spreading through the bathhouses in San Francisco. Schiltz was concerned that the leaders in the Gay Community were intimidating the medical establishment into covering up the way it was transmitted and therefore keeping the bathhouses open, which would cause it to spread out of control. Randy was too terrified to write about it himself as he did not want to be attacked by the community. David, never one to fear anything, took on the story. In 1981, he and Peter published Whitewash: Gay Leaders in California Have Obscured Vital Information About How the AIDS Disease Spreads.
The aggressive reaction to the story (references to the article still call David a “homophobe”) reinforced David’s suspicions. If leaders on the Left were willing to sacrifice millions of gay lives to preserve their power and orthodoxy, what wouldn’t they do? The article, the experience, and the ocean of death that followed were the final straw in David’s conversion from his Marxist roots to a leading thinker on the Right. He formalized his position on March 17, 1985 when he and Peter published “Lefties for Reagan” in The Washington Post. David departed the Left for good.
The change would cost him nearly everything – all of his friends, coverage in the New York Times Book Review (essential for authors at the time), and countless lost earnings. He would have to start all over. But if the world needed saving from his former comrades on the Left, that’s exactly what he would do. Later he would note that the Right never excommunicated apostates the way he had been abandoned by the Left.
He often complained that he had “the rescue gene.” For David, this meant nothing animated him more than someone in need of help. He would instantly leap into action, making every phone call, raising every dollar, and doing anything in his power to save that person. The realization that he had been party to the destructive force activated his rescue gene and infused him with an energy that would produce dozens of books, countless public appearances, and nearly nonstop work for the next four decades.
In 1996, he captured this saga in his autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey in which he retraced his life and political journey.
1998 proved to be a seminal year for David when he met his angel April Mullvain, whom he would marry and who, along with her son John Jay, would watch over him until his passing.
In 1988, he also founded The Center for the Study of Popular Culture, later to become the Horowitz Freedom Center, where he recruited an inspired group of new young intellectuals to join his cause. The name “Freedom Center” meant much more than most ever understood. While David became known for his change in views, in a sense he never changed at all. His personal style represented the place and community from which he came. Even when he wore a suit, he looked like a radical forced into it due to a court date or a wedding. More importantly, his mission to save the world centered around freedom. When David went to rescue people, it was always from oppression imposed by some person or group. Early on, he had been trained to think the rich capitalists were the oppressors. His political change came from the realization that his side was doing the oppressing. Protected by the guise of being “for the people,” the Panthers took Betty’s life. The progressives left millions to die of AIDS so they could preserve their leadership positions. His former friends on the Left brutally excommunicated him from all their social relationships to reign power over him. It became clear that to fight for freedom, he had to be on the Right and so the Freedom Center was born.
From the Freedom Center, he published thousands of high-impact articles and books. He understood the systematic implications of seemingly benign cultural changes and used that knowledge to predict much of the future. Notably, he precisely forecast the intense campus antisemitism of 2024 in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, published in 2006.
In 2007, David was crushed by the passing of his beloved daughter Sarah Rose who, more than any of his other children, inherited his indomitable spirit and passion for politics. She had finally succumbed to long-time chronic degeneration from her genetic condition Turner’s Syndrome. He captured the experience in his most intimate, and perhaps his best, book A Cracking of the Heart in 2009.
By the 20-teens, David had long been frustrated by what he referred to as the “soft, gentlemanly” tactics of the Republican Party. He lamented that the Republicans were bringing a nerf gun to a nuclear war. He intimately knew the Left’s tactics and desperately wanted his party to match them. His wish was granted when a new kind of candidate, Donald J. Trump, won the Republican nomination. David responded instantly with the best articulation of the Trump strategy in Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America. Later, in 2024, I met President Trump and mentioned David. President Trump’s face lit up and he insisted that I get David on the phone immediately. Hospitalized and weak, David was still delighted to speak with the President and know that his message was heard and heeded.
In 2024, David published America Betrayed: How a Christian Monk Created America & Why the Left Is Determined to Destroy Her. In it, he carefully explained how the Catholic Church –through the indulgences – had removed the freedom inherent in being accountable to God and replaced them with the oppression of being accountable to the church. He then explained how that same idea had come back into vogue in the U.S. Right up until the final moments, David fought for freedom.
In the end, David helped countless people and expended every fiber of his being pushing society towards freedom. He may not have saved the world, but he most certainly made it a better place – especially for us. He was our superhero and we will love him forever.
