Ronald Radosh

Ronald Radosh (born 1937) is an American Social Conservative writer, professor, historian, and former Marxist.

As he described in his memoirs, Radosh was, like his Ashkenazi Jewish parents, a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America until the exposure of the truth about Stalinism began during the Khrushchev Thaw.

He later became an activist in the New Left against the Vietnam War.

Irving Keith, who was killed in action during the spring 1938 retreat, was revered as an anti-Fascist martyr by the Radosh family and his nephew grew up regularly re-reading his letters.

It was only decades later that Radosh became very critical of his uncle's many written defenses of the ongoing Red Terror by the Servicio de Información Militar throughout the Spanish Republican Army, by simply repeating the conspiracy theory that all members of the anti-Stalinist Left were a crypto-Fascist "rearguard" who sought to, "create divisions in the Popular Front".

In the 1940s and the 1950s, he attended the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, both of which were private schools for children from the American Communist Party families.

He also attended the communist-run Camp Woodland for Children in the Catskill Mountains.

His memoirs vividly describe school-day encounters with Mary Travers, Woody Guthrie, and Peter Seeger.

Like almost everyone else he knew, Radosh was involved in protesting against American involvement in the Korean War and also believed in William A. Reuben's "first conspiracy theory... that the U.S. Government had framed the Rosenbergs and forced the key government witness, Harry Gold, to lie on the witness stand".

On June 19, 1953, Radosh joined Howard Fast and Civil Rights Congress leader William L. Patterson in a mass demonstration in Union Square against the imminent execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

When Fast announced that the Rosenbergs were being led into the execution chamber, Radosh recalls that a wail went through the crowd and the Party's folk singers began singing, Go Down Moses.

The following morning, Radosh attended the Rosenbergs' subsequent secular funeral in full Labor Youth League regalia.

He later recalled, "That moment would remain etched in my memory, forever the symbol of what awaited good, progressive Jews who dared to stand up for their beliefs. It would take almost forty years for me to face up to the real meaning of the Rosenberg case for America."

He began attending the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the fall of 1955.

He has said that his desire at the time was both to study history, which Karl Marx considered queen of the sciences, and to become a leader of America's communists.

Despite being raised to always defend the actions of the Soviet Union, Radosh developed a close friendship with Professor George Mosse, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, which Radosh had been raised to detest.

In 1959, Radosh arrived at the University of Iowa and intended to work towards his master's degree.

While Iowa City, "boasted one small, dilapidated movie theatre, many bars, [and] few restaurants", "the town also had its bohemian and political fringe".

For example, there was already one off-campus "Greenwich Village-style coffee shop" where Radosh regularly met to play folk music with Robert Mezey, Sol Stern, and other fellow radicals with whom he helped found the "Iowa Socialist Discussion Club."

Despite being raised as a red diaper baby by fellow travelers, Radosh's growing fondness during the early 1960s for the writings of Trotskyite historian Isaac Deutscher enraged senior members of the American Communist Party in Madison.

According to Radosh, Isaac Deutscher's writings told the truth about Stalinism and the Great Purge, without completely rejecting Marxist-Leninism or the October Revolution.

The American Communist Party in Madison's attempts, however, to coerce and intimidate Radosh back into the party line, backfired and instead became the major factor in his departure.

The last straw came when, "the party sent it's top youth organizer, Danny Rubin, to stay with us".

In September 1961, the Radosh family returned to Madison.

Radosh had received his masters as a historian, and began working towards his doctorate under William Appleman Williams, one of the founders of the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history, who further drew his young protege into the New Left.

Meanwhile, Ronald and Alice Radosh twice hosted, at their studio apartment along State Street in Madison, a young and unknown guitar playing folk singer, who deliberately dressed like and emulated Woody Guthrie and whose name was Bob Dylan.

Dylan once told Radosh, "I'm going to be as big a star as Elvis Presley... I'll play the same and even bigger arenas. I know it."

Radosh and Dylan performed together at, "regular, impromptu hootenanny sessions in a small new cafe on State Street, a place modeled after Greenwich Village hangouts".

Radosh later recalled, "In the years to come, I often wished someone had been running a tape recorder at these regular sessions."

Radosh turned his attention in the late 1970s to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whom he had believed for decades to have been the innocent victims of judicial murder by a kangaroo court.

After studying declassified FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing their friends and associates, however, Radosh was forced to conclude that the Rosenbergs had indeed committed espionage for the Soviet KGB during the Manhattan Project and the Korean War, the crime for which they were both executed.

When Radosh published his conclusions, despite his efforts to be balanced and objective, the American New Left was outraged.

Radosh credits his subsequent ostracism and cancel culture experience, which he termed at the time "Left-Wing McCarthyism", as the moment when his political views began to shift towards neoconservatism, and his subsequent research as a historian has continued to make him very critical of both Marxism and Communism.

Currently employed by the Hudson Institute, Radosh has also published an expose about the covert activities of Joseph Stalin's NKVD and the Red Terror during the Spanish Civil War.

His most recent book, about the foundation of the State of Israel, was co-authored with his second wife, Allis Radosh: A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel was published by HarperCollins in 2009.

The Radoshes are currently writing a book about the presidency of Warren G. Harding, to be published by Simon & Schuster.

Radosh was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and raised in Washington Heights.

His parents, Reuben Radosh and Ida Kreichman, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

A self-described red diaper baby who was, "born on the First of May", Radosh has stated that his earliest memory is of being taken to a May Day parade in Union Square.

His maternal uncle, Irving Keith (formerly Irving Kreichman), had trained at the International Lenin School in Moscow and then travelled to the Second Spanish Republic to fight as a Commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.