A Red-Diaper Idealist Loses His Faith
REVIEWED BY Jack Foley

Sunday, September 24, 2000

SAYING NO TO POWER
Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker By William Mandel Creative Arts; 680 pages; $18.50 paperback

In 1960, summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, author and Soviet affairs expert William Mandel said, ``If you think I will cooperate in any way with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any manner whatsoever, you are insane.''

A red-diaper baby born in 1917 who narrowly escaped being named Karl Marx Mandel -- he is William Marx Mandel -- Mandel was both an activist in and an observer of the revolution that began the year he was born. ``Between my father's interest in social change and my mother's in culture,'' he writes, ``I chose to follow my father.''

Following his father meant not only following the path of revolutionary activity but also suppressing ``creative imagination . . . in favor of logic and disciplined thought.'' The author's activism manifested itself early, and the chapters on ``kid power'' are some of the most interesting in his book ``Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker.'' Even more important, from 1931 to 1932 the Mandel family was in Russia, where the young William could learn Russian and observe the Soviet experiment from close up. It was a rich, determining period in his life, and it placed him in a unique position.

Following the logic of his father's convictions, Mandel joined the Communist Party in 1935, but he also honored his mother's awareness of culture. ``Saying No to Power'' is full of wonderful descriptions of growing up in America. If you don't know what ``stickball'' and ``belly-whopping'' are, this book can tell you. We also find discussions of Benny Leonard, ``Legs'' Diamond, Red Skelton, Father Coughlin and other more or less forgotten figures.

Later, Mandel gives us a tremendous description of a demonstration following the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a set piece reminiscent of some of the great moments in John Dos Passos' ``USA.'' The author's keen intelligence and powers of observation stand him in good stead throughout ``Saying No to Power,'' and the material dealing with his career as a writer and his 37 years as a radio commentator on Berkeley station KPFA is fascinating. (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be mentioned that both Mandel and this reviewer have contributed regularly, and without pay, to that beleaguered radio station. Such contributions are certainly no guarantee of collegiality, though, as followers of the station's recent history can attest.)

His central story is that of the loss of faith in what he calls a kind of ``religion'': communism. Like many who have lost their faith, Mandel has nothing to replace it with. Now, he writes, ``there is no longer a Utopian ideal I believe in.'' Mandel would not, however, endorse Gary Snyder's ``May Day Toast'' description of ``actually existing socialism'' as ``a blight on the century almost equal to that of Nazism.'' Though often critical of the USSR, he is at pains to point out the genuine accomplishments of the Soviet regime, which is the burden of his delightful radio piece ``If I Were Gorbachev . . . ,'' included here.

There are undoubtedly reasons to fault ``Saying No to Power''; it is too long and has too many commendatory letters in it. Though Mandel is often brilliant in analyzing the world around him, and is scrupulously honest in doing so, he is less successful in turning the lens upon himself. He can be sentimental, arrogant, insensitive, extravagantly self-promoting and utterly blind to his own motivations. (At one point, in a fury, he beat his daughter's head against the floor. One of his sons reminded him of this incident, which had slipped his mind!)

The material in the book could be scrutinized from a psychological point of view, and a very different portrait would emerge. Indeed, ``Saying No to Power'' suggests at times that the author's consciousness was awash in what he calls ``towering rage,'' from which he would find ``relief'' in the terrors of reckless driving.

All that said, no one can deny Mandel his magnificent social passion and sheer aliveness of mind. ``Saying No to Power'' is not only a moving autobiography but also a firsthand testimony to many of the most significant events of the 20th century, what Kenneth Rexroth called ``this century of horror.'' ``Don't oversimplify,'' Mandel writes: ``Life, and politics, and individual human beings are extremely complicated and internally contradictory.''

At various moments, Mandel offended everybody, communist and capitalist. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1952, though he was not informed of this, and went on for the next four years trying to pay his dues and attend meetings: ``No one would accept the money and no one would tell me where the meetings would occur.''

He officially quit the party in 1957. Though he published many books, no publisher would touch him for the 15 years following 1946. He was fired from KPFA in 1995. Even in the worst periods, he managed to get his message out. The times he lived in perhaps made an unlikely hero of him, but his insights focused the times in such a way that many understand them far better than we otherwise would have.

``Saying No to Power'' beautifully articulates one of the deep myths of America. Mandel acted with courage, intelligence and flamboyance at a time when all three were precisely what the Establishment was trying to eliminate. He may be an apostate, but he remains at the end of his book what he has been throughout his long and fruitful career: an optimist, a believer that, even amid the wrecks of the 20th century, something will come.

Jack Foley's most recent books are ``O Powerful Western Star'' and ``Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals.'' He hosts the Wednesday ``Cover to Cover'' on KPFA-FM.

Alsop Review
"Foley's Books"
by Jack Foley

WILLIAM MANDEL,
SAYING NO TO POWER
Creative Arts Book Company

Let's drink a toast to all those farmers, workers, artists, and intellectuals of the last one hundred years who, without thought of fame or profit--not motivated by a thirst for power--whose motivations were compassionate and humanitarian--worked tirelessly in their dream of a world-wide socialist revolution. Who believed and hoped that a new world was dawning, and that their work would contribute Wo a society in which one class does not exploit another, where one ethnic group or one nation does not try to expand itself over another, and where men and women lived freely as equals. The people who nourished these hopes and dreams were sometimes foolishly blind to the opportunism of their own leadership, and many were led into ideological absurdities, but the great majority of them selflessly worked for socialism with the best of hearts. Their dreams proved futile, and "actually existing socialism" became a blight on the century almost equal to that of Nazism. What we have now is nervous third world fundamentalism and developed-world global greed. The failure of socialism is the tragedy of the 20th century, and on this day, May Day, at least, we should honor the memory of those who struggled for the dream of what socialism might have been. And begin a new way again.

Gary Snyder, "May Day Toast, for the Workers of the World, for the year 2000"

"[T]he only thing permanent in the world is change...."
William Mandel

In 1960, summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), author and Soviet affairs expert William Mandel said,

"If you think I will cooperate in any way with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any manner whatsoever, you are insane."

In 1953 Mandel had similarly stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn (like Mandel, a Jew). "I was," he writes, 'a very angry man."

Saying No To Power is a demonstration of far more than Mandel's anger, though at times anger emerges as a primary theme. A red diaper baby born in 1917 who narrowly escaped being named "Karl Marx Mandel"--he is "William Marx Mandel"--Mandel was both activist and observer of the revolution which began in the year he was born: "Between my father's interest in social change and my mother's in culture...," he writes, "I chose to follow my father."

Following his father meant not only following the path of revolutionary activity but suppressing "creative imagination...in favor of logic and disciplined thought." The author's activism manifested early, and the chapters on "kid power" are some of the most interesting in the book. Even more importantly, from 1931 to 1932 the Mandel family was in Russia, where the young William could learn Russian and observe the Soviet experiment from close up. It was a rich, determining moment in his life, and it placed him in a unique position.

If Mandel, following the logic of his father's convictions, joined the Communist Party in 1935, he also honored his mother's awareness of culture. Saying No To Power is full of wonderful descriptions of growing up in America. If you don't know what "stickball" and "belly-whopping" are, this book can tell you. You will also find discussions of Benny Leonard, "Legs" Diamond, Red Skelton, Father Coughlin, and other more or less forgotten figures. "Mickeys," Mandel tells us, is an ancient slang term for "potatoes": he and his friends "roasted mickeys in a can over a coal fire in an empty lot on Boston Road near my junior high school in the East Bronx." Later, he gives us a tremendous description of a demonstration following the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg--a set piece worthy of some of the great moments of John Dos Passos' USA.

Mandel's keen intelligence and powers of observation hold him in good stead throughout the book, and the material dealing with his career as an author and his thirty-seven years as a radio commentator on Berkeley station KPFA (he was "an expert on Soviet affairs") is fascinating. But his central story is that of the loss of faith in what he describes as a kind of religion: Communism. Like many who have lost their faith, Mandel has nothing to replace it with: "Until the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, my faith in Marxist socialism, family was always secondary in my consciousness. Trying to change the world came first." Now, "there is no longer a Utopian ideal I believe in." Mandel would not endorse Gary Snyder's "May Day Toast" description of "actually existing socialism" as "a blight on the century almost equal to that of Nazism," however. Though often critical of the U.S.S.R., Mandel has always been at pains to point out the genuine accomplishments of the Soviet regime--which is the burden of the wonderful radio piece, included here, "If I Were Gorbachev."

There are undoubtedly reasons to fault William Mandel. The book is too long, and has too many commendatory letters in it. Though Mandel is often brilliant in analyzing the world around him--and is scrupulously honest in doing so--he is less successful in turning the lens upon himself. He can be arrogant, insensitive, extravagantly self-promoting, and utterly blind to his own motivations. (At one point, in a fury, he beat his daughter's head against the floor. One of his sons had to remind him of the incident, which had slipped his mind.!) The material in the book could be scrutinized from a psychological point of view, and a very different portrait would emerge. "I was out to cut his balls off," he says of his encounter with Senator Joseph McCarthy--not only veiled Oedipal feelings but equally veiled castration anxiety, which occurs as well in some of the author's early encounters with gays. (Mandel is nevertheless entirely supportive of the struggle for gay rights.) The book at times suggests that Mandel's consciousness was entirely awash in what he calls "towering rage," and he tells us he found "relief" from such feelings in the terrors of hairpin driving. Unlucky the driver who encountered him on the road at night! He can be sentimental.

Yet, all that said, no one can deny William Mandel his magnificent social passion and the sheer aliveness of his consciousness. Saying No To Power is not only a moving autobiography but a first-hand testimony to many of the most significant events of the Twentieth Century. "Don't oversimplify," Mandel writes: "Life, and politics, and individual human beings are extremely complicated and internally contradictory."

At various moment, William Mandel offended everybody, Communist and Capitalist. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1952, though he was not actually informed of this and went on for the next four years trying to pay his dues and attend meetings: "no one would accept the money and no one would tell me where the meetings would occur." He officially quit the Party in 1957. Though he published many books, no publisher would touch him for the fifteen years following 1946. He was fired from KPFA in 1995. Even in the worst periods he managed to get his message out. We are vry lucky to have had him, both on the page and on the airwaves. The times he lived in perhaps made a hero of him, but it is equally true that his insights focused the times in such a way that we understand them far better than we would have without his insights. Saying No To Power beautifully articulates one of the deep myths of America. If Mr. Deeds won't do it for you, Mr. Mandel will. He acted with courage, intellligence, and flamboyance at a time when courage, intelligence, and flamboyance were precisely what the Establishment was trying to eliminate.

It's too bad that William Mandel feels he no longer has a Utopian ideal towards which he can strive. If one were to arise before him--and it might--we can be sure that, even at the age of eighty-three, he would move energetically towards its realization. Indeed, despite his apostasy, he remains what he has been throughout his long and fruitful carrer: an optimist.

"Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets."

REVIEW IN THE BLACK SCHOLAR (Vol. 30, #1) BY ROBERT L. ALLEN, SENIOR EDITOR

SAYING NO TO POWER: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1999), 651 pp. $18.50, ISBN 0-88739-286-5

Reviewed by Robert L. Allen

Bill Mandel is best known to many for his courageous and dramatic defiance of House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunters during hearings in San Francisco in 1960 and his many years as a commentator on the Soviet Union on Berkeley radio station KPFA. Less well known, but revealed in this autobiography is his decades-long involvement in anti-racist struggles such as his defense of Angelo Herndon, Paul Robeson, the Martinsville Seven, W.E.B. Du Bois and, most recently, Mumia Abu Jamal. A richly detailed, engaging, and instructive book, Saying No to Power is the story of a man whose pen and voice have been powerful weapons in the fight against injustice.

Mandel was born into an immigrant Jewish family in New York's Lower East Side in 1917. The family's politics were reflected in the fact that they named their baby William Marx Mandel.

As a youth Mandel joined the Young Pioneers, a Communist youth group, and he wrote articles for its newspaper. His introduction to the realities of racism occurred in 1931 when he read in the Daily Worker about the Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine black youths were unjustly convicted on charges of raping two white girls in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Subsequently he was introduced to life in the Soviet Union when his father moved the family there for a year after accepting a job as a civil engineer. Young Bill studied Russian and took courses at Moscow University. He was impressed by the University's enrollment of mostly working-class men and women as well as members of ethnic minorities, and the students' commitment to building a new egalitarian socialist society. His chapter on Moscow University is entitled "Affirmative Action University."

Returning to New York his family settled in Washington Heights and Mandel enrolled at the City College of New York. He was expelled in less than a year for questioning the administration's calling of police to break up a student meeting. The expulsion led him to enroll in the Communist Party's Workers' School and later become a full-time activist and literature vendor for the Party It was in this work that he met and married his life partner, Tanya.

The CP was strongly committed to interracial working-class unity with the result that Mandel found himself assigned to assist a strike by laundry workers, most of whom were black women. He also became involved in organizing support for Angelo Herndon, a militant black worker who was indicted on insurrection charges in Georgia for leading an interracial demonstration of workers.

A high point for Mandel was being sent by the Party in 1938 to organize among black and white rubber workers in Akron Ohio. The CP was a strong presence in the labor movement and Mandel saw the power of interracial labor solidarity.

In need of a job during World War II, Mandelâs fluency in the Russian language got him hired by United Press as their resident Russian specialist, launching his long career as an expert on Soviet affairs. But his commitment to Marxism would deny him mainstream acceptance. Ironically, within a few years Mandel would be voicing concerns about the lack of democracy in the Soviet and American Communist Parties, doubts that would eventually lead him to quit the CPUSA in 1957.

One of the most harrowing sections of the book concerns the so-called "Peekskill Riot" in 1949 when a white racist mob, with the collusion of local police, brutally attacked an interracial audience attending an open-air concert near the town of Peekskill, NY, featuring Paul Robeson. Hundreds of people were severely beaten and their cars pelted with stones as the police stood by. Many were trapped at the concert site. Mandel organized a group of 16 drivers to return to the site to aid any who might still be there.

In December 1949 Mandel was a panelist with W.E.B. Du Bois at the Congress on American-Soviet Relations. The next year Du Bois headed the American Labor Partyâs ticket as candidate for U.S. Senator. Mandel was on the same ticket as candidate for Congress. Du Boisâs support for the Stockholm Peace Pledge got him indicted by the federal government as an unregistered foreign agent. Of course, Mandel strongly defended Du Bois. However, his less well known but more material contribution to Du Boisâs well-being was to help furnish the house that Du Bois and Shirley Graham bought in Brooklyn Heights when they first married. At the time, Mandel was trying to make a living as an interior decorator

Mandel joined another kind of campaign in 1951, the effort to stop the executions of the Martinsville Seven, a group of African American men convicted of raping a white woman in Virginia. Although the vigil did not save the men, Mandelâs moving account is a testament to the dignity and humani ty of the black and white people who stood together to protest the atrocity of the executions.

In the 1960s Mandel would gain national recognition for his radio show on Berkeleyâs KPFA. He would host the show for 37 years. The show, a review of the Soviet press and politics, was also a listener phone-in show, and Mandel credits himself with inventing the talk show format.

During the following decades Mandel supported himself and his growing family by working as a freelance translator. His true calling continued to be the fight for justice. Aside from the famous HUAC confrontation -- during which he blasted the witch-hunters ("If you think I will cooperate in any way with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any manner whatsoever, you are insane") -- he involved himself in civil rights demonstrations in San Francisco and the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, support for affirmative action, and the struggle over Peoples Park. For several years Mandel also became virtually a one-man support and advocacy committee for two black prisoners at Vacaville and Soledad prisons.

Writing in support of Mumia Abu Jamal in the closing pages of his autobiography, Bill Mandel issued a final challenge: "The movement to free Mumia will become invincible when it contacts every family in which a cop has killed someone, and convinces those families to recruit their neighbors in Mumiaâs behalf. For the majority of white people who think they are decent, and want to be, the testimony of such families will be persuasive in getting them to understand that the issue is not cop killers, but killer cops."

Bill Mandel has always been a fighter. Saying No to Power reveals the vision and passion behind his commitment to the struggle for social justice. It documents an important period in the history of the American Left, and the unflinching determination of one man to confront the critical issues of his time.

Manifesto is the online newsletter of the Institute on Disability Culture in Las Cruces

"II. SAYING NO TO POWER

"Those of you who have been folowing MANIFESTO editorials and conversations and some of you who have been following my writing even longer than that...realize that language has been at the crux of many discussions. The standard argument today is do we describe ourselves as 'people with disabilities,' 'disabled people,' 'Disabled People' or something else...

"There are also those who claim that everyone has a disability of some kind. They argue that we all have limitations. There's even a website now called halftheplanet. I've always resisted that argument because not everyone is discriminted against because of their limitations. But in thinking about this editorial my problem has become that I believe as another column in this newsletter states, that 'no one is free when others are oppressed.' Discrimination crosses boundaries just like disabilities do. We have said for a very long time that anyone can join this club. It doesn't matter your age, your economic status, your color, your ethnicity, your religion or anything else. Disability is an equal opportunity experience.

"So taking all that into consideration I've decided to see if I can change my language a bit. In this column I will no longer talk about people with disabilities. I will talk instead about people with unrestricted abilities (those who are not discriminated against) and people with oppressed abilities. I think this is a more accurate statement of who we are. There are (in the old language) people with disabilities who become, at least on the surface, people with unrestricted abilities. Some like Stephen Hawking and Christopher Reeve come to mind...Even though both have what the U.S. govrnment now calls 'significant disabilities' they are by virtue of their fame, their wealth, and their power, people of unrestricted abilities. They do not seem to consider themselves oppressed, except in Reeve's case, by his body. This is very different than those of us who believe we are oppressed by the society that we live in. Reeve might consider himself a person of unrestricted ability, while he might consider someone else in his same situation without his wealth, fame, and power as one with oppressed abilites.

"There's another reason to transform this language. It hit me while reading a powerful new book called SAYING NO TO POWER, by lifelong radical William Mandel.

"Mandel was born in the early part of the twentieth century to a communist family. He spent much of his early life as a communist and even lived in the Soviet Union for a year as a youngster. He was kicked out of college as a teenager because he questioned authority. He fought, and according to many bested, Joe McCarthy in that maniacal Senator's witch hung hearings. Later, Mandel testified bfore the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I read his entire book - a picaresque, fascinating romp that takes one from the streets of New York City to scores of places in the Soviet Union to the hills of Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement and beyond - before I took a look at his website. There I had the privilege of listening to Mandel's testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. It made me want to get up and dance. It's that powerful. In fact, Mandel later wrote me that one line from that testimony has been used at least once on some TV show or movie every year since - and that's 40 years folks!

"When I first thought about what I wanted to write about SAYING NO TO POWER I believed I'd start with some catchy phrase like, 'do you know who claims to have started the talk radio format AND was the target of the 'don't trust anyone over 30' statement? Well, by now you know it was Bill Mandel. You also might understand that although he is not a person with a disability he is a person with oppressed abilities because he was harassed all his life and unable to make a living in his chosen field. He turned from study of the Soviet Union to translating technical documents because no one would hire him. And that was after being solicited and working at Stanford's prestigious Hoover Institute ti produce an encyclopedia on the Soviet Union and publishing books and articles. Mandel's analysis of the Cold War is one that makes sense. He doesn't retreat from sharing when he was absolutely right in his analyses and he doesn't shy away from admitting his mistakes either.

"During almost all of his adult life he was a radio fixture on a local San Francisco Bay Area station. But he was let go in the mid-1990s because he broke that station's gag rule. To say he is a lifelong radical is not to exaggerate. To say he has been oppressed is not to exaggerate. But, we can all help change that. You can enhance Mandel's opportunities to move from a person of oppressed abilities to one of unrestricted abilities by ordering SAYING NO TO POWER. You can get it from Bill personally, autographed, at twenty dollars, 4500 Gilbert St., Apt. 426, Oakland, CA, 94611. Or you can get it from Creative Arts Book Co: 1-800-848-7789, FAX 1-510-848-4844. Or you can ask your local bookstore to order it which would help Bill get it out [to] the public. Or you can order it online from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com

"And check out his website and listen to the HUAC hearings at: http://www.billmandel.net/

--- Steven E. Brown."

March 23, 2000 Letters to the Editor
East Bay Express
P.O.Box 3198
Berkeley, California 94703

Dear Editor:

Reading Chris Thompson's brief article on a Washington,D.C. public relations firm that is taking names of those who participated in the Seattle WTO protest, I was reminded how few people have a living memory of what it was like to live through the cold war -- when it was a fair assumption that the U.S. government might investigate anyone who questioned its policies. There is a book, however, that brings those memories to life for a new generation. That book is Saying No to Power, William Mandel's historical memoir of the last century. As a reader of the Express for some 20 years, I was hoping it would review the book which was published last year by Creative Arts Press of Berkeley. In scope, I would compare it to the work of George Seldes' Witness to a Century, portraying as it does an eye witness account to many of the 20th century's most gripping events. Mandel's focus is the American Left and the particular point of view that his expertise as a Soviet specialist provided him. His perspectives are fresh and breathe life into a distinctly American tradition of dissent -- in the manner of Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams -- that seems strangely absent in this time when hardly a whisper of protest breaks the uniformity of triumphal boasting that issues from corporate friendly news media.

Mandel's physical description of America alone is worth the price of the book --ranging from the streets of New York City to the pleasant byways of California, including Palo Alto and Berkeley. Reading its pages, one can sense something of the excitement of the labor movement in the 20's, the anguish of our people in the 30's, the resolve to embrace Russia as our ally against Fascism in the 40's, and the fear that gripped our hearts in the 50's. As the native son of a family that traces its roots back to 17th century Pennsylvania and Virginia, I deeply appreciate the astonishing legacy of the American experiment: that our power and greatness rests not with our wealth but in our struggle as Americans to achieve liberty and equality within our own borders. Mandel, like a loving American son, has done a patriotic service to his country by reminding us of this legacy and pointing out the failings as well as the glories of this land.

Sincerely,
Bill Roller

PRESERVING A RADICAL PAST
book review - Saying No to Power, by Bill Mandel
Creative Arts Book Co., Berkeley, CA 1999, 617pp, $20
reviewed by David Bacon

We have a history in this country. It's hardly taught in schools, has no presence on television or in the newspapers, and is hard to find even in bookstores. But it is a history that will not be denied. Bill Mandel tells part of this history, as he saw and experienced it - a peoples' history. That's what makes his book important - Saying No to Power.

These days, saying no is not such a popular idea. The radical buzzword among progressive journalists is that our job is to "speak truth to power" instead, as though the rich and powerful didn't know it. But it's not speaking the truth alone that's important, it's organizing people to win some power of their own. That's where Bill's radicalism parts company from mainstream liberalism.

Bill Mandel has been a radical his whole life, and a Marxist and Communist for a good part of it. He lived through some of the most important events of our times, and miraculously, remembers them in exhaustive detail. His book is kind of a grand tour of the left of the last 80 years, seen through one man's eyes.

If you meet Bill, there are some things you'll never forget. His voice - the heavy gravellly trace of New York will never leave it. His hard line, as they say, not giving an inch in a political discussion. His efforts, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to put his politics in accessible terms, to make them a natural part of peoples' everyday experience.

That makes his book an interesting combination. He explains the ideas which guided socialist-minded people like himself, through myriad social upheavals. He doesn't apologize or give an inch. But he explains it in an accessible language - the description of his own life.

He was born and grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, the son of immigrants. His family, like many coming from the highly-charged political atmosphere of Europe at the turn of the century, lived, ate and breathed politics. For them, it was the most basic part of being alive. Before he was even in high school, he and his friends had organized a Communist youth group among his fellow students, a crime for which his best friend was deported to the Soviet Union at the age of 14.

Bill's father, imbued with the ideals of revolution, set off to Russia to use his engineering schools to build a new socialist society. While this seems strange today, it's only because we're so far removed from the turmoil of the times, when thousands of people left jobs and homes all over the world, going to Moscow to fight for revolution. I think the closest we come in my generation are the many people who went to Nicaragua, or to Cuba, to put their idealism into practice.

His youthful sojourn in the Soviet Union was to prove a watershed experience. He returned, and dedicated the rest of his life, to trying to help people in this country understand, not just Russians, but the many nationalities which together made up the old Soviet Union. His purpose was simple - to see them in all their courage, passivity, and humanity - warts and all.

If that doesn't sound particularly radical today, it's again because we've become so removed from the terrifying reality of the cold war. While we were allies of the Soviet Union during World War Two (which the radicals of Bill's generation termed the war against fascism - saying precisely what the war was against was much more important than numbering it), what followed was one of the darkest periods in American life - the red scare.

That's where Bill shined. Unbelieveably, he started the period as a fellow at the ultra-rightwing Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Having become a sudden ally of the Soviet Union in the war, U.S. policymakers and academics knew almost nothing about the place. Bill helped fill the gaps.

It was a short stint. Soon after the war was over, America adopted the politics of fear at home, and confrontation abroad. For forty years, nuclear war was just a hairsbreadth away. At the height of the hysteria, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for giving the Soviet Union the secret of the bomb, as though they were incapable (described in the U.S. press as illiterate peasants) of building one of their own. Shades of Wen Ho Lee.

In the middle of the madness, Bill began writing books and getting on Berkeley's KPFA radio (and even for a brief time on public KQED TV), trying to put a human face on the Soviet people. He not only believed that we would not go to war if we understood their humanity, but he believed that they had constructed a system able to meet basic human needs that went unmet every day here at home. He described their educational institutions, and the access of even the poor to their doors. Free healthcare and job security. Housing at a relative cost of pennies.

It's no wonder that the rightwing hated him. He was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee more than once, and in what he still looks on as his finest moment, in 1960 told the assembled redbaiters that "if you think I will cooperate in any way with this collection of Judaases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any manner whatsoever, you are insane."

Saying No to Power takes the reader through the bitter events at KPFA when, after decades of journalism which no one else would air, he was taken off the radio with little recognition or respect.

Of course, what had happened was that the cold war had ended. The ongoing political hysteria, through which his voice had cut with reason and clarity, began to unwind in the winds of perestroika and glasnost.

And in some ways, Bill lost his edge. He finally concluded that Marxism was a lost cause - that only a free market could bring reforms to the Soviet people. What economic reforms brought, however, was something quite different. Mass unemployment. The shredding of the social fabric. People working at jobs where they weren't paid for months at a time. And a standard of living which fell like a rock for the vast majority, while a tiny minority of gangsters and tycoons raided the wealth built up by blood, sweat and terrible sacrifice.

Although 25 million died to save their country from Hitler - half the dead of World War Two - the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, leaving in its wake a sea of ethnic wars from Chechniya to the other republics of the Caucusus and Central Asia. Ironically, Bill wrote one of his last books about these non-Russian, Soviet people. Rereading it today, it's hard not to be overcome with a sense, not of newfound freedom, but of great loss endured in the breakup of the old system.

Of course, many people in this country would agree with the crows of victory by the coldwarriors - that it was all for the best, and that a crippled and nominal political freedom was worth the economic devastation. Read Bill's book and make up your own mind.

Autobiography always has the danger of seeming immodest - how can you write about your own exploits without tooting your own horn. It's an additionally difficult position for many writers and academics on the left, who've spent a lifetime denied legitimacy by the established media because of their radical views. People like Bill have always had to fight to get the world to listen and take them seriously. Saying No to Power is a little full of the man himself.

But in the end, it's his memory that is so impressive. That makes Saying No to Power a valuable addition to the slowly growing literature that has documented the history of America's radical left - the union organizers, the anti-racists, the peace activists. It's a valuable contribution to making sure we don't forget our own history, ensuring that another generation doesn't grow up disconnected from their own true past.