What was Michael Harrington doing in this crowd? According to Isserman, "good-hearted, amiable Michael, defying expectations, proved a natural at faction-fighting." In the early fifties, foreshadowing things to come, Michael was expelled from Norman Thomas's Socialist Party because of his involvement in trying to take over its youth branch. In less than a decade, Michael would trigger similar internal crises with the new generation of radicals, like myself, who should have sparked his hope. Isserman's account is readable and objective, covering such episodes as these:

§ In 1962 Michael spent the entire opening night at the founding convention of Students for a Democratic Society in Port Huron, Michigan, attacking the draft I wrote of the Port Huron Statement for its criticism of both sides in the cold war arms race, its suggestion that organized labor lacked a vision and its assertion that students were a historical agency of change. He left abruptly the next morning, later acknowledging that he hadn't read the document.

§ Shortly afterward, Michael chaired an inquisitorial hearing on the Port Huron Statement by the League for Industrial Democracy, the parent organization of SDS, and ordered the firing of two SDS staff members (Al Haber and myself), the placement of locks on our doors and the impoundment of the organization's mailing lists. While we continued trying to launch a student movement, he then went to Paris for a year.

§ In 1964 he joined the Democratic Party establishment in favoring a compromise that would give two nonvoting seats to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party while seating the white-only delegation at the Democratic convention. Since the expulsion of the segregationist Democrats would have achieved the very "political realignment" that Michael preached, the compromise was denounced bitterly as a sellout by civil rights activists.

§ From 1965 on, according to Isserman, Michael and his comrades "established the reputation...as a group that had little to offer to the cause of peace in Vietnam--little that is, except for criticisms of those who were actually trying to stop the war." SDS leader Carl Oglesby said that while he originally admired Harrington and Howe, "here were these guys...denouncing me as a Red because I wouldn't criticize both sides equally--which seemed bullshit because both sides weren't invading each other equally, weren't napalming each other equally."

§ While Michael occasionally criticized the Vietnam War in editorials, he didn't make a public speech against it until 1969, when Richard Nixon was in the White House instead of Michael's Democratic labor allies.

By 1970 the logic of the Shachtmanites led them to support Nixon's Vietnam policies, which was a line Michael would not cross. He sat down and wrote a nine-page, single-spaced memo of disagreement. Shachtman, Michael's longtime mentor, never spoke to him again.

"His involvement in the Socialist Party had isolated him from some of the more significant political currents of the preceding decade," Isserman says. Rejected by the Shachtmanites as too soft, alienated from the New Left as too establishment, Michael drifted politically in the seventies and eighties into more modest, pragmatic attempts to revive democratic socialism and function as part of a left wing of the Democratic Party. He helped form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a realistic retreat from creating a socialist party; DSOC became an umbrella for many activists who identified themselves as socialists. Michael himself became a Democrat of sorts and was elected as a midterm delegate to the party's 1980 convention. But the hierarchy was in the process of moving toward the center, not the left, and quickly shut the door to independent participation in the platform drafting process. As the eighties continued, the times were not friendly to new socialist formations, so "Michael and his comrades spent a lot of time in other people's parades," Isserman says. Through it all, Harrington continued to lecture and travel as much as 100 days a year while raising two sons with his wife, Stephanie, in Larchmont, New York, writing prolifically and settling into an academic slot at Queens College.

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