An opponent of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and at odds with the orthodox pro-Soviet leadership of Gus Hall, Healey subsequently left the CPUSA to join the New American Movement (NAM), which merged to become part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982.

[2] Her mother's family, on the other hand, were Orthodox Jews, with her maternal grandfather serving as a shokhet, a supervisor of the ritual slaughter of animals to ensure that they were kosher.

Her mother was won over to socialism as a teenager after hearing a lecture on the subject delivered by J. Stitt Wilson in 1900 and later took part in helping to establish the Communist Party of America.

At the behest of the YCL she took a job in a peach processing factory, making 12 cents an hour and hiding when government labor inspectors came looking for underage workers.

[3] In the 1960s, she again faced imprisonment and a hefty fine under a piece of McCarthy-era legislation known as the McCarran Act, when she and others refused to register as agents of a foreign government (the logic being that the CPUSA was under the control of the Soviet Union).

[4] A critical moment for her came in 1956, after the reading of Nikita Khrushchev's speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which revealed the crimes that Joseph Stalin committed under the USSR's one-party system.

She stayed in the party until 1973, when she resigned in a dispute with CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall over issues of orthodoxy, to which she could no longer conform.

Through her involvement with NAM and the Democratic Socialists, she provided an important link between the activists of the 1930s and the younger generation inspired by the popular movement against the Vietnam War.

She had been broadcasting on Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles since 1959, and in Washington, she and Richard co-hosted "Dialogue," an hour-long public affairs show on WPFW on Wednesday mornings.

[10] Healey's extensive collection of papers and other material on the CPUSA is archived at the California State University, Long Beach library.