As he described in his memoirs, Radosh was, like his Ashkenazi Jewish parents, a member of the Communist Party USA until the exposure of the truth about Stalinism began during the Khrushchev Thaw.
After studying declassified FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing their friends and associates, Radosh came to the conclusion that the Rosenbergs had in fact committed espionage for the Soviet KGB during the Manhattan Project and the Korean War, the crime for which they were both executed.
[2] 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.
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".
[9] 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.
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.
[14] 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.
"[15] 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".
"[16] Despite being raised as a red diaper baby by fellow travelers, Radosh's growing fondness during the early 1960s for the writings of Trotskyist historian Isaac Deutscher enraged senior members of the American Communist Party in Madison.
"[17] Despite still being a senior leader of Madison's Labor Youth League, Radosh broke with the Soviet-backed Communist Party USA and continued to become a founding father of the American New Left.
"[21] The book profiles several historical conservative or far-right isolationists, "critics of American globalism", men who were "outside the consensus, or the mainstream ... [and] regarded as subversive of the existing order."
Radosh's stated aim in writing the book was to "move us... to think carefully about alternative possibilities" to "our current predicament," which was a clear reference to the ongoing Vietnam War.
[24] Despite his claims of being unbiased and evenhanded as a historian, Radosh found himself subjected to both ostracism and character assassination by the American New Left in an effort to discredit the conclusions in his book.
"[citation needed] As a result of their 1983 book and the subsequent revelations in the Vassiliev papers as well as decrypted Soviet intelligence communications from the era through the Venona project, a consensus has emerged that rather than having been framed by the FBI, both of the Rosenbergs had in fact been very valuable NKVD spies, and that Julius Rosenberg was both the handler and agent recruiter whose active network of moles and couriers stole highly significant military and nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union during both World War II and the Korean War.
According to Radosh, the last straw came when he visited refugee camps in Central America during the 1980s and listened to what he described as horrifying accounts of the tyranny experienced by the many Nicaraguan people who had fled from the Sandinistas.
West had alleged that infiltration of the United States federal government by Stalinist moles and fellow travelers had significantly altered Western Allies and policies during World War II to favor the Soviet Union.