Draper is best known for the 14 books he completed during his life, including work regarded as seminal on the formative period of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution, and the Iran–Contra affair.
[5] While attending a social function in 1935, Draper was approached by Harry Gannes, the foreign editor of the Communist Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker.
[5] After giving the matter careful consideration, Draper decided to accept the offer and went to work at the Daily Worker, where he remained for two years as assistant foreign editor,[5] writing for publication under the name Theodore Repard.
He was ready to travel to Russia when he was suddenly told he couldn't leave because the party had learned that his brother, Hal Draper, was a Trotskyist, causing Soviet authorities to regard Ted as a security risk.
[8] An article entitled "New Moment in France" was produced and published in the July 9, 1940 issue, in which Draper argued that the French collapse had altered the balance of power in Europe and hinted that the Soviet Union would be a likely next target of the Nazis in their pursuit of "an ever widening circle of expansion for easy booty.
[10]Draper refused to write any more articles for the New Masses after that date, limiting himself to a few book reviews so as to avoid a total severing of connections with the Communist movement.
[11] He also spent a six-month stint as correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS, before joining the staff of a short-lived French-language weekly newspaper based in New York City.
[2] Despite being invited back into the fold after the June 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union validated his earlier prognostications, Draper felt this impossible and instead worked at a series of temporary jobs to make ends meet.
[18] Under the direction of political scientist Clinton Rossiter of Cornell University, the Fund for the Republic determined to publish a full-scale history of American communism.
David A. Shannon of the University of Wisconsin was tapped to write the history of the CPUSA during the post-war period, while Draper was chosen to produce a monograph on the party's early years.
[18] Rossiter allowed Draper two years to complete the entire project, the history of American communism from its origins in 1919 until the sacking of party leader Earl Browder at the end of World War II.
[18] Draper set to work, mustering sources and conducting interviews with living participants of the formative period of the American Communist Party.
One of those with whom he conducted an extensive correspondence was James P. "Jim" Cannon, a midwesterner who was sacked from the organization in 1928 for supporting Leon Trotsky and the Russian "Left Opposition."
[21]Draper turned in the manuscript to Clinton Rossiter, who was irate about the truncation of the narrative but was in great need of a publication to show that the Fund for the Republic project was alive and functioning.
[21] The manuscript thus found print without revision as The Roots of American Communism in 1957 and Rossiter set Draper back to work for two more years to complete the rest of the assigned time period.
[23] After several tries and failures to complete the task, Draper turned his research material over to a young scholar whose work he appreciated, Harvey Klehr of Emory University.
[1] Draper moved across country to accept a similar post at the Institute for Advanced Study located at Princeton University, where he focused his scholarship on the question of race relations.
[25] Some of Draper's later works include A Very Thin Line, a history of the Iran–Contra affair, and A Struggle for Power, a monograph on the economic and political circumstances behind the American Revolution of 1776.
Materials relating to his two published books on American Communism and the Cuban Revolution are held by the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.