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Mr. [Theodore Draper]'s insistence that American Communism had always been a tail wagged by the Soviet Union made him a lightning rod for some historians in the 1970s and '80s. These new historians, as they called themselves, were rooted in the New Left of the 1960s. In seeking to define what was native about American Communism, they attacked Mr. Draper, saying that rather than offering a social and cultural history of the party, he took an institutional approach obsessed with the heavy hand of the Soviet Comintern.

He enhanced his reputation with a definitive study of the mid- 1980s Iran-Contra matter, in which U.S. officials covertly sold arms to Iran to win the release of U.S. hostages in the Middle East and used some of the profits to support Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras. After Army service in World War II, during which he wrote a history of the 84th Infantry Division, Mr. [Theodore Draper] wrote prolifically for magazines and gained his first wide notice with the books \"The Roots of American Communism\" (1957) and \"American Communism and Soviet Russia\" (1960).

[Theodore Draper] went from Communist Party fellow traveler in the 1930s to liberal anti-Communist in the 1950s and '60s before breaking with the Cold War hawks and attacking the U.S. role in Vietnam. For a time he was also the leading historian of American communism, writing two authoritative books about it.

[Theodore Draper] went from Communist Party fellow traveler in the 1930s to liberal anti-Communist in the 1950s and '60s before breaking with the Cold War hawks and attacking the U.S. role in Vietnam. For a time he was also the leading historian of American communism, writing two authoritative books about it. Draper was dogged in pursuit of whatever issue caught his attention, whether it was France's collapse on the eve of World War II, Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution, the U.S. war in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger's conduct of Middle East policy or the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra affair. Draper's insistence that American communism had always been a tail wagged by the Soviet Union made him a lightning rod for a new generation of historians in the 1970s and '80s. These new historians, as they called themselves, were rooted in the New Left of the 1960s.

Although the struggle's outcome is already known to the reader, numerous opportunities for a different type of revolution, at different times and for different reasons present themselves. Historians offer varying opinions and interpretations on why the Revolution occurred, exactly when it started to develop in the minds of colonist, and what were the over-aching objectives of the Revolution's leaders. \"Struggle for Power\" dismisses the emphasis on ideological reasons as the root cause and offers an alternative explanation. Indeed, he believes that in 1775, the leaders of this revolt only knew what they were against - revenue generated through Parliamentary-declared taxes - and not what they were for. Only after the January 1776 publication of Thomas Paine's \"Common Sense\" did the colonies stress independence as a reason for revolting. The author states that the rapid population and economic growth of the colonies made a \"struggle\" inevitable, ideological and patriotic causes aside.

impulse toward what was already being called \"independency.\" [Theodore Draper]'s argument is that well before the Stamp Acts, and even longer before any Jeffersonian ideas about inalienable rights appeared in the American discourse, the British were worried \"about the progress made by the American colonies and where it was going to lead.\" \"Whatever they did,\" Draper writes of the colonies, \"they were determined to do it on their own terms. When their interests conflicted with what the British wanted, they held out tenaciously, by passive resistance as well as by outright opposition.\" Among the most fascinating stories that Draper extracts from the documentary record is the first one he tells, about a battle of pamphlets that broke out in both America and Britain after the French and Indian War.

There is scant real evidence available, even to one who knows where to look, as quite evidently Mr. [Theodore Draper] does. The \"History Will Absolve Me\" speech, and the \"Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra\" are about the only real clues to [Castro]'s intentions. In his discussion of these two documents the author cannot help but make our State Department look a little foolish. The importance of this, of course, is that when Mr.

Born into a Russian-Jewish home in Brooklyn, the son of a shirt manufacturer, he attended the City College of New York during the depression and joined the communist-led National Student League. His brother Hal, two years younger, joined the small, anti-Stalinist socialist movement, edited a Trotskyist weekly, served as avuncular counsel to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and wrote several volumes vindicating Karl Marx. Brother [Theodore Draper], by contrast, became a Daily Worker staffer and then moved to the communist-guided New Masses magazine as foreign editor. Following repeated trips to Europe during the later 1930s, Theodore took a memorable turn. His idea, that the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 only postponed the German invasion of Russia, was unacceptable in communist official circles. He shifted to the staff of Tass, the Soviet news agency, staying six months before leaving for a non-communist French weekly in New York. A dropout from Columbia University graduate school, he set himself on a close history of the German invasion of France, The Six Weeks' War (1944). He had become a scholar without diploma, as he would remain the rest of his life, and joined the US army, serving as historian of the 84th Infantry Division.