Newspaper Article

Obituary: Theodore Draper: American communist and combative liberal cold-war warrior

Buhle, Paul

2006

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Bell, Daniel / Draper, Theodore