SOURCE: "Eldridge Cleaver's Last Gift: The Truth," in Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1998, p. M5.

[In the following essay, Horowitz comments on the significance of Cleaver's "many changes of heart" during his lifetime.]

Eldridge Cleaver was a man who made a significant imprint on our times and not for the best. But I mourn his passing nonetheless.

I first met Cleaver when he was Ramparts magazine's most famous and most bloodthirsty ex-con. "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist," he wrote in a notorious epistle [in Soul on Ice]. "My answer to all such thoughts lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes, is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts." This became an iconographic comment for the times, a ready excuse for all the destructive acts radicals like us committed.

No...