Theodore Draper

An American communist youth activist, later a combative liberal cold-war warrior and still later a stringent critic of imperial aims and consequences, Theodore Draper, who has died aged 93, was one of the last famous freelance intellectuals of mid-20th century America. His death leaves only Daniel Bell as a survivor of a distinct political trajectory and a different age.

Draper's magnum scholarly contributions include two early volumes on the history of American communism from the view of a party leadership that, albeit as a junior partner, he shared; and among other works, a major study of the Iran-Contra affair. He was by no means consistent, but he was a prolific and highly regarded essayist for more than half a century. Delivering messages from the pages of Commentary and, later, the New York Review of Books, he chose his targets and spared few antagonists.

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, 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.

Discharged in 1945, Draper became a cold war journalist and commentator, most often writing about the threat of communism to liberal democracy. By the early 1950s, he emerged as a frequent contributor to Commentary and journals with notable intelligence agency connections, the Reporter and the New Leader. Like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, he remained close to friends within the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its US affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, but spared himself the embarrassment of later revelations of CIA sponsorship by remaining outside their inner circles.

Funded by the Ford Foundation, Draper engaged in a unique pursuit of documenting American communist history through available sources and extensive communication with former leaders. Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960) were scholarly classics of their day.

Draper would be severely criticised, by the coming generation of New Left scholars, for showing no interest in the factors that made American communism vital and appealing. The appeal to sections of the immigrant working class, the ways in which communists influenced the Roosevelt administration, framed industrial unionism and sourced many of Hollywood's most interesting films all seemed beyond his ken. To his own satisfaction, however, he had captured the essential point: American communism was ultimately subject to commands from abroad.

Draper, also an acerbic critic of the Cuban revolution, joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1960, moving in 1968 to the Institute for Advanced Study. The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (1970) might be seen as an assault upon the newer generation of radicals. But he had also become discomfited by emerging neo-conservatism, realigning himself through appearances in the New York Review of Books.

A Very Thin Line (1991), his study of the Iran-Contra affair, was a defence of the constitution against the threat of conservative coup d'etat. Likewise, A Struggle for Power: the American Revolution (1996) dealt more frankly with imperial intentions on the part of the Founding Fathers than conservatives and many liberals found comfortable.

Married to a high school teacher, a singer and a medieval historian respectively, Draper is survived by his third wife, a son and four stepchildren.

· Theodore Draper, intellectual, born September 11 1912; died February 21 2006

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