WHEN THE POSITION OF CHAIRMAN of the Los Angeles Communist Party came open in the late 1940s, the two obvious candidates were Dorothy Healey, then the party's organizational secretary, and Ben Dobbs, the party's labor secretary. Both were smart and affable and had charisma to burn. They were also the best of friends, so - as Dorothy related the story in California Red, her quasi-autobiography cowritten with historian Maurice Isserman - they flipped a coin and it came up on the Dorothy-becomes-chairman side.
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
