 During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Healey was one of the leading public figures of the Communist Party in the state of California.An opponent of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and at odds with the orthodox pro-Soviet leadership of Gus Hall, Healey subsequently left the Communist Party to join the New American Movement, which merged to become part of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982.Healey was born Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum in Denver to Hungarian Jewish immigrants.