Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 33

  Like Buckley and other anti-Communists, she liked McCarthy and detested Eisenhower as a conservative lacking in principles and backbone. Branden recalled her indignation over a 1957 Time magazine article recounting a 1945 meeting between General Eisenhower and his Russian counterpart, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, in Berlin. The two had been debating the strengths of their respective forms of government. The article quoted Eisenhower as saying, “I was hard put to it when [Zhukov] insisted that [the Soviet] system appealed to the idealistic and [that ours appealed] completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position because he said: ‘You tell a person he can do as he pleases, he can act as he pleases, he can do anything. Everything that is selfish in man you appeal to. … We tell him that he must sacrifice for the state.’” The fact that Eisenhower couldn’t defend “the noblest, freest country in the history of the world” as a matter of principle against a puppet of “the bloodiest dictatorship in history” infuriated her. “That’s why, without a morality of rational self-interest, capitalism can’t be defended,” she told Branden. By then, she had delineated such a morality in Atlas Shrugged.

  Rand was also a regular guest at dinners and parties given by Frances and Henry Hazlitt in their apartment on Washington Square. Frances had been Richard Mealand’s assistant and Rand’s boss in the New York office of Paramount Pictures’ story department in the early 1940s. Henry, an economics journalist who championed laissez-faire capitalism to generations of readers of The New York Times, The Nation, and Newsweek, was the newly appointed editor of The Freeman, the magazine for which Paterson had been raising money in 1948. Both were longtime friends and admirers of hers. Through them she met East Coast acquaintances of her California political allies William Mullendore and Leonard Read, such as Frank Meyer and Willie Schlamm, and renewed her acquaintance with the now canonical Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.

  Mises, as he was known, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria whom Hazlitt had helped to bring to the United States in 1940. An author and prewar chief economic adviser to the Austrian government, he was considered one of the period’s great economic and social theorists in Europe but was known by only a handful of free-market intellectuals in the United States. Rand had met him soon after he arrived in New York. The two had much in common. They agreed that the future of political liberty lay with unregulated markets and limited government. They avidly supported private property, deregulation of industry, and a fixed gold standard to prevent governments from expanding state power by inflating the currency, the terrible consequences of which both had experienced at first hand. Throughout the 1940s and later, she consistently recommended his books to her friends, along with Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Paterson’s The God of the Machine. But Rand and Mises didn’t see eye to eye on the essential importance of individual rights, among other subjects, and legend has it that they got into an impassioned argument the very first time they met.

  Hazlitt had introduced them at a dinner party he and Frances gave in 1941 or 1942. As he later recalled the incident, they and his other guests were gathered in the living room after dinner. He took drink orders, and when he returned from the kitchen with a tray in his hands, he heard Rand saying to Mises, “You treat me like an ignorant little Jewish girl!” Without knowing exactly what had happened between them, but assuming that they were arguing about the doctrine of natural rights, he tried to make peace. “Oh, I’m sure, Ayn, that Lu didn’t mean it that way,” he remembered telling her. Mises, who was famously dapper, self-disciplined, and charming, jumped to his feet and shouted, “I did mean it that way!” Since the Austrian sexagenarian was already hard of hearing, Hazlitt surmised that he had not heard what Rand had said. In any case, peace was restored.

  Rand and Mises probably didn’t see each other again until the early 1950s. But during one of Hazlitt’s trips to Los Angeles, the well-known journalist delighted her by confiding that “Lu Mises and I were talking about you the other day, and he called you ‘the most courageous man in America.’” “Did he really say man?” she asked him. “Yes,” said Hazlitt, and she beamed. Within limits, she and the old-world economist liked and respected each other. But ideas trumped compliments. Years later, Nathaniel Branden discovered a set of angry margin notes she had penned in her copy of Mises’s most famous book, Human Action. “Bastard!” he recalled that she wrote on one page, irritated by Mises’s rejection of a moral, as opposed to a practical, argument for capitalism. (Her devotion to her own ideas sometimes “allowed normal human considerations to fall by the wayside,” Branden remarked mildly.)

  A second clash with Mises occurred in 1952 or 1953. It ended in a falling-out indicative of Rand’s diminishing tolerance for intellectual opposition. Again at the Hazlitts’, with the Brandens in attendance, the two eminences argued over the government’s right to impose a military draft, which was ongoing after World War II. Mises, who had a purely economic aversion to state power, supported it. Rand considered it an utter violation of individual rights, beginning with the right to life. The morning after their argument, she phoned Richard Cornuelle, the younger brother of her California acquaintance Herbert Cornuelle and a regular attendee at Mises’s weekly NYU economics seminar. Twenty-three, strapping, and handsome, Cornuelle knew both Mises and Hazlitt and had become fascinated by Rand. He liked to stop by her apartment whenever she had time to sit and talk with him. “I thought she was a most remarkable person, exerting a huge influence for liberty,” he said. But when she called and asked him to take sides in her dispute with Mises, he pled neutrality. “That’s not possible,” she told him. “You’re either with me or against me.” He refused to choose, and she ended the conversation and never spoke to him again. She remained friendly with Mises, however, for another decade and helped him to promote his books.

  Cornuelle was half relieved by the break, he later said, because his relationship with her had gotten a little “creepy.” “She was very magnetic, and you didn’t want to argue with her. You wanted her to like you, and you sensed that it wouldn’t take much for you to [be shown] the door.” Besides, “she was a terrible flirt. My brother Herb and I used to try to count the guys she’d told were models for her heroes. It was more than one but less than twenty.” Although he had met both O’Connor and Branden, they were rarely at Rand’s apartment when he was invited to drop by. “She kept her boyfriends separated,” he said, laughing. “Branden was then just beginning to be her protégé.” She had started to question Cornuelle about his sex life. “That scared me to death,” he said. For him, the shy younger son of a Protestant minister, the flirtation “was becoming a problem,” and so he didn’t try to reconnect with Rand.

  The earlier argument with Mises, and the older man’s apparent agreement that she was “just a silly little Jewish girl” (as the story came to be told, with the added embellishment that she wept), became a perennial item of gossip on the Right. William Buckley, Russell Kirk, and other right-wing Christian intellectuals repeated it with relish, for decades, without evidence that it was true. Her young friends, on first hearing the story in the 1960s, peremptorily denied that the incident had happened. In 1962, Branden wrote directly to Mises, requesting a written denial, and Mises, then in his eighties, complied. Yet, as Rand knew, the story was true. Hazlitt told it privately, to friends, a number of times over the years, and immediately after Rand’s death he wrote to correct an inaccurate account included by Buckley in his National Review obituary of the author.

  If the exchange with Mises did take place, as it almost certainly did, perhaps it isn’t surprising that at least once in her life Rand reflected something of the poisoned atmosphere of the anti-Semitic Russia of her childhood. That she tended to confront pain and fear by minimizing their importance would surely not have guaranteed a complete escape from the effects of second-class citizenship in her native city. In Atlas Shrugged, there comes a revealing moment, before Dagny’s crash-landing in Galt’s Gulch, when the heroine briefly
gives up the battle to save Taggart Transcontinental. She resigns her official position and withdraws to a country cottage that had belonged to her father. She feels immense pain at the prospect of losing her railroad; startlingly, she likens her pain to the howling of a wounded stranger in whose screams she could drown at any moment. “She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience; she had to fight him and destroy him.” Later, in the chapter “Atlantis,” Dagny reflects that “all the years of ugliness and struggle [weren’t real. They] were only someone’s senseless joke.” Of course, anti-Semitism was not a senseless joke. Neither were the other traumas and anxieties of Rand’s childhood and young adulthood.

  In this small world, other friends of Hazlitt and admirers of Mises were drawn into her circle. In the Austrian economist’s weekly graduate-level seminar at NYU, academics, businessmen, and activists, including Cornuelle, came to listen and ask questions; many stayed in the seminar for years or even decades. One longtime student and friend of Mises was Murray Rothbard, a quick-witted twenty-eight-year-old intellectual prankster and self-styled “anarcho-capitalist.” The Cornuelle brothers had brought Rothbard to visit Rand in 1952, and Rothbard found the experience of paying court to her both fascinating and depressing. In 1954 he tried again. As the leader of a high-octane clique of young Mises students who called themselves the Circle Bastiat, he bowed to group pressure to provide an introduction to her. He arranged for a meeting between members of his circle and Rand’s Collective. The date set was for a Saturday evening in mid-July, with a follow-up meeting scheduled a week later. Rothbard and his friends survived to tell the story, and told it many times.

  The Brandens were in Canada, but Rand, O’Connor, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, and other Rand associates were arrayed on the sofa and chairs in her living room when Rothbard and his young companions George Reisman and Ralph Raico entered. After introductions, she spoke mostly to seventeen-year-old Reisman, a brainy recent graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. Before the discussion got under way, Reisman presented her with a pair of tickets to a dinner event in support of Roy Cohn, who had recently resigned as Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel; Cohn had been accused of misusing the power of his office on behalf of a homosexual lover during the recently completed Army-McCarthy hearings. Reisman was on assignment from one of the dinner’s organizers to ask the novelist to come, he explained, and mentioned that McCarthy would also be there. Although McCarthy’s star was swiftly setting, Rand still supported him. She declined, however, on the grounds that, for her to become involved in a defense of Cohn, she would have to abandon Atlas Shrugged and proclaim his innocence as the novelist Emile Zola had proclaimed that of Dreyfus. At first, Reisman was amazed—not by Rand’s comparing Cohn to Dreyfus, but by her grandiosity in likening herself to Zola. After reading Atlas Shrugged in 1957, however, he concluded that “a comparison [of Rand] to Zola [was] several orders of magnitude too modest.”

  Reminiscing years later, Reisman, by then a distinguished economist at Pepperdine University, recalled that his hero Rothbard sat silently and appeared amused as the younger man experienced what the older one had undergone two years earlier: the grim impossibility of winning an argument with Ayn Rand. As the novelist’s delighted admirers looked on, Reisman attempted to defend the Misesean proposition that people’s values—meaning their judgments and choices—are necessarily subjective, changeable, and often arbitrary. Rand would have none of it. She lured him into admitting the objective fact of his own existence—as Branden had tried to do with Alan Greenspan—then pointed out that human life requires definite, particular resources and actions to keep it going. Those were values. From there, she captured all the points. “No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t budge her,” Reisman recalled when he was in his seventies. “She had an answer and an explanation for everything, including a preference for vanilla ice cream over chocolate ice cream.” He never forgot her method of arguing. With irrefutable logic, she transformed what he thought were self-evident propositions into absurdities. Adding to the impression made by her logic was the sheer force of her personality. At some junctures, he became so “frightened of her driving me into some other position I did not want to take that I did not even allow myself to recognize what I really believed.” When the discussion took a detour into physics, Reisman hypothesized that, since no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, there must be empty pockets of space, or voids, when objects move from one position to another. That was “worse than anything a Communist could have said!” she thundered. Later, he understood her to have meant that the “existence of nonexistence” was the kind of conceptual gibberish that historically set the stage for priests and tyrants to brainwash people. At the time, however, debating with her was “comparable to being in the presence of the voice of Judgment on Judgment Day.” For Reisman, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but that didn’t keep him from becoming one of her loyal lieutenants after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.

  The party broke up at five thirty in the morning. The next week, other members of the Circle Bastiat came along to support their friends in open competition. The evening ended in defeat, and, for Rothbard, in deflation. After that, he decided it was best to keep his distance from the first lady of reason. In a letter to his friend Richard Cornuelle, he reflected on her blind spots and also her charisma. She offered a brilliant argument for the importance of ethics in a time and place that badly underrated them, he noted, and communicated “great truths that we have literally never heard in the classroom.” But she was also humorless, puritanical, and gave herself far too much credit for the originality of her ideas. “While I agreed (or thought I agreed) mainly with her position, I found myself rooting like hell for George [Reisman], who found himself under a typical Randian barrage, according to which anyone who is not now or soon will be a one-hundred-percent Randian Rationalist is an ‘enemy’ and an ‘objective believer in death and destruction’ as well as crazy.” In a leap of logic and intuition, Rothbard divined a flaw in her approach that others wouldn’t discover for a decade, if at all: the one-party nature of her philosophical system. The famous individualist “actually denies all individuality whatsoever!” he exclaimed to Cornuelle. Given her rejection of the relevance of family background, temperament, and personal preference in the formation of values and ideas, a Randian utopia “would be a place where all men are identical, in their souls if not in their personal appearance.” This was an eerily precise forecast of the busy uniformity of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged, where everyone agrees on almost everything. Forewarned as he was, though, Rothbard could not resist her intellectual appeal. In 1957, he, too, would briefly enlist in her growing army of supporters, with unfortunate results for him.

  During this period, Ayn and her recently married protégé Nathaniel Branden were neighbors and saw each other two or three times a week. Exchanging greetings at her apartment door, or saying good-bye after a Saturday evening of reading and group discussion, Branden was aware that their embraces lasted a little longer and were a little more intimate than they had been before. He felt “an enhanced sense of male power” when he kissed her good night, he later wrote, and sensed “that she felt a heightened awareness of herself as a woman.” Heretofore apprehensive in his relationships with women, even with his wife, he wrote, “I liked knowing I was the cause of what she was feeling.” Gradually, they began to hold hands in public and say aloud that they were soul mates. Oddly, no one in the Collective noticed, or acknowledged noticing, anything overly familiar in their behavior with each other or in the effusive compliments they traded. Later, Branden would claim that he and Rand were still unaware of what was coming.

  In private moments, she asked him about the state of his marriage. Had the sex problem been cured? Predictably, the answer was no. When he attempted to make love to Barbara, she often turned away. Rand, acknowledging that the situation was frustrating, advised him, and also Barbara, to be patient and persevere. One evening, he told
her that he sensed in himself a capacity for sexual passion that had never been fully aroused or released with his wife. To drive the point home, he compared himself to Dagny at a low ebb in the story, feeling downcast and yearning for an ideal lover at the very moment when the anonymous John Galt happens to be passing in the shadows outside her office window. Was Branden suggesting that Rand was his John Galt, or that he was willing to be hers? In either case, the analogy must have served to remind her that she was sexually lonely, too. Branden was throwing down a gauntlet. He later said that he did not know that she would pick it up.

  From his teenaged years onward, Branden had wanted to be a writer as well as a psychologist. As it turned out, his first published piece of writing had been a letter to the editor of the UCLA newspaper while he was still a student there, in protest of an editorial that was sympathetic to a Communist professor who had committed suicide. He gave a copy of the published letter to Rand on Father’s Day of 1951, signing it, jokingly, “To my father—Ayn Rand.” In the spring of 1954, he applied to New York State to change his legal name from Nathan Blumenthal to Nathaniel Branden, which is a perfect anagram of the common Hebrew formulation for “son of Rand”: “ben Rand.” “Nathaniel,” in addition to being a variant of Nathan, was the first name of Dagny’s idealized ancestor, the self-made railroad tycoon Nathaniel Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. In September 1954, the courts approved the change. Now Rand and he were father and son, mother and child, romantic heroine and—grandfather. They were also sons and lovers. A few days after the official name change, the first act in their love affair began.

  They were riding together in the front seat of a car alongside O’Connor, who was driving, with Branden’s sister Elayne and Barbara in the back. They were returning to New York from Toronto, where the group had been visiting Elayne and Nathaniel’s parents and sister Florence and her husband. In Florence’s living room one afternoon, Rand and Branden had been explaining some of her ideas when they found themselves performing a spontaneous duet, jointly fielding questions from the family and several acquaintances and laughingly completing each other’s sentences. They felt a degree of spiritual unity that was intoxicating.