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By Root 1557 0

the 1950s that Saul Bellow described it as an intellectual annex of Moscow. The Right was very small, but vibrant and unified; it hadn’t yet splintered into Old Right libertarians and cold warriors, as it would do later in the decade. Members had a few favorite gathering places, and one was the Upper West Side penthouse apartment of J. B. Matthews, a reformed Communist fellow-traveler who, by 1953, was serving as Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s head of research and the executive director of the senator’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Among active anti-Communists, Matthews was known for his large collection of files on suspected Communist sympathizers in federal agencies and elsewhere; these were proving helpful to McCarthy as he tracked down supposed traitors in the U.S. government. When visiting New York, McCarthy often stopped in at Matthews’s, enjoying a drink with anti-New Deal newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler, Rand’s friend Eugene Lyons, William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, and others; Rand first met McCarthy there. Buckley, a high-spirited partisan and writer then in his twenties, was leading the youthful postwar wing of hard-Right Republicans who wanted government to support traditional Christian values and actively defend those values around the world. A Catholic from a privileged Connecticut family, he had gained early fame with a controversial book called God and Man at Yale; in 1955, he would found and edit National Review, the soon-to-be oracle of conservative orthodoxy.

Rand attended a number of Matthews’s parties, one of the few places where her 1947 HUAC testimony was regarded as a badge of honor. As in California, she was often at the center of a powerful male throng, taking on all comers, and she left an indelible and largely favorable impression. “Tell me your premises,” she would say on greeting new acquaintances, and having placed her serve would launch a volley of ideas. Contemporaries, including Buckley, remembered her as “singular.” Recalling the first time he met her, he mimicked her Russian accent as she declared, “Mr. Buckley, you arrrr too intelligent to believe in Gott!” (“That certainly is an icebreaker,” remarked Buckley’s friend Wilfrid Sheed on being told the story.) The future host of Firing Line took it in good grace, and they became friendly acquaintances—until the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, when many of her relationships changed or perished. She invited him for cocktails in her apartment, with her husband; he arrived with his mother-in-law in tow, and they all had a lively time talking about McCarthy. “She was a McCarthyite,” Buckley stated, “and so was I. I had just written a book about him.” The young man-about-town thought she possessed “an instantly communicable charm” and “glamorous hair.” For the next few years, he sent her postcards written in liturgical Latin, as a joke.

The postwar Right tended to view McCarthy’s Senate hearings as not only necessary on their face but also as payback for earlier leftist allegations that the antiwar, pro-capitalist Old Right conservatives were Nazis and Fascists. Rand’s support for McCarthy, as for HUAC, may have had as much to do with her fragile understanding of American due process as with her principled abhorrence of Communism. But it may also have been a result of the trust she tended to accord to those who shared her views and, as she saw it, had the courage to express them against liberal opposition. Toward the end of the 1950s, soon after the senator’s death from alcoholism, an acquaintance named Joan Kennedy Taylor ran into her at a National Book Awards ceremony. “Tell me,” Taylor recalled her saying, “what did people have against McCarthy?” Taylor told her, “Well, Ayn, it’s primarily because he wasn’t truthful. He said all these things and couldn’t back them up.” And she said, “Oh, I see. The Big Lie.” In later years, she told a young friend that McCarthy’s mission had been right but that he had lacked the moral courage to pursue it into the highest reaches of government. She also supported