Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [151]
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