Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [152]
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,