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was that happiness, as an end in itself, quickly deteriorates into the pursuit of pleasure, “with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. … Randian man,” he continued, “has to be held ‘heroic’ in order not to be beastly,” and all deviations from Randian revelation must be viewed as willful immorality so as to prevent debauchery. “There are ways of dealing with such wickedness,” he thundered in the essay’s most inflammatory passage. “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” Interestingly, within two years of writing the review, in a series of private letters to Buckley, Chambers moved closer to Rand’s position in favor of unrestricted capitalism. He withdrew his support for National Review’s brand of religion-based conservatism and lauded the indispensable dynamism of the nation’s economic system, which “is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative” in any traditional sense. Rand did not learn about his change of heart.

She had expected attacks, but she had not expected her worldview to be confused with Marxism or Fascism, or for herself to be accused of advocating mass murder. Anguished, she asked Barbara and other friends why American intellectuals such as Chambers couldn’t understand what she was saying. And why hadn’t anyone with cultural standing risen to defend, or at least accurately summarize, her themes of freedom, rationality, no first use of force, and individual rights? “I had expected some kind of better understanding,” she told Nathaniel. Instead, critics focused on her adamant atheism and harshly contemptuous passages and finally placed her outside the realm of the reasonable Right. Wearily, she said, “Historically speaking, [it’s] even earlier than I imagined.” To some degree, history would prove her right.

Ironically, perhaps, Isabel Paterson, who though no longer a columnist with the Herald Tribune still retained some influence among conservatives, did come to Rand’s defense against Chambers, although Rand probably never knew it. Notwithstanding the older woman’s own early warnings to her former friend about the limits she was placing on her influence by insisting on her atheism, Paterson sent an indignant letter to William F. Buckley in care of his secretary, Gertrude Vogt, who had once been Paterson’s secretary at the Herald Tribune. Chambers’s review was so vicious it could be considered libelous, Paterson wrote, and was absolutely worthless. Because Paterson was now an occasional contributor to National Review, Buckley answered in a vaguely conciliatory manner. Paterson was not satisfied; she told her friend Muriel Hall that the review was “the dirtiest job imaginable” and “If I ever see Mr. Chambers again, I won’t speak to him.” It’s hard not to wonder whether a mending of fences might not have taken place between the two old friends had Paterson said that in print.

Rand ignored Chambers, but she never forgave William F. Buckley, Jr., for his bad faith. After 1957, she did her best to avoid him. At her death, he wrote in his National Review obituary of her that she made it a practice to ask potential party hosts whether he was on the guest list; if so, she refused to go. For his part, he told acerbic stories about her throughout the 1960s and 1970s and, in 2003, lampooned her as a pontificating, bob-haired, chain-smoking poobah in his novel Getting It Right. Yet he insisted that the selection of Chambers to review her book was not a conscious act of sabotage and that no one at National Review was out to get her. “I believe she died under the impression that I had done it to punish her for her [religious] faithlessness,” he said. “But [pairing Chambers with the book] was a coincidence.” Like other former friends with whom she had—and would—cut off contact, he seemed to miss her. In years to come, he sent her nonliturgical postcards suggesting they make up. He sometimes phoned at night. Rand thought that he had been drinking on such occasions and hung up. Yet