Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [177]
Like any capitalist, he hoped to make a profit and decided to charge $3.50 for each of twenty lectures, or $70 for the series. Rand had concerns about the venture. Who would pay to hear a young psychologist with no institutional affiliation talk about philosophy? And what would the public association with her unpopular ideas do to his future? Eventually, she agreed, on the condition that he not name the organization after her. More than ever, she was protective of her name and ideas; she didn’t want to give her enemies an opportunity to seize on her friends’ errors of knowledge and attribute them to her. So the series was designated the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, soon to become the Nathaniel Branden Institute, or NBI.
NBI’s twenty-seven-year-old founder immediately began to recruit an audience. He contacted mutual acquaintances. (Bennett Cerf and Hiram Haydn pled a shortage of time; Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor attended.) He also sifted through Rand’s fan letters and sent flyers to intelligent-seeming admirers within driving distance of New York. His flyers were addressed to “the readers and admirers of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged” and, with Rand’s permission, mentioned the author’s name in the first line of copy. Members of the junior and senior collectives eagerly signed on, but even they didn’t foresee the almost Elmer Gantry—like talent that Branden would bring to the presentation of her ideas. If she was a “she-messiah,” as Newsweek called her in 1961, he was the rock upon which her 1960s following was built. Even those who disliked him—and over the years, there were many—admired his almost single-handed organization of Objectivism into a detailed philosophic system, a national movement, and, briefly, a familiar national brand, and recognized the fact that he set the foundation for Objectivism’s better-known stepchild, the 1970s libertarian movement.
As his famous mentor’s bodyguard and philosophical double (“We [are] like Siamese twins,” she once told him. “Our minds work exactly the same way”), his responsibilities multiplied. At her request, he and Barbara helped to select the forums for her public appearances, sat in on her interviews, accompanied her to important appointments, screened her visitors, and held a presumptively unfriendly world at bay. When he explained her theory that ethics should be consistent with the requirements of actual human life or issued orders for action to various ranks of loyalists, he spoke with Rand’s authority. In New York, he became the face and voice of her philosophy. From this time forward, what he wanted, he most often got.
* In October 2008, Greenspan, then eighty-two, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of the lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” That testimony constituted his retraction of assertions he’d made in a 1963 essay he published in Rand’s The Objectivist Newsletter, “The Assault on Integrity,” in which he wrote, “It is precisely the ‘greed’ of the businessman, or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.”
THIRTEEN
THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER
1958–1963
My personal life is a postscript to my novels. It consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.’ I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books—it has worked for me, as it has worked for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same.
—“About the Author,” Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Bennett Cerf and Hiram Haydn were among the first to notice the change in Rand. In professional settings, their “most interesting” author was a simple, often modest,