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By Root 1553 0

he hadn’t received any professional training, and he didn’t yet have a Ph.D. (He would get one in 1973.) He had applied for but been refused a New York State license to practice therapy on the basis of too few hours of supervised practice; eventually he would obtain certification in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., with privileges to work in New York. In spite of his minimal credentials in the late 1950s, however, his clients took up all of the hours he was willing to devote to therapeutic practice, and those he could not see he passed on to his cousin Allan Blumenthal, a physician, whom he was training in his techniques and who set up a practice largely on that basis.

At first, Rothbard was pleased to be in therapy with Branden. After a few weeks, however, the sessions began to sour. Branden started to pester him about converting his wife, Joey, a practicing Christian, to atheism and Objectivism, Rothbard recalled, in a much-disputed 1989 magazine memoir called “My Break with Branden and the Rand Cult.” According to him, one evening when he and Joey were visiting Rand, someone suggested that Joey listen to a recording of Branden’s NBI lecture arguing for the nonexistence of God, in Objectivist parlance (since one cannot prove a negative). When she listened but refused to reevaluate her convictions, the pressure on Rothbard intensified. He later reported, perhaps falsely, that Branden urged him to divorce her.

By the spring of 1958, Objectivist events and activities were multiplying. After Branden’s weekly NBI lecture, a group gathered at a nearby coffee shop and talked about ideas until closing. The discussion that followed Rand’s fiction-writing workshop sometimes lasted into the early morning. Educational events were augmented by gatherings at the Blumenthals’ or Brandens’ apartment, in addition to invitation-only Saturday nights at Rand’s. Everyone lucky enough to be included was expected to attend all or most of these events. (“Why is it you don’t see us more often?” Branden once asked Rothbard—ominously, Rothbard thought.) Yet even during socials, there was very little small talk, which Rand, of course, deplored; typically, she, Nathaniel, or Barbara would lead a discussion of politics, books, music, or current events, while others stretched their necks to listen. (“Those parties were very hierarchical,” recalled one disenchanted NBI student. “They were round-tables of oratory.” “They were absolutely a nightmare,” Barbara later admitted. “They were as far from parties as anything you can imagine.”) As though spontaneously, guests adopted Rand’s opinions, preferences, even gestures. Since she smoked, they smoked. Once, Rand bought a new dining room table, and according to Shelly Reuben, her typist at the time, two admirers who had been in her apartment went out and bought the same table. The musicians in the group pretended to prefer Rachmaninoff—Rand’s favorite Romantic composer, a popular figure in the Russia of her youth—to the tragic, “malevolent” Beethoven and the “pre-musical” (meaning, pre-Romantic) Bach and Mozart. Once she described Brahms as “worthless,” and Leonard Peikoff, a talented pianist who was perhaps Rand’s most reverential follower, rushed to give away his collection of Brahms recordings. When not in his studio painting, Frank sat silently in a corner.

The naturally unruly Rothbard and his prankish friends found some of this funny, and one night they improvised a skit that made fun of the Collective. With George Reisman playing a chain-smoking, thickly accented Rand, Ralph Raico as a pompous Branden, and young historian Ron Hamowy imitating a beleaguered rank-and-file follower named Tina, they blended reasoned demands for lecture fees by Raico with satirical quotes from Francisco’s money speech in Atlas Shrugged. They taped their hijinks on a reel-to-reel recorder, and when Branden found out about it he demanded the tape. “After all,” Rothbard claimed he said, “you wouldn’t mock God.” The libertarian refused, citing private-property rights and thinking, Who’s God here, buster? You,