• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1779 0

with Rand. His teacher Ludwig von Mises, Helmut Schoeck, and other conservative thinkers and writers took his side in the plagiarism scandal, perhaps partly because they disliked Rand’s habit of self-promotion and Branden’s heavy-handed tactics on her behalf. But he lost two close friends, George Reisman and Robert Hessen, both also in therapy with Branden. Flushed with the grandeur of Rand’s vision, they sided with their new confederates. In just a few months, Reisman, in particular, had come to worship Branden, describing him to Ralph Raico as “what the best within us [in the Circle Bastiat] started out to be” and explaining that under his care, he had discovered what it felt like to be someone for the first time in his life. He remained loyal to organized Objectivism until well after the author’s death. As for Hessen, who later described his single therapeutic session with Branden as a “hideous” episode of bullying and intimidation, during which he watched Branden pace the room like a panther, he left New York for a year of graduate work in history at Harvard. When he returned, he switched therapists to Branden’s cousin Allan Blumenthal. In the spring of 1959, he also went to work as Rand’s part-time personal secretary. With her permission, while in that position he collected and helped to safeguard archival drafts of her essays. She purged him, too, over a minor disagreement, in 1980.

Even if Rand didn’t always initiate what insiders called “denunciations,” she established the atmosphere in which they took place and participated. Her daily conferences with her protégé became more fractious as her moods darkened during 1958. After Rothbard’s expulsion, she tightened the rules of admission to their philosophical clubhouse. “She was very controversial and feared that others would use the actions of her acolytes to discredit her,” recalled Hessen. As a result, she decreed that only she, Nathaniel, and Barbara could call themselves “Objectivists.” Everyone else had to refer to himself as a “student of Objectivism.” NBI enrollees were not only required to read Atlas Shrugged but also to declare their agreement with the major tenets of John Galt’s speech, according to a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post. Prospective participants were invited to pay for and attend a single introductory lecture but could not ask questions, in part because the crowds at these preliminary events overwhelmed the ability of the principals to answer. (“I went to a [lecture] once and raised my hand,” said Bertha Krantz, Rand’s copy editor at Random House. “I was told very bluntly, very coldly, ‘You don’t question.’ I got up and left.”) In any case, Rand was likely to explode in anger if questions suggested doubt or disagreement.

As NBI expanded, Barbara gave up her job as a junior editor at St. Martin’s Press to supervise its daily operations. Seen as a kind of Aphrodite to Rand’s imperial Hera and Branden’s Apollo, she, too, was an object of awe and admiration among the lesser lights. “If one considers that Ayn was God and Nathan was Jesus Christ, that left me as the Virgin Mary,” she once said wryly. Students referred to her as “the most beautiful woman in the world” or as “the Ice Queen,” both tributes to her cool, pale, increasingly aloof aura of good looks and regal bearing. “I learned repression, as so many of [Ayn’s] young friends did,” she later wrote about this period. By stifling unacceptable thoughts, perceptions, and facts—her literary enthusiasms, her mentor’s moods, her husband’s ongoing affair with the ideology’s great parental figure—”I encased myself in a sheet of ice,” she wrote.

Years later, Nathaniel bitterly described the program of conformity he implemented on Rand’s behalf during the 1960s. The implicit premises the inner circle accepted and that he “transmitted to our students at NBI” included:

Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.

Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.

Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue