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By Root 1684 0

Edith Efron and Al Ramrus pestered Mike Wallace until, in February 1959, he invited her to appear on his half-hour TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, in her first television appearance. He gave her a forceful introduction as they sat facing each other across a bare table on an empty stage. She was “the founder of a new and unusual philosophy [that] would seem to strike at the very roots of our society,” he declared, “a revolutionary creed” that had launched a national movement along the lines of “democracy or Communism.” While he spoke, the camera lingered on a small, plain woman, with uncoiffed hair, a changeable smile, and darting, dark, magnetic eyes suggestive of wariness and excitement. Employing his famous stern interrogatory method, Wallace asked, “Miss Rand, would you agree that, as Newsweek put it, you are out to destroy every edifice in the contemporary American way of life?” She blinked, then answered good-naturedly. “Yes. I am challenging the moral code at the base” of a great many institutions, and that code is altruism, she replied. Throughout the next twenty-five minutes of give-and-take, the camera caught fleeting expressions of wonder, amusement, anger, and contempt moving across her features. But she explained the workings of her great philosophic engine clearly, gracefully, and with a fiery emphasis on the sine qua non of individual freedom and individual responsibility.

She didn’t always tell the truth in answer to his questions. When he inquired, “Whence did this philosophy of yours come?” she gave an answer that, from this point on, became her stock reply: “Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgment of a debt to Aristotle, who is the only philosopher who ever influenced me. I devised the rest myself.” This, of course, was not only untrue, but also highly unlikely on its face. It worked against her being taken seriously by the influential intellectuals she wanted to persuade. “You have an accent,” Wallace observed. “It’s—” “Russian,” she replied, whereupon the interviewer asked if her parents had immigrated to America with her or had died in Russia. “I came alone,” she told him, adding that she had no way of finding out if her parents were alive or dead. (She had learned of their deaths in 1946, through Marie von Strachow, but may have wished to protect her sister Nora, whose status and whereabouts she did not know. On the other hand, she had told the same story to both Brandens.) Was her husband a big industrialist, like the heroes of Atlas Shrugged? the interviewer wondered. Oh, no, he was an artist, she told him. The next question must have surprised her. “Is he supported by you?” Wallace asked. “No, by his own work, actually, in the past,” she stammered, adding, “By me if necessary, but it isn’t quite necessary.” This exchange took place in the context of an earlier discussion about whether only strong, independent people like John Galt and Howard Roark are worthy to be loved. (A weak man or woman “certainly does not deserve love,” Rand solemnly told Wallace. People “cannot expect the unearned, neither in love nor in money.” When the host protested that few people could meet her standard of strength or merit, she proudly admitted, “Unfortunately, very few.”) The currency in which O’Connor’s right to be loved was to be measured, she explained, was the pleasure he gave her, proving that she was not an altruist in love. For O’Connor, this must have been excruciating: to be described as though he were a mistress, on the one hand, and for Rand to deny supporting him, on the other—here was a perfect vise of undeservingness.

She also mentioned Branden, whom she identified as “my best intellectual heir, the psychologist.” She shyly but proudly confided that his lecture series was becoming very successful. In the previous month of January 1959 alone, Mr. Branden had received six hundred letters of inquiry about his lectures.

Afterward, the show received unprecedented amounts of mail from viewers, much of it positive. But journalists in general were dumbfounded that Wallace had devoted