Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [196]
Standing in front of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, wearing her gold dollar-sign brooch, in 1967.
Mrs. Rose Greenspan, Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan, Rand, and Frank after Greenspan was sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1974.
One of several cartoons of Rand by Edward Sorel, this one from The New Yorker, February 14–21, 2005.
In New York, 1970s.
On the balcony overlooking the central hall in Grand Central Terminal, photographed by Theo Westenberger for Look, 1979.
A recently discovered 1961 portrait by Frank. “Her eyes might say, ‘Come to bed and dominate me,’” wrote Nathaniel Branden when he saw the portrait in 2007. “But of course if you obey her, who is the master of whom?” Speaking of Frank, another acquaintance said, “So he knew her after all.”
In January 1962 Branden persuaded her to launch a four-page monthly bulletin called The Objectivist Newsletter (later, in a digest-sized format, The Objectivist) to spread her message to all those students and others whose curiosity had been aroused by her books and speeches. It was remarkably professional looking, and it published most of her original nonfiction throughout the 1960s. She and Branden incorporated it as a jointly owned business venture outside the NBI umbrella, which was held and controlled by Branden alone. By contractual agreement, they co-wrote and co-edited the publication in equal shares and split the profit; at a minimum, each was required to write one serious article or essay for every issue.
Rand had never enjoyed expository writing. In the 1940s, she wrote in her journals that such work bored her, primarily because its purpose was not to create a world of her own but to help others to learn. But after thirteen years of shoehorning ideas into the thoughts and speech of characters in dramatic situations, she was finding it difficult to work on a new novel. She wasn’t convinced “that there’s a human race out there and that the struggle is worth it,” she told Branden. Writing for her ideal fiction reader was hard; writing for the newsletter turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable. Compared to constructing a novel, composing essays was child’s play. All she had to focus on were clarity and logic. Thus she entered into a new career as a cultural polemicist, almost against her will; without the pages of the newsletter to fill, she might have written less. Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the social tumult of the late 1960s, she published scores of both cranky and brilliant essays, many suffused with the anti-war, old libertarian spirit of the Isabel Paterson— era American Right: she wrote on the absolute nature of individual rights, on the proper limits of government, on the virtues of capitalism and the evils of economic control by a coercive state. Her often bitter rhetoric notwithstanding, many of these are worth reading decades later, if only for their clarity of language and purity of point of view. In “The Ethics of Emergencies,” for example, she warns against defining national emergencies too broadly or, worse, making them permanent, so that everyone is expected to sacrifice his liberties all the time. In “Man’s Rights,” “The Nature of Government,” “The Anatomy of Compromise,” and “The Roots of War,” she combined her old, defiant dedication to radical individualism with shrewd demonstrations of how to deconstruct political speech and uproot hidden agendas—in other words, how to think one’s way through government propaganda.
Branden’s essays for the newsletter and its successor publications helped him to refine his core ideas on psychology, especially on the nature of romantic love and self-esteem, which would form the backbone of his future best-selling books. Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, later a member of the Nixon administration and an advisor to Ronald Reagan, occasionally added their views on economic issues, including a defense of the gold standard by Greenspan that, in combination with his lifelong admiration