Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [197]
She, her supporters, and The Objectivist Newsletter campaigned for Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964, hopeful that the most conservative candidate since Calvin Coolidge might at last acquire the authority to roll back FDR’s social-welfare legislation. After Willkie, she had never publicly supported a political candidate, but she endorsed Goldwater on a number of occasions, both during the Republican primaries (where he was running against Nelson A. Rockefeller) and in the general election against Lyndon B. Johnson. Inspired by her, two dozen of her friends and admirers formed the New York Young Republican Club to support him and launched a magazine, Persuasion, to explain his anti—New Deal views to voters. “We thought he wasn’t doing a good job of explaining himself,” said Joan Kennedy Taylor, who helped to found the club and magazine. On the night before one famous Goldwater rally in Madison Square Garden, Rand even wrote an unsolicited, reportedly masterful speech for him. “It made his points in his voice, but it was tremendously clear, and even used the concept of God as he would have used it,” said an NBI staff member who typed the speech. On the day before the rally, Barbara took the document to Goldwater’s temporary office at the Garden and handed it to a campaign staffer. Either Goldwater didn’t receive the speech in time to use it, or he preferred his own rhetoric, whose generalities frustrated Rand. The imprecision of his language, Rand thought, made his enemies’ attacks easier. In November, he lost to Johnson, in part because of the infamous “Daisy” television ad, which more than hinted that the outspokenly anti-Communist Arizonan might start a nuclear war with Russia. To the readers of The Objectivist Newsletter Rand wrote, “In former campaigns Republicans [have] been guilty of compromise, evasion, cowardice, ‘me-too-ism.’ Barry Goldwater was not; he had courage, frankness, integrity—and nothing to say.” She compared his public speeches to headlines running above blank newspaper columns. What he needed was what every other conservative politician and every citizen and businessman had always needed: a consistent philosophy.
More surprising, perhaps, is that Rand, through the activism of some of her closest acolytes, helped to end the military draft that she so hated. Her mid-1960s legal watchdog, Hank Holzer, and his wife and law partner Erika Holzer, along with Robert Hessen, Leonard Peikoff, Martin Anderson, writer David Dawson, and other Young Republican Club members filed legal briefs, wrote plays and essays, and held conferences to raise public opposition to the draft as an infringement of the right to life. Anderson, already a young star in the academic world, joined Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and persuaded him to include a promise to end the draft in his platform. Nixon, a Quaker, agreed. Once elected in the race against Hubert Humphrey, Nixon appointed Anderson to serve on a commission to study an all-volunteer army, and a volunteer army became law in 1973, two years before the American withdrawal from Vietnam. It was the first time the nation had been without a draft since FDR reinstated one in 1940, in preparation for America’s entry into World War II. Rand never wrote about her indirect role in this achievement, but she did endorse Nixon in 1968, partly on the basis of his opposition