Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [236]
She bound Peikoff to her tightly, partly through a scholarly book he had been working on since the early 1960s. Called The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, its purpose was to amplify Rand’s controversial argument in “The Fascist New Frontier” that America was marching toward Fascism, by comparing postwar American ideology with German philosophical ideas he argued had given rise to the Third Reich. He became preoccupied with Nazi atrocities against thinkers and Jews, tracing them to Kant and Hegel. The book was scheduled to appear in 1969, by arrangement with Weybright and Talley, a publishing firm founded by Victor Weybright, Rand’s friend at NAL. But Rand demanded more revisions, and more revisions after that. For the next thirteen years, Peikoff produced draft after unsatisfactory draft of the manuscript. “She was making him rewrite the book, rewrite the book,” one of Rand’s employees recalled. “He was trying to prove to himself [the depth of] his devotion.” Phillip Smith, a member of the reconfigured inner circle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said, “We were always hearing [that] Leonard had finished a chapter and was going to [consult] with Ayn, and then he would come back and say, ‘It has to be all rewritten.’” In the end, she rewarded him with an introduction like the one Branden had been waiting for and never got. But the tribute she wrote was muted. She praised The Ominous Parallels as “the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself” and as a philosophical bulwark against the collectivist ideas that were still helping to destroy the lives of people around the world. Paraphrasing Dr. Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged, she ended the introduction by exclaiming, “It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine.” The statement was overtly grandiose, but it was also subtly deflating. Dr. Stadler, speaking to Dagny after examining Galt’s newly recovered electric motor, says, “It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!” Rand was signaling that the ideas in The Ominous Parallels were not new and were fundamentally hers rather than Peikoff’s. The book was finally published, complete with introduction, three months after her death in 1982.
She kept him off balance by favoring him as her “number-one man” without designating him her official philosophical successor or “intellectual heir.” After Branden, it is unlikely that she would again invest a follower with so much trust and power. Yet he must have wanted the validation that came with the title “intellectual heir,” for he claimed it after her death, even posting it on his Web site, implying to others that she had bestowed it on him in her will (there is no such reference). While she lived, he tried not to repeat the mistakes that had caused her to punish him in the middle 1960s; overcompensating, perhaps, he relentlessly proselytized for her in social and academic settings. He paid a price. The open, witty boy who had felt “total awe” on meeting her in 1951 gradually became humorless and dutiful. He was known as a gifted teacher. Employed as a junior philosophy professor at colleges including Hunter, New York University, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, however, he couldn’t resist trying to “convert” his students to Rand’s ideas, in spite of warnings. As a result, he lost his teaching posts and damaged his future prospects. By the middle 1970s his university teaching career was over, although he continued to seek jobs throughout the 1980s. In 1987, when he was fifty-four years old and living in California, his second wife, Cynthia Pastor, wrote a poignant letter to Sidney Hook, her husband’s former academic adviser at NYU, pleading for help in finding her husband a post in which to exercise “his talent and passion for teaching.” Peikoff had applied to three hundred