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stayed in Titusville, NASA’s pleasant bedroom town for Kennedy Space Center employees, remembered that she was wearing a new diamond-and-ruby ring. The ring had forty rubies, one for each year she had been married to Frank, and she told the family that he had given it to her for their wedding anniversary in April. On Rand’s return to New York, Barbara Weiss reflected that she had never seen the great woman in a better frame of mind. And yet there was unremitting anger. “Those who suggest we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded,” she wrote in The Objectivist. This, like her praise, was a scrap of old rhetoric, and was unseemly.

Another high point was an address she gave in March 1974 to members of the senior class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. She spoke at the invitation of Colonel Herman Ivey, a philosophy instructor who had completed two tours of duty as a pilot in Vietnam and was an admirer of Atlas Shrugged. The Vietnam War was officially over. But the eleventh-hour airlift of American support personnel out of Saigon was still a year away, and the bitter criticism of the military for its conduct of the war charged the atmosphere at West Point. Rand made it clear to Colonel Ivey that she admired the cadets’ and officers’ voluntary service as exemplary of the strength, competence, restraint, and honor that characterized American military tradition, and this made him more eager to present her to his students.

The speech she gave, later published as “Philosophy: Who Needs It” in a book of the same name, proved an emotional epiphany for everyone present and was an example of Rand at her most stirring. It opened with a parable. A spaceship crashes on an unknown planet. The astronaut regains consciousness amid a strange landscape, under a foreboding sky. He knows that he should ask himself certain questions, which Rand identified as the basic questions of philosophy: Where am I? How can I discover where I am? and, Once I know where I am, what should I do? The astronaut, however, is filled with fear. If he pursues these questions, he may discover that he is in dangerous territory or too far from Earth to manage a return. He spots some odd-looking creatures approaching his spaceship from a distance and decides to wait and see if they have answers. He is never heard from again.

The three questions, Rand explained, are the province of three branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Conventional wisdom would answer them this way: (1) The astronaut is in an incomprehensible world, whether he is in space or on Earth; (2) his mind is powerless to discover anything for certain; and (3) there is nothing he can do. Therefore he is helpless in the face of his destroyers. The habit of rationality would answer differently: (1) He is in a universe governed by natural laws; (2) he can acquire knowledge of those laws through observation and reason; and (3) he must act, and act on his own behalf. “You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles,” she told the cadets in a famous defense of philosophical reflection. “Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious rational convictions—or a grab bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.” She extolled Aristotle and warned against “the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment,” which, she declared, had sown confusion for two centuries among practical leaders such as themselves. In effect, said Colonel Ivey, she told the nation’s aspiring young officers that they not only had the ability to understand the differences between right and wrong but also the