Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [239]
Afterward, Rand, accompanied by Frank, Allan and Joan Blumenthal, Rand’s secretary Barbara Weiss, Nathaniel’s sister Elayne Kalberman (who had temporarily sided with Rand against her brother), Elayne’s husband Harry Kalberman, Leonard Peikoff and his new (first) wife, a broadcast technician named Sue Ludel—Rand’s diminished inner circle—walked to the West Point officers’ club to answer questions and sign autographs. “Men were standing on other men’s shoulders to hear her,” said Barbara Weiss. “There was a wall of men. They didn’t want to miss a word.” Yet even within the shared context of the military academy, there were those who were displeased by her ideas. “My impression was that the cadets and the faculty were very much taken with [her speech],” said Brigadier General Jack Capps, then deputy head of the English department. “But when they had time to sit down and think it over, some of the things Miss Rand had advocated were things that they had gone to war against.” He mentioned her answer to a cadet’s question about the moral legitimacy of federal raids on the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and, in general, the history of U.S. aggression against American Indians (as they were then called). When cultures clash, she answered coolly, the superior technological culture will always prevail against the inferior, less developed one. Moreover, she said, the tribes that had occupied the land for five thousand years had done nothing with it and should stand aside for those who would. She didn’t know that the cadet who had asked the question was a native American, but the other cadets and officers knew and were embarrassed, said Brigadier General Capps. Before she returned to New York, Colonel Ivey asked permission to publish her speech as an introduction to a new West Point philosophy textbook, and Rand proudly agreed. For the most part, “it was a dream trip” for the sixty-nine-year-old writer, recalled Barbara Weiss.
One complication of the visit was her labored breathing. For months she had experienced increasing shortness of breath and fatigue, but at the academy she realized that she couldn’t walk more than a few yards without stopping to rest. Back in Manhattan, she paid a visit to Murray Dworetzky, her GP since the early 1960s. As usual, the doctor chided her about her smoking. His headstrong patient, inhaling smoke through her long cigarette holder while sitting in his office, answered, as usual, “Give me a rational reason why I should not smoke.” Just then his assistant knocked, entered, and handed him a set of X-rays. The doctor placed her chest X-ray onto a viewing box and, stunned, replied, “Here is a good reason.” There was a lesion on one of her lungs. She had lung cancer. She stubbed out her cigarette. The doctor began searching through his Rolodex for surgeons.
She took the news calmly—more calmly than she took any indication of physical ill health in Frank. She entered New York Hospital and had one lung removed. In accord with the practice of the time, she remained in the hospital for nearly a month. She was an obstreperous patient, even though she was medicated heavily for pain. One day, she pointed to her ninth-floor hospital-room window and said to Joan Blumenthal, “Isn’t it funny, Joan? I wonder how that tree can be nine stories tall.” Blumenthal glanced at the window and realized that Rand was seeing not a tree but the reflection of her IV pole, and told her so. As with her UFO sighting years earlier in California, Rand believed the evidence of her senses, and she flew into a rage. Blumenthal, who visited her every day,