Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [315]
from as far away as Africa: 100 Voices, Frances Smith, president of the Ford Hall Forum, p. 222.
even the night before: Author correspondence with BB, June 27, 2008.
exchange ideas, news, and gossip: Author interview with Molly Hays, February 29, 2004.
on WBAI-FM: Together and separately, AR and NB taped radio programs for WBAI from 1961 to 1965. From 1965 to 1969, AR had a regular biweekly program of her own.
turned young adversaries into grudging admirers: “I’ve seen audiences start booing and end up cheering,” said LP; AR:SOL, DVD.
“Abortion is a moral right”: AR, “Of Living Death,” speech given at the Ford Hall Forum, December 8, 1968, reprinted in The Objectivist, September—November 1968, p. 534.
primarily because its purpose: May 4, 1946 (JOAR, p. 479).
She wasn’t convinced: MYWAR, p. 211.
composing essays was child’s play: Harry Binswanger, “Recollections of Ayn Rand.”
clarity and logic: MYWAR, p. 297.
warns against defining national emergencies too broadly: Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” TON, February 1963; reprinted in TVOS, p. 49.
“for the gold standard’s inherent price stability”: The Age of Turbulence, p. 481.
she endorsed Goldwater: TON, October 1963 and March, July, September, and October 1964.
helped to found the club and magazine: Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.
famous Goldwater rally: This took place on May 12, 1964.
“It made his points in his voice”: Unpublished taped interview with Barbara Weiss, conducted by BB, September 25, 1983.
took the document to Goldwater’s temporary office: Author interview with BB, October 14, 2007.
didn’t receive the speech in time: I haven’t been able to find a copy of this speech in the Goldwater archives or among the papers of his senior staff.
imprecision of his language: Ayn Rand, “Check Your Premises: The Argument from Intimidation,” TON, July 1964, p. 26.
“Daisy” television ad: The ad, broadcast by the Democrats in September 1964, showed a little girl sitting in a green field counting the petals of a daisy. A male voice also begins to count—a countdown to a nuclear explosion. The implication was that Barry Goldwater’s stance against a nuclear test-ban treaty with Russia would end in a nuclear war.
“In former campaigns”: Ayn Rand, “Check Your Premises: It Is Earlier Than You Think,” TON, December 1964, p. 49.
March 1964 Playboy interview: “The Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand,” pp. 38–43, 64.
Alvin Toffler: Toffler visited AR’s apartment to conduct the interview. At first, she struck him as “a nice Russian-Jewish grandma.” When he admitted that he had not read AS, she ordered him out and told him not to return until he had read it. After a subsequent, more successful interview, he recalled that his transcriptionist couldn’t decipher her words through her thick Russian accent. Finally, on receiving proofs, she edited not only her answers to his questions but also the questions and his introduction. Toffler wasn’t impressed by her philosophy. “It was like Marxism turned upside down,” he said. But he liked her and invited her to dinner with his wife and guests (author interview with Alvin Toffler, May 27, 2007).
reached two and a half million people: Don Hauptman, “The ‘Lost’ Parts of Ayn Rand’s Playboy Interview,” Navigator, March 2004, p. 9.
attributed the suffering of mankind: NB named these archetypes (JD, p. 281).
“chief destroyer of the modern world”: Ayn Rand, “Brief Summary,” The Objectivist, September 1971, p. 1091. Interestingly, Nietzsche also hated Kant. In The Anti-Christ, he wrote that Kant and others like him regarded “beautiful feelings” as arguments, “the heaving breast as the bellows of divine inspiration,” and conviction as the criterion of truth. “German decadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!” he wrote in 1895 (trans., H. L. Mencken, 1920).
a “New Intellectual”: “New man” was a popular concept in the Russia of AR’s youth, appearing, for example, in Lenin’s favorite novel, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Chernyshevsky