Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  “I was hoping to hear from you.”

  “The phones weren’t working. Then when I called after Kennedy’s Cuba speech there wasn’t any answer.”

  “I was in New York for a few days. I went to a seminar, Ludwig von Mises. He has it right about the state, the enemy of liberty. I call on a lady in New York.”

  “Well, that’s nice, Theo.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. I’m rather old for that. Well, I’m only seventy-two. Your Ezra Taft Benson is what, a hundred and seven?”

  “That’s great, Theo. Do I get to meet her? When?”

  “Before the next Soviet ultimatum, I hope.”

  “That’s what I wanted your views on. Here, of course—I mean, at JBS—it’s simple. The U.S. was told to do it.”

  “Well, of course, that isn’t what happened. JFK was just scared. What we need now is to wait for the Republicans to be heard from. Nothing much yet from them. Nixon is busy trying to become governor of California, Rockefeller trying for another term in New York, Scranton trying for Pennsylvania. Everybody drawing huge breaths of relief that we aren’t at war. That’s good, we aren’t at war. But we should never be threatened by war, not with the right leadership. So look at the status quo ante. The Soviets have pulled back their missiles. Well, they weren’t there before. And we’ve promised not to invade Cuba—that’s a fresh promise. And also to remove our missiles from Turkey—that’s a fresh promise. So the Communists are net ahead, one more step.”

  Woodroe asked what in Princeton had been the reaction to the crisis. There had been angry talk among some students, he learned. “The faculty didn’t have much to say. They’re remarkably docile, you know, Woody. If there’s a Democratic administration supervising things, they tend to just sit and take it.”

  The conversation went on another ten minutes.

  Woodroe promised to visit soon.

  “Maybe you’ll see me in New York.”

  “I hope so. I’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll call. How’re the Rocky Mountains doing?”

  “I’m having a problem with Mount Olympus.”

  “I’ll snap a picture of it tomorrow and send it to you. Thanks, Theo. Good night.”

  Woodroe had a happy time those three days. His mother asked whether he would like it if she invited to dinner, that last night, Hester Adams. He laughed. “Mom, I took Hester to the senior prom in 1956! That was like a million years ago.”

  “No, darling. It’s been only six years.”

  Ellie disposed of the issue. “Hester Adams is engaged, Mom. The announcement was made a couple of weeks ago.”

  His mother invited, instead, two old friends—a classmate, and a teacher Woodroe had especially liked. In the two and a half hours, the John Birch Society was not once mentioned. He thought that faintly odd. But he wasn’t going to bring it up himself. Besides, his mind was on the next evening meal he’d be having. With Leonora Pound, in New York.

  In his hotel room at the Sherry Netherlands he waited for the phone to ring. She had said she would call his room from the lobby at seven o’clock. At 7:15 the telephone finally rang. He heard her out, nodding his head as she spoke, as if signaling acquiescence at every point.

  She had suddenly decided, she said—late in the afternoon—that it would be more pleasant to eat “at home.” She had brought together everything they would need, now cooking in her own oven. But if he wished, he could bring around an extra bottle of wine. “I don’t have a big cellar.”

  He knew the address. He had used it—1012 Sixth Avenue—in writing to Leonora from Texas. She had gotten her own apartment after signing up to work full-time with the Nathaniel Branden Institute. He arrived with two bottles of wine, one of them a sauterne, and with the cake that had caught his eye at the corner bakery.

  Did he wish anything written on the cake? the lady had asked. “It’s compliments of the house.”

  Woodroe paused. “Well, yes. Write two words, ‘Altruism’—that’s A-L-T-R-U-I-S-M”—he spoke the letters slowly while the woman, wielding the tube, squeezed out the frosted lettering. “Yes,” the woman said, “and the next word?” Woodroe didn’t look into her face to see if she smiled: “S-U-C-K-S.” The cake was boxed, and he walked down the block and into 1012. At the elevator he rang the eleventh floor, then walked down the hall to 11E. The door opened and she was radiantly there. The measuring cup in her left hand didn’t hinder their embrace. With one hand, Woodroe held the straps of his two packages. He let them down to the floor and renewed his embrace, touching his lips to hers, diffidently, then with a trace of passion.

  “Let me check the stove,” she managed to say. “Put your coat in the closet. Give me the wine. What’s that?”

  “A cake.”

  “Oh, I had some ice cream. Well, we’ll have ice cream first, and if the election returns are good, we’ll have the cake.”

  Two hours later they sat on the sofa, the wine and demitasses on the coffee table. They had touched on every subject in their excited, happy talk—on General Walker and Barbara Branden, Helena Crowder and Robert Kennedy, Salt Lake City and the NBI lectures.

  “Hey,” she said, “let’s have a look at the elections. After all, they only happen every other year. And it was the last election—no, it was the Republican convention of 1960, not the election of 1960, that brought us to Sharon. That was a . . . happy event for me, Woody.”

  He took her hand. “Well, the national election, post-Sharon, gave us President Kennedy. That was some choice, it turned out. It gave us the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, and the missile crisis.”

  “Oh yes. On the other hand”—she spoke in an even, academic tone of voice—“it got that Communist Eisenhower out of the White House.” She broke into laughter.

  So did he. Maybe his complete surrender into laughter was a little . . . disloyal to his employer? He’d think about it. He could only retaliate in their running mockery, Birch vs. Objectivism, by saying he’d like a piece of cake. She bounded up and brought the box over from the kitchen with two forks and a knife. She opened it and the ensuing laughter was, once again, mutual.

  They drank from the dessert wine and then he told her, his throat dry, that he would like to take her to bed. Wordlessly, she led the way. He didn’t want to think about his night with Teresa in 1956, but as his excitement mounted, he was taken back to that exhilarating rapture, and tried now to pass it on to Lee, to his lovely Lee, and he knew the extra measure of his elation. Now they whispered to each other. It was midnight when she said, “Let’s go see what happened. No. No. Don’t put any clothes back on.” She preceded him to the living room and they made do with only the light from the television screen. It was as it had been in Kapuvar.

  The Democrats had scored big gains in House and Senate races. The dramatic personal news was California: Richard Nixon, former vice president, had been soundly defeated by the Democrat Pat Brown.

  She turned the sound not off, but down, and they lay on the sofa, remarking on the news as the items cropped up on the screen. Other GOP presidential aspirants had scored. Nelson Rockefeller in New York, George Romney in Michigan, William Scranton in Pennsylvania.

  “Guess that means something,” Leonora said.

  “Nothing we care about, Lee. Right?”

  “Right, Woody.”

  “We care about other things.” He leaned over and brought his lips to hers.

  23

  THERE HAD BEEN AN INKLING of it a month earlier. Ayn Rand had not left her Park Avenue apartment in weeks. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden worked night and day, it seemed, on the concerns of the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Ayn said at a gathering of the Collective on Saturday that she thought there was a little pallor in the handsome face of Nathaniel. Her eyes searched the room and touched down on the faces of the seven Collective members in attendance. Only Leonard Peikoff was absent—he was in California and had served notice he would not be there. The deliberated passage of Miss Rand’s questioning eyes gave the impression that this was
a forum, and that the views of everyone there were being consulted in a probe for consensus.

  But of course it wasn’t that way with Ayn Rand. If she detected a pallor, there was a pallor; and if others did not espy it, the explanation was as simple as that they were blind. Even so, her eyes looked about inquisitively as if seeking confirmation of what needed no confirmation.

  Alan Greenspan attempted to contribute to the question being explored. He said, “Yes. Nathaniel, perhaps you and Barbara should get away for a day or two? As an economist, I know something about the allocation of effort. It is economically profligate to deploy high skills that are not required for the undertaking at hand. You may say that there is an inelastic demand for work of a clerical nature being done to promote the fortunes of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and I would acknowledge that—but without acknowledging that the allocation of your special skills to such work is the reasonable way to proceed.”

  Ayn liked the direction in which the talk was proceeding. She elucidated with manifest pleasure.

  “As Alan says, there are demands which, because they are inelastic, by definition need to be met, and it is in the nature of social accommodation that these are often—note, I am not saying necessarily —undertaken by persons whose time, measured by their resources, is not reasonably used in such activity.

  “Consider me—” She pointed to Barbara, seated to her left, next to Frank, and traced one of her habitual finger arcs over the heads of all the members of the Collective, reaching finally Nathaniel, seated at her right hand. “I spent thirteen years composing Atlas Shrugged. With my fingers depressing exactly the right keys on that typewriter”—she pointed to the hallowed object on the desk in the corner. “I was fully allocating my mind to the work in hand. As most of you know because of the frequent readings I did here with the Collective, the words—the language, the images, the ideas—were the product of intense thought and—”

  “A brilliant imagination,” her husband interposed.

  Ayn Rand nodded her head slightly and produced a faint smile. She resumed: “And the end product could not have been effected except by the allocation of my entire attention. Now. . . .” She paused dramatically, leaning over to light a cigarette. There was silence. “Sometimes, working alone at, say, two in the morning, I would need or desire sustenance. And then? Are you following me, Joan?”

  Joan Mitchell, who had been married briefly to Alan Greenspan, nodded her head and volunteered, “You made your own tea.”

  “Exactly,” Miss Rand said. “You have here the actualization of the economic conundrum. Aristotle and I both boiled water, which is work that does not tax the resources even of an illiterate slave boy. The point, as applicable to Nathaniel and Barbara, is that they should give more thought to the distribution of the work of the Institute so that they do not need to spend so much time, so to speak, boiling water.”

  Mary Ann Rukavina asked, “Ayn, might it be contended that the use of one’s mind in such activity as is unrelated to that which requires the full application of the mind could be understood as nature’s means of exacting rest? I mean, when you were writing at two in the morning, there had to come a point when you had to stop in order to rest. And, clearly, when sleeping, one is, in a sense, just going one step beyond the boiling of water—”

  Ayn stopped her. “We are hardly discussing the natural biological requirements of the human body, which engages in activities—the use of the mouth to eat, of the alimentary canal to process, the anus to excrete—necessary to the cyclical demands of organic life. If you are saying that a pause in order to boil water is a means of resting the mind, giving it surcease from the level of exertion required for hard rational application, the answer is: No. Alan is correct. It is a misallocation of economic energy.”

  After most of the Collective dispersed, at about one in the morning, Ayn tilted her head back and blew smoke up toward the ceiling.

  “We have established, Nathaniel, that the pallor I spoke of is there. You and Barbara must go on a few days’ vacation.”

  24

  WHAT MADE IT ALL PERFECT was that Ayn, two days later, said that she would consider Nathaniel’s invitation to travel with him and Barbara to Toronto.

  Joseph Blumenthal, Nathan’s father, had a men’s clothing store in Toronto. He and his wife were very proud of their son and of his national recognition as the right hand of Miss Rand’s Objectivist movement. Dinah Blumenthal had told Miss Rand nine years earlier, at the wedding of Nathaniel and Barbara in 1953, that she had read The Fountainhead with great enjoyment. Actually, she hadn’t read it, but Joe Blumenthal had done so with especial curiosity after fourteen-year-old Nathan announced to the household that The Fountainhead was the most important book he had ever read. A few years later, Nathan departed for Los Angeles. Once there, he wrote to Ayn Rand, imploring her to give him just one hour of her time. He was desperate to meet the illuminating genius who had changed his life with a single book.

  The invitation extended, Nathan Blumenthal arrived at the ranch house at eight in the evening. He left at five o’clock the next morning.

  At Nathaniel’s wedding in 1953, Ayn Rand served as matron of honor, Frank O’Connor as best man. The bridal party was held in White Plains, New York. Joseph Blumenthal had risen to his feet to give what proved to be an extended toast. He said he had wanted friends and family present to hear something of the nature of the letters he had received after Nathan met Miss Rand. Unfortunately, the packet of letters from his beloved, brilliant son had been lost in the fire at his establishment—“the fire that burned up enough men’s clothes to equip the Canadian army!”

  But he remembered much from them. How Ayn Rand had received Nathan at the Chatsworth home in Los Angeles. How she had told him, after an hour or two, to stay on and have dinner with her and her husband—“that lovely man, Frank O’Connor. If anybody here doesn’t know it, Mr. O’Connor is embarking on his own career as an artist. He will be a renowned artist, you take my word for it. I have seen pictures of several of his oil paintings, and my knowledge is not limited to evaluating the quality of men’s clothes!” There was polite applause.

  He told of Nathan’s stupefaction when Miss Rand kept him at her ranch until five o’clock in the morning. They had discussed, young Nathan had written home, “everything in the world, and all of the ideas that were . . . generated by her Fountainhead book.”

  That nine-hour session—Mr. Blumenthal had extended both arms, raising his eyes skyward—had been the birth of a wonderful association, following which Nathan came to New York to live and study and Miss Rand and Frank also moved to New York from California.

  Pressing his invitation to join them on the trip to Toronto, nine years after the wedding, Nathaniel reminded Ayn and Frank that they had not traveled out of the city in months. Ayn pondered the invitation, puffing deliberatively on her cigarette. She would decide that night, she said.

  Nathaniel and Barbara learned of her decision at six the next morning. The telephone rang, waking them up with the good news. Ayn would accompany them on their vacation.

  Nathaniel had intended to fly to Toronto, but Ayn had never been on an airplane. Although she didn’t say so, Nathaniel detected the problem immediately: She was afraid to fly.

  “We can always drive, Ayn.”

  And so they did, breaking up the long trip with a night at a motel in Syracuse. Arrived in Toronto, Ayn was respectfully and warmly received. She in turn was civil to the Blumenthals.

  It had been suggested that on the third and last day of the visit, Ayn and Nathaniel might offer an informal seminar at his parents’ home. After Nathaniel had said on the telephone in New York that Ayn had okayed the idea, the Blumenthals invited a dozen friends. A reporter from the Toronto Star, getting wind of Rand’s visit, rang the Blumenthal house to ask if he might make mention of the seminar the next day in the “Goings-on About Town” section of the paper. Nathaniel placed his hand over the phone and relayed the request to Ayn. Getting the signa
l from her, he went back to the phone. The answer was no. But the reporter did not hang up. He asked if he might himself attend. “Not professionally. I am just a fan.” Again Nathan covered the phone with his hand and relayed the request.

  “How many times has he read Atlas?”

  Nathaniel smiled and put the question to the caller. After getting the satisfactory answer, he said, “Okay, you can come.”

  Nathaniel was nervous about how Ayn would behave before an audience untutored in objectivism, half of them personal friends of his parents, the rest, friends of friends. He took Barbara aside and consulted with her.

  “The thing to do, Nat, is not to permit questions. If nobody asks a question, she can’t be rude to anybody.”

  That gave rise to an idea.

  After Nathaniel’s talk, Barbara would be introduced and would advise the assembly that she would now put to Miss Rand the five questions most often asked at her seminars. Barbara was well qualified to do this, she’d say, having attended, with her assistant, Leonora Pound, all of Nathaniel’s lectures that had been followed by Miss Rand’s Q & A.

  Ayn agreed to the format.

  Nathaniel and Barbara devoted a half hour to devising the five questions. They must be questions that did not presuppose specific knowledge of the Objectivist movement, let alone familiarity with the lectures that had gone before. But they must exploit the natural talent of Ayn Rand for exposition. They resolved to ask:1. Is it true that objectivists can’t believe in God?

  2. What is the difference between objectivism and libertarianism?

  3. What is it about objectivism that is unique?

  4. What are the political prospects of success in the movement you are leading?