Did he, Professor Oliver, have specific knowledge of an agency in Minsk where such training is given? Professor Oliver had been asked that question when testifying before the commission. Oliver had answered airily that he did not have specific knowledge that Minsk even existed.
“—and while there,” the article in American Opinion continued, “[Oswald] married the daughter of a colonel in the Soviet military espionage system (and probably also in the secret police). Oswald took up his duties as an agent of the Conspiracy. In April, 1963, he was sent to Dallas, where he tried to murder General Edwin Walker. The failure does not reflect on the assassin’s professional training: General Walker happened to turn his head at the instant the shot was fired.
“In November, Oswald was sent back to Dallas, where a job in a suitably located building had been arranged for him. He shot the President of the United States from ambush, left the building undetected, and would have escaped to Mexico but for some mischance. He was stopped for questioning by a vigilant policeman, whom he killed in a moment of panic. Arrested and identified, he, despite his training, was so vain as to pose for photographs while triumphantly giving the Communists’ clenched-fist salute.”
It seemed to Woodroe that Professor Oliver was carried away in his certitudes. Where had it been established that the Communists had gotten Oswald his job in the Texas School Book Depository? That his flights to Mexico had been arranged?
Glued to the text, Woodroe read on with intense curiosity. Oliver did not falter.
“Obviously, something went wrong in Dallas. The identification of the murderer was a near-miracle. I shall not be greatly astonished if, in the course of the Conspiracy’s frantic efforts to confuse us with irrelevancies, it should be disclosed that pay-offs had been made by Jakob Leon Rubenstein, alias Ruby, and other members of the underworld that panders to human vice and folly.
“It is quite true that the Communist Conspiracy, through the management of great broadcasting systems and news agencies, through the many criminals lodged in the radio and the press, and through many indirect pressures (such as the allocation of advertising and harassment by bureaus of the federal government), have a control over our channels of communication that seems to us, in our moments of discouragement, virtually total. As was to be expected, a few moments after the shot was fired in Dallas, the vermin, probably in obedience to general or specific orders issued in advance of the event, began to screech out their diseased hatred of the American people, and, long after the facts were known to everyone, went on mechanically repeating, like defective phonograph records, the same vicious lies about the ‘radical right’ until fresh orders reached them from headquarters.”
Woodroe could hear Revilo Oliver saying the words. And he knew that he would not have made any typographical errors in composing his article on that typewriter in the room with the battery of typewriters.
The phone rang.
“Have you seen American Opinion?” Jesse Andrews wanted to know.
“I’m reading it right this minute.”
“Well, it’s going to cause quite a sensation, quite a fuss. We sent it out to the AP, and Revilo is giving a press conference at Urbana at 5 P.M. There might be something on the television news. Just checking.”
“Thanks. I’ll let you know what I think of it after I’ve finished.”
Revilo was drawing his conclusion based on the reversal of fortunes he wrote about.
“But the significant fact is that there were enough honest American newsmen, in the United States and abroad, to make it impossible to conceal the Conspiracy’s connection with the bungled assassination. That is very encouraging.
“All that could be done at the moment to obscure the Communist’s mischance was to stage an elaborate spectacle with all the technical virtuosity seen in a performance of Aida in the Baths of Caracalla or the amphitheatre at Verona, supplemented with the cruder devices of Hollywood’s expert vulgarians. Every effort was made to incite an orgy of bathos and irrationality.”
Woodroe had to admire the technical virtuosity. Revilo’s language!
“Regardless of office, political violence is always shocking and a warning of impending collapse. The Roman Republic was doomed as soon as it became clear that the wealthy and high-born renegade, Clodius [sic], could send his gangsters into the streets with impunity; when the decent people of Rome tried to protect themselves by hiring gangsters of their own under Milo, that was not an answer: it was a confession of defeat. The assassination of Kennedy, quite apart from consideration of the office that he held, was an act of violence both deplorable and ominous—as ominous as the violence excited by the infamous Martin Luther King and other criminals engaged in inciting race war with the approval and even, it is said, the active cooperation of the White House.” Woodroe let his eyes close for a moment.
Oliver continued. “It was as deplorable and ominous as the violence of the uniformed goons (protected by reluctant and ashamed soldiers) whom Kennedy, in open violation of the American Constitution, sent into Oxford, Mississippi, to kick into submission American citizens, whom the late Mr. Kennedy had come to regard as his livestock.
“Such lawlessness, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators or their professed motives, is as alarming as the outbreak of a fire in a house, and if not speedily extinguished, will destroy the whole social order. That is a fact that all conservatives know, for it is they who read the lessons of human history and understand how hard it is to build and how easy it is to destroy—how perishable and precious are the moral restraints and the habitual observance of them by which civilization shelters itself from the feral barbarism that is latent in all peoples.”
Woodroe was dumb with fascination. Where was Revilo headed?
“The foregoing are two good and sufficient reasons why Americans were shocked and grieved by the assassination in Dallas. Let them suffice us. It is imperative that we do not permit ourselves to be confused at this critical time by a twisted proverb and residual superstition. Taboos are for barbarians, who indulge in tribal howling and gnashing of cheeks and breast whenever a big chief dies or an eclipse portends the end of the world. We are a civilized race.
“I have mentioned but a few of the hundred reasons why we shall never forget John F. Kennedy. So long as there are Americans, his memory will be cherished with execration and loathing. If the international vermin succeed in completing their occupation of our country, Americans will remember Kennedy while they live, and will curse him as they face the firing squads or toil in brutish degradation that leaves no hope for anything but a speedy death.”
An hour later, he telephoned Jesse.
“I’ve finished the Oliver article.”
“That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I’m resigning from the John Birch Society. I’ll put it in writing.”
He hung up the telephone.
41
THE YOUNG ECONOMIST and idealist Murray Rothbard was one more of that seemingly endless list of excited readers of Atlas Shrugged who, on reading it, wrote to Ayn Rand to profess gratitude and enthusiasm for the novel. Rothbard’s letter was learned and lyrical, even poetic, his enthusiasm unmitigated. “I have just finished your novel today. I will start by saying that all of us in the ‘Circle Bastiat’”—Rothbard’s think group, honoring the memory of Frederick Bastiat, Libertarian—“are convinced that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. You have carried the novel form to a new and higher dimension.” A meeting with Rothbard was buoyantly arranged, at which, however, not everything went well. Nathaniel Branden was present and thought he had spotted in Murray’s face something he later described as fear and malice, though it was more than Rothbard’s features that brought on the ensuing disharmony.
The meeting took place at the Rand power center, her legendary studio, at which the Collective continued its sabbatical worship. Murray was infatuated by the novel but didn’t think its author divine, and he was young enough, and self-reliant enough, to le
t his feelings show. This irreverence brought on more than the usual consumption of cigarettes by Rand, as she deployed her forces.
Murray Rothbard had set the stage by declaring that he was a libertarian and therefore an anarchist. But this was a huge, oblique leap in Rand World, and not a little arrogant. There were plenty of self-styled libertarians around, certainly including Miss Rand, who was their queen mother; but she was not an anarchist, indeed she disdained anarchy. So then, who had the property rights here?
Nathaniel Branden, in search of definition, challenged Rothbard. Without some government, how did Rothbard propose to ensure individual rights? Rothbard answered, “With private, competing defense agencies.” That reply was brought to Ayn Rand and precipitated her withering comment, everywhere reiterated in Randian circles, “You mean, as in civil war?”
The Randian movement was in pretty full swing in 1964, seven years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. The nascent libertarian political movement had not yet been organized nationally. Its scattered disciples at the beginning were not seeking to pick factional quarrels with the Objectivist legions. John Hospers, a devoted student of Rand and an estimable philosopher, would one day soon step forward as the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, but even then the party, like the conservative movement at large, was riven by personal and ideological disputes. Hospers, and others, labored to make antigovernment thought and resolution a national movement. They encouraged thoughtful discussion in magazines and teaching seminars, imitating, if unevenly, such programs as Nathaniel Branden had so successfully launched in behalf of objectivism. But they were always heavy-laden by the unanswered question, What is the charter of libertarianism?
That was a question Woodroe and Leonora frequently asked themselves, sometimes when dining at home in the apartment, sometimes in the company of other members of the Young Americans for Freedom, or with Marvin Liebman, or with editorial associates of National Review. “Two-hundred-proof libertarians,” Leonora said, quoting a learned friend, Professor Ernest van den Haag, “oppose all taxes and all public services. That has to mean that they oppose public courts, laws, police, armies, roads, parks, education, and public health. Well, that lets me out, Woody, and you too, right?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t want to rely on a private volunteer defense force to stop the Soviet military who moved in on Budapest.”
“On the other hand,” Lee made the point, “there’s a certain, well, poetry in putting it that way, isn’t there? Like . . . well, like paradigmatic political thought. How things ought to be—no government, etc.?”
“But Rothbard and Hospers and those people aren’t writing in the spirit of the utopians. That is the point,” Woodroe stressed. “And Miss Rand insists she’s not a utopian. She says she’s prescribing for the modern world, effective more or less immediately.”
“Ayn,” Lee ventured, “is a . . . fabulist.”
“Would she like it if she heard you use that word about her?”
“I don’t think so, because it might suggest she was otherworldly. She . . . isn’t. She insists she isn’t.”
Woodroe nodded. “I know. So we’re left wondering, What does the libertarian movement have to say to the GOP? Anything? What will the libertarians, if they get around to selecting a spokesman, testify to if they present themselves to the Republican Platform Committee in San Francisco?”
“That’s not so hard. You have to begin somewhere. You come out for a reduction in all federal enterprise—”
“Including defense?”
Lee paused. “Yes, that’s a tough one. We want to stop the North Vietnamese in their war against the South. That isn’t going to get done by Murray Rothbard and his volunteers. Still, you can go on about federal aid to education, health, Social Security, you name it—”
“Public monuments?”
“Adam Smith said that was a proper concern of government.”
“The libertarians wouldn’t say that, would they?”
“Guess it depends on whom you ask.”
It went on and on.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, disputes raged between satrapies in the libertarian/anarchist/Randian world. There was only one pope, and he was Ayn Rand. Her edicts were dispositive. Her (ritualized) excommunications of heretical followers who wandered off the dogmatical trail, or were thought insufficiently servile, had the desirable effect of finality within the Randian communion. But such folk, in exile, did not cease to exist or, even, to exercise influence.
Where possible, the Randian ultramontanists preferred to have persuasive grounds for trials and convictions. They did not always succeed, and strategic loyalties were frayed. Kay Nolte Smith was expelled for making unauthorized changes to a few lines of dialogue in a public performance of Rand’s play Penthouse Legend. Some confederates deemed her sentence (expulsion) inordinate, even eccentrically severe, given the long years Kay had put in as a faithful disciple. Four years later she was told she would be readmitted, but now she declined (“I had come to my senses”). The formidable John Hospers was ruled out of bounds. On taking leave of Rand, he recalled, “along with the pain and desolation, I felt a sense of release from an increasing oppressiveness.” He was now glad for relief from “the web of intellectually stifling allegiances and entanglements” that were a part of Rand life.
In Murray Rothbard’s case, the tinderbox was a scholarly paper in which he cited as the source of certain ideas he was advancing on the subject of causality a scholar who had written in the Middle Ages. Rand Inc. pounced on this, insisting that the inspiration for that thought had been Ayn Rand, not a mere Aristotelian of centuries back. Rothbard was summoned to Rand’s chamber, where formal censure had been scheduled, but Rothbard simply declined to show up. The Collective proceeded without him, expelling Rothbard from the Objectivist circle. In turn, Rothbard took to registering his own dissatisfactions with Rand and Randianism, broadcasting his criticisms of her. And so it went.
The Rand people did not like it that Murray Rothbard soon acquired—the Randians would say, cultivated—the cognomen “Mr. Libertarianism.” To begin with, chubby, hardworking, obstreperous Rothbard was a relative upstart, a highly productive scholar, to be sure, but damaging to the usefulness and integrity of objectivism because of his anarchist propensities. The Randians believed, along with most libertarians, that limited constitutional government was necessary, and therefore tolerable. But Rothbard pressed his fight against any government at all, going beyond even where his patron, the august Austrian seer Ludwig von Mises, had gone. Mises, after all, had written, “Government as such is not only an evil but the most necessary and beneficial institution, as without it no lasting cooperation and no civilization could be developed or preserved.”
Some sensed—correctly—that Miss Rand’s growing aversion to association with “libertarians” reflected less her opposition to any proposal by a libertarian group than her resentment of the apparent willingness in some of her subordinates to proceed without her explicit benediction. Keith Edwards, who represented the Nathaniel Branden Institute in Detroit and was active in nascent libertarian politics, made one attempt to understand Rand’s objections to what he was doing, but was rebuffed. Ayn Rand’s exfoliated position was that no political party could succeed unless explicitly based on her philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Early followers had heard her use the term libertarian freely and approvingly, but now she associated the term with defective, unruly—and therefore excommunicable—disciples; so that Murray Rothbard—and even John Hospers—became the enemy. Now Rand would use, with equal contempt, the terms fascism, Communism, and libertarianism.
The House of Rand could not tolerate this swirl of individualists who, whatever their misgivings about government, declined to be governed by the thought and the pronouncements of Ayn Rand. The libertarians would not organize into a political party until many years later, but in the political contest dead ahead, they rallied behind Barry Goldwater, as did Miss Rand.
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42
LEADERS OF THE YOUNG AMERICANS for Freedom arrived in San Francisco in the high spirit of loyalists, triumphing over morganatic contenders with impure bloodlines, here now to see their hero crowned. YAF chairman Robert Bauman, elected to the post after the untimely death of Bob Schuchman at age twenty-four, held a press conference. He jubilantly told a questioner that young Republicans who had been deprived of the nomination of Barry Goldwater four years before, in 1960, were now in San Francisco “to see it happen.” This, he said, was the “catalytic moment” for a Republican Party accepting the proud mandate of enduring conservative principles.
But the catalytic moment had obstacles to overcome. And these proved overwhelming.
By the time the nomination was in hand and Goldwater officially named, the public image was of a presidential challenger askew, wobbling through a convention floor strewn with questions, denunciations, challenges, and unanswered questions.
And the question of the role of the John Birch Society was everywhere.
Senator Mark Hatfield, from Oregon, gave the keynote address. The Goldwater camp was apprehensive about him. But after all, he was a “moderate,” and moderates needed to have a voice at the convention.
Senator Hatfield leapt right into the question of factionalist boarding parties. “There are bigots in this nation who spew forth their venom of hate,” he declared. These groups must be overcome, he said, including “the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society.”
The applause was uncertain.
Former president Dwight Eisenhower was there, an earthy champion of the capitalist ethos—he was a paid commentator, hired by ABC News. But of course his own moment at the convention was as premier spokesman for the party, the Republican who, only four years earlier, had occupied the White House, to which he had been reelected after a first term. When General Eisenhower addressed the convention, he too warned against “radicalism of any kind, whether of the Right or the Left.” He exhorted the delegates not to “stain our image by consorting with radicals of any kind.”
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