Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  “Yeah, but after the Tonkin Resolution you could hardly convince a lot of voters that Johnson was ‘soft’ on the Communist issue.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. But I’ve got a feel on Johnson and the whole Communist business, just the way I got to feeling the same thing toward the end of Jack Kennedy’s years. They haven’t learned how to say no to the Communists. I don’t know how long it’ll be, but you watch. The North Vietnamese will take over the South. The Taiwanese will get kicked out of the United Nations. We’ll recognize Peking. And? Aw, shut me up, Dean. I’m sitting here stewing, and maybe I’ll bore myself to death.”

  “Until the nuclear bombs land?” Karl Hess always had a smile.

  Goldwater laughed. “You know, last week when you birds were vacationing in the Caribbean, I was in Washington for the fundraiser for my deficit and I was in my hotel room at the Hilton when the phone rang. I picked it up, and the voice said”—Goldwater’s imitation was dead-on—“‘Bar-rree? This is Lyn’dn.’

  “I said, ‘Fuck you, Lyndon,’ and hung up. Two seconds later the phone rang again, an’ this time he says, ‘Barry, is that the way to talk to the president of the United States?’ An’ I said, ‘What do you want?’

  “‘I thought you might want to come on over to the White House and have a cup of coffee.’

  “I said, ‘I don’t drink coffee.’

  “An’ he said, ‘That’s right, I forgot. Well, come on over and have a shot.’”

  Karl loved it. “What did you say then?”

  “I said I didn’t have time tonight. If I had time tomorrow after the GOP conclave, I’d come around. The thing about Johnson is, he doesn’t care what he said during the campaign, but he doesn’t see any point in having an ex–presidential candidate—never mind that I lost bigger than Governor Landon, and that I don’t even have a Senate seat anymore—going around loose, hating Johnson full-time.”

  “Let’s just do it half-time then,” Karl suggested.

  “Good idea. They call that moderation, right, Karl?”

  Dean Burch thought to get into the act. “Full-time would be extremist, right, Barry?”

  “Right. Let’s have half a drink.”

  47

  AYN RAND HAD NOW ENTERED into melancholy, and the intensity of her sexual passion for Nathaniel eased, to a point that physical union stopped entirely. This did not at first affect their collaboration on Objectivist enterprises. But after a year of this, Ayn took to finding fault in Nathaniel for this and that. Her criticisms were always done in private and were entirely personal in direction—there were no expressed misgivings about the quality of his leadership of the Nathaniel Branden Institute. What he got was simply Ayn in a critical mood. Ayn Rand’s critical moods were intense, her language lacerating; and then one day, a year later, it came to him, after heavy concentration on objectivist epistemology, that Ayn was really asking now for a return to sexual intimacy. Nathaniel’s problem was that, vis-à-vis the goddess of his faith, he simply could no longer... get it up.

  This was by no means a problem he was having with Patrecia Wynand. Ayn Rand hadn’t attempted to alter the tall, beautiful Patrecia’s first name, which, as far as Nathaniel knew, had always had that odd spelling, but Ayn had had a very direct influence on Pat’s last name. It had been “Scott” ever since her wedding two years ago, which Ayn had jovially attended, Pat having taken lessons in objectivism from Nathaniel. After a time, she became an apostle of the movement. She played a dramatic part in a Rand play, delighting Ayn by her portrayal. “Patrecia, what is magnificent is that you have taken the philosophy of objectivism and applied it to the art of acting!” Elated, Pat thought to consider a career as an actress, which dalliance led to the conversation with Ayn in which it was suggested that Pat change her last name to “Wynand.”

  “Wynand as in the character in The Fountainhead?” Patrecia was quick enough to remark.

  “Indeed,” said Ayn. So from then on it was Patrecia Wynand.

  That she was married to Larry Scott didn’t seem to matter; Wynand, after all, was a stage name. What did matter very much was that the relationship between teacher (Nathaniel) and student (Patrecia) became ardent—supremely ardent, Nathaniel confessed to his wife, Barbara. Barbara, who had been married to Nathaniel for some years, understood him, and was herself distracted, as it happened, by the affair she was having with one Wilfred Schwartz.

  So then there were the inherent complications. Nathaniel’s mistress-on-hold was anxious to come back into play, knowing nothing about the mistress not-on-hold, and relying—because Ayn was very close to Barbara—on her ex-lover’s wife to revive the dormant adultery.

  Well, what happened was that Nathaniel just couldn’t stand the tension anymore. He spent hours and hours with Barbara discussing and analyzing and objectifying the situation. Desperate, he came finally to a conclusion: He would have to tell Ayn.

  Tell her what?

  Well, certainly not about Patrecia. That would be too much. He would tell Ayn only that the old ardor didn’t work for him anymore. After all, she was twenty-five years older than he. He wrote all of this out on notepaper; he would read his notes aloud to her, to make absolutely sure he remembered to say all the things he wanted to say. After all, Ayn had said to him, had said it in the presence of her husband, Frank, and Nathaniel’s wife, Barbara, that in entering into the sexual relationship with Nathaniel, she had had no intentions whatever to seek marriage with him; he was a quarter century younger than she, and these age differences couldn’t just be ignored. And then Nathaniel had added, in the notes on the speech he prepared to recite to her, a declaration—of utter, perpetual devotion to Ayn as his inspiration, his seer, the great genius of the modern age, and in the truest sense of the word, his perpetual mistress.

  He walked down tremulously from his own apartment, in the same building as Ayn’s, several floors higher. Stepping into her studio, he waited anxiously for her. She had said she would be there at eight. She came in.

  Her expression was severe.

  “Go ahead, Nathaniel. What do you have in mind to discuss?”

  He read her the notes he had written. Word for word. He did not let his eyes stray from the paper.

  Nathaniel had seen her cross before. He had seen her critical. But he had not seen her uncontrollably, titanically, murderously angry. It was like a great tidal wave smashing everything in its path, including skyscrapers, the white cliffs of Dover, and the Maginot Line. When finally he escaped upstairs to Barbara, they wept together. But before they had come near to exhausting their reserves of mutual consolation, the telephone rang, and lo! it was Ayn. She wanted to speak with Barbara.

  She did so at great length. Ayn told how she had misestimated Barbara’s husband. She had thought him a true man, on the scale of the great men she had created in fiction. He was less than that. Far less. He was despicable.

  After one hour on the phone, it was agreed that Ayn would not lay eyes on Nathaniel while he did his work at the Institute. All communications of a professional nature would be relayed through second-in-command Barbara. There would be a period of probation for Nathaniel, said Ayn. That was not easily explainable to Barbara, because after all, the Institute was a Branden enterprise, not organizationally subordinate to Ayn Rand.

  The Objectivist scene was strained, but Nathaniel continued with his work. A few weeks later, Ayn summoned him. He was to appear at her studio in two days.

  He had dreaded the next, clearly predictable chapter in his dealings with Ayn. At this point, he had concluded ruefully, he would have to tell her all. Tell her that he was in love. He would not tell her that he was actually sleeping with his new love—only Barbara knew that. No one else, including Patrecia’s husband.

  Nathaniel begged Barbara to actually speak the words, to tell Ayn that Patrecia was Nathaniel’s love—but a Platonic love. Nathaniel thought it would be easier if the relationship was disclosed by a woman. Barbara finally agreed. They discussed the best procedure and hi
t on the idea of bringing in a third party, to reduce the one-on-one melodrama. Barbara came up with a nominee: Allan Blumenthal. Why not? It wasn’t more, really, than an experienced psychiatrist could handle. As a practitioner, Allan was professionally equipped to handle problems. And he was a member of the Collective. Who better than Allan Blumenthal?

  Barbara called on her old friend and undertook to brief him on the entire story, chapter by chapter.

  Barbara counted on Dr. Blumenthal, Ph.D., M.D., psychiatrist. He could surely take it all in.

  He would be told now that Ayn and Nathaniel had become lovers, that Frank and Barbara had been advised of the arrangement. That during the recent period, sexual activity between Ayn and Nathaniel had ceased, owing to Ayn’s depression. But that now Ayn had asked to revive the sex. Nathaniel had then told her he could not continue as her lover. Nathaniel had fallen in love with Patrecia. Indeed, he was having an affair with Patrecia but saw no reason to say this much to Ayn, but he did feel he had to let her know that he was in love with Patrecia, another woman who was not his wife.

  Blumenthal listened to it all, then asked, his mouth set heavily, for a night to think the matter through as well as he could.

  Barbara called Ayn and confirmed the appointment for the following day: for herself, Nathaniel—and Allan Blumenthal.

  When they walked into the familiar studio room where the Collective continued to meet regularly on Saturdays, Barbara saw that the dutiful Frank O’Connor was also present.

  “Where’s Nathaniel?” Ayn wanted to know, blowing smoke from her mouth.

  Allan Blumenthal took over. “Ayn, I have been asked to have a hand here, and I counseled that Nathaniel stay in his own apartment upstairs until we call him down.”

  “The answer is no.”

  So Nathaniel was called down, and sat by the desk on the studio landing.

  Ayn had on a little extra rouge, Barbara thought. Allan, middle-size, wearing his usual dark suit, sat down in the same spot he occupied on Saturdays.

  He began with some talk about psychological instincts and their bearing on coordinate thought and impulses in men of different ages—

  “Get to the point.”

  Allan nodded his head. He drew breath and said that Nathaniel was in love with Patrecia Wynand.

  He added quickly that the last thing Nathaniel wanted was to hurt Ayn Rand, that he was devoted to her. Barbara reiterated this.

  “Get that bastard down here!” Ayn instructed Allan, pointing to Nathaniel on the landing.

  What happened then was recorded in the memory of the professional, practicing psychiatrist.

  It was one denunciation after another by Ayn Rand.

  “You are an irredeemably rotten human being. . . . Objectivism never meant anything to you. You passed yourself off as a soul mate, God damn you. You’re less than Peter Keating or James Taggart,” she said, referring to the weak, evil figures in her two novels.

  Blumenthal tried to slow her down, but failed. She followed the imprecations with concrete talk of retaliation.

  “Your whole act is finished! I created you, and I’ll destroy you! You won’t have your career or money or prestige! You’ll have nothing! I’ll stop the publication of your book! I’ll remove your name from the dedication page of Atlas Shrugged! You would have been nothing without me, and you will be nothing when I’m done with you!”

  She stopped. She approached Nathaniel, coming within inches of his face. “Did you tell Patrecia about our relationship?”

  Nathaniel said that yes, he felt he had needed to do so in order to instruct her on the context of the problem.

  Rand gasped. Then she backed her arm wide and smashed her open palm against Nathaniel’s face, backed it again and hit him again. She shouted, “God damn you! God damn you!”

  She turned then so that Barbara and Frank and Allan could see her full face.

  “Well,” she said, wheeling again to Nathaniel. “I have one more thing to say to you. If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years. And if you achieve any potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”

  Allan Blumenthal told Barbara later that when he strode suddenly from the studio to the bathroom after Ayn’s screed, it was in order to vomit. He didn’t say whether the nausea was provoked by his face-to-face encounter with the apotheosis of objectivism.

  Whatever. There had been nothing in his experience quite like it, he told Barbara.

  “There can’t have been anything like it in anybody’s experience,” Barbara replied.

  But they didn’t proceed as if the whole objectivist business was now demonstrated to be phony. Inertial forces continued in command. The next day Ayn would merely make reference to an administrative problem that had been taken care of: Nathaniel and Barbara would have to fend for themselves; they were off the payroll.

  Allan Blumenthal was back at his post on Saturday night, a docile member of the Collective.

  48

  NATHANIEL AND BARBARA and Allan talked about it—my, how they talked about things, the Randians!—and a few days slipped by. Nathaniel resolved that the moment was past due to address the staff of the Nathaniel Branden Institute and of the newsletter, The Objectivist. He had gone an entire month without teaching. They needed to be told something.

  What?

  What they needed to know, he and Barbara finally decided, was that he and Ayn Rand had had—a parting of the ways. Nothing more than that. Just that.

  Why?

  Nathaniel was not about to tell the cadre of national Objectivism that he had been expelled from the movement because he had declined to resume sleeping with Miss Rand.

  But he had to say something, and here Nathaniel talked himself into a singular act of self-abasement.

  What he said to the thirty or forty devoted members of the staff, Barbara seated in front, Leonora at her side, was that he had acted immorally, without fidelity to objectivist principles.

  By doing what?

  He did not specify. Instead he went immediately to the consequences of his infidelity.

  The Nathaniel Branden Institute would dissolve.

  There were gasps of surprise and shock.

  The newsletter, The Objectivist, would continue, under Miss Rand. Nathaniel would retire from the board of editors.

  The next edition of Atlas Shrugged would no longer include his name, alongside that of Frank O’Connor, as dedicatee.

  Barbara Branden was crying. Lee reached over to hold her hand and she too began to cry. Others had wet eyes.

  Nathaniel made the point that under no circumstances was anyone to lose confidence in the movement itself. What mattered in life was that objectivism should prevail. Nothing done by votaries of a faith had any bearing on the faith itself. Whatever his mistakes, they were his, not to be taken as weaknesses in the structure of the movement he sought to serve.

  “I have taken actions I know to be wrong,” Nathaniel said. “I have failed to practice the principles I taught to all of you. Ayn is fully within her moral rights in severing our relationship. But objectivism is as worthy of your support as it ever was.”

  He bowed his head slightly and left the room.

  What on earth did Nathaniel do?

  Everyone wondered, everyone talked about it. Had he molested a child? Taken and sold drugs? Conspired with the enemy?

  Nobody penetrated the real story.

  What did happen was that, excepting, of course, his wife, NBI members ended any contact with Nathaniel. He was at first stunned that this should include members of the Collective, intimate friends and fellow apostles for so many years.

  But they would have nothing further to do with him.

  Whatever he had done—and if he had accurately described it as a betrayal of Ayn Rand, then that is what it had to have been—if his betrayal was so grievous as to have justified such extraordinary measures as Ayn Rand had taken, then the
se measures must have been condign.

  What hurt and astonished him most was that Allan Blumenthal—the sole informed witness to the drama—joined in repudiating both Barbara and Nathaniel, and placing both in Coventry.

  Allan! He had actually vomited, he told Barbara, on hearing Ayn’s imprecations on Nathaniel. He had gone so far as to wonder out loud whether Rand hadn’t in actual fact “created an entire system, including her philosophical system, to deal with her own psychological problems.”

  Nathaniel had always known it, had even gloried in it, but now he knew directly the unmitigated force of Ayn Rand’s charismatic presence.

  But two days later, one heretofore unflinching arm of Ayn Rand’s system snapped. Ayn was informed that Barbara Branden thought it wrong for Ayn to attempt to stop the New American Library from publishing Nathaniel’s book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, nearly complete. Barbara passed the word to headquarters that she thought this measure unwarranted.

  Through an intermediary, Ayn summoned Barbara to appear before the Collective to answer for her insubordinate thought. Barbara got Ayn on the phone and said dejectedly but firmly that she was willing to argue the case for Nathaniel’s right to publish, argue the case with Ayn. But she was not willing—she found her voice tightening, in words directed to her mentor, her god, lover of her husband, who was determined now to exact vengeance by destroying her husband’s career—“absolutely not willing” to appear before Ayn’s court and submit to its members as qualified jurors on the question.

  Ayn countered directly. She ordered Barbara to appear.

  Barbara refused.

  Ayn’s telephone slammed down.

  Barbara was weeping when, minutes later, Lee came into her office. Barbara looked up at her young assistant.

  “Come with me to the grill,” Barbara motioned her head.