Memories fade over the course of forty years, perhaps especially in matters of sequence and timing. In a statement Barbara circulated a few weeks after the incident, she described it differently. According to her, she did not divulge Rand’s secret. She conveyed a threat, telling Holzer she “was worried that [Ayn’s] attacks would compel [Nathaniel], in self-defense, to reveal information which would be painful and embarrassing to Miss Rand. I did not say what this information consisted of.” In addition, she stated, under duress Nathaniel had shouted loudly, in a tone of moral outrage, in front of Holzer and the staff, “How long is she [Miss Rand] going to count on me to remain silent?” In any event, Rand did not heed the Brandens’ indirect warnings. But, with very few exceptions, they kept their vow to remain silent about the affair until after she had died.
Among the exceptions were Branden’s sisters, Florence, Elayne, and Reva. All three believed their brother’s account, but their sense of unity ended there. Elayne and Reva sided with Rand. Florence flew from Toronto to New York to support her little brother. She asked for a meeting with Rand, which was granted and lasted for five hours. In the presence of Frank and a watchful Holzer, she asked outright whether there had been a romantic relationship between the older woman and Nathaniel. Rand dismissed the question as preposterous, as she would later dismiss the questions of less intimate acquaintances. Yet she spoke heatedly about Nathaniel’s moral degeneracy in choosing Patrecia over her. He was evil, depraved, a gigolo, Rand told Florence. At last, she asked, in a convulsion of loneliness and frustration, “Florence, am I real to you?” Yes, Florence answered in a letter written a few months later, she was real, both in the magnitude of her genius and in the fraudulence and cruelty of her pretence of being an innocent victim in a fourteen-year affair with a younger man.
Florence recalled that Rand became more and more inflamed as she discussed Nathaniel and his outrages against her. “The thing that really got to me was that she was leaning against a desk, with her legs spreading farther and farther apart as she talked about him,” Florence recalled. She interpreted the gesture as a graphic indication that there had been a sexual relationship between them. Finally, Rand shouted that if Nathaniel had been half the man he pretended to be, he would have been in love with her rather than with Patrecia. When the meeting ended, Holzer followed Florence out into the hallway and warned that if one word were said to any third party about what had just transpired, he would deny it. During both of these encounters, Frank sat by silently.
As a last direct strike, Rand and her attorney set to work on a blistering condemnation of the Brandens. When the statement appeared as a letter in the October issue of The Objectivist, entitled, “To Whom It May Concern,” it ran to fifty-three paragraphs, each contributing to a controlled, chronological though ultimately vague impeachment of Branden and, to a lesser extent, Barbara. The writing was elegant, without a trace of shriek or sprawl, but it seemed to protest in too much detail. It began:
This is to inform my readers and all those interested in Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden are no longer associated with this magazine, with me or with my philosophy.
I have permanently broken all personal, professional and business associations with them, and have withdrawn from them the permission to use my name in connection with their commercial, professional, intellectual or other activities.
I hereby withdraw my endorsement of them and of their future works and activities. I repudiate both of them, totally and permanently, as spokesmen for me or for Objectivism.
There it might have ended, but she went on. Her reasons, she explained, began with Mr. Branden’s three-year drift away from the principles of Objectivism and toward frivolous pursuits. Her personal relationship with him had also deteriorated, turning into “a series of his constant demands on my time, constant pleas for advice, for help with his writing, for long discussions of his personal, philosophical and psychological problems.” After she had warned him that she would not tolerate this treatment forever, he began to reveal certain unacceptable traits. “This year … I was shocked to discover that he was consistently failing to apply to his own personal life and conduct, not only the fundamental philosophical principles of Objectivism, but also the psychological principles he himself had enunciated and had written and lectured about.” The example she gave: He had told her that he sometimes acted “on the basis of unidentified feelings,” a charge that only Randian true believers could find surprising. She added, “He did not practice what he preached.”
The problems had multiplied, she wrote. In the previous two months he had presented her with a paper “so irrational and offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him.” Next, she had learned from Mrs. Branden that he had long been concealing “ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life” that had involved the deliberate deception of a number of persons, including herself, and amounted to a conscious breach of morality. She implied, but did not state, that he had committed financial malfeasance in the matter of the $25,000 loan. That he “was exploiting me [not only] intellectually and professionally [but also] financially … was grotesquely sickening,” she wrote. Thus she had ended their professional association, too.
All this time, she continued, Mrs. Branden had pretended to be her ally. Yet almost as soon as she had refused Mrs. Branden’s proposed business plan for NBI, the younger woman was heard to utter “veiled threats” against her. Mr. Branden joined his ex-wife in engaging in “unbelievably hysterical” behavior in the presence of her attorney and the NBI staff. “Since this change in their attitude occurred when they realized that … the gold mine involved in the use of my name was shut down, draw your own conclusions about the cause and motive of their behavior.”
Finally, with an apology to subscribers and others who had trusted the Brandens on her recommendation, she held herself blameless for the rupture and the blow it might represent to thousands of her admirers. “No one stays here by faking reality in any manner whatsoever,” John Galt tells Dagny when she crash-lands in utopia. “I do not fake reality and never have,” she declared in her published statement. Even so, she did not celebrate the tragic downfall of “an unusually intelligent man who had the potential to become a great man.” The lesson was that her philosophy made no allowances for personal contradictions or hypocrisy. It “will stifle the mind” that attempts to adopt it in part or play games with it. “Objectivism, like reality,” she wrote, “is its own avenger.” And so it was.
Within a week or two, the Brandens answered her letter with one of their own. In a tone of barely controlled outrage, Nathaniel pointed out that he had repaid the $25,000 loan within ten days of Miss Rand’s belated objections to it. “So much for my alleged financial exploitation of Miss Rand,” he wrote. In fact, she had exploited him, he continued. She had coerced him into giving up his share of The Objectivist while refusing to keep her promise to return his copyrights, an infringement of their original partnership agreement. She had taken more of his time for her personal problems than he had taken of hers. And in the realm of their personal dealings, he announced, she had pressed for a relationship that he could not agree to. The paper that she had found so “irrational and offensive,” he declared in a concluding sentence that fueled decades of speculation, had really been “a tortured, awkward, excruciatingly embarrassed attempt to make clear to her why I felt that an age distance between us of twenty-five years constituted an insuperable barrier, for me, to a romantic relationship.”
Years later, in an interview in a small libertarian magazine, long after the scandal had harmed the reputations of everyone involved, Hank Holzer admitted that Nathaniel was innocent of all financial charges. He “did not steal any money from Ayn Rand. If that is the charge, I can tell you in my very considered, researched judgment that that did not occur. It is an unfair charge.” At the time, however, he was silent.
In her own rebuttal, Barbara stated that her friendship with Rand had never bee
n motivated by financial considerations. “It was precisely my horror of accepting the financial gain about to be showered upon me that caused me to tell her” about Nathaniel’s unspecified “ugly acts,” she wrote. She then predicted that anyone who expressed sympathy for the evil Brandens or tried to remain neutral in the break would be pronounced immoral themselves and ostracized. As the bright, clear days of autumn reached their zenith, she and Nathaniel mailed their letter, entitled “In Answer to Ayn Rand,” to 21,000 subscribers of The Objectivist. Then Barbara and, separately, Nathaniel and Patrecia, left New York to begin new lives in Los Angeles.
The reaction to Rand’s charges against the Brandens exceeded Barbara’s prediction. Alan Greenspan, Leonard Peikoff, and others signed a terse coda to Rand’s “To Whom It May Concern” in which they renounced all future contact with the Brandens. Lest Branden disclose more information about a romantic relationship with Rand, he was discredited as a confessed liar and thief whose word on any subject could not be trusted. No questions needed to be asked or answered. If the author of the greatest book ever written declared that the Brandens “had lied to preserve their money pot and association with Ayn,” as one contemporary described the prevailing wisdom, well, then, who could doubt it? Not Allan Blumenthal—not after his philosophical torch-bearer had explained that Nathaniel had been the sexual aggressor at every stage of their affair and had exploited her financially for years. Not Peikoff or Holzer. They disseminated and enforced the party line—”You’re either for Miss Rand or you’re against her”—setting in motion a wave of Soviet-style loyalty oaths and excommunications that would eventually slow Rand’s movement to a trickle. A witch-hunt atmosphere took hold. As attorney Holzer recalled, “Ayn wanted to know on whom she could rely.” The lawyer phoned NBI tape-transcription reps, seeking evidence of any suspicious behavior on the part of Branden, while Peikoff notified the representatives and others that the Brandens were now official “enemies” and that any who objected to the phone calls or forced taking of sides would be blackballed. When Peikoff, now thirty-four years old, launched his own series of non-NBI lectures in the spring of 1969, students had to sign a waiver promising not to contact either of the pair or buy Nathaniel’s forthcoming book or subsequent books. In New York, therapists dismissed patients who asked for explanations with an air of disapproval that baffled some for years and haunts a few to this day. Holzer reportedly refused to represent some clients in midcase. Recalled Joan Kennedy Taylor, “He was supposedly handling the estate of my father [Deems Taylor]. Before ‘To Whom It May Concern’ came out, he called me and said, ‘There’s been a break. Don’t feel I’m singling you out, but I’m asking all my clients: Which side are you on? If you give me the wrong answer I can no longer represent you.’ I told him I didn’t know what he meant by the wrong answer … to which his answer was, ‘Then you must understand that I can no longer represent you.’ And he didn’t.” Taylor and a number of other of Rand’s more grown-up, independent-minded followers and friends, including Florence Hirschfeld and Al Ramrus, continued to admire her thought and work but never again attempted to see her.
By the beginning of 1970, with the Holzers gone and others disillusioned or scattered, Rand’s full-time following dwindled to a few newcomers and five or six inner-circle members competing for her favor in the absence of the Brandens. They were, they had to be, prepared to act as unquestioning loyalists and, in some cases, willing avengers in her cause. And the greatest of these was Leonard Peikoff.
* In Ayn Rand’s view, concepts are formulated by looking for similarities among perceived objects (i.e., seeing that all tables have legs and tops), setting aside differences in measurements of shared qualities (such as the differing lengths of two tabletops), and retaining the essential conceptual similarities.
SIXTEEN
IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US
1969–1982
When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great, is an attribute of youth—and the process of aging is the process of that expectation’s gradual extinction.
One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.
—Introduction to Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, 1962
The 1970s found Ayn Rand’s ideas gliding quietly—almost anonymously—into the conservative mainstream, including the National Review and two Republican administrations. (Gerald Ford told a convention of small businessmen that Washington was “an instrument of philanthropic collectivism,” for example.) But her ideas roared and shouted within a new group of young right-wing libertarians who were disgusted with the economic policies of the Republican Party and determined to found a party of their own, which they called the Libertarian Party. In its “Statement of Principles” it rejected “the cult of the omnipotent state” and called for the restoration of each individual’s right to “exercise sole dominion over his own life.” It recommended a speedy return to the gold standard and, when seeking its first presidential candidate in 1972, it chose Rand’s erstwhile friend John Hospers. Its founders and members, many of whom were self-declared Objectivists, almost universally revered Rand as the guiding light and most courageous exponent of limited government and free markets.
Rand rejected the libertarian cause, alleging that its promoters had stolen her ideas while failing even to try to master her complete philosophy. The presence of Murray Rothbard and John Hospers among the movement’s leadership didn’t improve her opinion. In fact, after the departure of Branden she wasn’t much interested in praise from the idealistic young. The world was small and personal.
She removed Branden’s name from the dedication page of all future editions of Atlas Shrugged and made a new will, bequeathing her estate jointly, at first, to Leonard Peikoff and Allan Blumenthal. Keeping to her practice of revising her history with former friends and allies, she diminished the importance of the Brandens and denied the originality of Nathaniel’s work. But she did not expunge his essays from future printings of The Virtue of Selfishness or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And for two long years, she brooded over the questions of Branden’s character and motives. Had he always been corrupt, or had he gradually become so? When had the evil in his soul begun to dominate? Was he a con man? A common crook? Had he ever loved her? She continued to say that he had embezzled money from her, although she knew that he had not. She and her remaining loyalists insisted that he had stolen and exploited her ideas, and they tried unsuccessfully to quash an early attempt he made to market his NBI lecture tapes under his own name. Only Frank and the Blumenthals were aware of the sexual component of Rand and Branden’s relationship, and with them she agonized over various explanations of his sexual psychology. On the one hand, she needed to understand his betrayal of her in order to restore the rule of reason in her life. Lacking the ability or willingness to be honest with herself about his conduct or to scrutinize her own, however, she could not find an adequate explanation. Gradually she stopped speaking about him, or even referring to him, with anyone other than members of her household: Frank, her housekeeper, her personal secretary Barbara Weiss, and perhaps Leonard Peikoff. As the 1970s wore on—a politically dreary sequence of years beginning with Nixon’s wage and price controls and final abandonment of the gold standard and ending with the fourteen-month-long Iran hostage crisis—she largely retreated from the public eye.
Like a younger son stepping out of his elder brother’s shadow, Peikoff took charge of Rand’s physical and emotional well-being. Now in his middle thirties, he was still young for his age, with a high-pitched voice, thick glasses, and a tendency toward excitability. He deeply revered Rand; he believed, and regularly said, that hers was the greatest mind in the universe. When asked to compare what he had learned from her with what he had learned in school, he o
nce answered, “How would you compare … going to the Metropolitan [Opera House] and watching a ballet versus living in Auschwitz?” By way of explanation, he said, “If you took the total of my mind, whatever rational knowledge I have is ninety-eight percent from her, and one or two percent of simply historical data from fourteen years of universities.” She called him by the Russian pet name “Leonush” but still sometimes flew into a rage at his mistakes or oversights. Her verbal abuse seemed only to intensify his love. Said a member of Rand’s 1970s inner circle, “Sometimes she would wipe the floor with him. You’d think he had threatened to kill her. I finally said, ‘How can you let her do that?’ He said, ‘I would let her step on my face if she wanted.’”
If he heard rumors about sex between Rand and Branden, as he almost surely did, he dismissed them as slanders against Rand. He regarded her as a spiritual mother figure and could not imagine even the villainous Branden breaking the constraints of a universal taboo—let alone with the willing participation of his idol. He did his best to replace the vaunted genius Branden as her interpreter, buffer, publicist, and enforcer. In January 1969, he launched his own private lecture series, beginning with an “Introduction to Logic,” followed by a twelve-part series, “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” During his first lecture in the logic course, he answered a question about Branden’s forthcoming book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, with a stern warning that no one was to buy or read it. “Either you deal with him or you deal with Ayn Rand and myself,” he reportedly declared. “Either/or. If you have dealings with him, I don’t want you in this course.” One student walked out of the auditorium and withdrew from the class. Her money was refunded but her name was stricken from The Objectivist subscriber rolls and she was barred from all future lectures and events. As letters of inquiry or protest arrived about the demands that students take sides, hundreds of others were reportedly added to a blacklist. Yet so tied to Rand or to the group were some of these defectors that they adopted pseudonyms to enroll secretly in lectures and subscribe to the magazine. In turn, loyalists later spoke of using false names on mailing lists, as means of ensuring that Rand’s new enemies weren’t communicating with subscribers by using the approved list. After one of his lectures, Rand herself was asked whether she and Branden had had a sexual relationship, as the bold questioner thought was implied by parts of Branden’s “In Answer to Ayn Rand.” “If you could ask such a question you would not be able to believe the answer,” she replied, sophistically, to her supporters’ admiration. Presumably the fifth columnist was removed from the room.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 50