Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  She bound Peikoff to her tightly, partly through a scholarly book he had been working on since the early 1960s. Called The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, its purpose was to amplify Rand’s controversial argument in “The Fascist New Frontier” that America was marching toward Fascism, by comparing postwar American ideology with German philosophical ideas he argued had given rise to the Third Reich. He became preoccupied with Nazi atrocities against thinkers and Jews, tracing them to Kant and Hegel. The book was scheduled to appear in 1969, by arrangement with Weybright and Talley, a publishing firm founded by Victor Weybright, Rand’s friend at NAL. But Rand demanded more revisions, and more revisions after that. For the next thirteen years, Peikoff produced draft after unsatisfactory draft of the manuscript. “She was making him rewrite the book, rewrite the book,” one of Rand’s employees recalled. “He was trying to prove to himself [the depth of] his devotion.” Phillip Smith, a member of the reconfigured inner circle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said, “We were always hearing [that] Leonard had finished a chapter and was going to [consult] with Ayn, and then he would come back and say, ‘It has to be all rewritten.’” In the end, she rewarded him with an introduction like the one Branden had been waiting for and never got. But the tribute she wrote was muted. She praised The Ominous Parallels as “the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself” and as a philosophical bulwark against the collectivist ideas that were still helping to destroy the lives of people around the world. Paraphrasing Dr. Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged, she ended the introduction by exclaiming, “It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine.” The statement was overtly grandiose, but it was also subtly deflating. Dr. Stadler, speaking to Dagny after examining Galt’s newly recovered electric motor, says, “It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!” Rand was signaling that the ideas in The Ominous Parallels were not new and were fundamentally hers rather than Peikoff’s. The book was finally published, complete with introduction, three months after her death in 1982.

  She kept him off balance by favoring him as her “number-one man” without designating him her official philosophical successor or “intellectual heir.” After Branden, it is unlikely that she would again invest a follower with so much trust and power. Yet he must have wanted the validation that came with the title “intellectual heir,” for he claimed it after her death, even posting it on his Web site, implying to others that she had bestowed it on him in her will (there is no such reference). While she lived, he tried not to repeat the mistakes that had caused her to punish him in the middle 1960s; overcompensating, perhaps, he relentlessly proselytized for her in social and academic settings. He paid a price. The open, witty boy who had felt “total awe” on meeting her in 1951 gradually became humorless and dutiful. He was known as a gifted teacher. Employed as a junior philosophy professor at colleges including Hunter, New York University, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, however, he couldn’t resist trying to “convert” his students to Rand’s ideas, in spite of warnings. As a result, he lost his teaching posts and damaged his future prospects. By the middle 1970s his university teaching career was over, although he continued to seek jobs throughout the 1980s. In 1987, when he was fifty-four years old and living in California, his second wife, Cynthia Pastor, wrote a poignant letter to Sidney Hook, her husband’s former academic adviser at NYU, pleading for help in finding her husband a post in which to exercise “his talent and passion for teaching.” Peikoff had applied to three hundred colleges and universities, she wrote. He had been granted three interviews and had been “explicitly rejected because of his views.” Hook replied, not unkindly, that before recommending his former student for another teaching job, he would have to be satisfied that Peikoff would not inject, where inappropriate, Randian dogma into classroom instruction. “I made that a condition before giving him a couple of classes to teach at NYU many years ago,” Hook wrote. “He didn’t live up to the condition … I still recommended him in hopes he would mature and try to follow the pedagogic model to which he had been exposed in my classes. … I do not believe, concerned as he is with teaching the message, he is interested in students as individual human beings and helping them develop their own independent personalities.” The eminent professor also cited longstanding reports of Peikoff’s “spiteful fury” against associates who differed with him, manifested in boycott campaigns against colleagues’ books and in nuisance lawsuits, in the intensity of which he exceeded even Rand.

  She also named him an editor of The Objectivist and of its scaled-down successor publication, The Ayn Rand Letter, until late 1974, when the Letter was discontinued. “I am tired of saying ‘I told you so,’” she wrote. The essays she contributed to almost every issue were not the sweeping policy statements of the 1960s; they were sometimes illuminating, more often bitter assessments of current events. She published position papers against the war on poverty, “selfless” hippies, affirmative action, government funding of the arts, international relief aid, the Watergate Committee—as well as in opposition to the Vietnam War and a wave of 1970s anti-obscenity legislation. She crafted a brilliant and farsighted critique of B. F. Skinner’s 1971 behaviorist manifesto, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which she aptly quoted Victor Hugo: “And he [the student Marius in Les Misérables] blesses God for having given him these two riches which many of the rich are lacking: work, which gives him freedom, and thought, which gives him dignity.” More often, she quoted from her own work in rebuttal to the prevailing wisdom of the decade’s altruists and shallow thinkers.

  In 1969, she led a course in nonfiction writing, with the announced purpose of training a new brigade of contributors to The Objectivist. The class met on Saturday evenings in her apartment, where she offered detailed if conventional advice about content and composition. Edited, these lessons appeared posthumously as The Art of Nonfiction. Also in 1969, she published The Romantic Manifesto, a collection of essays reflecting on the philosophical meaning of art as “sense of life” and as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments,” which was Rand’s definition of the romantic strain in which she wrote. She continued to present her popular annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston but accepted few other public engagements.

  There were memorable exceptions. In July 1969, Alan Greenspan, then a member of President Nixon’s Gates Commission on the draft, arranged for her to be present for NASA’s launch of Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy, Florida, an event that for the first time placed men on the surface of the moon. She was thrilled by the sight of the powerful rocket lifting into the sky. “What we had seen, in naked essentials, was the concentrated abstraction of man’s greatness,” she wrote in The Objectivist. When the spacecraft landed on the Moon, she praised Neil Armstrong’s broadcast comment, which might have come from Atlas Shrugged: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Although she didn’t approve of government funding for scientific projects except in military matters, she restated what she had written about the atomic bomb: “It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice.” The family with whom she and O’Connor stayed in Titusville, NASA’s pleasant bedroom town for Kennedy Space Center employees, remembered that she was wearing a new diamond-and-ruby ring. The ring had forty rubies, one for each year she had been married to Frank, and she told the family that he had given it to her for their wedding anniversary in April. On Rand’s return to New York, Barbara Weiss reflected that she had never seen the great woman in a better frame of mind. And yet there was unremitting anger. “Those who suggest we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded,” she
wrote in The Objectivist. This, like her praise, was a scrap of old rhetoric, and was unseemly.

  Another high point was an address she gave in March 1974 to members of the senior class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. She spoke at the invitation of Colonel Herman Ivey, a philosophy instructor who had completed two tours of duty as a pilot in Vietnam and was an admirer of Atlas Shrugged. The Vietnam War was officially over. But the eleventh-hour airlift of American support personnel out of Saigon was still a year away, and the bitter criticism of the military for its conduct of the war charged the atmosphere at West Point. Rand made it clear to Colonel Ivey that she admired the cadets’ and officers’ voluntary service as exemplary of the strength, competence, restraint, and honor that characterized American military tradition, and this made him more eager to present her to his students.

  The speech she gave, later published as “Philosophy: Who Needs It” in a book of the same name, proved an emotional epiphany for everyone present and was an example of Rand at her most stirring. It opened with a parable. A spaceship crashes on an unknown planet. The astronaut regains consciousness amid a strange landscape, under a foreboding sky. He knows that he should ask himself certain questions, which Rand identified as the basic questions of philosophy: Where am I? How can I discover where I am? and, Once I know where I am, what should I do? The astronaut, however, is filled with fear. If he pursues these questions, he may discover that he is in dangerous territory or too far from Earth to manage a return. He spots some odd-looking creatures approaching his spaceship from a distance and decides to wait and see if they have answers. He is never heard from again.

  The three questions, Rand explained, are the province of three branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Conventional wisdom would answer them this way: (1) The astronaut is in an incomprehensible world, whether he is in space or on Earth; (2) his mind is powerless to discover anything for certain; and (3) there is nothing he can do. Therefore he is helpless in the face of his destroyers. The habit of rationality would answer differently: (1) He is in a universe governed by natural laws; (2) he can acquire knowledge of those laws through observation and reason; and (3) he must act, and act on his own behalf. “You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles,” she told the cadets in a famous defense of philosophical reflection. “Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious rational convictions—or a grab bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.” She extolled Aristotle and warned against “the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment,” which, she declared, had sown confusion for two centuries among practical leaders such as themselves. In effect, said Colonel Ivey, she told the nation’s aspiring young officers that they not only had the ability to understand the differences between right and wrong but also the responsibility to act on their convictions. Whereas other guest speakers had maintained a diplomatic silence on the subject of the cadets’ military mission, she praised them for preserving “qualities of character which were typical at the time of America’s birth, but are virtually non-existent today: earnestness—dedication—a sense of honor. Honor,” she added, “is self-esteem made visible in action.” At the end of the speech, the cadets and officers stood and cheered.

  Afterward, Rand, accompanied by Frank, Allan and Joan Blumenthal, Rand’s secretary Barbara Weiss, Nathaniel’s sister Elayne Kalberman (who had temporarily sided with Rand against her brother), Elayne’s husband Harry Kalberman, Leonard Peikoff and his new (first) wife, a broadcast technician named Sue Ludel—Rand’s diminished inner circle—walked to the West Point officers’ club to answer questions and sign autographs. “Men were standing on other men’s shoulders to hear her,” said Barbara Weiss. “There was a wall of men. They didn’t want to miss a word.” Yet even within the shared context of the military academy, there were those who were displeased by her ideas. “My impression was that the cadets and the faculty were very much taken with [her speech],” said Brigadier General Jack Capps, then deputy head of the English department. “But when they had time to sit down and think it over, some of the things Miss Rand had advocated were things that they had gone to war against.” He mentioned her answer to a cadet’s question about the moral legitimacy of federal raids on the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and, in general, the history of U.S. aggression against American Indians (as they were then called). When cultures clash, she answered coolly, the superior technological culture will always prevail against the inferior, less developed one. Moreover, she said, the tribes that had occupied the land for five thousand years had done nothing with it and should stand aside for those who would. She didn’t know that the cadet who had asked the question was a native American, but the other cadets and officers knew and were embarrassed, said Brigadier General Capps. Before she returned to New York, Colonel Ivey asked permission to publish her speech as an introduction to a new West Point philosophy textbook, and Rand proudly agreed. For the most part, “it was a dream trip” for the sixty-nine-year-old writer, recalled Barbara Weiss.

  One complication of the visit was her labored breathing. For months she had experienced increasing shortness of breath and fatigue, but at the academy she realized that she couldn’t walk more than a few yards without stopping to rest. Back in Manhattan, she paid a visit to Murray Dworetzky, her GP since the early 1960s. As usual, the doctor chided her about her smoking. His headstrong patient, inhaling smoke through her long cigarette holder while sitting in his office, answered, as usual, “Give me a rational reason why I should not smoke.” Just then his assistant knocked, entered, and handed him a set of X-rays. The doctor placed her chest X-ray onto a viewing box and, stunned, replied, “Here is a good reason.” There was a lesion on one of her lungs. She had lung cancer. She stubbed out her cigarette. The doctor began searching through his Rolodex for surgeons.

  She took the news calmly—more calmly than she took any indication of physical ill health in Frank. She entered New York Hospital and had one lung removed. In accord with the practice of the time, she remained in the hospital for nearly a month. She was an obstreperous patient, even though she was medicated heavily for pain. One day, she pointed to her ninth-floor hospital-room window and said to Joan Blumenthal, “Isn’t it funny, Joan? I wonder how that tree can be nine stories tall.” Blumenthal glanced at the window and realized that Rand was seeing not a tree but the reflection of her IV pole, and told her so. As with her UFO sighting years earlier in California, Rand believed the evidence of her senses, and she flew into a rage. Blumenthal, who visited her every day, mentioned the incident to her husband, Allan, and Allan mentioned it to Peikoff, who was staying in Rand’s apartment, caring for Frank. Peikoff dutifully reported the Blumenthals’ concerns to Rand, who remained furious for months. Home again, she would phone Joan and scold the younger woman for having tried to undermine her rationality. Meanwhile, the thinker who insisted that a heroic sense of life grants no importance to mental suffering proved to have little tolerance for physical pain. Finding movement difficult, she would not sit or walk. Her medical attendants, like her mother long ago, exhorted her to move—even to wiggle her toes—to prevent blood clots, but she would not cooperate. She changed position without protest only when she was arguing with someone, Blumenthal recalled wryly; then, she waved her arms.

  She often reverted to childlike demeanor during the period of her recovery. Peikoff remembered bringing her home from the hospital, an event he later described as the most cheerful moment in his life with her. “She was finding it difficult to walk,” he recalled, “and she sort of stumbled into the apartment.” At her request, he put on her “tiddly-wink” music. Buoyed by the gay spirit of the melodies of her youth, “she got [her] little baton and started to march around the room
, tossing her head, grinning at us, conducting the music. That was very happy.” Yet she refused to take walks around the neighborhood or exercise—that is, until doctors also ordered Frank to walk. Then they would go out together. Mostly, she preferred to stay in bed, watching TV game shows during the daytime and prime-time dramas in the evening and reading mysteries. She worked with her secretary to answer accumulated fan mail and sometimes played solitaire.

  She gave up smoking but refused the Blumenthals’ requests to make her decision public, even though, as they reminded her, she had indirectly or directly encouraged her fans to smoke. She still denied that there was any conclusive, nonstatistical evidence to prove that smoking caused cancer. The Blumenthals understood that she was all but unable to admit to imperfections or mistakes. And they knew that she was trying to absorb a number of profound and painful psychic blows, including the loss of her protégé and a mutiny by her body. But she was testing their patience and, to some degree, their admiration.