Anne Heller: Ayn Rand and the World She Made

According to his nephew, Jonathan Hirschfeld:Author interview with Jonathan Hirschfeld, August 26, 2006.

beginning the next day:Author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.

“We were like mother and father figures”:Author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.

Rumors “spread like wildfire”:MYWAR , p. 351.

Barbara and Wilfred Schwartz:TPOAR , p. 350.

“I am not a teacher”:“To Whom It May Concern,” p. 454.

To Barbara, she said, “I won’t”:TPOAR , p. 350.

a sense of liberation:Author interview with BB, June 2, 2008.

She swore that she would not merely write:TPOAR , p. 351.

“I never wanted”:“To Whom It May Concern,” p. 454.

On September 3:TPOAR , p. 351.

The literary agency declined to participate:MYWAR , p. 355.

“What happened to property rights?”:MYWAR , p. 357.

A year later, Ed Nash:TPOAR , p. 349.

Rand also kept her threat:TPOARC , p. 122, based on copies of AR’s unpublished letters in the Rand archive at ARI.

According to Holzer’s recollection:OHP interview with Hank and Erika Holzer, February 9, 2006.

described it differently:“In Answer to Ayn Rand.”

as she would later dismiss the questions:Robert Hessen remembered: “Sometime later that fall [1968], when Leonard began to give lectures, Ayn agreed to participate in the question periods. Nathan had by now published his ‘Answer,’ with its elliptical last line about its being impossible to carry on a romantic relationship given the age difference. And someone said, ‘Is it true, as Nathan said it was, that you and he had a sexual relationship and that your break was over the end of that?’ And she said, ‘If you could ask me a question like that, what reason would you have to trust my answer?’ It was an ingenious and manipulative answer,” recalled Hessen. “And I thought, Either it’s a rehearsed answer, because it’s very brilliant, it throws the questioner off, or it’s a spontaneous answer, which is even more brilliant. I remained friends with her for the next twelve years, and we never talked about Nathan;” author interview with Robert Hessen, October 17, 2007.

Yes, Florence answered:Un-mailed, unpublished letter from Florence Hirschfeld to AR, reviewing the points made during their fall 1968 meeting; undated, early 1969, courtesy of Florence Hirschfeld.

“The thing that really got to me”:Author interview with Florence Hirschfeld, Jonathan Hirschfeld, and EK, August 25, 2006.

in the October issue:It was labeled May 1968 but was published in October.

Within a week or two:“In Answer to Ayn Rand.”

He “did not steal any money from Ayn Rand”:“Interview with Henry Mark Holzer,” p. 6.

a terse coda:“For the Record,” The Objectivist , May 1968, p. 457.

he was discredited:MYWAR , p. 368.

If the author of the greatest book:Author interview with Leonard Hirschfeld, December 15, 2006.

“Ayn wanted to know”:OHP, Hank and Erika Holzer, February 9, 2006.

The lawyer phoned NBI tape-transcription reps:JW, citing Keith Edwards, NBI Detroit business rep, The Ayn Rand Cult , p. 45.

Peikoff notified the representatives:MYWAR , p. 358.

students had to sign a waiver:TPOAR , p. 357.

In New York, therapists dismissed patients:Author interview with John Allen, January 3, 2005.

“He was supposedly handling”:JKT, from taped, unpublished interviews by journalist JW in preparation for a CBC special report on the tenth anniversary of AR’s death, titled Ideas: The Legacy of AR (1992). 19 6 9-1982

“When people look back at their childhood”:Ayn Rand, “Introduction to Ninety-Three [by Victor Hugo],” TON , October 1962.

“an instrument of philanthropic collectivism”:Quoted in “TRB from Washington,” The New Republic , July 19, 1975.

She removed Branden’s name:Author interview with JMB and Dr. Allan Blumenthal, October 7, 2007.

tried unsuccessfully to quash:Henry Mark Holzer, “Legal Notice,” The Objectivist , May 1969.

“How would you compare”:“Ideas in Action,” videotaped interview of Leonard Peikoff by James Valliant, WJM Productions, August 5, 1995.

“Sometimes she would wipe the floor with him”:Author interviews with EK, July 21 and August 25, 2006.

“Either you deal with him”:Taped interview with Betty Scourby, conducted by Fred Cookinham, March 30, 2003.

In turn, loyalists later spoke:100 Voices , Daniel Sutton, p. 263.

“If you could ask such a question”:Author interview with Robert Hessen, October 17, 2007.

scheduled to appear in 1969:“Objectivist Calendar,” The Objectivist , August 1968, p. 496.

“She was making him rewrite”:Unpublished taped interview with Barbara Weiss, conducted by BB, September 25, 1983.

“We were always hearing”:Phillip Smith, from taped, unpublished interviews by journalist JW in preparation for a CBC special report on the tenth anniversary of AR’s death, titled “Ideas: The Legacy of AR” (1992).

“the first book by an Objectivist philosopher”:Ayn Rand, introduction, in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: Stein and Day, 1982).

“It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea”:AS , p. 333.

“number-one man”:Author interview with Molly Hays, February 29, 2004.

on his Web site:http://www.peikoff.com/op/home.htm.

at colleges including Hunter, New York University:Unpublished letter from AR to Sidney Hook, undated, 1957. Sidney Hook Papers, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, box 24, folder 27, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

In 1987, when he was fifty-four years old:Unpublished letter from Cynthia Peikoff to Sidney Hook, April 16, 1987, and unpublished reply from Sidney Hook to Cynthia Peikoff, April 21, 1987; Sidney Hook Papers, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, box 23, folder 43.

She also named him an editor

of The Objectifist:”Objectivist Calendar,” The Objectivist , September 1968, p. 528.

in which she aptly quoted Victor Hugo:The Ayn Rand Letter , January 31, 1972, p. 42.

appeared posthumously:Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers , Robert Mayhew, ed. (New York: Plume, 2001).

Also in 1969:The Romantic Manifesto (New York: World Publishing, 1969), p. 45.

Alan Greenspan arranged:Karen Minot and David Oyerly, “Interview with Henry Mark Holzer,” Full Context , July/August 2001, p. 5.

“It is not coercion, not the physical force”:Rand seems to have forgotten, or overlooked, the fact that NASA had been formed by an act of Congress in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s successful, and, to Americans, shocking, launching of Sputnik I and II into space and the consequent fear that America had fallen behind in its technological battle with Russia. In 1960, NASA appointed former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to lead the American effort to reach the Moon (Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist , September 1969, p. 709).