Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

The final question would bring an answer very pleasing to their hosts. Barbara would ask, in Joe Blumenthal’s house:5. Who is equipped to lead the Objectivist movement after you have retired?

  An hour later Ayn announced that she wished to dine alone with Nathaniel the night before the seminar. She would wish to consult with him about their appearance. They would go to a restaurant, one that a friend had recommended, L’Esprit du Nord.

  Upstairs, an hour later, there were three exchanges. In their own bedroom, Dinah Blumenthal said to her husband that she was rather surprised by Miss Rand’s decision about dinner the next day, since Dinah had prepared a good dinner at home for all four of their visitors. Joseph told his wife that they were dealing with a very great lady, and that people of genius had to be expected to act—differently.

  In the guest room, Frank O’Connor told his wife that her decision to go out alone with Nathaniel might upset their hosts, who undoubtedly had made preparations for them all. “Cubbyhole,” Ayn said, “I need to make my own decisions in these matters. You know that.”

  In the children’s room where they were staying, Barbara Branden made something of a scene, keeping her voice down only with effort. “What do you think you’re doing, leaving your parents’ house on the first visit with them in five years to have dinner with Ayn, who you see in New York every day of the week?” Nathaniel said that he had been a little put out by the suggestion, but what was he to do? Ayn was their guest, and the primacy of guests’ desires was how the world worked.

  “Besides,” he said, “Ayn is Ayn. The whole world revolves around her. Why would it be different in Toronto?”

  Barbara thought to say that it was certainly clear that Nathaniel’s world revolved around Ayn.

  But she stopped when she reflected that this was so also of her own world. That world too revolved around Ayn.

  25

  ON THE DRIVE BACK in the rented car, Frank was at the wheel, as he had been ever since setting out for Canada. Barbara Branden sat at his side, but her mind was not on the discursive patter Frank now and then engaged in. She trained her mind on the scene in the back seat. Ayn and Nathaniel were speaking to each other endlessly, in a high pitch of exuberance. They spoke about everything, about the seminar the night before, about the philosophical innocence of his parents, about Nathaniel’s boyhood memories, about Ayn as a girl, about her confidence in him as eventual successor and leader in the Objectivist crusade, about the high hopes he had for the success of her forthcoming public lectures, about the great ambitions they both had for the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which owed everything to her thought and her patronage.

  Barbara slightly adjusted the rearview mirror and brought a lipstick to her lips to feign the need for the mirror angled to her use. She left it in place, giving her a view of the back seat whenever her indignation sought it out. Ayn and Nathaniel were holding hands.

  They stopped for lunch on the outskirts of Syracuse. The conversation between the Numero Uno Objectivist and the Number Two Objectivist continued unchecked. Barbara bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times. She shared it, and some fried chicken, with Frank. Across from them in the booth, Ayn and Nathaniel ate and talked. After lunch they made their way back to the car. Nathaniel volunteered to take the wheel, but Frank said he rather enjoyed driving, which he had scarcely had a chance to do since leaving California. An hour or so later, there was silence in the back. Once more, Barbara adjusted the mirror. Ayn was asleep, her head on Nathaniel’s shoulder, his arm around her neck.

  They reached the outskirts of Albany and found the recommended motel just off the highway. They entered the restaurant for a light evening meal. Ayn and Nathaniel were suddenly silent, but Frank and Barbara could both see the bewitchment in her eyes. They agreed to start out for New York at eight in the morning.

  In the bedroom, Barbara wheeled on her husband. She hissed out the words. “She’s in love with you. And you’re in love with her.”

  Nathaniel usually liked to talk and to explicate, to argue and to expound, to analyze and to opine. But tonight he thought only to say, “Barbara, I’m tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you want to make love with me? Why not just pretend I’m Ayn Rand?”

  His face flushed, he marched in his shorts into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. Seconds later he opened it, walked to the end of the room, thrust his hand into the briefcase, and pulled out a volume. He reentered the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it.

  Two weeks later, toward the end of the afternoon, Ayn waited for Nathaniel in her studio. He had lecture notes he was to go over with her.

  She sat in the living room, a book on her lap, at the same end of the sofa from which she presided at meetings of the Collective. Opening the door, following the usual, perfunctory ring of the bell, Nathaniel headed for her desk, where he and Ayn usually sat when they had work to look over together. But today she beckoned him to the sofa. She said she was ready to talk over with him the “private subject” he had told her, on the way back from Canada, he wanted to discuss.

  Nathaniel Branden had actually phrased in his mind exactly what he wanted to say. He came out with it.

  He could no longer go on as things were between them. He loved his wife, Barbara, and was in many ways happily married, but he felt in his loins an urging that Barbara did not satisfy. “It could only be satisfied, Ayn, by you.”

  He was not John Galt, he said, referring to the fabulist hero of Atlas Shrugged, a man handsome beyond description, intelligent beyond peer, dominant beyond comparison. But in years of association with her, he said, inexorably he knew that the union they had accomplished intellectually cried out for enhancement. In his thought, Nathaniel had deployed the perfect word to describe what he did not want.

  “I don’t want a Platonic relationship.”

  Ayn looked with her great eyes at her enchanted, enchanting, virile junior by twenty-five years. She stood, walked to the door, locked it, and then pulled down the shade.

  She took his hand and drew him down on the sofa.

  26

  IN PLANNING HIS RETURN to Belmont and the meeting with Bob Welch, Woodroe called Jesse Andrews. They chatted for a bit about the national election results and the missile crisis in Cuba: “Bob’s bulletin analyzing that scandal will be in the mail in a couple of days. It is very long—thirty-six pages.”

  “Are we still on for tomorrow afternoon, a conference with you and Bob?”

  “Yes. We want to talk to you about General Walker and other things. But you shouldn’t plan to go back to Dallas. The Walker operation is on hold, pending the lawsuits and all that business. But Bob has an idea, and I fully endorse it: We need a presence in the pro-Communist, cultural capital of the United States. And you know I got to mean New York City. So come in about three o’clock, but plan to return to New York in a day or two. We’ll go over the whole Dallas business.”

  Bob Welch looked older than he had even two months ago. He was, as ever, civil and courteous. He tried to make his asseverations in soft-spoken tones. He said almost parenthetically that the arrest of General Walker and “the attempt to pronounce him insane” was a straightforward strike by the Communist arm within the government but this time they had really overdone it, what with the flagrant denial of civil liberties. “They will face the consequences.”

  Woodroe listened. He waited for Welch to go on to discuss the future of Edwin Walker. Welch said nothing further about Walker, so Woodroe prompted him. “Bob, the general’s problems with the U.S. marshals in Oxford came after he made his press statement and the Q & A that followed. There was something . . . not quite right there in that statement.”

  “The general was rattled.”

  “Bob, in the first place, nothing rattles Edwin A. Walker. He wouldn’t have been rattled at Hiroshima. In the second place, he prepared that statement for the press in Dallas, two days before he delivered it. He even tried it out on Helena.”

  Robert Welch gave the smile Woodroe had
seen before, seen several times in the fourteen months he had spent in Belmont. It meant: I have heard your position, now let us move on.

  “General Walker is an American hero and he is a dedicated anti-Communist and that means he will be misrepresented and persecuted. That, really, is all we need to know in order to proceed with our plans concerning him.”

  Jesse broke in. “But that doesn’t mean, Woody, that we’re saying you need to go back to Dallas—”

  “Right,” Welch amplified. “What we needed you for there needs . . . no further attention, at this point. Helena Crowder is topflight. And she has a young man in tow, Jonathan Summers, a graduate of South-west Texas recommended by Senator Tower. He can do some of the work you were prepared to do.

  “No. Where I want you, Woodroe Raynor, is in New York City. Largest city in the United States and, after Washington, the most corrupt ideologically—the most pro-Communist–oriented—and our membership there is very low. . . . We need in New York a—if you will excuse it, Woodroe—a nice, bright, presentable young man who can go to meetings, speeches, forums, and identify himself as a representative of the John Birch Society. And have the chance to get into the public forum on the subject of the Communist movement and the subversive failure of the United States government to contend with it.”

  “Yes, Bob, and I like the idea. Jesse tipped me off to it on the phone yesterday, so I’ve had a chance to think about it. And I’ve checked in New York at your office. You have at this point exactly one paid secretary in New York and enough office space for a handful of volunteers. Do I go in there with a budget to expand that operation?”

  “We’re not thinking so much of increased membership in New York as we are of heightened presence. Most anti-Communist activity in New York is, well, free—free admission, I mean. People are welcome to come in. The key character in New York is Marvin Liebman. He raises the money and organizes letterheads—the whole thing—for most of the anti-Communist organizations in New York. The key outfit of the Liebman operations is the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the United Nations. He also runs Young Americans for Freedom—your old outfit—and a half dozen other fronts. You need to get to know him.”

  “I met Liebman at the Sharon conference.”

  “Good. Cultivate him.”

  “And what about a budget?”

  “We don’t have much spare change. Your salary would remain the same, but with an expense account of—What would be reasonable, Jesse?”

  “I don’t see how you could take anybody to a ham sandwich in New York on less than”—he looked up at the Founder for approval—“a hundred bucks a week?”

  Robert Welch stood up after nodding his head. “I have to copyread my report on the missile crisis.” He extended his hand.

  Woodroe took it.

  After two hours’ debriefing by Jesse on the situation in Dallas, Woodroe went to his hotel room, a sandwich and a beer in hand from the local delicatessen.

  On the phone he gave Leonora the good news. “It’s now confirmed. I’ll be staying in New York. So don’t pack my bags, Lee.”

  “I wouldn’t pack your bags, Woody, unless I was going off somewhere with you. Maybe Budapest?”

  Woodroe winced. “That’s a bad memory, Hungary. One day I’ll tell you about my first night—my only night, actually—in Hungary.”

  “Did you misbehave?”

  “Not by Miss Rand’s standards. It was . . . consensual.”

  “Can’t wait. Woody, be sure to watch at 9 P.M. the president’s fireside chat. Joan Mitchell has a contact at CBS and got an advance copy. Our movement is having some effect on the White House. Your people at John Birch are hitting hard on big government; ours at the NBI are also hitting hard on big government.

  “Anyway, the president’s going to say that we have to have tax reductions effective January 1, 1963. He’s going to announce that Walter Heller, his chief economic adviser and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has so advised him, so the administration’s tax-reduction program is ‘top priority.’ JFK will say, here is his language exactly—I have the speech—that ‘the case for a tax cut is independent of recession and rests on the long-continued existence of the gap between capacity and spending and the absence of any reason to suppose that the gap will close itself.’ How do you like that, Woody?”

  “I like it fine. Maybe we can sign Kennedy up!”

  “First we’ll give him twelve lectures by Nathaniel.”

  They spoke a full hour. Finally, “Just think, Lee. I won’t see you again—till tomorrow.”

  “Unless there’s a Communist takeover.”

  “Fuck you, Goldstein.”

  “Well, you’ve practiced at that, Raynor. Good night, my love.”

  27

  WOODROE WROTE TO MARVIN Liebman. Liebman’s command station on Lexington and Thirty-eighth Street was only nine blocks from the Birch office. In the letter, Woodroe recalled their meeting in Sharon at the founding of YAF and congratulated Liebman on the success of the big YAF rally at Madison Square Garden, less than two years after Sharon. Liebman was friendly and talkative on the phone about the prospects for 1963. Woodroe was in turn talkative. He told Marvin he was eager to exchange thoughts on the anti-Communist enterprise. He told him that he had had direct experience with the Communists in Hungary, that he had graduated from Princeton in 1961 and had gone to work directly for Welch, and that he had been at Oxford when General Walker was there, and could they meet for lunch?

  Sure, Marvin said. What about tomorrow?

  That was no good. “I’ve got to be in Princeton.” He would not disappoint Professor Romney. “Friday?” Liebman suggested. They made the date.

  The arrangement was as usual. Woodroe would go to the apartment on Nassau Street. Professor Romney’s seminar (“Go West, Young Man,” it was informally dubbed) ended at five. “We’ll have cocktails and then dinner, skip the sherry,” the professor told him. “I’ll have a few minutes on my painting. I’m still having trouble with Mount Olympus, though I’ve sketched it three times and have National Geographic photos of it. They were an improvement on what you sent me. But thanks, anyway. I already told you. It continues to elude me. Did you stare at it as a boy? I’m sure you did. Perhaps the common experience accounts for our elevated view of all matters. Maybe you will give me a critique. Bring your sunglasses—I have used very bright colors. The Soviet feint into Cuba in October was a mighty precedent. Foreign powers, if they are sufficiently hostile, now know they can with impunity bring nuclear weapons to U.S. beaches and vacation for a few weeks. I received your postcard from Memphis last October. You sounded as if you expected to spend the rest of your life trying to get back to Dallas.”

  Woodroe arrived early enough for squash with his friend Elmer, who was now a senior. They had competed vigorously in squash for two undergraduate years. Elmer Gantry (his parents—they married at age nineteen—had thought it a huge joke to name him after the popular novel deriding clerical hypocrisy) was very solemn in the matter of his squash game, and absolutely unconcerned about all other matters, including foreign policy. He told Woodroe that Communism “would take care of itself after a while—everybody will get tired.”

  “Tired like those zippy missiles the exhausted Commies sent around?”

  Elmer shrugged and walked over to his side of the court.

  A half hour later Woodroe didn’t give evidence of it, affecting nonchalance, but he was privately elated that he had won the game. He enjoyed Elmer’s company, and enjoyed defeating him in squash. He showered, put his pants and jacket back on, and walked over toward Nassau Street.

  Not having visited Romney since before his trip to Texas, Woodroe knocked before entering the apartment.

  “Come in. That you, Woodroe?” The voice came from above. Theo Romney was hard at work at his painting.

  Supper was brought in by the student delivery service. Romney asked for more details about what Woodroe had seen and heard in Dallas and
Oxford, and then turned to the broader question.

  “It looks to me as though the Communists are retaining the initiative,” Romney said. “They’ve given us a kind of ultimatum—no more blockades. They’ve won on every front—Bay of Pigs, Berlin, missile development, and they’re cranking up an initiative in Southeast Asia. The Republican Party is having a hard time articulating a foreign policy. No matter what JFK does, Americans love him. I don’t know whether you people in the Birch Society can do anything to call public attention to how it’s going, but your man Welch has to be careful.”

  “About what?”

  “About giving the impression that everybody in the United States is a Soviet agent.”

  “He doesn’t say that.”

  “I know. But he gives that impression. Tell me about your girlfriend . . . Leonora?”

  “Yes. Leonora Pound. She’s an . . . objectivist.”

  “You told me that. She works for Ayn Rand. I read The Fountainhead a while back. You read it?”

  “Of course. It was easier going than Atlas Shrugged.”

  “I told you I haven’t done that. Maybe I’ll take it along if I ever do another mountain hike. I think what it’s telling you is that steep mountains are nothing for true believers.”

  “You mean true nonbelievers.”

  “Yes, I know Rand is a worked-up atheist. Nonfaith can move mountains, is her motto.”

  Woodroe smiled and poured another glass of the red wine. “She’s certainly consistent in her antistatist positions.”

  “Yes. And from what I’ve read, she wants the conservative philosophy to be as . . . inhuman as the characters in her books. She wants to contend against the Communists by urging us to use reason. I’ve got nothing against reason. Do you, Woody? Though I can’t remember your using any reason in my class.”

  Again Woodroe smiled. He had scored the highest grade in Professor Romney’s class and he knew that he had earned it.