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WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957–1968
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and the remaining members of Circle Bastiat. When the dust settled,
Rothbard had lost both Reisman and Hessen to the Collective. In a gesture
of high drama Joey Rothbard mailed each a torn dollar bill, symbolizing
their broken connection. Filled in on the accusations, outsiders
like Schoeck, the National Review editor Frank Meyer, and Richard
Cornuelle dismissed Rand and her group as “crackpots.” They found
her accusations of plagiarism groundless. The ideas that Rand claimed
as her own, Schoeck noted, had been in circulation for centuries. Still
constrained by his phobia, Rothbard was unable to attend the conference
as planned. 30
The incident left Rothbard with a deep hatred of Rand and her followers.
He was profoundly traumatized by the hostility of Nathan, with
whom he had shared deeply private information during therapy. Just
as bad was the defection of Reisman and Hessen, longtime friends who
now accused him of immorality and intellectual dishonesty. Rothbard
was shaken to the core. He scrawled a lengthy memo to himself, outlining
nine “fl aws of Randianism” and a separate list of Randian heresies.
He consoled himself with the idea that Nathan’s letter was so unreasonable
his accusations would never be taken seriously. “It is now obvious
to me and everyone else what a contemptible clown Branden is,” he
wrote his parents, concluding, “I’m certainly glad I’m free of that psycho.”
Looking again at Whittaker Chambers’s review of Atlas Shrugged,
Rothbard discovered that he had been warned. He sent Chambers a second,
appreciative letter, apologizing for his fi rst attack and marveling at
Chambers’s ability to identify Rand’s dictatorial nature. Later he would
write a satirical play about Rand, Mozart Was a Red, and a pamphlet
titled The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. 31 He was a powerful enemy
who did everything possible to turn fellow libertarians against Rand.
Despite her longing for recognition, Rand found intellectual interchange
hard to manage. When she did have contact with those prominent
enough to enhance her reputation, she rarely made a positive
impression. It did not take long for her to repel Sidney Hook, a prominent
anti-Communist philosopher at NYU. Hook fi rst heard of Rand
through Barbara Branden and Leonard Peikoff, two of his students. He
was suspicious of the great power Rand held over her followers, who
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