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LOVE IS EXCEPTION MAKING 235
agree, because I didn’t think that physics was corrupt. I could see the
interest in me dying down in her eyes.” 49 Rand could turn her charisma
on and off at will, charming those who paid her proper homage while
freezing out those who did not.
For every NBI student who found Rand harsh or was the target of an
unprovoked rage, there is another who remembers Rand’s sensitivity
and caring. Jan Richman, a Los Angeles NBI representative, described
her fi rst meeting with Rand: “[She] said that I should take my glasses off.
I took them off, and she said, you have very beautiful eyes. You shouldn’t
hide them behind glasses; get contact lenses. I remember I felt like crying.”
Martin Anderson, the author of a controversial book that attacked
federal urban renewal programs, The Federal Bulldozer, was a professor
at Columbia Business School when he and his girlfriend attended an NBI
lecture they saw advertised in the New York Times. There he befriended
Alan Greenspan, who invited him to several smaller events with Rand.
Anderson remembers Rand as a “pussycat,” a warm and caring fi gure. It
was Rand, alone out of a late-night café crowd, who noticed his trouble
and helped prepare his coffee when a broken arm left him unable to
open a package of cream. When Rand learned about his upcoming wedding
she asked to be invited and presented the couple with a wedding
gift. Older, professionally accomplished, and married, Anderson was
insulated from the groupthink and gossip of younger NBI students. His
engagement with Objectivism was purely intellectual. Rand helped him
clarify and unify his long-standing political beliefs, shaping them into
a cohesive and integrated whole that helped direct his future work in
Republican politics. 50
There seemed to be two Objectivisms: one that genuinely supported
intellectual exchange, engagement, and discourse, and one that was as
dogmatic, narrow-minded, and stifl ing as Rand’s harshest critics alleged.
And the closer one got to New York, the more repressive the atmosphere
became, Objectivists noticed. 51 For all their emphasis on reason,
Rand and NBI instructors met intellectual disagreement with invective.
Sometimes the two sides of Objectivism alternated with stunning speed,
leaving Rand’s followers unsure where they stood. A college student who
would pursue a philosophy doctorate at the University of Rochester, and
then a professorial career at Tulane, took Leonard Peikoff’s NBI lecture
series in the summer of 1965. He and several advanced students met
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