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Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand
By Bill Bradford
Alan Greenspan’s name first appeared in the New York Times not, as one might expect, in connection with politics or economics, but as the author of a 73-word letter to the editor of the Times Book Review. The future head of the Federal Reserve wrote to protest a hostile review of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged that had appeared a few weeks earlier.
It was the fall of 1957. By this time, Greenspan had abandoned a career as a jazz saxophonist, earned a degree at New York University’s School of Commerce, enrolled in and abandoned the Ph.D. program at Columbia, worked as staff economist with what today would be called a think tank, and become a partner in a Wall Street economic forecasting firm.
Alert readers noticed Greenspan’s name in the Times again seven weeks later, this time in Lewis Nichols’ column “In and Out of Books.” The subject was a group of admirers of Ayn Rand, who gathered on Saturday evenings in Rand’s living room “for discussions of philosophy.” Greenspan is listed among members of the group and identified only as “an economic consultant.”
Nichols described the group as a “class,” though he noted that “uncouth outsiders” were apt to use the language of religion rather than education to describe it. That may have been the last time Rand’s following was described as a class; as her acolytes grew in number and devotion, it gradually came to be treated as a religion and, increasingly, as a cult. At its head stood Nathaniel Branden, a psychotherapist 25 years Rand’s junior. He lectured on Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism,” co-edited (with Rand) The Objectivist Newsletter (later The Objectivist), and controlled access to Rand. He recently described the beliefs of the cult in these words: “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter of any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth.”
From its modest origin in the early 1950s, Rand’s following grew rapidly. By the mid-1960s, over 20,000 copies of The Objectivist were selling each month, and people in more than 80 cities were gathering around tape recorders to listen raptly to Nathaniel Branden Institute lectures.
But all was not going well. Unbeknownst to everyone but their spouses, Rand and Branden had been having an affair since the mid-1950s, and by now Branden wanted out. This led to a bizarre chain of events, culminating with Rand calling Branden to her apartment, where she slapped him around and cursed him (“If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you’ll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve any potency, you’ll know its a sign of still worse moral degradation.”). In the next issue of The Objectivist, she repudiated Branden “totally, permanently” because of a “disturbing change” in “his intellectual attitude,” to wit, “a tendency toward non-intellectual concerns.” She also charged him with poor management of their jointly owned publishing effort and detailed some of the events that had led to their split. She did not mention he had jilted her.
As I learned in hours of interviews with their associates, Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle during this entire period and beyond. He lectured on economics for the Nathaniel Branden Institute. He wrote for the first issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, and when Rand broke with Branden, he signed a public statement condemning the traitor “irrevocably.” When Gerald Ford appointed him to the Council of Economic Advisors, he invited Rand to his swearing-in ceremony, and attended her funeral in 1982.
Greenspan was introduced to Rand by Joan Mitchell, a young woman he was dating. She was a friend of Barbara Weidman, Nathaniel Branden’s fiancée and already a member of the group of young admirers who met in Rand’s apartment. “I was not really able to interest him in Objectivism,” Joan Mitchell Blumenthal recalls. She and Greenspan married, but quickly discovered they had little in common. It was only after their marriage was annulled that “he started showing up at Ayn’s, a strange turn of events.”
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