On Mar 2, 2007, at 9:16 PM, Jayson Funke wrote:
Personal, professional, whatever I guess. Who influenced whom etc?
Were they
colleagues, or student/mentor etc?
Greenspan was around 30 when he was hanging with her, so she was
probably the dominant figure.
Here's something <http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16149/
article_detail.asp>:
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.”
Greenspan and Rand didn’t hit it off. According to Nathaniel Branden,
he was philosophically a logical positivist and economically a
Keynesian, both doctrines anathema to Rand. “How can you stand
talking to him?” Rand asked Branden. “A logical positivist and a
Keynesian? I’m not even certain it’s moral to deal with him at
all.” (Barbara Branden doesn’t remember it that way, and neither does
Greenspan. She and Greenspan deny he was ever a Keynesian.)
Nathaniel Branden engaged Greenspan in some “very long and involved
philosophical, metaphysical, epistemological, political, economic,
and moral conversations,” according to Barbara, which soon “had a
profound effect upon him.” He abandoned his positivism and
Keynesianism, and soon, along with other members of the Collective
(as the Rand’s young acolytes ironically called themselves), he was
reading chapters of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written.
“Alan became much warmer, more open, more available,” recalls Barbara
Branden. “I mean Alan will never be Mr. Warmth, that’s just not his
personality and nature. But the dourness, the grimness, the solemnity
that he had when we first met him practically disappeared, I think,
because he accepted us and knew that all of us including Ayn and
Frank accepted him. It was like a family, it really was. And he was
part of that family.”
Not everyone shared Barbara’s opinion. One member of the Collective
recalls, “It’s simply that he is a very cold person. It’s very hard
to know what’s on his mind. Through those thick Coke-bottle glasses,
you can’t even tell that he’s awake sometimes.”
More than one member of the Collective marveled at his ability to
attract beautiful women. “It was incredible how he always had a
beautiful woman at his side,” recalls Barbara Branden. “I think it
was the attraction of his intellectual power and probably his
reserve. You couldn’t knock him over by batting your eyelashes at
him. He certainly had a profound effect on women.” Another member
speculates: “Maybe he was a good kisser, from all those years as a
saxophone player.” His ex-wife Joan Mitchell Blumenthal offers a
different explanation. “He is very clever, he knows a lot about a
million things, and he has a wonderful sense of humor. Alan is
charming and always interesting.”
He remained the odd man out. Rand preferred people who were young and
(as one member of the Collective remembers) “malleable.” But she cut
Greenspan some slack by virtue of his maturity and occupation. “He
was her special pet, because he was older, and in the business
world,” recalls Edith Efron, who joined the Collective a few years
later. “She didn’t know anyone else very well who was a businessman.
I think this was very important to her…she allowed him more
intellectual liberty than she did other people.”
One area where Greenspan was apparently permitted ideological
deviation was economics. The “official” Objectivist theory of
economics was the Austrian theory of Ludwig von Mises, which, among
other tenets, holds that economic forecasting is impossible. The
issue apparently wasn’t discussed, but Greenspan continued his
successful career as an economic forecaster after becoming involved
with Rand. And he never, as one Collective member archly points out,
“attended Ludwig von Mises seminars at New York University, despite
ample opportunity.” (Today, Greenspan describes himself as an
“eclectic, free-market forecaster,” who “generally agrees with
Austrian economics.”)
“He was different,” Barbara Branden recalls. “Which was very wise of
him. He kept his private life to himself, which the rest of us did
not do.” Another recalls he “used to come late to everything and
leave early. And he had his own relationship with [Rand] which was
dignified. And he kept somewhat aloof from everybody, which was a
smart thing to do.”
And he remained a puzzle to some. “Alan Greenspan is incredibly
terse,” one member told me, as if “everything he sends is a telegram
and they’re charging by the word. He’s deliberately low-keyed and
ponderous. On the other hand, he is a musician, so there obviously is
a side of him that has passion and emotion, but…I would say he’s very
guarded. He must be a wonderful poker player.”
Barbara Branden remembers this differently. “Alan had no talent for
and no interest in small talk. So if people around him were engaged
in small talk they wouldn’t get anything from him. I mean that he
would simply stand there and have nothing to contribute. But if there
was something interesting, then he was very social.”
Greenspan was unique among the Collective’s older members. The first
to join, he was virtually the only one not to be expelled. In 1957,
economist Murray Rothbard read Atlas Shrugged and was enchanted. He
wrote Rand an enthusiastic fan letter and was invited into her
movement, only to be expelled less than a year later, ostensibly for
plagiarism. Philosopher John Hospers, who never bought in to all of
Rand’s thinking on epistemology and metaphysics but was sufficiently
sympathetic with her esthetics, ethics, and politics that he was a
frequent guest at Collective gatherings, was expelled instantly in
1962 after he criticized Rand’s address to the American Society for
Esthetics, which he had arranged. Journalist Edith Efron, who had
joined the Collective after she interviewed Rand for Mike Wallace’s
syndicated column, was expelled without explanation in 1967.
Greenspan’s aloofness may have been one reason he survived. Coming to
meetings late, leaving early, he wasn’t very involved in the battles.
John Hospers recalls that “he avoided talk about philosophical issues
altogether,” which also helped keep him above the battles. He was
certainly aloof from the biggest battle of all, the battle between
Rand and Nathaniel Branden in 1968. By this time, he was off working
as a policy advisor to Richard Nixon, who was campaigning for
president. He’d been recruited to the campaign in 1967 by Martin
Anderson, who had become a peripheral member of Rand’s coterie after
reading Atlas Shrugged in the early 1960s. It turned out that an old
friend of Greenspan was also involved in the campaign: Leonard
Garment, who had managed the jazz band in which Greenspan had played
back in the late ’40s, had become Nixon’s law partner and was working
on the campaign. Greenspan quickly became a domestic and economic
policy analyst for Nixon. When Rand and Branden split, Rand asked
Greenspan to repudiate Branden publicly. Without ever speaking to
Branden, he agreed.
After the 1968 campaign, Greenspan returned to economic forecasting
in New York, refusing job offers from the Nixon administration. Six
years later, President Ford offered him a position as chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisors; Greenspan accepted. With Ford’s defeat
in 1977 he returned to private life, but was appointed by Ronald
Reagan to head a special commission on Social Security in 1981. Since
1987 he has headed the Federal Reserve System.
From the start of his political career, questions have arisen about
Greenspan’s political beliefs. Shortly after his appointment to the
Council of Economic Advisors, he was asked on “Meet the Press”
whether he had changed his opinion, published years earlier in a
Nathaniel Branden Institute pamphlet, that anti-trust laws ought to
be abolished. He replied forthrightly that he continued to believe
they should be, but he was well aware that such a move would be
politically unpalatable for the foreseeable future.
Greenspan has also taken flack from other Randians for failing to
implement policies that would radically free the economy. “Alan
Greenspan, whatever his rationalization,” John Ridpath of the Ayn
Rand Institute told an interviewer for the Canadian Broadcasting
Company, has “abandoned any philosophically principled stance” and
“compromised himself and what he learned from Ayn Rand over and over.”
