Good as Goldwater
My review of Pure Goldwater, a volume of Barry Goldwater’s journals (and some other odds and ends), is now up on Reason‘s website.
I’m reading Bill Buckley’s posthumous Goldwater memoir, Flying High, right now. Here’s one striking anecdote I hadn’t heard before:
… at this dinner [for the 1950s Freeman], Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, causing the eminent professor to stop eating and mobilize his scorn and fury on her. Ayn Rand thereupon burst into tears and exclaimed, “You are treating me like an ignorant little Jewish girl!”
Mises jumped up from his chair with joy. “That is exactly what you are! An ignorant little Jewish girl!”
Rand was not one to be crossed lightly. But even she might have known better than to gainsay Ludwig von Mises.
I’m not a fan of Buckleys 100%, but I think I really want to read that book.
Also, where the hell can I get new books of all the Goldwater auto/biographies, they are all out of print is seems :[.
As Jacques Barzun might say to brent burk, Begin Here:
tinyurl.com/6lefr5
Brent,
If you ever need help finding a rare/out of print book for a good price shoot me an email.
Dylan
That is quite a Mises anecdote.
Is Buckley the only source of the story about Ayn Rand’s dinner confrontation with Von Mises?
Yes, as far as I know he is. And one of the recent books about Buckley — I forget whether it’s in Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup or Rick Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place — says there was some invention in WFB’s Goldwater book. WFB acknowledges as much in the book itself, though he says the fictionalizations were limited to episodes like the conversation between Eisenhower advisers that he imagines taking place before Khrushchev’s famous visit. Still, the Mises-Rand episode should be taken cum grano salis unless another report turns up somewhere.
[...] readers of the Tory Anarchist will remember this post from two years back in which I called attention to a colorful anecdote involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand in [...]