In a New York Times article published during the anniversary of Atlas Shrugged in September 2007, one of the quoted people, a president of an investment firm, praised Ayn Rand for the great gift she left the world. Along with this, and as a negative counterweight, she was quoted as saying, Rand was not a "nice person," a subjective appraisal that her financial expertise would not qualify her to make.
This negative appraisal was a continuation of a long-standing, media campaign against one of the most benevolent human beings ever to walk the face of the earth. Over and over again, since entering the public arena, Ayn Rand and her philosophy have been portrayed in a negative and primitive light in the media, as if both are advocates of the very thing Ayn Rand fought against: life as death.
The portrait of Objectivism as a dark-age, Neanderthal philosophy of dog-eat-dog Darwinism has always been a theme of those who emotionally opposed the philosophy. In the seventies, one of the very first books about Ayn Rand, was by an author named William O'Neill, who wrote a book called, Charity Toward None. O'Neill misinterpreted everything Ayn Rand said, and then tried to paint her and Objectivism as a heartless philosophy without compassion and benevolence.
The attempt to paint Ayn Rand in a negative light was and still is an on-going process. Apparently, when it comes to Ayn Rand, some people think they can drop all attempts at objectivity, and like William O'Neill establish a fantasy-world picture of the great author without any attempt at capturing the facts.
I emphasize this because some people criticize Ayn Rand for her fierce protection of her philosophy and her displays of anger, casting aspersions toward her personality that she wasn't a "nice person," as if she was hosting a ladies' tea party and not fighting the world. What would these people do if they were fighting a life-and-death battle all alone, and one's enemies lacked the simple courage of naming correctly what they opposed about your philosophy, and resorted to misinterpretation the vast majority of the time?
The simple prejudice in judging Ayn Rand has always stood out for those of independent mind. In this mode, and as an example of how she is judged, one could compare Ayn Rand's life to a man who also was fighting a life-and-death battle, Che Guevara. With Guevara, one sees that he was not reluctant to take a man's life if that man threatened the Cuban Revolution. On more than one occasion, Guevara, using the Cuban Revolution as his measuring stick, ordered the death of men, who he deemed traitors or counter-revolutionaries. Thus, a man advocating an ideology based on serving and sacrificing for the community or a "better world" imposed the strictest of measures to those who threatened its existence.
In contrast, Ayn Rand, the advocate of rule law and constitutional rights, had to suffer the arrows of her enemies—enemies, many times, too craven and cowardly in their approach to face her head-on as an ancient Viking warrior, or a knight of the Round Table, would face his enemy.
Many years ago I read an article about the life of the actor Paul Robeson, where the writer compared his life to a caged lion, strong, bold, full of life, but condemned to living his life walking around in an iron cage. I, often, thought this was a good comparison to most great people, head and shoulders above other people, condemned to travel at 35 mph hour while they have the talent, strength and ability to travel at 70.
I have, often. thought what it was like to be Ayn Rand, totally alone in the world with a gestating philosophy living inside of her, and a hostile world confronting her at every turn. No doubt, for those who admire her, this is a good point to think about and try to imagine. It is especially good point for those who try to exploit every blemish she may have had, or any kind of human feeling she may have displayed.
This is especially relevant to many of the so-called "open" school of Objectivism, many of its members undecided, at times, as to whether they should love or hate Ayn Rand. It is also relevant to the many young Objectivists, many still in their intellectual diapers, who think they have to criticize Ayn Rand or make definite statements about where she went wrong.
In speaking about Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, in "My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand," states that he was around nice people all his life and learned nothing, so a little anger from Ayn Rand was worth the price. Knowledge comes at a price and perhaps anger on the part of one's teacher, instructor or mentor is part of that price. Nice people will only cater to what other people want to hear, manufacturing an image of life that extracts reality out of the picture. No doubt, this is a choice each individual makes, some time in one's life. With Ayn Rand, the facts of reality were always of prime importance, and this is what made her a world-moving, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, perhaps never to be repeated again.
The Great Woman's Life
The life and legacy of Ayn Rand casts a giant shadow. She is an enormous historical figure, and her achievements are monumental. She came to the United States at 21 with a weak dominance of English and not only became a best-selling author in a foreign language alien to her native tongue, but stamped her books with her philosophy of life. Later on, she emerged as a philosopher, publishing her non-fiction works that would define and expand her beloved Objectivism. Even beyond this, she became a radio and television personality, spreading her philosophy before the world with her fearless demeanor of confidence and intellectual certainty on all the popular shows of that time--Mike Wallace, Phil Donohue, Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder.
To conceptualize the ground covered by Ayn Rand is to walk in the footsteps of a giant personality. Her achievements are beyond enormous, and enter into the realm of non-comparable when one relates her to other people of her time. What other public figure would one name to compare with her? Without a doubt, she has achieved a level of human accomplishment that puts her in the rarefied realm of sui generis: in a class of her own.
At the philosophical level, she was an extraordinary innovator; at the heroic level she compares to Joan of Arc and had the heart of a lion; at the literary level she spars with the giants; at the life-experience level, she had an amazing range of real-life experiences; and on the personal level, she was a warm and extraordinarily benevolent human being.
Ayn Rand challenged the philosophy and morality of American society—the ethics of self-sacrifice and the epistemology that supported these ethics. In the face of a hostile culture, she was a fearless crusader, a warrior for the most castigated of all minorities—the individual. A novelist and philosopher she holds the unique position of having her philosophy illustrated in best-selling novels with her ideal man as the centerpiece of her view of the world.
Compare her to other historical figures and there is no comparison. She is like an enormous skyscraper dwarfing and overshadowing her contemporaries. She emerges as a Herculean giant. She is the lone genius with the vision of a world-mover, a veritable Atlas defending and holding the civilized world on her shoulders.
Even more, she fought for her vision of the world and her novels as she wanted them to be published. Not only did she achieve best-seller status but she did it in a language that was not her mother tongue. When one has accomplished another language and experienced the myriad difficulties, twists and slants of a different tongue, one can readily appreciate what she accomplished. If Ayn Rand, an immigrant in a strange world, wrote best-selling cookbooks or romance novels it could be rated as a unusual achievement. But she not only published in a foreign language writing her books exactly as she wanted them written, but she shot to the top of the best-seller lists doing it against the collectivist current of the "Red Decade."
Compare her to Isabel Paterson or Frank Lloyd Wright, contemporaries of her day, and the illuminating vision of Ayn Rand stands head and shoulders above the pessimism and mysticism of Paterson, and the chaotic private life of Frank Lloyd Wright. With Ayn Rand, her great crime was that she sought the soaring mountaintops of intellectual giants while being held prisoner in the commonality of everyday life.
To conceptualize her accomplishments is to remain awestruck by the sheer scope of what she accomplished and the formidable barriers she faced. She was subject to some of the most intense hostility and slander—and outright irrational hatred ever seen in the intellectual arena. For many, the need to be rational and intellectual in regards to Ayn Rand seemed to fly out the window, and as with many great people, her existence unleashed a torrent of buried and sometimes unconscious hostility and rage.
Ayn Rand has been criticized and attacked by many who are quick to jump on any bandwagon adverse to Ayn Rand, but who never seem to have any answers of their own to the state of the world. Mostly, they crouch on the sidelines and toss darts from a safe position but when it comes to answers, they come up empty-handed and seem to be more comfortable arguing amongst themselves or with others, than they are with positive solutions to match those of Ayn Rand.
When these people attack Ayn Rand, they never mention that Ayn Rand was the first one to give a moral foundation to a free individual and a free society. She is the first one to rationally challenge the morality of self-sacrifice and point out that it is the enemy of a free, open-market society. She is the first one to place the blame of the tragedy of the world on the morality of altruism, and state that it is a living contradiction to the concept of self-interest inherent in the foundation of capitalism. She is the first one to state that the purpose of morality is man's happiness and his survival as a man, and that this and not self-sacrifice, is the basis of a free-market society.
Even more, Ayn Rand has been instrumental in showing the link between reason and individualism, and that the whole foundation of individualism sits at the foot of a free mind exploring and understanding the world. In fact, she goes on to point out that reason is individualism, and that Kant's attack on reason was an attempt to undercut it and establish the basis for a morality of duty and self-sacrifice—a morality at the base of and responsible for the human blights called fascism, communism and religious fundamentalism.
In this regard, Ayn Rand is the first one to supply the philosophical foundations for a free society. She has stressed repeatedly that when service to others and self-sacrifice are the moral foundations of a society, what is to prevent a dictator from imposing this morality. If under an altruist morality, people are "too selfish" to voluntarily adapt to the "moral ideal" what prevents a dictator from "forcing" them to be unselfish. If service to others is the moral ideal, how can one make any "selfish" attempt to defend one's life?
In her writings, she points out that America's intellectual leadership has "collapsed and abdicated." Intellectuals, the conveyor belts of knowledge to a society, now openly deny the power of the intellect. They proclaim the mind is impotent, reason unreliable and that man cannot know the facts of reality. According to most intellectuals, the purpose of morality is to teach men to sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. In essence, she proclaims we are heading toward a new dark ages—a collapse of civilization and the philosophical foundations that support it.
It would be hard to envision what Ayn Rand was fighting without understanding the world she lived in and battled against. Time and time again, especially in the early, formative years of Objectivism, one could witness the hostility and irrationality of many people toward Ayn Rand, illustrating how ingrained fears, resistance to change, and willingness to suffer are traits inherent in a large portion of the population that, many times, overrides a reasoned and rational argument. Rather than willingly accepting or at least exploring a vision of an untainted world, many people in their need to conform and belong, will do anything in their power to destroy it.
If one goes back to the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943 as a starting point for an understanding of what Ayn Rand was facing, the portrait reveals itself in startling detail. In reading The New York Times on the day of Lorine Pruette's supportive review of The Fountainhead, the image of a heroic and valiant battle against a totally hostile culture begins to shape and form. Slowly, Ayn Rand, like a fierce Viking warrior, entered the battleground, alone and without allies—her only weapons being her mind and her fierce determination to succeed.
Even before this, on completing We the Living in 1934, she fought a run-up skirmish to The Fountainhead with her battle to have her first major novel published by Macmillan. The thirties—or the so-called "Red Decade"—was marked by a great deal of sympathy and support for Marxism in intellectual circles. The "Noble Experiment" of communism that was playing out in Russia was considered the fashionable ideology for the intellectual elite. The horror Ayn Rand had escaped in Russian was now being talked about in intellectual circles as the unstoppable wave of the future and the hope for a better world.
Professionally, there was no respite for Ayn Rand. She had to battle on every front. In the early years, there was the struggle first to have Woman On Trial produced at the Hollywood Playhouse, and latter to see Night of January 16th go through a run on Broadway. In both of these situations, she thought the best of her work was being undercut or misunderstood.
Later on with the publication of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and her rise to prominence in the culture, she endured a flak of hostility and slander, that spoke of a full-fledged intellectual war from every established media outlet of the culture. The established forces were out for blood and Ayn Rand had no defenders or supporters to portray her side of the picture. She was alone with only a tiny, toddling child called Objectivism as her ally.
Ayn Rand's experience with making the movie of The Fountainhead is detailed by both Barbara Branden and Jeff Britting in their books. By all accounts, it was a harrowing experience where she felt her philosophy and ideas were misunderstood and assaulted from all sides, and her theme of individualism weakened by the performance of Gary Cooper.
Later on, her experience with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) left her disillusioned with the forces supposedly fighting communism, and their ability to intellectually counter the communist threat in the movies. The film clip of Ayn Rand appearing before the HUAC committee that appears in the documentary Sense of Life, is a perfect example of what she had to face and try to overcome. Here, one sees a young Ayn fighting bravely to impart the message of a totalitarian state while one of the committee members inquires if "Russians aren't like other people" as if he didn't know or didn't want to know about knocks at the door at midnight, summary executions, trials without legal protection, imprisonments at the whim of the government, mass starvation, and what is worse, a silent and unmoving world.
One wonders what kind of thoughts went through her mind after an experience like that, a refugee from a nightmare, who finds that in her new world people are calling her nightmare "the great social experiment" and intellectuals—the so-called people of the mind—are openly embracing an ideology that would make them one of the first casualties.
Alone and without financial support, she fought against an army of supporters of communist Russia and intellectuals sympathetic to a society where individualism was a criminal act and the individual's purpose in life was to serve the collective wishes of the Communist Party.
Think about this. You are a young, struggling writer and you have no power over who will accept and publish your book. You know that publishing your book could give you more financial stability, a more influential name, and maybe the opportunity to work full-time on your writing instead of laboring in a job that saps much of your vital, creative energy.
Isn't there a great temptation here to compromise, to go with the flow a little, and get that book published? Isn't there a temptation to take the financial security and take shelter in the softer life? Yet, she did none of this. She stayed the course, went through twelve rejections of The Fountainhead, and came out through the light at the end of the tunnel.
Can you conceive of The Fountainhead being rejected twelve times by living and breathing human beings? Can you imagine what type of thoughts went through her head when a book of this grandeur gets rejected by the elite of the Manhattan publishing world? Can you imagine the things you have to tell yourself to keep on moving, to keep on believing, to keep on writing—to sustain a belief in a benevolent universe?
What do you tell yourself when the editorial board of a publishing house thinks your book approaches genius in its power of expression, but rejects it anyway because they think it won't sell because of its greatness? The book was not rejected for its mediocrity or its flaws but for its power of its expression and its excellence of stature. What do you tell yourself to recover from this type of rejection? What type of devices do you develop to go on working in this type of atmosphere with no one to help you or to shore up your spirits? Only Frank O'Connor, the noble man of spirit, stood by her side and watched the whole spectacle take place, describing it one time as, "You're handing out pearls and getting only pork chops in return."
In her Journals, Ayn Rand talks about people who told her privately how much they liked and admired the The Fountainhead—people who were in a position to help her—but instead remained silent. Isabel Paterson, her friend and a newspaper columnist, had a chance to review the book in print and give it a tremendous push forward. Instead, she refused the opportunity and remained silent in public.
And through all this Ayn Rand endured, and was able too see her way through the malevolent universe vision of Dominique, Gail Wynant and Steven Mallory, and give the world the benevolent and uplifted, love-of-life vision of Howard Roark.
Not only did Ayn Rand have to fight a formidable enemy but she had to do it all alone. She had to face one of the heaviest bombardments of intellectual flak ever witnessed in the realm of ideas, and she also had to face the terrible disappointment of those who were supposedly the defenders of capitalism, letting her down and in most cases opposing her.
In this sense, one of her most vociferous enemies was William F. Buckley, the conservative author and founder of National Review, who regularly wrote or sponsored unfavorable articles of Ayn Rand in his magazine. One of these articles was called "Saint Ayn" published in 1967 with her picture on the cover wearing a halo, alluding to her as Saint Ayn, a sneaky illusion to Objectivism as a cult movement. Even more disappointing intellectually, was the spectacle of one of the most prominent writers at National Review, asserting for many years that the popularity of The Fountainhead was due to the bold, sexual parts of the book. Of course, along with all this, Buckley was heir to the infamous Whittaker Chambers smear and slander of Atlas Shrugged printed and published in National Review that disposed of Ayn Rand as if she was the archenemy, to be opposed and defeated instead of communism, fascism and religious authoritarianism.
At the same time as the flak from the National Review crowd was appearing, the Human Potential Movement in psychology was attacking Ayn Rand for her concepts of rational self-interest, individualism and her support of capitalism. The psychologist, Albert Ellis—noted for his Rational-Emotive psychology—attacked her for her concept of egoism and referred to Objectivism as a religious movement in a book written about the subject, called Is Objectivism A Religion? In her book on rape, Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller referred to Ayn Rand negatively as a traitor to her sex. Jerome Tuccille wrote a book called, It Usually Starts with Ayn Rand. In the book, he uses ridicule and satire against Ayn Rand, describes Objectivism as a cult, and includes an account of Murray Rothbard's experience with Objectivism that never occurred. In 1973 William O'Neill wrote a book about Objectivism called With Charity Toward None. More than anything, the book was a vision of O'Neill's inner beliefs, where he set-up an imaginary world to debate with and wrote the book on this basis. Practically, nothing he discussed, short of her name and the name of her philosophy, pertains to Ayn Rand and her philosophy.
The mainstream media also maligned and distorted her message when it wasn't ignoring her. The standard procedure was to criminally distort her writing, and then criticize the straw man. Most times, she was referred to as a conservative or a right-winger, usually mentioned in relation to capitalism, and almost never mentioning her revolutionary message in regards to reason and the morality of self-interest, or her writings on the destructive nature of altruism. For example, the writer Claudia Pierpont wrote a distorted and biased article about Ayn Rand for The New Yorker, and never once mentioned a fundamental concept of Objectivism—the war against altruism and self-sacrifice as the fundamental cancer of our society.
The left-wing media also took part in the carnage. In the documentary about Ayn Rand's life by Michael Paxton called Sense of Life, Al Ramrus, the director of 60 Minutes talks about the rampant hostility directed toward Ayn Rand, displayed, many times, by people who had not read her work. He speculates that if they read her work they were in danger of opening their eyes to another way of life. He quotes the novelist Saul Bellow, a liberal, as saying that during the sixties Manhattan was an intellectual annex to Moscow, and goes on to say, "if it was that way for Saul Bellow think what it like was for Ayn Rand."
When The Fountainhead was published in the forties, Diana Trilling, the Susan Sontag of her time, railed against the amount of paper used to publish the book during wartime. Granville Hicks, an influential left-wing intellectual, member of the American Communist Party and editor at Macmillan, tried to have The Fountainhead rejected and gave it a very negative review. Many years later, the writer Nora Ephron, who wrote a book called Wallflower at an Orgy ridiculed the idealistic struggle of Howard Roark, and like Hillary Clinton would expound about the naive, adolescent Ayn Rand stage. Speaking about The Fountainhead in a 1998 New York Magazine quotation, she said, "It is better read when one is young enough to miss the point. Otherwise, one cannot help thinking it is a very silly book."
I lived in New York during the seventies and attended classes in Objectivism at the Hotel McAlpin. I also experienced the battleground that was then New York. It was not a pretty picture. To many eyes, civilization was collapsing and except for Ayn Rand and her followers, there seemed to be no answer. The Left was at its ascendancy, and America and capitalism were smeared at every opportunity, to say nothing of individualism which was openly equated with racism and fascism. In fact, almost anyone with an individualistic view was smeared as a fascist, and Ayn Rand was a major target.
The hostility toward Ayn Rand came from all sources, and to be sure, she had almost no allies amongst the business or professional communities. Indeed, the country was torn apart by racial conflict and the Vietnam War, and undergoing a tremendous upheaval in social, sexual viewpoints and mores. Rational thought and productive behavior were labeled as conspiring with the hated establishment. "If it feels good, do it," was a popular motto, supposedly an act of rebellion in defiance of the rigid conservatism of the fifties and early sixties. Even more, there was a tendency in the media centers, and especially amongst the New Left, to label any type of assertive behavior and intellectual certainty as fascism. The mode was rebellion and defiance of the established ways. Even Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher and hero of the New Left, commented critically of the anti-intellectualism of many of his followers and their anarchistic, hell-bent-for-leather contempt for philosophic thought and rational behavior.
No matter from what arena the criticism came from, in dealing with Ayn Rand, one almost never saw an intellectual or rational argument. Almost never mentioned were the fundamental themes of life and death, individualism versus collectivism, rational self-interest versus altruism. Also missing were any serious discussions of the quality of her writing compared to other famous writers, her characterizations, craftsmanship, her fierce battle against a hostile culture, or any acknowledgement of her success as a writer even though she was writing in a second language.
The usual format still common to this day is to see her major books described as "wordy" or "silly" or "misguided" or "naive" or "preposterous." The real kicker and the dead giveaway of what type of personality one is dealing with is when one hears her books are read "for the juicy sexual parts." In over 40 years of reading about Ayn Rand, I can count on my right hand the number of rational criticisms, I have witnessed in regard to her novels and philosophy. For the most part, the critiques are distorted and biased, so filled with prejudice and irrationality, it precludes further comment.
Academics of Ivory Tower fame and some in the libertarian world, chastise Ayn Rand for her anger. But what would one expect to emerge from a person who was fighting an entire world alone, not to conquer it—but to set it free and teach it how to be happy? What can one expect to emerge from the lone creator treading down a path the rest of the world feared to tread, and gaining mostly hostility for her blood, sweat and tears? How much flak can one person endure without the help of allies without reacting in anger? Yes, slowly the young of independent mind saw her message and gathered to her cause, but what about the bastions of civilization and the business world, who turned their head or stuck it in the ground?
Ayn Rand was like a caged lion sentenced to a life of constant pain and trivial slander, without even the opportunity to battle her opponents face-to-face in open combat. What she faced was not the glorious honor of honest combat but trivial sniping from faceless enemies. She saw her life and family destroyed by communism and suffered the anxiety and terrible isolation of the lone individual against the collective force of a mass movement. She was intelligent enough to know the consequences. She came to the United States and saw the same philosophy of altruism infecting the society and once again had to battle alone and without allies. What others could not see or refused to see, Ayn Rand saw very clearly.
On one of the walls of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street is a painting of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. What he sees on this arrival is the mass of people in an orgy of debauchery, worshipping a false idol, a golden calf. His face is twisted with intense anger and rage. He has spoken with God and returned with a guide for living that he sees as the salvation of the people. And what does he see in his absence? A riot of chaos and anarchy. And he is furious.
Although philosophically Ayn Rand sought a much different world than Moses, the plot is very similar: a Herculean, historical figure striving for the vision of a better world and displaying anger and rage at the results of the mission. Can anyone imagine what it was like to be in her skin? What did she think when she arrived in American to see the country in such a decayed philosophical condition without a voice or a philosophy to defend it? She had traveled an ocean to live in her ideal world and now she found herself under attack once again. She had survived the Russian Revolution and now in America she saw its intellectuals lauding a philosophy of death and enslavement as a "noble experiment."
People familiar with combat veterans know the inevitable effects of battle scars and trauma, and of course one of these effects is anger and rage. Was the plight of Ayn Rand any different? Was her combat any less fatiguing, any less harrowing, any less solitary or lonely? At least in an army one has allies and comrades? Who did Ayn Rand have and who were her allies?
While an author and a philosopher by necessity, Ayn Rand was also a fierce and courageous warrior, a warrior braver and fiercer than Russell Crowe's The Gladiator, and no doubt much more alone in her fight to prevail and survive. Historically, who does one compare her to? Who can stand next to her and who can challenge her fierce determination? And what knowledgeable individual, would criticize her for her anger. As Leonard Peikoff remarks in his tape, "My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand," "She saw things much differently than other people and was quick to see the consequences. She angered when she thought something was detrimental to her vision. But her anger never lasted."
In Sense of Life, Leonard Peikoff again alludes to the reactive anger of Ayn Rand, saying that she reacted so strongly to the anti-mind, anti-reality theories of Kant because if accepted, they negated one's values, one's loves, one's passions--a desired career; a romantic affair; one's friends and interests.
In other words, she angered at the slaughter of life, the destruction of the productive, the innovative, the civilized. In contrast, what do you say about people who view the death of life, and remain silent, unperturbed, and indifferent?
All great people suffer the pangs of living in this world, and for Ayn Rand, and her enormous vision and intelligence, one wonders the true scope of what she had to endure. Most great people endure an extremely arduous journey to their destination. Most likely, their original isolation in the world has taught them they must prevail, and their judgment and vision must reign supreme. Often, this interprets into the complete confidence in their view of the world to the exclusion of all others, an iron-will that must prevail at all costs.
Such disparate and outstanding people as Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Spencer, Picasso, Mozart, H.L. Mencken, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, traveled down lonely and very isolated paths to reach their journey, and had personalities that showed all the effects of being human beings.
Ayn Rand's focus and direction was to the New Intellectual, the man and woman of intelligent mind and independent thought, who was seeking a revolutionary vision for a new and rational world. Rand's powers of communication were extraordinary and more than anyone, she strived to put across in clear, concrete language what she wanted to convey. In this sense, I have to say that Ayn Rand was one of the bravest individuals the world has ever witnessed. She endured the hostility of a thousand lifetimes, and she endured it with dignity and strength. She fought so hard and gave so much.
As she states in Ayn Rand Answers towards the end of her life at a question-and-answer session at one of her lectures. "I am tired of battling low-grade irrationality," going on to say she had battled every type of irrationality she saw. Saying that she didn't mind battling high-grade irrationality if any existed she quotes Leo in We the Living, who said he could summon the strength to fight lions but not lice. She ended by saying she was leaving the fight to others.
She gave so much. May her heroic battle be remembered by all who admire her.
This article is copyright © 2008, by Alan Tucker. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print. Email notification is requested. All other rights reserved.
