Alan Shrugged: Alan Greenspan, the World’s Most Powerful BankerIn the late winter of 1981 Ayn Rand visited her internist Dr. Murray Dworetzky at his office in Manhattan. She had been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years and Dworetzky was troubled about her health. “You’ve got to stop it,” he told her. “It’s terribly bad for you. It’s dangerous.” “But why?” she demanded. “And don’t tell me about statistics. I’ve explained why statistics aren’t proof. You have to give me a rational explanation. Why should I stop smoking?” A nurse entered the office and handed Dworetzky copies of Rand’s chest X-rays. Dworetzky sighed and pointed to shadows on the film where none should have existed. “That’s why,” he said. “What’s wrong? What is it?” “I’m...sorry. It looks like a malignancy in one lung.” Rand removed the cigarette she had burning in her long black filter with the gold dollar sign embossed along the side, snuffed it out in the ashtray on the doctor’s desk, and put the filter back in her purse. It was the last cigarette she ever smoked but it was already too late. The surgeries and treatment she received during the next few months did little to reverse the downward spiral. She grew weaker and frailer through January 1982 and had to be hospitalized with cardiopulmonary problems in February. The end was drawing near. Rand breathed her last on the morning of March 6, 1982--ironically enough, the fifty-sixth birthday of her most famous protégé, future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rand herself had turned seventy-seven years of age a month earlier. Leonard Peikoff, whom Rand had designated as both her intellectual and financial heir, began to call her acolytes with the news. It was a sad day for all of them, even though it was long expected. The woman whom they had worshiped not only as a mother figure, but as a virtual goddess as well, their philosophical and political leader, was no longer among them, no longer available to guide them through the tricky nuances of life. Rand was laid out at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at Madison Avenue and 81st Street in Manhattan, her adopted home. On the Monday night following her death, hundreds of admirers stood outside in the cold dressed in everything from blue jeans to mink coats awaiting their turn to pay their respects. Between seven and nine o’clock about eight hundred mourners passed somberly by her coffin. A six-foot-long floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign lay in the coffin beside her body. On her breast was a photograph of her deceased husband Frank O’Connor and on her finger was the simple gold wedding band she had worn since Frank placed it there in 1929. Among those passing through for a final look at the woman who had made such a powerful impact on their lives were Greenspan; Robert Bleiberg, editorial director of Barron’s; many leaders of the Libertarian Party; professors from various colleges and universities ranging from Vassar to York University in Toronto; and the remaining members of her so-called “Senior Collective.” Two hundred of Rand’s friends and disciples attended the private burial ceremony in Valhalla, an hour north of New York City. The casket was lowered into her grave on top of a rolling hill as snowflakes blanketed the grass and soil. The deceased novelist/ For those who came to pay their final respects, Rand’s death marked the end of an era. The goddess of laissez-faire capitalism, of rational self-interest, of extremely limited government had managed to infuriate conservatives with her atheism and liberals with her attacks on the welfare state. Now she had passed from the scene, truly one of a kind. For Alan Greenspan, his mentor’s death marked the beginning of a meteoric career no one who knew him could have predicted at the time. |
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