Wednesday, January 05, 2005

 
RE NRO 1957 Whittaker Chambers on *Atlas Shrugged*("Big Sister Is Watching You")

Well, Kids, I don't have any good stories about Chambers and Ayn Rand, but Roy Cohn had a weird one about her recounted in "The Autobiography of ROY COHN" by Sidney Zion...
J.B. Matthews, a Methodist minister who had recently been appointed staff for the McCarthy committee, was forced from that post after the *American Mercury* "led off" a Matthews article with "The largest group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen." (I haven't the foggiest if that statement was objectively true at the time.) Cohn claimed that Matthews had not written that lead, but that it had been "edited-in by Jack Clements, who ran *American Mercury*." And that Clements turned down a request to publically admit to that, but he, not having "the capacity to understand human decency," refused to do so because this "would destroy the credibility" of his newspaper. McCarthy reluctantly agreed that Matthews had to go, but was unaware of a White House plot to denounce Matthews before McCarthy could announce his decision so that he(McCarthy) would appear to have "knuckled under" to the Eisenhower administration. "To buy the needed minutes, Nixon was put on the case, good old reliable Dick. He buttonholed Joe in the Senate Office Building and kept him in conversation about all sorts of crap..."
Cohn then added a "bizarre footnote" to the Matthews affair. At a "Georgetown cocktail party" he learned that Ayn Rand had her own theory when she asked, "Why did Joe McCarthy sell out to the Communist party?" and then explained that she was referring to "The Matthews case." Cohn was unable to dissuade Rand, who said, "The Commies got to Joe, and you're protecting him."
Cohn concludes the strange tale with, "I saw Ayn Rand a couple of more times over the years. Each time she'd wave her finger at me and say, "Your're going to tell me the truth some day." That poor lady went to her grave believing that the Communist party reached McCarthy and that's why J.B. Matthews had to go. Oh well, nobody's perfect."
True. And the book reviewed by Chambers was far from perfect. Still, in my youth, I liked *parts* of that sprawling comic book, and shared its loathing of Third World countries which expropriated private property. -And would *not* have been amused had the makers of "A Day Without A Mexican"(haven't seen it, but assume that it's a piece of Hispanic Hubris *^%#$!)had decided to call their movie "Aztec Shrugged."