83. Memories of Murray

83

DAVID GRANT

MEMORIES OF MURRAY

I CALL THIS “MEMORIES OF MURRAY,” because my interactions with Murray Rothbard have been the most stimulating of my 40+ years of involvement in the libertarian movement.

But first, Walter Block has asked me to write about myself. I’m 61 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. My parents were civil servants, and they (and my older brother) were standard-issue Jewish liberal Democrats. For those of you who inhabited New York in the Fifties and the Sixties, the political mood in our household can best be summarized by my telling you that they read The New York Post every day. (I hasten to add that the Murdoch-owned New York Post of today is 180 degrees different from the Dorothy Schiff-owned Post in my youth!) And they voted for Adlai Stevenson.

Since I was seven, I wanted to be a journalist. When I turned 17, I began work as a copy-boy (that was before liberals morphed the term into “copy-person,” of course) at a Newhouse daily, The Long Island Press. At 19, in 1964, I graduated to my dream job there: I became a reporter. After covering local news in Queens and Nassau counties, I was named New York City Hall reporter and deputy bureau chief for The Press.

In time, I also contributed free-lance articles to several publications, including The New York Times; as a lifelong devotee of The Times—not its politics, but its journalistic standards—this was a high point of my life. But free-lancing rarely pays the bills. And when I lost my life savings ($750) in a poker game in 1973, I had to get a job. (I will mention college below, during my Rothbard reminiscences.)

Let me interrupt to mention two jobs in my life that were decidedly NOT libertarian. (1) In 1966 I was drafted into the United States Army; I served mostly in the Canal Zone as a photographer. (2) Beginning in 1970, I worked in the public affairs office of New York City’s Housing and Development Administration, eventually becoming its director of public affairs. (This was under Mayor John V. Lindsay; talk about “NOT libertarian!”)

Soon thereafter, I took a job as vice president of the politically connected public relations firm Howard J. Rubenstein Associates. After 11 months I quit Rubenstein (in August 1974) and formed my own public relations firm. I have been very active in my industry, including holding many leadership positions in our professional society. My heart remains in journalism, but I am better at public relations than I was as a newspaper-man.

Perhaps as penance for the two un-libertarian things I mentioned above, I named my public relations firm after Mises; the firm is called “LVM Group,” and our clients—3M, Channel 13, the Empire State Building, and others—have no idea what the name stands for.

Which brings me closer to a subject most of you will want to know about: Murray Newton Rothbard.

If you were to ask me, 11 years after Murray died (and many more years since I last spoke with him), what was the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Murray Rothbard now—I’m skipping for the moment the extraordinary brainpower, the powerful books and essays, and the infectious personality—then it would be his cackle. It was not the timbre of the cackle, nor its loudness, nor its length; indeed, it was not a particularly unusual cackle at all. What made Murray’s cackle noteworthy to me was its frequency. Predicting precisely when Murray would cackle was not necessarily easy; what was easy, though, was predicting that it would surely emerge from him very often.

When I think about Murray’s cackle, I am reminded of the title of a long essay he wrote about one of our mutual heroes, the journalist H.L. Mencken. The headline for Murray’s piece referred to Mencken as a “joyous libertarian.” Anyone who spent time with Murray and had frequent exposure to his cackle realized pretty quickly that the mantle “joyous libertarian” had switched easily from Mencken to Murray. (When I attended the Mises seminar in the early Sixties, by contrast, I found Mises anything but joyous; indeed, he appeared extremely dour. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that I was still a teenager, while Mises was then over 80; such an age difference can be quite intimidating!)

But back to Murray. How did I first meet him? I became interested in the conservative movement after, as a high school student, I heard a speech by an unknown Senator named Barry Goldwater (I can even now hear Murray shouting “fascist!” at the mere mention of Goldwater’s name) at Hunter College in May of 1960; he was introduced by William F. Buckley, Jr., by the way. So notable was the occasion that I even think I remember the date: May 14, 1960. I was piqued enough by Goldwater’s passionate speech to buy Conscience of a Conservative.

This was also about the time that I was thinking about college. Just about when I first encountered Goldwater, and I was trying to figure out what to major in, an uncle of mine suggested economics; as a journalist, my instinct was to major in English, but my uncle told me that economics might be more practical for me.

That decision, and my growing interest in the conservative movement, gradually led me to the names of Mises, Hazlitt and Hayek. And I did indeed get my bachelor’s degree in economics at Queens College, which seemed a hotbed of Keynesians to me, and I got half of an M.A. in economics at New York University.

I may have been a sophomore at Queens College when my childhood friend Larry Moss and I started to attend the Mises seminar at New York University. (Larry has gone on to a distinguished career as an author, economist—with a decidedly Austrian bent—and professor at Babson College.) At some point around that time, someone mentioned the name Murray Rothbard to me. I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I remember well that he was described to me as—I am not joking!—“an anarchist dwarf.” And so, of course, I thought that this guy Rothbard must be some kind of wacko, and I hardly gave him another thought. (When I met Murray and saw that he was certainly not unusually short, I discounted the noun—but not the word preceding it.)

As I delved more and more into Austrian economics, I began to wonder about this fellow Rothbard. At some point someone (I cannot recall who) suggested a meeting with him. And so Larry and I trudged to 215 West 88^th Street (sometimes one’s memory can still be good; even now, decades after I last called him, I easily recall the phone number at his apartment: SC-4-1606) for what turned out to be the first of many memorable evenings.

Often those evenings stretched to 3 a.m.; in those days (the early Sixties), New Yorkers did not worry about taking the “A” train back to Queens at such forbidden hours. Larry and I met many memorable people at Murray’s and (his wife) Joey’s apartment, including Edith Efron and Leonard Liggio.

But, of course, it was the “anarchist dwarf” himself who was the engine, the soul and the heart of those evenings. He seemed to love being a host and observing the give-and-take of his guests. Nor was he ever shy; if he ever lacked an opinion about anything, I certainly can’t recall such a moment!

One of the most (of many) notable things about Murray was his occasional reaction when you asked him a question or raised a topic for discussion. His attitude always seemed open and, charmingly, quizzical—I say “charmingly” because Murray was of course quite fixed in his opinions, and yet he didn’t always seem so. (This was quite unlike Mises, from whom Larry and I learned the word “apodictic”; Mises not only loved [and used] that word, but he lived that word himself. But not Murray.)

Let me invent an example, because I can only recall the general phenomenon, rather than a particular instance: I say to Murray something with which the great majority in our circle would accept, such as “Well, of course, Adam Smith has to be one of libertarianism’s greatest 18^th Century heroes.” Murray cocks his head, looks puzzled (NOT angry, not upset, not a hint that he might even slightly disagree) and says, good-naturedly, “Really? Why do you say that?”

It was exactly as if he were questioning something that I had said that was utterly uncontroversial and indeed banal and of virtually no significance—such as, “Well, of course, Washington is the capital of the United States,” “My eyes are brown,” or “Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in Casablanca.”

In other words, one could say things in the presence of Murray with which (it later became obvious to me) he furiously—and apodictically!—disagreed, and yet often his reaction would be the kind of mild response your grandmother might give you if you asked her what kind of flowers she liked.

In contrast, Murray could excoriate like few others. One of his favorite nouns was surely “fascist”—and he used it very liberally indeed.

Typically, the evenings at Murray’s and Joey’s apartment were long; I don’t recall his ever asking me and Larry to leave, and the conversations were lively. The talk was almost always fascinating, with much back-and-forth debating and a great deal of humor and, of course, many cackles.

Joey, Murray’s wife, was a charming hostess. My chief recollection of the apartment itself was the seemingly never-ending array of bookcases—row upon row upon row of bookcases that seemed fully 100 feet high and topped off mere inches from the ceiling.

In addition to those enjoyable evenings with Murray and Joey, I have of course spent countless hours immersed in his books and articles. The first book of his that I read was probably Man, Economy and State; I have read it 2 ½ times altogether.

While often provocative, Murray’s opinions were indeed apodictic. This is most obvious, of course, in his theoretical tomes. In some cases, such as The Ethics of Liberty, I find him frequently unpersuasive. Even in such cases, however, he rarely fails to provoke intellectually; consider, for example, his distinction between copyright and patent (with which Mises disagreed) and his thoughts on what he called “Kid Lib.” And of course he could be delightfully un-politically correct, such as when speaking of certain feminists.

Clearly, a lot of research went into his not-so-theoretical works, such as America’s Great Depression and his delightful two-volume history of economic thought. Someone wrote somewhere that Murray seemed to have read EVERYTHING ever published about EVERYTHING; as one picks through his extensive footnotes, one can believe it.

Both in person and in his writings, Murray was one of the most exciting and inspiring people I ever met in my life. I’m glad I had the chance to know him.

David Grant runs his own public relations firm, the LVM Group.