Preserving the Fountainhead

Leonard Peikoff clears his throat. With a neat stack of books by the late philosopher and writer Ayn Rand on his desk, Peikoff launches into his weekly radio show, "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" Outside his Irvine office window it's a brilliant Sunday, but all this Rand disciple sees in the newspaper clippings he flips through is darkness: Success is scorned, mediocrity esteemed, irrationalism glorified, selfishness considered a sin, sacrifice a virtue.

Consider, he says, Bill Gates.

The gall rising in his voice, Peikoff reads aloud the details of the richest man in the country's march toward Calvary: The mega-billionaire has prostrated himself before Congress, virtually apologizing for the success of Microsoft Corp. that inspired a federal antitrust investigation--one of this era's great creators of wealth and jobs and technology forced to beg for forgiveness from the American public like a mass murderer at a parole hearing.

"Has America reached the stage that to become a lovable character you can't be loved or admired or valued because of your creativity or achievements?" says Peikoff, the 64-year-old executor of Rand's estate and a lifelong friend whose voice is going out to a dozen radio stations across the country, including KIEV 870 AM in Los Angeles. "If this man will do this to himself he doesn't have any dignity at all. If he doesn't have any dignity or pride, I'm sorry to say he deserves what he has coming to him. Do you think that's going to deflect the Feds?"

If Gates were a hero in a Rand novel, of course, he would have thumbed his nose at Congress and used the occasion to give a spellbinding, hours-long speech defending his moral right to make more money than anyone else in the country.

Preposterous? Perhaps. But then, for most people, Rand's philosophy has always hovered somewhere between naive narcissism and suicidally noble idealism. Yet 16 years after her death, this poetess/philosopher of freedom, capitalism and the individual is still inspiring millions of Americans. Her novels, especially "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," have fascinated readers for a half century and continue to sell more than 350,000 copies a year. Last fall, freshmen at UC Berkeley voted "The Fountainhead" the most important book they had read, while a Library of Congress/Book of the Month Club survey in 1991 found "Atlas Shrugged" trailing only the Bible as the most influential book in people's lives.