• • Not quite a bull’s-eye 
Daniel M. Ryan, Enter Stage Right Personal life  Review of the book Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, by Frederick Sheehan.[Frederick] Sheehan goes out of his way to highlight Ayn Rand's first impression of [Alan Greenspan] when they met: "'Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?'" (p. 9.) This quote serves as a leitmotif of the book as Sheehan digs into Greenspan's later life. He decided that the other Greenspan – the man who hitched his wagon to Arthur Burns's star early on – was the real Greenspan. The impression he conveys is that Greenspan wasn't even much of an Objectivist, although Sheehan doesn't intimate that Greenspan was drawn into Rand's inner circle out of a desire to rub shoulders with a popular novelist. He presents Greenspan as a man who did believe in Rand's philosophy in his own way, but shed it while ascending the socio-political heights. Like many libertarian critics of Greenspan, Sheehan brandishes "Gold And Economic Freedom" as a reproach – even if he holds his nose a little while doing so.     Share on Facebook