I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Jerome Tuccille 357
Hardly a weekend passed between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two that I was not
battling my way from one barroom brawl to another.
Obviously, this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. If it did I was going to
end up in jail or in an AA ward before I was thirty. Escape was my only answer, and escape
I did to San Francisco when I twenty-four years old. San Francisco was not far enough away
from the Bronx to suit me, so I boarded a cruise ship and sailed to Australia, lived there
for six months working on my Great American Novel, then continued on my round-theglobe
odyssey through Singapore, India, Malta, the Suez Canal, and finally Europe. Broke
and still unpublished, I returned to the U.S. around the time Barry Goldwater was running
for president, a time when the big news of the day was the escalating conflict in Vietnam.
Until this time, my anarchism was unstructured and emotional, a mere rebellion
against everything I despised. Goldwater articulated a philosophy of life and government
that touched a chord inside me in a way no one had done before. His book, Conscience of
a Conservative, was the first political book I read that gave me something positive to believe
in: individualism, limited government, self-reliance, free enterprise. No longer was I just a
rebel looking to smash things as I bulled my way through life. Suddenly I stood for something
as well. Now I was a Conservative.
Over the next few years I devoured every book and magazine I could find preaching
the Conservative message. I discovered Buckley, Hazlitt, Bentham, Locke, Adam Smith,
and eventually Rand. I started writing for Conservative and Classical Liberal publications,
including The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and the
official magazine of Young Americans for Freedom. By 1968 I had completed Rand’s basic
course on Objectivism at the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and had read most of Rand’s
work plus books by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. I started calling myself
an Objectivist, even though Rand would have denounced me as a second-hander since I
had not paid for her advanced courses at NBI.
The problem for me with most Conservatives I encountered at the time was the war
in Vietnam and the military draft, both of which kept getting in the way. I was adamantly
opposed to our being in Vietnam, I thought a military draft was despicable, and I was
troubled by so-called advocates of freedom, individualism, and limited government who
supported both positions. Somehow, Conservatism was at odds with my core beliefs, but
there was no alternative to turn to.
No alternative, that is, until I discovered Karl Hess. I picked up a newspaper one day
and read about this hirsute fellow who had been a speechwriter for Goldwater, and was now
calling himself an anarchist and a New Leftist. This was interesting, especially since YAF
had invited me to debate Karl at some Conservative gathering in Manhattan. I was supposed
to articulate the Conservative message while Karl defended his new anti-war, pro-New Left
stance amid a hostile audience. The problem was that, by the time the day of the debate came
around, I found myself more in agreement with him than I did with the panoply of Conservative
stalwarts on the platform with me, including Libertarian-Conservative Frank Meyer and an
out-and-out social nationalist, Henry Paolucci. Into the midst of this ideological circus strode
a man I had corresponded with but never met before, Murray Rothbard, and a coterie of his
acolytes, including Walter Block, Leonard Liggio, Joe Peden, and probably a dozen others.