I was in the midst of reading up on Alan Greenspan, whose new memoir, The Age of Turbulence, has just been published to wide publicity and boffo sales, when I saw in a local gossip column that he and his wife had been spotted (somehow!) spending yet another Sunday afternoon in the owner’s box at FedEx Field, watching the Washington Redskins writes Andrew Ferguson for the Weekly Standard.

For Washingtonians of a certain sort, the owner’s box and its shifting set of inhabitants plays roughly the same social role that the roof of Lenin’s Tomb did in the old Soviet Union–a promontory upon which members of the city’s elite can display themselves. And I recalled an odd moment from a biography of Ayn Rand, the radical libertarian philosopher to whom Greenspan was devoted earlier in his career.

“Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?” Rand once asked a mutual acquaintance.

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, apparently. This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her.

Read it here: The Age of Turbulence