 I have to say, we cannot talk about Murray without talking about his other half, his beloved wife, Joey. She was wonderful. A very smart woman, had a master's from NYU in history. She knew everything about American history, about opera. He called her his indispensable framework, and we just have to have a little tribute to Joey Rothbard. She was great. Now turn it up to Walter. Welcome to this panel. Personal reminiscence is a Murray, Murray Rothbard that is, in case you're wondering. I'm going to call upon people in the order that they'll list in the program, except I've recently been pointed chair of this session, so I'll go last. It'll be John Denson, David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, and Joe Salerno is taking Lou's place. John Denson was very instrumental in setting up the Mises Institute. He was one of the first bulwarks of the Institute. Each speaker will get eight minutes, and I've got my student here on tone who will flash a five minute, a two minute, and a one minute sign, after which I will grab you if you don't leave the podium. So I now call upon John Denson. Thank you very much, Walton. The first time I met Murray Rothbard was in 1976. I was a delegate to the Libertarian Party Convention. I had been an alternate delegate to the Republican Convention in 68, and a delegate in 72. As the same thing happened to me as Ron Paul, and the 72 convention, and Nixon put on wage and price controls, and severed the dollar, and so forth. Not as he was a Keynesian, and I abandoned the Republicans and thought I'd try the Libertarians. That was a conference where Roger McBride was the presidential nominee, I thought was a good candidate. He wrote a good book. His father was with Rita's Digest and had given a revised, shorter version of Hayek's road to serfdom, so he had some Libertarian credentials. Murray was very instrumental in that party. He was serving on the platform committee, and he delivered a speech in favor of a non-interventionist foreign policy, which was something I had been searching in the Republican Party for the Robert Taft division, and found out it didn't exist anymore. So this was a political party that was championed in the foreign, no foreign intervention in the war. So Murray was very excited about it, and so was I. So I wanted to talk to him. I had read his book, Great Depression, and had taken it actually to the 72 Republican convention because I found that people there among the Republicans, they were for the free market, but we do need government control to prevent depressions and monopolies. So I wanted to tell Murray, and I was a little scared to talk to him. I never met him, and I knew how famous he was, and didn't want to say something stupid. So I just walked up and shook his hand and told him I'd taken the Great Depression to the Republican Party, but unfortunately didn't think it did much good. The next thing, next time I met Murray was a Kato Institute conference at Dartmouth College in 1979, and this was exactly what I had thought needed to be done rather than politics is to go to the intellectual part and develop a critical mass of intellectuals and communicators and students and teachers, and that's what I envisioned doing. And I knew that Murray had been one of the three co-founders of the Kato in 1974, and he was instrumental in changing the name to Kato. So he was speaking, as was Ralph Raco, and I had gotten very interested in war and World War I, and Ralph was speaking on that. Also there was a teacher from Auburn University named Roger Garrison, who was very much a follow of Rothbard and Meases, and that is what I thought we were going to try to do at Auburn, was to put together the faculty we had there and invite students and so forth, but I had no idea how to run a conference or an institute. So I talked to Murray a whole lot at that, it was a week-long conference, and to Ralph Raco for a good bit, and then I talked to a girl named Marsha Freedman who was in charge of that Kato conference, and I told her I was interested in what they were doing and I thought that was the way to go, and I told her that I was interested in trying to do this at Auburn University. If I could put it together and find somebody that knew how to do all this, because it not only takes an intellectual but an entrepreneur, which of course Lou Rockwell is. And so Murray eventually severed his relations with Kato. The next thing that I had happened that eventually involved Murray was in 1982, I got a call from a complete stranger named Lou Rockwell. I'd never heard of Lou, and he told me that he was in town, and I was an Opliker, and he called and said he'd like to come over and talk to me at home. He was going to create an institute called the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and of course I was familiar with Mises, I'd read socialism and other books, and very familiar with Hayek and Hazlitt and all of that by that time, and I was just ecstatic. I thought, my gosh, this is a dream come true, so Lou came over, and he told me about his background, that he'd been a chief of staff for Ron Paul, and I was very familiar with Ron Paul, and then he told me that Mises, he talked to Mises Mises herself and told her what he wanted to do, and she was willing to lend her help and become active if Lou would pledge to support her husband's ideas for the rest of his life. So Lou made this promise to her, and it was a pretty risky thing to do to devote his life to something that really wouldn't exist yet, but she agreed to be active and she was made into the chairman, and then he told me that Murray Rothbard had committed to be vice president in charge of academics, and I thought, man this is sensational, and I said what can I do, and he said, well I understand you're on the board of trustees at Auburn University, and that you wanted to do something like this. I said that's exactly right, but I didn't know how to do it, and he said, well I think I do, so we talked about a proposal to make to Auburn University to connect the Institute. He wanted to connect to a major college, so that was why he was calling on me, so it drew up a proposed contract and I took him to meet the president of Auburn University and presented that to him so that they would provide some facilities, physical facilities inside the university, and the Mises Institute would pay money to Auburn University to be used only in the economics department, so it sort of recycled the money. So the Mises Institute started in a small office in Thatch Hall with three people, Lou, Marty, and Pat, and all still three here, of course, and they had a small room, and over the years we gradually went up to larger and larger facilities, until finally we got the best office in a conference room and classroom space for the Mises Institute in the New College of Business, a brand new building. I met with the architect and told him what we wanted, and the president let me do that, and so everything gave it great credibility and visibility being a major part of the business school, and then Lou and I both decided it was better to have our own facilities, and of course, if you've been to the Mises Institute now, it's a huge facility much, much 10 times bigger than what they had in the business school, and it's still room to grow. The next thing involved in Murray was Roseanne, my wife Roseanne and I had invited the faculty every year to come to our home for supper and cocktails, and in 1985, we did a special reception for Murray Rothbard and his wife, Joey. So this gave me an opportunity to have a long, one-on-one conversation. I've always been scared to talk to him because I'm just a lawyer, I'm not an economist or a historian, and Murray was so kind to people that talked to him, and maybe he didn't know exactly what they were talking about. He's very gentle, never puts you down, very eager to talk, so we looked at my library and my books and we talked, and finally Joey came up and said, whoa, time's up. Anyway, we did the cost of war conference, and he said that was the greatest thing seeing the Mises Institute into a war issue. Thank you very much. I don't like to brag, but I'm very pushy, and you can see how pushy I was. He's bigger than me, and I pushed him off, but we have to because we have very good other speakers, and we want to get everyone to have a turn. The next speaker is David Gordon, who really needs no introduction because he's unique. When Murray first met David Gordon, he said he had a photographic memory. He knows everything about everything, and he's very creative, and he's the most wonderful addition to our little group, so I present my friend, colleague David Gordon. One thing very important to know about Murray Rothbard was he had a abiding interest in people. He would always have funny stories about various people he'd known. One example, he knew the historian Harry Omer Barnes, who was a diplomatic historian. At one time, Murray was in charge of having, there was a volume of essays in honor of Barnes. It eventually came out under a different editor, Arthur Goddard, who was called Harry Omer Barnes Learned Crusader. Usually these volumes of essays are intended to be a surprise to the person who gets them, but Barnes found out about it before, and what he would do when contributors would send in their essays. If they criticized him, he'd put in something in the essays, say if they criticized him, that Barnes would put in. Professor Barnes would reply in this way, so when Murray was telling me the story, he said, eh, he wrote his own fast drift. Now, another one thing also about Murray, as you can tell if you've read his, any of his books, he had a tremendous knowledge of details of all kinds. One thing I like to do is I have trivia questions. They're usually rather silly ones, but I told him, I had trapped Mel Bradford, who was a professor at University of Dallas, who knew a great deal of American history himself. I'd given him the question, what was Rutherford, in Rutherford B. Hayes' name, what did the B stand for? And I told Murray about this, and Murray said, eh, it was birchard, of course. Now, and he could do that, he was so good on details. I remember the first time I heard him lecture was at a Cato conference in 1979 in Eugene, Oregon, and he said in his lecture, just someone asked him a question, said, oh, there's a good unpublished dissertation at SUNY Buffalo on that subject. He gave 1965, and he just knew that off the top of his head. But when he was interested in details, he was always in pursuit of liberty. He always had his main goal in mind. On one occasion, I remember when he was teaching at UNLV, he had a course on monetary theory, and instead of using the standard textbooks, he used his own book, The Mystery of Banking, and someone, I think some people in the department were protested, they said, oh, we should use the standard textbook. So when he heard about this, he said, eh, I teach the truth. And this was one thing that was primary to him. One other story I think I'll give that shows his, I was very interested in knowing all sorts of what people were doing. In one of the Mises University conference, it was, I think the last one he went to, which was in Claremont in 1994, I had heard some very good gossip about someone. I won't say what it is, but that would get me into trouble. So I was sitting with him and telling him the story, and someone, one of the students came up and had kind of, it was just standing there, had kind of a quizzical expression on his face, and Murray Electronic said, can't you see we're busy? So he really wanted to know everything about everything. And in his historical method, he, for him, as you see this in his history of economic thought, he wasn't satisfied just with giving the account to the major figures. He would give the, all the minor figures as well. All the people, he wouldn't just tell you say about Adam Smith and others. He'd tell you about James Stewart, Adam Ferguson, people who weren't so well known. He believed this was the way to do history. You have a total immersion in the sources and you give the accounts of everyone's thought. So it was one of the great privileges of my life was to know Murray for all those years. And he certainly influenced me more than anyone else, and I'm very grateful to have known him. Thank you. The next speaker is Paul Gottfried, who is a historian, an eminent historian, a longtime friend of Murray Rothbard's. He was a professor and endowed chair at Elizabeth Town University for many years. Paul Gottfried. Among the many roles in this life that I have been forced to assume was teaching a Greek class. I was the classicist at one time. And the, one of the assignments that I gave the students toward the end of the semester, which they hardly ever mastered, was learning the opening lines of the greatest literary work of the ancient world and one of the greatest literary works of all times, Homer's Iliad, which starts with the lines Meninaida Thea, Piliadeo Achileos, Ullumenei Chimurri Achaiois, Algei Athekin. And to translate, O sing, O goddess, about the destructive anger of Achilles, the son of Placus, which caused suffering to tens of thousands of Achaeans or Greeks. Now the implacable wrath or anger of the semi-divine Achilles, his, his mother was a goddess, drives the ancient narrative and among the consequences of Achilles' anger, according to Homer, is dragging down the dowdy spirits of many brave warriors to Hades and preparing carrion, in the Greek word is Chalodia, for dogs and vultures. Now here we are told what happens to those who are afflicted with truly destructive anger, the Illuminae Menus, but I'd like to speak this afternoon about a different menus or anger, one that does not produce the grave results depicted by Homer. And here I'm referring to the creative fulminations of our late friend and mentor, Murray Rothbard, who show the positive aspects of becoming annoyed with fools and going after them with unforgettable mockery. The target of Murray's manus or anger included adjut-prop leftist movies, modal libertarians, the Koch machine, and just about every neo-conservative who came of age in Murray's unfortunately abbreviated lifetime. Murray also convinced me from his polemics that I should fear Menchvicks more than Bolsheviks, that the neo-conservative crusade for global democracy, and this is something that Dr. Paul would agree with, could be traced back to Sidney Hook and even further back to the Devil. I also learned, I fully agree with that sentiment, just everyone in this room must know. I also learned from reading Murray that the American regime had been going downhill with few bright spots since the presidency of Martin Van Buren and that Lincoln and Wilson were hideous warmongers who could never be sufficiently discredited or detested. Of course, I didn't need lots of persuading to take over some of Murray's pet peeves. His exasperated laments about lying historians causing me to think about topics that would not have entered my mind before I read Murray. Finally, I'd observe that both of us took the same combative stance in presenting ideas. We were both compulsive debaters and landed up refining arguments in the course of lacing into our targets. Here too Murray's outburst against dishonest historians influenced me. Among his revisionist works, they changed or expanded my mind about historical subjects included his essay on the progressive use of war for social planning. And before I go on, let me mention that the book on the progressive era, I will try to limit myself to five more minutes, is one of the best books on the subject I have ever dipped into. I hardly recommend that all of you buy this. It is from what I can see the finest book in the English language on the progressive era. And I also was influenced by Murray's work in the Great Depression. And while I had scorned the received interpretations of the origin and causes of World War I throughout my life, my family were on the losing side of that dust-up. I never encountered Harry Elmer Barnes until his name came up in one of Murray's essays. Murray assured me that Barnes was a good guy. And he did so in the presence of Ralph Raco who seemed to agree. Because of these recommendations I read Barnes' work on the First World War and my newest anthology of essay should make clear that I now deeply appreciate Barnes' intellectual honesty and the accuracy of his observations about shared responsibility of both sides for the war. I finally should mention, and I will try to limit myself to the five minutes allotted to me, that I suffer egalitarian envy whenever I think of Murray as a polemicist. He was simply better at going after deadheads and unprofessional scholars than I could ever hope to be and especially now at my advanced age. Murray was the Mozart of polemicists putting complicated concepts into understandable phrases and deploying them brilliantly against opponents. As polemicists most of the rest of us are at the competence level of Antonio Salieri and I'm speaking here about the plotting Salieri of the Mozart movie, not the real Salieri, who was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert and a distinguished operatic composer. I still recall competing against Murray in the late 1980s and what he called the sweepstakes. Several libertarian and paleo conservative commentators volunteered to respond to a neoconservative critic in a very short live newsletter which folded right after our contributions were published. All of us acquitted ourselves well but only Murray managed to produce a truly outstanding rejoinder. Although I agonized over my polemic what Murray submitted was simply better crafted. I still read Murray's movie reviews with egalitarian envy but also the light in the vitriol that he poured over flicks they urged us not to see. One Murray movie that Murray found ridiculously overrated is The Piano and he maliciously exposed every ineptitude in this feminist film about a woman in the Australian Outback being emotionally and artistically starved by her overbearing husband. Toward the end of the movie, hobby cuts off a finger from the hand of his defiant wife with an axe but just despite him she goes on grinding out melodies at the keyboard with an artificial finger. The piano includes one formulaic love scene featuring Holly Hunter that goes on and on. All we see throughout the ordeal is Holly Hunter's beer back which provided Murray with the opportunity to expand on the reasons that feminist movies rarely produce convincing love scenes. He remarked at great length with memorable humor on how truly bored he had been staring at Holly Hunter's less than bewitching back for 15 minutes. Murray's review had the effect that every time I hear about Holly Hunter or the piano my mind is immediately drawn to the image of her beer back and to Murray's searing comments about feminist love scenes let it be said that beside all his other achievements no one to my knowledge ever did better skewering a chick flick trying to be a feminist movie than did Murray in this timeless review. Thank you. I think I heard something. Joe Solano is next. You can see it's sort of like herding cats. Each of these people could speak for hours on end entertainingly but they only get eight minutes so here is Joe. I'm standing in for Lou Rockwell. I mean I'm a poor substitute but I'm still going to take 12 minutes because I'm Lou's representative. Murray's well-known anti-authoritarianism extended well beyond politics into his personal life. One time I was at a three-day conference with him on the topic of methodology at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. We were at the hotel there. The receptionists looked like the steppard wives an empty smile it was very very very oppressive the the bus boys moved like Robocop. I was I was on the elevator with a fellow graduate student who was attending and he had a shirt on it said crush the state and there was almost a scuffle there were a few cadets in the elevator at the same time. I was trying to stand in front and obscure it. Anyway by the second day Murray was tired of the suppressive atmosphere and so and he began to complain that academics weren't real people they were too pretentious and stuffy and then and then he came out and said Joe he says we need to go over the wall we need to break out of the hotel and and find real people for an entertainment. So I asked the hotel receptionist if he had any idea of a of a nearby place that played live music and and and had dancing which Murray had requested. So he gave us a recommendation and so a bunch of us got into a car including Murray and we were in the we proceeded north in these this mountainous windy roads above West Point to go to Newburg New York which is 10 or 20 miles away and almost immediately a very thick fog descended and pretty soon it was we couldn't see past our headlights we had to slow down to 20 minutes so that 20 miles per hour. So at that point we were all debating whether we should turn back and of course the lone descent was was Murray who kept saying onward troops press onward toward destination so he he didn't want to go back. Now this was the height of disco era we wound up having a great time there there was a lot of dancing and pretty girls and and Murray was always applauding the best dancers and stuff and actually some of the some of the girls came over to us and and and they thought Murray was great they gave him a big hug and it's ah sweetie. So we finally decided we had to go back and fortunately there was no fog as I said it was the height of the disco era so on the way back Murray had picked up a few lines from Donna Summers disco song on the radio and he serenaded us all the way back with those few lines he had a really practiced musical ear and they had an excellent vocal range so he actually sounded pretty good. And another time we were at at a at a conference at a I think it was Menlo Park Junior College out in the Bay Area and in California and so when we would come back from dinner it tended to coincide with the hours in which this high school program had its study study hours so the monitor every time we'd walk back from at night it was from dinner would yell out the window for us to keep quiet Murray was always had a very was always had a loud giggle and was had an infectious laugh and a carry and so he on the second or third day he got tired of this and kind of muttered back you can keep your fascist dump. The other point I wanted to make was that Murray was he didn't have a trace of false modesty everyone he realized that he you know he acknowledged his great achievements and so on and and he liked the fact that people called him Mr. Libertarian and the dean of the Austrian school but yet he had a deep and profound humility. He so one one one day I was having lunch with him at his favorite deli in New York City and it was in the early 90s and he was working on his great work on the history of economic thought and he was over lunch he was eagerly telling me a lot of stories that David had mentioned all he that Murray always focused on the sort of the minor characters the ones with corks and so he was going on about how one economist was totally evil and how a modern psycho babble which he really didn't like actually explained John Stuart Mill who was kind of a very a weird guy and he went on and on in his rapid style New York style of speaking and then eventually well I was listening I was totally absorbed in everything and I didn't utter a word which I guess was kind of uncharacteristic of me or he thought so so at some point he stopped and he said he started apologizing and and saying I'm sorry I'm monopolizing the conversation because he mistook it for my silence for boredom but I assured him I wasn't bored and I asked him to go on but but think of it this is one of the greatest economists in the world who was giving me a private seminar and he thought that he was boring me and and I mean that that's just the kind of guy he was I mean he was extremely humble one last story about his humility at the one of the earliest Austrian conferences in the United States in 1974 South Royalton Conference of Walter attended a number of people here attended Murray gave a talk in which he for the first time publicly criticized Mises about his utilitarian ethics rather than natural rights and at the end of it Murray came back and we said a great talk and and and he said I'm still a little shaky this is the first time I ever I ever um criticized my mentor Mises in public I mean so he was 50 years old he was a prodigious scholar he was probably the he was the greatest Austrian economist in the world at that time and yet he had the proper respect for for his mentor and for for his predecessors okay so that I think that the one less I took from that was that you you do want to economics is not a dead end you do want to advance it but you always want to do so by building on the work of of your predecessors like Mises and Rothbard thank you when I think of Murray I think of Murray's living room that's where I met Murray that's where I spent a lot of time with Murray I want to mention all the people who were part of the living room and then I'm going to ask the people in the room here who were on this list to stand Bob Smith Leonard Ligio Joe Peden Ralph Raco Ron Hamaway Jerry Wallows Larry Moss Walter Grinder Carl Hess Father Siddowsky SJ Chuck Hamilton these are people who have been in the living room three or more times Roger Garrison was there once and at around midnight he's a polite guys from Alabama they're polite not like people in New York City and at around 12 he's making moves like he should leave and Murray saying you know stay Roger and you know Murray stays until three or four in the morning Joe Salerno John Hagel Mario Rizzo Jerry O'Driscoll and of course Joey Rothbard although she wasn't really part of the living room she was sort of I don't know what but I have to mention her as part of the living room so would the people who were in this room please stand that's Joe and John Hagel John there he is way in the back did I leave out anyone else who was part of the living room David Jared okay great thank you George Reisman was part of the Circle Bastia which was a group that's ended before I got there I got there on around 65 and maybe 66 so the living room as far as I'm concerned the Mises Institute is just the living room grown big I don't mean to insult the Mises Institute I mean to compliment the Mises Institute by saying that it's the embodiment of what Murray really wanted and that was the living room for me Joe Salerno mentioned the Royalton thing and I want to mention a contribution of Joe's here the question came up what was responsible for the renaissance of the Austrian movement was it the Hayek's winning of the Nobel Prize which occurred roughly at the same time as the Royalton conference now the Royalton conference had three speakers Kersner Rothbard and Lachman and there were oh maybe 35 or 40 people like Joe and I graduate students and maybe beginning professors and Joe's point is that how did those 40 people get there it couldn't be because of Hayek's Nobel Prize which occurred like within a few months of that and Joe I think rightly points out that the renaissance of the Austrian movement was mainly communist aid in 62 that's how I got to know Murray I would read man economy and state all day and then at night I'd go play risk with him it was the sort of cognitive dissonance because I wanted to be worthy of Murray and the only way I thought I could be worthy of Murray was to criticize him I'm a little weird but that's the way I thought I would impress him that I was really loving what he was doing and he just wanted to be friends with me and I couldn't get that it's sort of like you can't be friends with Mozart I mean Mozart you know how can he how can Murray want to be friends with me and he did it was the most amazing thing he wanted to be friends with everyone boy time goes fast when you're having fun doesn't feel good when I was young I would keep track of how many words I would write in a day how many pages 300 words a page five pages to be 1500 words and if I did 1500 words of five pages I felt I was okay and I didn't always make it but some many a day I would write five pages and sometimes 10 one day I got up early in the morning and I stayed until to the next morning and I wrote 23 pages so I called Murray and I said well you know who's the macho man here I wouldn't dare compare quality but I'm just comparing quantity and Murray goes who keeps track of that and I was pushing then I'm pushing now and I insisted that Murray you know tell me how many pages he he writes and he said eight pages an hour so in my best day of 23 pages I did roughly three of his hours again I don't compare quality I just compare quantity uh that was a professional typist could type faster than Murray they can do 100 110 words an hour Murray couldn't do that much but I mean he's writing new stuff it was just amazing I remember one time Joey we were in the living room and somebody said Murray you're giving a paper tomorrow and Murray says what what and he wasn't prepared and he just went into his room and three hours later he came out with you know 15 pages worth of stuff so I mean the reason he is so productive is that he he types fast and he thinks fast I disagree with Murray on several things Guido said that we're not a museum we're not a randian cult we're allowed to disagree with each other Murray disagreed with Mises Murray was pro-choice Ron is pro-life you can't get two libertarians with greater credentials than that they're 180 degrees apart we're not a cult we can disagree with each other I've disagreed with Murray on abortion immigration voluntary slavery Israel suey money is sui generous or is it a product good cost the Hayekian triangle is wage and time preference in empirical relationship or an apodictic one I'm a co-author with Joe on that one I'm a co-author with Peter Klein on homogeneity and the division of labor Israel I disagree with to my mind the litmus test is do you love and respect and revere Murray and if you do you're a Rothbardian even if you don't agree with them on everything and I am certainly a Rothbardian Murray used to like soap operas when I first saw that I thought you know that's sort of low soap operas and yet I like Big Bang which is just a soap opera so I'm some of a Rothbardian on that Joey used to criticize Murray on opera because Murray would want to sing all the parts the soprano the bass whatever and Joey would say no no you you can't sing all the parts and Murray was saying no no I can and they had great arguments Murray stole a lot of my ideas it's true he published 20 years before I ever thought of it but we don't we don't mention that a lot of my work is a derivative of Murray's Murray had one line in Manny commune stayed on blackmail I put blackmail in my defending the undefendable and I have a whole book on blackmail Murray a favorite private property I have a series on private roads private oceans and now I'm coming out with a book on private space and you know privatization of moon and Mars I don't like to brag but I will I think I'm the only co-author of Murray Rothbard's it happened when I was the associate editor of the R.A.E review of australian economics predecessor to what Joe is now editing as Q.J.A.E. another thing that I've got over Murray is he never won the Rothbard Medal of Freedom I did haha I follow Murray in many ways he had a wide correspondence with everybody I have a wide correspondence too and I put a lot of that on Lurockwell.com he insisted everyone calling Murray I insist everyone call me Walter instead of Dr. Block or Doc Block sounds silly I encourage my students he encouraged his student I was never a formal student of his but I am a a student of his I have another honor one time Murray was teaching at Brooklyn Polytech and he couldn't make it and he asked me to substitute for him and I substituted for Murray so that's something that I can brag about my whole career is predicated on if I do this will Murray be proud of me and if he is I'll do it and if he's not I won't thanks for your attention