… I have fallen ill of the desire to turn out a ‘literary’ job. Specifically, I would like to do a job somewhat like Ayn Rand did in The Fountainhead, but with modern and especially pictorial art, as my target."

Robert A. Heinlein, Jan. 28, 1949

It is no exaggeration to say that Robert A. Heinlein was American science fiction. His impact is beyond measure. When engineers first developed mechanical arms for the handling of radioactive materials, they named them Waldoes, after a story Heinlein had written predicting such devices. The man who made the first waterbed admitted his debt to Heinlein for originating the idea. During television coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, clips were shown from Heinlein and George Pal's 1950 film, Destination Moon, a well deserved honor considering how that seminal movie helped to inspire public support of the real space program.

Now we have the last of Heinlein's books, a selection of his correspondence edited by his wife, Virginia. The casual reader will be pleasantly surprised at how engaged a collection of letters can be. He makes every subject interesting: Pearl Harbor, house building, libertarians, cats, editors (yes, even editors), space research, fan mail, world travel (the most amusing photograph in the book is one taken by Ginny of a penguin looking at a copy of Friday during a visit to Antarctica), his part in the Goldwater campaign, stuffed owls, guns, mortgages, sex…and lots of stuff having to do with the daily vicissitudes of a busy author's life. There are some nice pieces by Mrs. Heinlein as well.

The letters are so arranged that the reader may follow the trajectory of Robert A. Heinlein's thought — and a fascinating journey is the result. When he died the Associated Press had this to say: "His fiction explored the seeming contradictions of his own philosophy, which embraced libertarianism and a passionate faith in the military." If there are paradoxes here, they are paradoxes to be found in the American character itself; and this is a good idea to keep in mind while reading his letters.

It is appropriate that the long-awaited diaries of H.L. Mencken and this final memoir of Heinlein should become available around the same time. Libertarianism would be considerably poorer had either gentleman not made his appearance when he did. It is not to overlook the difference in temperament — Mencken the cynic and Heinlein the Romantic — to recognize that both were uniquely American in their powerful opposition to something that alas, is equally American: eternal Puritanism.

There wasn't a drop of Puritanism in either man's robust veins; and both understood that Puritanism takes many forms. No sooner are the old Puritans pushed back, than new ones rise to take their place — and sometimes both join forces to make life even more imponderable. The Author of "If This Goes On" and "The Year of the Jackpot" and Stranger in a Strange Land was not a man to be surprised by the crazy-quilt political alliances of today; the old and new puritans screaming against pornography is just too perfect an illustration.

Another example: it isn't good enough to condemn racism and sexual prejudice as stupid. It is not enough to reject bigotry; you must atone for the bigotry of others! In rejecting collectivism, the author of The Star Beast knew that you fight bigotry with clear reason. It is quite a different matter to treat racism, or any other folly, as a sin. Just as Mencken before him, didn't believe in sin. He believed in personal responsibility.

Reading Grumbles from the Grave, one is struck by how much Heinlein really loved America. Few of his fans will ever share the love he felt for his country. This was in part, because he was unthreatened by those special irrationalities that mark the psyche of the fanatic. He understood manias from the outside. His practical patriotism was, right or wrong, untouched by crusading hysteria.

In the letters, he says, "I stand by my heresies." One can only add Amen. In reference to Stranger he comments on what a pleasure it was when he "indulged in the luxury of writing without one eye on the taboos, the market, etc." Whereupon RAH sells a million copies! Before we think too many heresies of our own re: the market, it is worth observing that Heinlein was always a taboo breaker, even in his most self-consciously commercial period.

Let's lift ourselves by our own bootstraps and take a trip back in time — to the fabulous fifties when our hero achieved, through the juvies, nothing short of a miracle in science fiction. Not until reading this book did I, for one, have the slightest inkling of what he was up against in those days. If you think it was the time of McCarthyism and that's what I'm driving at, well, you're in for a surprise.

(But first an aside: We libertarians become so focused on our own difficulties making headway in the Arts that we sometimes lose sight of the problems faced by other unpopular Ideologies: Heinlein’s libertarian views ultimately cost him less than his loyalty to the Navy and his cultural conservatism —as distinct from any social conservatism. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is virtually a Holy Book for anarchists, a blueprint for a revolution that may actually happen one day. It didn’t begin to cause him the trouble on our earthbound world that Starship Troopers and Farnham’s Freehold did; more or less these later. We’re kidding ourselves fellow libertarians, if we think it was the freedom message running through all his books that kept him in hot water.

The proof of what Heinlein was up against is waiting for us back in the fifties. In the next issue, Bill Ritch reviews the newly restored editions of The Puppet Masters (1951) and Red Planet (1949). As for the latter, I’ll leave it to Bill to tell you how the book’s pro-gun sentiments were, uh, shot down. Nobody’s faster on the draw than a social engineer with a job in the arts. I’ll make my case in good old 1951, the year of The Day the Earth Stood Still, when God’s flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and He has His work cut out for Him.

Perhaps we should only be so surprised that sexual material was cut from The Puppet Masters, material that was perfectly acceptable for a men’s magazine of the time—or a comic book (pre-Wertham)…or a mystery novel…or a mainstream novel…or maybe everywhere but TV and SF! Clearly SF labored under very special handicaps in those days. But it is nothing short of mind-boggling to see all the anti-soviet material that was cut from this novel. A number of editorial hands were involved, between Doubleday and Galaxy, but it is not clear from the published letters just who made the political excisions, or pressured Heinlein to make them. It’s a sure bet that such editorial decisions were not made in the interest of the novel becoming a more timeless work of art. (But I had to admit to Harlan Ellison that this material does date the book.)

What matters is that we’re talking about NINETEEN FIFTY-ONE. The House Committee on Un-American Activities has been going full blast since 1947. Joe McCarthy became a significant figure in 1950 with his accusations about the State Department, and now his Senate Committee is staffing around in the tracks left by the House Committee. The Army/McCarthy hearings at which McCarthy will self-destruct on television will not occur until 1954. Lillian Hellman hasn’t testified yet, showing her fellow fellow travelers how to stand up to what Bill Buckley sarcastically calls The Terror.

It is simply inconceivable that at such a time, Robert A. Heinlein could not get his anti-Soviet, anti-Communist opinions in print! Here was a taboo mightier than any sexual taboo he would on in his later career (in an admittedly less prudish time.) During the height of McCarthyism, only a powerful taboo could stop him expressing ideas in line with what the Senator was preaching. But how can this be? Surely it was McCarthyism, not anti-McCarthyism, that was the power of the day. We have a mystery on our hands.

The solution lies in answering other elementary questions. Why was he called a Fascist for writing Starship Troopers in which he advances the anti-fascist notion of a society where the military draft is absolutely unthinkable? Why was he called a racist for writing Farnham’s Freehold where he shows that any individual of any race can be a racist when given power over others, unless free will is exercised in favor of justice? “But Brad,” I can hear the voices of fan after fan whispering from the outer darkness, “he’s a Fascist because Starship Troopers makes us feel uncomfortable. And he’s a racist because Farnham’s Freehold has a black villain. And we liked The Puppet Masters much better before the parts were put in that make Heinlein sound like Ronald Reagan. And besides," I hear the voices chant, “if you’re a libertarian, why are you wasting all this precious space constructing a defense of Mr. Heinlein's reactionary politics?”

I’ll tell you why. I’m opposed to the reactionary attitude on a level so profound that I prefer the conservative’s honest version to the liberal’s travesty of the same damn thing. The liberal reaction to Heinlein, over the years, is depressing at best. (For a more grotesque demonstration of their vaunted tolerance, observe the hatchet job on Mencken.)

The Liberal Establishment was created by FDR and Eleanor, better known as Count Dracula and his vampire bride. This dreaded thing is so powerful that even McCarthyism could only give it a hiccup and a hangeover. (McCarthy was as Whitaker Chambers said, a scoundrel. He was also a boob. But he was done in less for his indifferences to the Bill of Rights or his commie-bashing than for becoming an inconvenience to the Liberal Establishment.) It wasn’t McCarthyism that restricted Heinlein’s freedom of expression in 1951.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been “educated” in one of our glorious public schools and watched plenty of public broadcasting network television over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised by what I’ve learned from Heinlein’s letters, combined with reading the new editions. You see, the opinions cut from The Puppet Masters were not only encouraged in those bad old days but they were supposed to be required. I barely exaggerate The Official History.

There is only one conclusion: WE HAVE BEEN MORE LIED TO BY THE LIBERALS MORE TIMES THAN A CONSERVATIVE KNOWS HOW TO COUNT. Not even Robert A. Heinlein could save us from an enemy so entrenched that it makes the puppet masters look like momentary pests. After all, you can get a parasite off your neck easier than off your back.

Lest the reader conclude that I have gone off the deep end, I must explain that years and years of defending Heinlein against charges of racism and fascism has really ticked me off. I was so busy defending my hero that I forgot to attack his enemies. Anyone who knows me will find it difficult to believe that I would ever miss a chance to be on the attack. I was still giving the benefit of the doubt in those days. It seems self-evident that the real Fascists and racists are to be found among Heinlein’s habitual detractors. This is no place to go into a detailed history on the origin and policies of the Italian political party that later proved inspirational to a more radical German party. It suffices that most people throw around the “you dirty fascist bastard” label as a political swear word. As for the charge of racism, it leaves me foaming at the mouth. I’d go into a litany of the positive figures from different ethnic and racial groups to be found in his admirable stories except that I don’t want to sound like some wimpy, apologetic liberal myself. The best defense of Heinlein is: READ HIS BOOKS. The people who find unreasoning hatred there must bring such emotions with them.

Reading Heinlein’s letters has opened my eyes to a number of things. Most of the SF writers (not all) who eulogized him after his death would not write a dangerous book if their lives depended on it. To them he was just a good story teller from whom they learned some new tricks. Yes, he was a good storyteller. He was also more than that. In the earlier letters RAH seems to view himself as a commercial writer of cash-and-carry prose. But his later letters show him taking his work more seriously. The fact is that from the very beginning, he was a writer with strong beliefs. The true commercial hack has no beliefs, no principles, no values. He practices true democracy. He serves the mob whatever is popular. Heinlein was never a hack. He was too good for that.

I worry that the crafty-“Arts”-wing of the Liberal Establishment will labor long and hard to denigrate Heinlein now that he is gone. The party line was laid out while he was still among us. They will never fail to decry the later Heinlein as dull and preachy. They will dislike every single restored version of any earlier work. And I’ll make a prediction: Feminoids and Theocrats, two kinds of Puritans worthy of Cotton Mather's ghost, will prosecute a bipartisan campaign against the incest-related material in some of the later novels. They will try to burn these books.

Meanwhile, the literati will do to him what they have done to Hemingway. He was too middle class, too male, too white, too sexist, too insensitive, too patriotic, too successful, too arrogant, too unsympathetic, too willing to shoot something…even too libertarian in Heinlein’s case. (If they bother to notice) and there are so many better books to read, don’t you know? I went all the way to a Masters degree in English education. I blanched at the thought of pursuing a Ph.D.! I ate all of what they served up until I could eat no more. It’s not that everything served in the halls of Academe was poison, mind you, but that good books were considered only fit for seasoning. The main course was rancid. And things have gotten a lot worse.

Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK in the end. Wait long enough and even libertarianism will prevail somewhere. And we can get along with most anyone who doesn’t want to lock us up or destroy our property — which brings us back to the problem of the book burners. I know what we’ll do; we’ll perform a public service and slaughter the censors. We'll invite free-speech socialists to join us. After we have a broad spectrum of left and right together, we’ll invite the censors to a party on the moon and space them. (See Bradbury’s “Usher II” for a useful scenario that worked wonders on Mars.) If this seems a bit severe, remember that it’s for their own good.

We have to win. We must mature as a species or we will not survive. We cannot be afraid of our own imaginations; we will not conquer space if we don’t have the brains to live together without initiating force. We will not conquer space if we cannot defend ourselves against those who violate our rights here on Earth. The old Left has lost its faith in Utopia. All its dreams are dust. Now it’s our turn. Heinlein helped show us the way.

One last word on the book (remember the book?) under review. Through these letters the reader steps behind the scenes of the creation of some of the greatest SF novels ever written — including the finest series of juvenile adventure novels of all time. That he gave us the later during the anal-retentive fifties is a tremendous achievement.

By the time of Starship Troopers, he’d had enough with the taboo-mongers and wrote: “I will not let even the ghost of Horace Greeley order me to revise my ideas to fit popular prejudice. I’ll hike up the story, but the ideas will remain intact.” He did indeed write those literary works he spoke about back in 1949, inspired by the example of Ayn Rand. He is loved by a broad spectrum of taste and opinion, but nobody loves his Romantic optimism as much as we do. We’re the crazy ones. We want freedom.

No writer need be ashamed when his work is taken seriously enough to affect the way people actually live. It is ironic that the most strident critics against this sort of thing are invariably religious people who allow their lives to be greatly influenced by books! Heinlein is worth taking seriously. That is a perfect motto by which to remember him as entertainer, grand storyteller, man of principle and thinker.