How My Father, Jerome Tuccille, ‘Failed’ His Way to Success: New at Reason

Libertarian author and thinker Jerome Tuccille died on February 16, aged 80.

His son, J.D., writes:

In a real way, it was failure that drove my father’s success—failure to achieve his original goals was the prod that drove continued effort and accomplishment throughout his life.

Just weeks before he died on February 16, my father finished writing his last book. It’s a history of the Bonus Army, military veterans who demanded cash payment of benefits promised to them for their service in The World War (the only one at the time, since politicians had yet to air the sequel). They were brutally dispersed by troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, who was honing the skills he’d apply to more deserving targets in the Pacific a little later in his career. I doubt my old man would have been motivated to labor on that book through the complications of the multiple myeloma eating away at him if he’d achieved his life-long goal of a major bestseller and felt comfortable resting on his laurels.

His writing career started with politics; magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, and the books Radical Libertarianism (1970) and It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand (1971) made his name. But politics damn near broke him. He never expected his 1974 run for governor of New York as the Libertarian candidate to end in electoral victory, but he hoped that his candidacy would win enough votes to gain permanent ballot status for the party. He failed in that goal—and in efforts to continue to earn a living amidst the demands of the election. Breaking with the political preoccupations that had driven him for the previous half-decade, he put on a suit and bluffed his way into a meeting with a Merrill Lynch branch manager by implying that he was a potential big-money client. That he had, instead, a big need for money and had bullshitted his way in the door impressed the guy and landed him a job.

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