In the 1960s Ayn Rand was becoming a major cultural presence. She drew overflow crowds at colleges from Yale to Wisconsin to Lewis and Clark. She wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times. She was interviewed by Alvin Toffler in Playboy. (The interview can be found in The Libertarian Reader.) She accepted an offer to place her papers in the Library of Congress.

And in 1967 her celebrity was officially recognized by an invitation to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Those who remember it say that Carson was so fascinated that he scrapped his other guests and kept her on for the whole show. He invited her back twice more. Alas, many of the early Carson shows were lost in a fire at NBC’s archive, and Objectivists have lamented the lost tapes ever since. Now a partial tape of that first Tonight Show appearance has turned up, and Libertarianism.org has it:

Visit Libertarianism.org for classic and original videos of Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Thomas Szasz, Walter Williams, and many more.