Read just about any newspaper review or commentary on Heller's Rand biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, and you run smack dab into sheer unalloyed gloating that Ayn Rand was... human. The San Francisco Gate, the New York Times and New York Magazine, not to mention just about everyone else run the common theme, that somehow the biography exposes a contradiction between Rand's politics and her real life. That's not an argument that makes a lot of sense, especially since there isn't much in the way of actual contradictions between the two, aside from the usual stuff about her affair, an affair that wasn't actually kept secret.

You don't have to be an admirer of Ayn Rand, which I'm not, to notice the hypocrisy of treating Heller's biography as discrediting Rand, while treating the revelations about JFK's personal life, which are a great deal worse than anything involving Rand as in no way interfering with the credibility of his politics. Same goes for Ted Kennedy. And that's not necessarily wrong, because people are human and do make mistakes, but it's possible to discuss their ideas without using their biographies as a weapon. The reviews of Heller's biography do the opposite, trying to discredit Rand by using her biography as a weapon against her ideas.