A commercial lecture agency had lined up an array of public lectures across eleven states, beginning with a radio address to an overfl ow crowd of more than 3,000 the day after his arrival in New York. Hayek maintained the cultivated reserve and unabashed elitism of a Viennese aristocrat, and did not take well to this new position. An interviewer at the time dwelled on his “purely academic” demeanor, and an observer at his fi rst press conference recounted that he had “small, sensitive hands which he seemed at a loss to know what to do with when he was not lighting his lowslung briar pipe.” De cades later Hayek recalled his shock at the dictating machines and microphones that greeted him at his fi rst public event. Hayek’s uneasy relationship with his pop ular persona had begun.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 222