My friend and former fellow Hoover colleague Bob Hessen died Monday at age 87.
I want to talk about how I came to know about him, some of his professional accomplishments, and some of our interactions, but I want to lead with one of the most important things about him.
It’s this: Bob Hessen was one of the warmest, nicest, most thoughtful people I have ever known.
I first came across Robert Hessen’s work when I was 17 years old. I had read Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I wanted more. I found her book of essays on free markets and capitalism, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, and bought it. I read every essay and learned a lot. It cemented for me two ideas: (1) economic freedom works and (2) we had never had complete economic freedom. One of the essays in the book was by Robert Hessen, who, when he wrote it, was, I think, a graduate student. I wish I remembered the name of the essay: my marked-up copy disappeared in my office fire in February 2007. I do remember that it was on economic history and that I liked it.
If you had told me then that I would meet Bob Hessen and become his friend, I would not have believed you. To me he was a god, and I was a 17-year-old from rural Manitoba.
But I did meet him. In 1979, I became a senior policy analyst with the Cato Institute, based in San Francisco, and occasionally drove down to visit people at Hoover. That’s probably when I met him. In September 1980, the Mont Pelerin Society meetings were held at Hoover and I attended all the sessions. He and I interacted a lot that week, especially at an informal event at which the more libertarian and younger MPS attendees presented reports on how freedom was faring in their countries. It’s really starting at that date that I counted him as a friend.
In the fall of 1980, I started teaching at Santa Clara University and commuting from my home in San Francisco. We had lunch together at the Stanford faculty club shortly after Reagan was elected president in November 1980. Bob knew of my desire to be a senior economist with Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. I had told him about my time as a summer intern in 1973 under Herb Stein and Nixon, and how much responsibility I had been given after my immediate boss, Bob Tollison, left and before his replacement came a month later. Bob told me that I should aggressively pursue the position and pointed out that even if I didn’t end up liking the job (it turns out that I did), it would be a great line on my resume and a door opener for the rest of my professional life. He turned out to be right.
I did aggressively pursue the job and that’s an interesting story. But it’s a separate story. Suffice it to say that I might not have had that job if Bob had not encouraged me so strongly.
Back to Bob. He was one of the more careful readers I’ve met and it was that care that led him to some of his major accomplishments. One that stands out is his 1979 book, In Defense of the Corporation, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, I can’t easily quote from the book because it was another casualty of my fire.
And, speaking of my fire, Bob did me a huge favor that relates to my fire. The fire destroyed not only my computer and my back-up hard drive but also my rolodex. Remember those? So I had no way of reaching him. But serendipitously, he called me in my new office about a week after my fire. He immediately understood my devastation: someone who loves books as much as he did would immediately understand. He pointed that Gloria Valentine, Milton Friedman’s long-time assistant, had not yet disposed of his books in his Hoover office –Milton had died just 3 months earlier. He suggested that I call her and gave me her number. Ten minutes, I called her. Gloria was ready because Bob had already called her during those ten minutes. Gloria invited me up and I raided Milton’s office. I didn't want to be a total pig, so I took the 80 or so volumes (out of over 500) that were most interesting. Again, I owe Bob. I’m not sure I would have had the guts to do that had Bob not suggested it.
There’s much more to say about him. I’ll say more about some of his intellectual accomplishments in a blog post at EconLog.
Suffice it to say that I’m so glad that a few of us visited him during the MPS meetings at Hoover in January 2020 and that he and I had a long phone conversation in July 2023.
I will miss him.
P.S. Here’s a nice memory from his friend Chris Matthew Sciabarra.
I loved Bob and counted him as one of my dearest friends too. Here’s what I wrote last Friday. So deeply saddened I’ll not see him again: https://arrivalsanddepartures.substack.com/p/finding-luck-in-love
Excellent.
Bob was everything you said he was.
I had counted him a friend almost as long as you David. We "met" by phone when I co-founded the Free Market Society of Chicago about 1992 and asked him to be an Advisor - which he graciously agreed to do. I consulted him on many issues from that point on, met with him when I visited the SF Bay Area, then started meeting somewhat regularly after we moved to SJ in 1995.