Rip Jerome Tuccille, author of it usually begins with Ayn Rand.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: Obituary

FAILURE DROVE MY father's success.

Just weeks before he died on February 16, he finished writing his last book. It's a history of the Bonus Army--the military veterans who demanded cash payment of the benefits promised to them for their service in the First World War. They were brutally dispersed by troops and tanks commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was honing the skills he'd apply to more deserving targets in the Pacific later in his career.

I doubt my old man would have been motivated to labor on that book, through complications associated with multiple myeloma, if he'd earlier achieved his goal of writing a major bestseller.

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)--that made his name. But politics damn near broke him. He didn't expect his 1974 run as the Libertarian candidate for governor of New York to end in electoral victory, but he hoped his candidacy would win enough votes to gain permanent ballot status for the party. He failed in that goal, then put on a suit and snagged a meeting with a Merrill Lynch branch manager by implying he was a potential big-money client. That he had, instead, a big need for money and had bluffed his way in the door impressed the guy and landed him a job.

He went on to write not just about money but about people good at accumulating the stuff, like Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and the Hunt family of Texas.

This was a fortunate turn. If disappointment in politics hadn't spurred him to move on to biographies, his name wouldn't have featured in news coverage across the country and around the world 30 years later, when a shady real estate tycoon who had threatened him repeatedly as he wrote an unauthorized biography of the man made a run that ended at the White House.

He struggled to reconcile himself to the idea of making a living as anything other than an author. Even the lucrative brokerage business was supposed to be a stepping stone until the books he wrote sold enough copies to live off.

That dream failed too.

But he made his peace with it and entered what he later admitted was the most rewarding period of his life. He landed a financial writing job at T. Rowe Price that suited his temperament and gave him time to produce some of his best work...