The Politics of Presidential Appointment. Sheldon Hackney

as Pappas Fellows that week. They were personal friends of ours and I wanted to be there during their visit. So, I could not visit Washington until Friday, April 9. I rode down on the train in high spirits the evening before. Cokie and Lindy had been a wonderful team. Cokie was brash and irreverent; her mother as usual was so sweet that you had to listen very closely to get the wisdom that she was dispensing about public life in Washington. They are so different, yet they are clearly devoted to each other. Large student audiences loved them.

      In addition to that reason for feeling good, I thought that I was at last going to learn where the search for a NEH chair was. Silly me! I had spent many late night hours during that week filling out personal information forms sent by the White House, covering finances, jobs, organizational affiliations, club memberships, and residences over an impossibly long period of time. I thought that they probably would not require me to do such an onerous chore if they were not serious about me, but I was not sure.

      After checking into the Hay-Adams, across the park from the White House, I met Martha Chowning in the lobby. She was the lone Clinton political appointee at the NEH, so she was to brief me on the current state of the agency. It was then functioning under Lynne Cheney’s choice as acting chair, Jerry Martin, a former political appointee who had “burrowed” into a senior civil service position at the NEH.

      Martin eventually left the NEH and became the first president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization started by Lynne Cheney, with a founding board full of high-profile public figures, including Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman (of whom, more later). The ostensible purpose of ACTA is to hold universities accountable for protecting free speech on campus, and for teaching students the fundamental values of Western Civilization. That is the way that it describes itself, but it rests more specifically upon a consistent right-wing critique of higher education that has been developed and elaborated over the past fifteen years.[6] I became the symbol of the “liberal elite” that is alleged by the right wing to be running American universities, and that is at work undermining the traditional values on which our culture depends. If this sounds to you like a conspiracy theory, you have been paying attention.

      A quick flash forward can reveal this critique at work in the report released in December 2001 by ACTA, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”[7] The report begins by noting that the country responded with admirable patriotism to the terrorism of September 11, 2001. “Not so in academe. . . . professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.” The report’s evidence consists of 115 brief quotations from speakers on college campuses, ripped out of context, that say such things as “revenge is not justifiable”; “stop the violence, stop the hate”; “an eye for an eye makes the world blind”; as well as such dangerous truisms as that we need to understand how America is viewed by the rest of the world. The report concludes that colleges are “short on patriotism.” “The message of much of academe was clear: blame America first.” The technique here is quite familiar. Point to a few outlandish examples that suit your purpose, and then act as if they are typical of the whole rather than marginal. The thing to note, I believe, is that the report does not engage the dissenting ideas themselves. It simply implies that all of higher education is unpatriotic.

      Why would an organization dedicated to free speech on campus attack higher education for permitting free speech? It is enough to make one suspect that the authors of the report don’t want free speech; they want their speech. This is only one of a number of curiosities. Why, with President George Bush’s approval ratings hovering around 92 percent, was it thought important to coerce the last 8 percent into line? Indeed, in an era of Republican hegemony, when political scientists who measure such things report that the political spectrum has shifted markedly to the right and is increasingly polarized between centrists and the right wing, do culture warriors speak in such apocalyptic terms about a liberal conspiracy to subvert the republic? The solution to these curiosities is that the ACTA report is not about rallying support in the current crisis; it is about furthering its long-term project of de-legitimizing higher education in the public mind, and advancing the world view of movement conservatives.

      Meanwhile, back on April 8, 1993, I was still innocent of the covert actions and dirty tricks of the people who saw me as a convenient representative of their conspiracy theory. Martha Chowning, however, gave me an astute analysis of the internal politics of the NEH, and also handed over to me a load of NEH publications and a briefing book that told me everything anyone could want to know about the NEH and its programs. Things were beginning to look serious.

      I got over to the Old Executive Office Building the next morning a little before eight, only to find that my name had not been entered into the security computer. Was this a subtle message? I was rescued from this purgatory by Leslie Maddin who happened by and recognized me. She is the daughter of a retired Penn faculty member, and she was then working in the Office of Presidential Personnel, though in a different area from the one interested in me. She quickly found Bill Gilcher and Susan Reichly, and they all took me over to the White House Mess, where Jan Piercy met us for breakfast.

      We had an interesting conversation about the NEH and the other cultural agencies. After a very long time, I finally asked, “Am I going to get the nomination?” “Oh, yes,” they laughed, “we thought you knew.” I suppose I should have understood that Jackie Trescott was the White House messenger.

      As David Morse had guessed, they had been trying to hold the NEH until the NEA and the Institute for Museum Services were also ready to announce. They finally realized that those decisions were so indefinite that they should go ahead with the NEH—but going ahead did not really mean going ahead. They normally did not announce an “intention to nominate” until after the FBI background check. In this case, however, they would try to get Bruce Lindsey to approve going public before the check was completed. Furthermore, I would have to be cleared by the general counsel of the White House. That would take about an hour of conversation with a lawyer after he had studied my personal data. A quick telephone call revealed that the general counsel had not received the forms that I had sent by Federal Express the day before.

      I explained that my situation was increasingly uncomfortable on the campus. The Washington Post had reported on Thursday, the previous day, that my nomination was a “done deal.” A Daily Pennsylvanian reporter and photographer had ambushed me in 30th Street Station that evening as I was setting forth for Washington. It was very clever of them to figure out exactly what was going on. That picture and a story about my job interview in Washington appeared in the DP on Friday, even as I was eating breakfast in the White House Mess with the President’s headhunters. Furthermore, the New York Times had reported that same morning, Friday, that the White House was poised to announce my nomination. It would be good for me if the President’s intentions were public information so I could be definitive in announcing my own plans. They understood this, but they couldn’t promise anything.

      I got back to Philly at 1 P.M. and was met by a university car that took me directly out to Kennett Square, near the Penn Veterinary School’s campus for large-animal medicine, to talk about Penn’s appropriation with State Representative Joe Pitts, the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee. He was, as always, very supportive. By the time I got back to my office on campus, about 3:45, the White House General Counsel’s Office had called to get my telephone numbers. They now had the forms and would be calling me. Before that could happen, however, about 4:30, Bill Gilcher called to say that at 5 P.M. the White House was going to announce the President’s “intention to nominate” me. Late afternoon on a Friday, I realized later, is the traditional time to make announcements that one hopes will be seen by as few people as possible. Nevertheless, I was delighted.

      A few of my close advisors assembled later that afternoon to figure out what I could and should say in public.[8] That was relatively easy: “I am delighted to be chosen and, if confirmed, will be honored to serve.” I would then have to say to the university community that the trustees and I had given much thought to contingency plans and more would be announced about those shortly. Then