The Politics of Presidential Appointment. Sheldon Hackney

my time doing administrative chores of one kind or another, while also teaching and publishing. I constantly felt torn, pulled in different directions. Perhaps a stint as a full-time administrator would allow me to discover whether I liked that better than full-time teaching and writing. If I didn’t like it, I could always return to the faculty after five years and not be much the worse for wear. The new administration was especially rich in talent. I learned a lot from my colleagues, and I particularly learned from Bill Bowen, a remarkable academic leader.[5]

      Unfortunately, in my third year as provost, the fall of 1974, before I had a definitive answer to the question of which university track I wished to run on, I got a call from Edmund McIlhenny who was chairman of the Tulane University Board of Administrators, that is, the trustees. He was looking for a new president and had been told that I might fit Tulane’s needs.

      The lure of the South was great. If I were going to remain in administration, being president of a first-tier private university would allow me to make a contribution to my native region, a region that suffered then even more than it does now from an educational deficit. The universe of first-rate private universities in the South is extremely small. It consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Emory, with Rice as a special case. Tulane, I eventually decided, was an opportunity that I could not pass up.

      I labored five years in New Orleans in a tough environment, what in the business world would be called “a turnaround situation.” Tulane’s trajectory changed dramatically. I earned the usual number of enemies for doing what was necessary, and I made some mistakes that exacerbated the inevitable friction. When Penn came looking for a president to succeed Martin Meyerson, I was therefore receptive. The Tulane and Penn stories await a different telling. For current purposes, I need only note that when I moved to Penn in February 1981, I found myself in the middle of a huge controversy because the trustees had selected me rather than the inside favorite, Vartan Gregorian.

      At Tulane, I had arrived as the exotic ivy leaguer, full of mystery and magic. At Penn, it was assumed by campus activists, the student newspaper, and the local press that I must be the opposite of Greg. After all, our appearances differ. He was short, plump, swarthy, charming, and ebullient; I was tall, slender, white, and reserved. Since he was liberal and creative, I must be conservative and managerial. Charisma is in the eye of the beholder. Given my later public persona, it is ironic that I spent the 1980s fencing with the “progressive” activists at Penn, who cast me as the oppressive representative of corporate America. It took me perhaps four years to break through those stereotypes completely and establish warm relationships with the dominant political center of faculty and students.

      The point of this race through my resume is that, after applying to graduate school, I never had to hustle or to promote myself to get my next job. They came to me. This created a hazard of good fortune. Here I was in the winter of 1992-93, faced with a “what next?” problem of large proportions, without a lot of experience in finding jobs for myself, especially in Washington. I was therefore not surprised to notice shortly before Christmas that the Clinton cabinet had been filled without me. I was at least clever enough to realize that if I wanted to go to Washington, reticence was not going to work. On the other hand, I didn’t have a particular job in mind, and I didn’t know how to pursue it, even if I knew what I wanted.

      Then, on December 2, I read in the newspaper that Lynne Cheney had resigned as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to become effective January 20, 1993, the day President Clinton would be inaugurated. Nothing could have made her political conception of the job more apparent. Ignoring that storm warning, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that is a job I could do. It might even be fun.” I realized that I was at a great disadvantage in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering for jobs in the new administration. I did not even hear the gossip. So, I called Joe Watkins, who had been one of my assistants at Penn, and who had gone to Washington to work in the Bush administration. He was on his way back to the Philadelphia area with the hope of finding a way to run for public office as a Republican. He made an effort in the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, but the odds were too long. The Republicans missed a terrific candidate.

      Joe dropped by Eisenlohr, the president’s house on the campus, in late December, bringing me the “Plum Book,” which lists all the appointive offices in the federal government, along with a lot of good advice about how to maneuver. He also reported that he had sent my c.v. to the Clinton transition office in the hands of a friend of his who is a Democrat, with the message that I would make a good chair of the NEH. I had also just learned that, without my asking, Judge Leon Higginbotham, a Penn trustee, had sent a letter on my behalf to Vernon Jordan. Joe’s advice was to flood the office with as many pieces of paper as possible. Chaos being the rule in such operations, you could never tell when a c.v. or a letter of recommendation would find itself in the right pile of papers at the right time to get one on a list of prospects. After his tutorial, I remember thinking that I was probably in the process of being humbled.

      Lucy and I took our family, eleven in all, including children, in-laws, and grandchildren, to Club Med in Ixtappa, Mexico in early January for a wonderful week of sun and fun together. I went to the convention of the American Council on Education in San Diego when we returned. There I had a long talk with Tom Ehrlich, a close friend since we had worked side by side at Penn during my first five years, when he was provost, before he went to be the president of Indiana University. He was leaving IU now, so we had a lot to discuss about our futures. He had decided that he didn’t want to do another university presidency, though there were a couple of great ones pursuing him. He and Ellen were headed back to Palo Alto to lead a more civilized existence near their children. When I told him that I was a bit at a loss to know how to pursue the NEH chairmanship, he told me that I should call Joe Duffy, who Tom thought was the most wired-in person in Washington. Joe was then the president of American University, though he soon joined the Clinton administration as the director of USIA. I had known him for some time. In addition, he could tell me something about the NEH; he had served a term as chairman as the appointee of President Jimmy Carter.

      I called Joe in late January, not long after I got back from San Diego. He was extremely nice and very helpful. By then I knew that one of the pieces of paper with my name on it had fluttered onto the right stack in the right office at the right time and that my name had once been somewhere on a long list of people being considered for the NEH. David Morse, Penn’s excellent director of federal relations, had called John Hammer, director of the National Humanities Alliance, the coalition of scholarly and public organizations that benefit from NEH grants, and learned that my name was not being pursued because it was thought that I was not interested. I told Joe Duffy this bit of gossip, and he promised to find out what the state of play was, and also to pass on the word that I really would be interested.

      This was after the Inauguration, so the appointment process was now being handled by Bruce Lindsey’s Office of Presidential Personnel, and the transition team had melted away. David Morse had also been able to construct a list of “mentions,” people whose names were being unofficially circulated as possibilities among various interested organizations in order to gauge the possible reception of their nomination. There were nine on David’s list, and I knew seven of them relatively well, and they were all attractive candidates. The good news here was that it was not yet done; I was not too late.

      Bolstered by this information, on January 29 I called Senator Harris Wofford, whom I had known since his days as president of Bryn Mawr College. I asked him if he could help me, assuming that he did not have another horse in the race. He was immediately supportive. Not only did he not have another candidate for the NEH, but his candidate for Secretary of Education had not been picked, and he thought Clinton needed to appoint some people from the big industrial states like Pennsylvania that had supported him. It sounded like a good argument to me. I began to practice my Rocky imitation, though it usually comes out sounding more like the southside in Birmingham than south Philly.

      Harris said he would go all out for me. He then advised me to get as many endorsements as possible from influential folks, politicians and others. We went over some names. He urged me to get Marion Wright Edelman to speak to Hillary for me. I said that if I approached it right, I could probably get Lucy to speak to Hillary as well. I was beginning to get the hang of this thing.

      I