Monday, May 12, 2008
How the vice president's powerful wife makes sure that historians and other scholars follow the right path.
Aug 26, 2004 | Stumping for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, vice presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, ferocious culture warrior of the conservative movement, has been trying to soften her image. The controversial former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan and first Bush administrations no longer mentions her signature issues: the evils of feminism, or how liberal academics are teaching students to hate America. Mostly she talks about her grandchildren, beaming with pride that one of them calls her "Grandma of the United States."
Such a sweet old lady would never presume to meddle where she has no authority, would she? After all, Cheney has long shuddered at the horror of Hillary Clinton. "Mrs. Clinton got herself in a certain amount of trouble by operating from a platform where she really didn't have a mandate from the voters to establish policy," Cheney sniped to the Daily Telegraph of London in 2001. And in a Hillary-bashing forum at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2000, Cheney remarked about the then-first lady: "The hypocrisy is the thing that is most distressing."
But now, unelected and unappointed, Lynne Cheney is back in charge at the National Endowment for the Humanities, operating without that pesky "mandate from the voters" through handpicked surrogates in key positions. "It's pretty obvious that she's running the agency," William Ferris, a history professor who headed the NEH from 1997 to 2001, said of Cheney.
The endowment's chairman, Bruce Cole, a Renaissance art scholar from Indiana University, is a conservative ally of Cheney whom George H.W. Bush had appointed to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory body that oversees grant-making for scholarly research, preservation, media and teaching projects at the $137 million agency. At Cole's swearing-in as chairman in December 2001, Cheney and her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney, showed up to clink glasses. The unusual high-level attention sent a message that was not lost on the endowment's staffers.
Moreover, two close Cheney friends have been installed in key positions at the agency. In charge of day-to-day operations is deputy director Lynne Munson, who was Cheney's special assistant at the NEH from 1990 through 1992 and later followed Cheney to her fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute. And Celeste Colgan, a member of the National Council on the Humanities, is a former Halliburton official and longtime Cheney family crony who was Cheney's deputy at the NEH from 1986 through 1992. Both women, according to many sources close to the endowment, are widely perceived to be responsible for an Orwellian atmosphere of secrecy and paranoia that has descended over the agency, a Cheney family hallmark.
Though she has no formal standing in day-to-day management, Cheney's photograph is featured prominently on the agency's Web site, and she always seems to pop up at chairman Cole's side for important announcements. In 2002, when President Bush unveiled a special $10 million White House-backed education program on American history, "We the People," the first audience member he thanked in the Rose Garden ceremony was Lynne Cheney. The president did eventually acknowledge Bruce Cole as well, though he got his name wrong, calling him "Bob."
During her chairmanship of the agency from 1986 through 1992, Cheney was known for killing research projects deemed offensive to conservative orthodoxy, scribbling "not for me!" on proposals dealing with race, gender discrimination or the legacy of slavery. She considered the endowment so irredeemably left-wing that she campaigned to abolish it. But times have changed. Republicans control the White House and Congress. Democrats are cut out of the process. Now conservatives view the agency as a useful tool for propagating the kind of uplifting and generally uncritical version of American history they believe necessary for national greatness, as Cheney explained in a CNN interview last year: "American history that's taught in as positive and upbeat a way as our national story deserves."
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