With Cheney and other conservatives creating a frenzy and with a tight presidential contest with Bill Clinton looming, George H.W. Bush fired Frohnmayer. The former NEA chairman, who holds a master's degree in Christian ethics, laughs about the experience in retrospect. But he said he remains proud of the principles he stood up for. "We are a wildly diverse country, and we have a lot of different viewpoints being represented by a lot of different applicants," he said. "For me as chair to simply impose my own personal tastes was to me not an appropriate use of the chairman's veto power."

Cheney certainly felt otherwise. Angela Iovino, who worked at the NEH during Cheney's chairmanship, recalled a brouhaha about the Aztecs that sent Cheney's culture-war beanie cap spinning off her head. The problem was that Cheney discovered that the ancient natives of Mexico had practiced human sacrifice. "She went nuts on that. She threw her hands in the air and said, 'How can we look into the cultures of these savages?'" Iovino said. "We just looked at each other. What do you say to something like that? We just stared, mutely. She didn't really foster conversation."

The scene was indicative of Cheney's basic ignorance of the world outside American borders, said Iovino, a language expert. "Lynne Cheney is a hardworking woman, but it was hard to talk to her about anything outside the Republican conservative agenda. She rarely knew what language was spoken in what country. She thought Hebrew was spoken in Jordan," Iovino said.

Throughout such controversies, Cheney's loyal lieutenants -- Lynne Munson and Celeste Colgan -- were at her side, absorbing the lessons that would guide them a decade later when they returned to the NEH as Cheney's surrogates.

Of the two, Munson is considered the most punitive, because she controls the day-to-day operations of the endowment. In the hallways, she has been overheard boasting loudly that she has spoken recently with Cheney. Unlike previous holders of the deputy's position, Munson lacks a Ph.D., an essential qualification whose absence, her detractors say, is evidence that pure politics is behind her assignment.

Colgan, 65, earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Maryland and has known Cheney for decades. From 1986 through 1992, Colgan was Cheney's deputy at the NEH. Later, she spent two years as director of the Wyoming state commerce department, then followed Dick Cheney to Halliburton, where she became vice president of administration. Colgan is widely viewed as Cheney's eyes and ears on the National Council.

Robinson, the retired NEH program officer, remembers Colgan as a fearsome presence. One of the good things Cheney had done, Robinson said, was secure three years of funding from the Reader's Digest and Geraldine R. Dodge foundations for "thinking" sabbaticals for harried high-school teachers. When the money ran out, Robinson, who oversaw the sabbatical program, secured a commitment from the foundation to extend the program another year. Colgan was livid. "She blew her cork at me, and she accused me of feathering my own nest. I had no idea what she was talking about. But Celeste just absolutely dragged me across the carpet, accusing me of trying to take some personal advantage from this. To this day I still don't know what she was talking about," Robinson said.

Bill Clinton's election in 1992 moved Cheney out of the NEH and over to the American Enterprise Institute, where Richard Perle and other neocons were plotting what then seemed the improbable invasion of Iraq. Munson, who had been Cheney's special assistant at the NEH, followed her to the think tank, where she wrote a book, "Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance," that ridiculed the kind of modern art that John Frohnmayer had defended in the early 1990s on free-speech grounds. Both Cheney and Munson remained active in a conservative anti-feminist group called the Independent Women's Forum, funded by the Clinton-hating Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

Cheney banged out a new book: "Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense and What We Can Do About It," published in 1995. Also that year she founded, with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an advocacy group to fight "political correctness," a perch she used to bash Clinton's nominee to succeed her at the NEH, University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney. Hackney had sinned in not interfering in the university's regular adjudication process when a group of black students accused another student of racism for taunting them as loud and rowdy "water buffalo." The accused, who was born in Israel, said he'd badly translated a Hebrew expression used to describe inconsiderate people. A Cheney appointee to the National Council on the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Kors, led the attack from within the university on Hackney, while Cheney stoked conservative anger through her television appearances. (A student journalist at Penn who was also instrumental in promoting the story, Stephen Glass, went on to notoriety at the New Republic, where he was eventually exposed as a serial fabricator.)

As Hackney later wrote in "The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture War": "I followed the story in the press of some idiot named Hackney, who was either a left-wing tyrant or a namby-pamby liberal with a noodle for a spine. My critics couldn't decide which. Not only did I not recognize him, I didn't much like him either." In the end, the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed him.

In a parallel universe, meanwhile, Dick Cheney had figured out he would not be president and took his consolation prize as head of oil services conglomerate Halliburton. He invited Colgan to follow. And so his wife's old friend became Halliburton's vice president for administration and secretary of the Halliburton corporate foundation. She also served as a liaison to the company's executive compensation committee, which rewarded Dick Cheney with stock, options and other income worth $36 million in 2000. (Told where the woman who had accused him of feathering his nest had landed, Robinson, after a stunned pause, said: "It's amazing how cozy these people are.")

Then, George W. Bush's disputed election swept the Cheney crowd back in at the NEH. Turmoil quickly followed as Munson began stacking the supposedly independent peer review grant panels and the National Council with conservatives. At the same time, Munson and Cole revived the Cheney-era practice of "flagging" research proposals for rejection that were insufficiently patriotic.

"It was Lynne Munson who had all these harebrained ideas about peer review panels," said Robinson, who retired from the NEH in 2002. He said Munson began requiring program officers to submit their choices for peer review panels to her for approval, thus eliminating "wrong-thinking" people from the front lines of grant making. Other sources with knowledge of the process confirmed Robinson's account. NEH spokesman Lokkesmoe declined to comment.

At the same time, Clinton academic appointees to the National Council were removed from their areas of expertise, where they had once had influence over how to distribute NEH grant money. Instead, they were assigned to powerless, non-grant-making panels that oversee the backwater state humanities councils. Among the Clinton-era scholars who were disappeared in this manner were Maryland's Ira Berlin; University of Virginia history professor Edward L. Ayers; Susan F. Wiltshire, a classics professor at Vanderbilt University; Evelyn Edson, a history professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College; and Pedro Castillo, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Berlin, a prominent historian of Southern and African-American history, made no secret of his anguish, telling numerous colleagues of his anger, humiliation and intention to resign. But either too traumatized or too afraid to speak publicly about the experience, Berlin responded neither to phone messages left at his home and office nor to e-mails. In response to questions from Salon about Berlin's resignation, NEH spokesman Lokkesmoe released a heavily edited version of the historian's resignation letter highlighting bland pleasantries. "It pleases me much to have participated in its [NEH's] great work," Berlin wrote, according to the excerpt released by NEH.

Bush appointees to the National Council include conservative intellectuals known for tendentious argument. Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom is co-author, with his wife, Abigail Thernstrom, of "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," a 1999 book that argued that racial progress has been more extensive than liberals portray and would be even further along without affirmative action. Also on the council is Emory University's Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who attacks traditional feminism and has been associated with the same Independent Women's Forum where Cheney and Munson have found homes.

Others are notable for their connections to right-wing academic advocacy groups associated with Cheney. Council member Jeff Wallin, for instance, is listed on tax returns as treasurer of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit group Cheney helped found to lobby against tenure and perceived liberal bias in universities. The NEH identifies Wallin as president of the American Academy of Liberal Education, yet another conservative front group fighting perceived bias in universities; the organization counts Fox-Genovese among its board members.

While the NEH has become a closed circuit of self-reinforcing conservative worldviews, stories are flying about grant proposals that are being turned down or altered to secure NEH funding. According to several sources, a well-rated proposal for a television documentary on Barry Goldwater, considered the father of the modern conservative movement, was rejected because the right wing has since turned on the 1964 Republican presidential nominee. Before his death, Goldwater came out in favor of gay rights and women's rights, denounced the religious right, and took other positions that are anathema to conservatives. Lokkesmoe had no comment.

By last January, the Chronicle of Higher Education had published a lengthy investigation on why many apparently worthy grants were not receiving funding from the NEH. The Chronicle found that the Cheney-era practice of "flagging" projects was back. William Ferris told me he rarely blocked a proposal that had been recommended by peer reviewers and the National Council. "Maybe once a funding cycle," he said.

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