The Politics of Presidential Appointment. Sheldon Hackney
interests.
He was an ideal candidate to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I and others on the transition team knew from the start that we had the right person for the job. Of course, we did not anticipate the extent to which he would become a lightning rod for right-wing attacks.
The story Sheldon relates in the pages to come intersects with all the avenues of history, politics, and society that came into sharp focus in what were termed the Culture Wars. And at the outset of the Clinton administration, the Culture Wars were at their most intense.
We should understand the attack on Sheldon not only as part of that ongoing battle but as an attempt to undermine the Clinton presidency. It was not the only such attempt, and not the most important, but it shows in a clear way the machinery of “slander by slogan” at work.
The intense partisanship of some political actors, and the fascination of the press with “controversy,” made it impossible for the public to understand the difficult “gray area” issue of how universities must protect the speech rights of less powerful students against the abusive speech of more powerful students.
The partisanship and the controversy combined to make Sheldon’s confirmation process one of the most brutal I’ve witnessed in my thirty years on the national scene.
It is nice that the tortured story you are about to read had a happy ending.
I am proud that Sheldon Hackney was confirmed as chairman of the NEH, and that he served with distinction, vision, and committed leadership. Of course, that came as no surprise to me.
Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., is senior managing director of Lazard Frere and the author of Vernon Can Read.
We rounded the corner of the broad corridor in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on June 25, 1993, approaching room 430 where my confirmation hearing was to be held. Suddenly we were aware of a crowd and the loud buzz of conversation. People were standing two abreast in a long line stretching almost the length of that mammoth hallway. Martha Chowning, who had worked as an “advance person” in the Clinton campaign and was now the liaison to the White House for the National Endowment for the Humanities, had met me as my taxi pulled up outside, and she was trying to prepare me for the scene I was about to encounter. The hearing room was already jammed with people, she said, and the news media were there in force.
My anxiety level, already high, began to soar. Martha added that some of the crowd had just come from a hostile press conference staged by my opposition in a nearby room provided through the good offices of Senator Trent Lott. Presiding at that counter-hearing were Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, who had dubbed me “The Pope of Political Correctness,” and Floyd Brown of the Family Research Council, the creator of the infamous Willie Horton advertisement for George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.[1] Fresh from a successful “Borking”[2] of my friend, Lani Guinier, the University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law whose nomination to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights they had forced President Clinton to withdraw, they were determined to make my confirmation another major battle in the “Culture War.” Though I was a reluctant combatant in the Culture War, I was by then the most visible gargoyle decorating the battlements of the Ivory Tower.
By then I had been mocked on national radio by Rush Limbaugh, denounced in hundreds of newspapers and Newsweek by syndicated columnist George Will, excoriated in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer, flayed alive for television by Pat Buchanan on “Firing Line,” and otherwise held up for scorn and derision. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the house organ of movement conservatives, had written seven—count ’em, seven!—unflattering editorials about me and the University of Pennsylvania over the span of a few weeks in April, May, and June, while I stood blindfolded and lashed to the stake. John Leo of U.S. News and World Report created a “Sheldon Award,” which he annually bestows on the college president who most closely appoximates my profile in cowardice. Whoever formulated the precept that there is no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right, could not have had this in mind. I know there are people who think it is worse to be ignored than to be criticized, but I am not among them.
As I walked down the corridor toward my appointment with the Senate Committee, I thought of the Tony Auth cartoon that had appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer just two weeks before. It showed a pride of lions feasting on a carcass labeled “Lani Guinier.” Parachuting into the midst of this feeding frenzy was a figure labeled “Hackney.” He had a quizzical look on his face as he gazed down at his carnivorous landing zone. I knew exactly how he felt.
Thinking back on that spring-from-hell, I recall it not only as the worst time of my life, but as an out-of-body experience. 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. I remember laughing at the headline of a story in the New York Post that trumpeted, “Loony Lani and Crackpot Prez.” I did not think that Lani was loony, of course, but it was even harder for me to realize that I was the crackpot prez. How could a mild-mannered, unassuming Ivy League president get into such a mess? Even more interesting, how could he get out of the mess?
The story that follows answers those questions. It is an odyssey of sorts, an account of my journey, both geographical and intellectual, from Philadelphia to Washington. It did not take nine years, nor am I the man of many wiles, but there were adventures along that metaphorical I-95, and I will insinuate into the story some of the wisdom gleaned from my encounters.
Though this is a story about a Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, it cannot be fully understood unless the reader knows something about me and about the university world. Thus, having begun the book with my confirmation hearing, I then backtrack to provide necessary context before returning to the actual confirmation. My primary purpose is to tell my own story in my own way, getting the white hats and black hats on the right heads. I believe my story about an allegedly grotesque example of “political correctness” illustrates how the Culture War and the current media environment combine to polarize public discussion. In that polarized atmosphere, the public has no chance to understand complex issues. Not only are moderates trampled underfoot, but the great gray areas where life is actually lived, the areas of ambiguity and tradeoffs between competing values, are rendered toxic to human habitation. This is not healthy for a democracy.
The only way I have been able to make sense of this brief slice of my life is to think of it as a case study in how the politics of public perception work. Both Left and Right struggle to frame issues advantageously by aligning those issues with prevailing cultural values in a way that will favor their own side. This has always been the case. To the Federalists, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were about patriotism; to the Republicans, they were about free speech. To the abolitionists, the Civil War was about slavery; to the white South (at least in retrospect), it was about states’ rights.
The question is, “How close to the truth should a polemicist stick, and who is to protect the public from unethical distortions?” I will demonstrate how the version of my story that the public heard was created for ideological purposes and then governed as much by the internal dynamics of the media’s storytelling, and the intensely bitter partisan atmosphere of 1993, as by any “truth” residing in the events themselves or in the characters featured in the drama.
My tale is set precisely in the era of politics by professional character assassination exposed by David Brock in his recent confessional, Blinded By The Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. Indeed, one might think of my experience as a squirrel hunt in an obscure corner of the forest where the big game hunt was also in progress. The hunting parties overlapped, and the fates of the quarries were linked, but I am not suggesting that the two adventures were of similar significance.
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