Читать книгу The Politics of Presidential Appointment - Sheldon Hackney - Страница 7

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

It is impossible to turn the pages of this small but important book without being struck by ironies and lessons from the Culture Wars. One of the most interesting to me, a sobering cultural lesson, concerns the campus event that lies at the heart of this book, the infamous “water buffalo” incident. Here is the lesson: the participant in the white mob became a hero for the right wing, while the four black women remained faceless and the objects of national ridicule.

Thankfully, another lesson that emerges from Sheldon Hackney’s story is that justice can triumph if people of good will, from the broad center of the political spectrum, have the courage of their convictions and refuse to be intimidated.

I have more than a passing interest in the story you are about to read. Like its author, I am a native Southerner who grew up with an intense interest in history and politics and with a strong desire to bring my native region fully into the Union, to have it embrace not just the rhetoric but the reality of democracy. Unlike its author, I am not white and I did not grow up in his world of middle-class privilege. Nonetheless, the social revolution that changed our country beginning in the 1940s and those mutual interests in history and activism eventually brought the two of us together. Sheldon and I shared a Southern heritage, though we had experienced it from very different perspectives. More importantly, we shared a sense of history and a deep commitment to racial equality. We were interested in not just what America had been, but what it could be.

Sheldon Hackney is a brilliant scholar and an outstanding educator. He had served ably as the president of Tulane University and was in his first year as the president of the University of Pennsylvania when my daughter, Vickee, graduated from the school in 1981. I was the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremonies.

I had also known Sheldon’s mother-in-law, Virginia Foster Durr, because of her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, and with the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mrs. Durr was a Southern white woman in a class of her own. Her world was that of the old Southern aristocracy, mostly mythic but not altogether. She married Clifford Durr, of a prominent Alabama family, a Rhodes scholar and a lawyer who went to Washington to help FDR bring the nation out of the Great Depression. Mrs. Durr’s sister was married to another Alabama lawyer, Hugo Black. In Washington, Mrs. Durr was a close personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. The family was well-connected.

However, the Durrs turned their backs on Washington power and prestige during the McCarthy era. Who could ever forget the scene of Mrs. Durr on the witness stand during the Eastland Hearings witchhunt, calmly powdering her nose while ignoring the inquisitors. And then her husband, by then a member of the Federal Communications Commission, displayed his own courage when he was confronted with the regrettable Truman loyalty oath. Durr correctly declared the oath unconstitutional, refused to sign it, and in protest declined President Truman’s offer of reappointment.

The Durrs then returned to Alabama just in time to befriend Rosa Parks and to become among the few white Southerners to support the Civil Rights Movement that emerged from the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the process, of course, they were ostracized from white society and Durr lost most of his law practice.

I learned most of this history in the mid-1970s, when Mrs. Durr began spending summers with her daughter and son-in-law, Lucy and Sheldon, on Martha’s Vineyard. During family vacations there I took great pleasure in revisiting the Civil Rights Movement on a shaded porch with Mrs. Durr and in getting to know the Hackney family. I came to admire and respect Sheldon not only for his humanity but also for his intellect and proven abilities.

In 1992, another of my friends, Bill Clinton, was elected president and he chose me to head his transition team. And that is how I, a black man from humble beginnings in Atlanta, Georgia, became one of the political mentors of Sheldon Hackney, a white man from a more privileged background in Birmingham, Alabama. When Sheldon told me that he was interested in a place in the Clinton administration, I was eager to help him. He was exactly the sort of person who needs to be in the public service: smart, knowledgeable, a proven administrator, thoroughly grounded in the broad center of politics, and an intellectual who could communicate across the spectrum of educational levels and 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.