Читать книгу The Politics of Presidential Appointment - Sheldon Hackney - Страница 8

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.

Like most tales told by the protagonist, this is about good versus evil. I naturally hope the reader will cheer for the right side. In a truer sense, however, this is not about an apocalypse, in which the forces of light are arrayed against the forces of darkness. On the contrary, this is a story about the gray area, about how hard it is to be a centrist when the forces of polarization are so strong. It takes place in 1992-1993 when the Culture War was at its most intense.

The reasons for the Culture War itself are not mysterious. First and foremost, it is a counterrevolution seeking to bridge the cultural chasm of the 1960s, the fissure that separates post-Sixties America from the 1950s. That long decade, from the Brown decision in 1954 to the resignation of Richard Nixon as President in 1974, was a flamboyant mixture of nobility and self-indulgence. The Civil Rights Movement and the other social justice movements transformed the monochromatic mainstream into cultural technicolor; but the Civil Rights Movement eventually was shattered by the excesses of black nationalism; the New Left dissolved amidst delusions of revolutionary violence; the anti-war movement, while morally correct, also unsettled America’s view of itself as indomitable and righteous. Furthermore, the counterculture created its own opposition by identifying the culture itself as the threat to human freedom, imagining the enemy to be all the verities of middle-class life: the sanctity of the nuclear family, chastity, sobriety, cleanliness, respect for authority, postponed gratification, hard work, and responsibility toward others. Not only have we not yet fully integrated the results of the 1960s into our habits of thought and our daily lives, we are still sorting through the rubble of that decade and arguing about which bricks we want to use to build our new house. Politics in the 1990s were about the attempted transvaluation of America in the 1960s by the forces of change.

Politics, of course, are still about tax codes, the regulation of commerce, and how many public dollars are going to be spent for what purposes in whose district. Aside from domestic security against terrorism, which is not a partisan matter, there are still large and real issues that claim our attention: health care, campaign finance reform, restructuring social security, protecting the environment, and the wisdom and social justice of tax cuts. Still, to an unusual degree, the public arena in the 1980s and 1990s was full of arguments about such things as the Mapplethorpe photographic exhibit that was canceled at the Corcoran Gallery in 1989, the Enola Gay exhibit that was recast at the Smithsonian in 1995, the proposed national history standards that were ambushed in 1996-97, the “Sensation” exhibit of contemporary British art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, the Confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina in 2000, and such continuing controversies as school prayer, abortion rights, school vouchers, gays in the military, and hate-crime laws. In short, values-in-conflict have been competing with the politics of resource allocation.

One of the ironies of the rise of the New Republicans is that the Cultural Right has successfully copied tactics employed in the 1960s and 1970s by the Cultural Left. The culture, of course, is constantly in motion, pushed and pulled this way and that by innumerable influences, some of them large and impersonal, such as changing technology, but some of them quite self-conscious. For example, the extraordinarily successful women’s movement, since its rebirth with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, proceeded along two fronts at once.[3] One front was public policy. It advocated new laws that were designed to prevent discrimination against women in hiring and in pay, and that were intended to protect women from harassment in the workplace. The notion was that laws would change behavior and behavior would change the culture, an approach pioneered by the Civil Rights Movement.

At the same time, however, the movement assaulted patriarchal biases in the culture directly by attacking the language in which those biases were encoded, and by confronting the manners that were the reflection of the cultural biases. It may have seemed silly to have to use gender-equal “him/her” rather than the privileged “him,” and it was a nuisance to learn to use the neutral salutation “Ms.” in order to avoid the culturally loaded “Miss” or “Mrs.,” but those tactics had the desired consciousness-raising effects. Behaving as if “the personal is political” struck many as bad manners, but it worked. The culture changed in the intended direction. That is why conservatives have anathematized as “politically correct” such linguistic subversion of the existing order.

The Religious Right is following a course similar to the women’s movement by seeking to capture the government for some of its purposes (prevention of abortion; teaching creationism in school; protecting prayer in schools; character education), and by waging at the same time cultural warfare in the non-governmental public square over powerful symbols (prayer at public events; the invocation of religiously derived values in public policy debates; respect for the flag; recitation of the pledge of allegiance).

The counterculture of the 1960s, on the other hand, did not trust the government, and disdained the political movements of the Left in the 1960s as well. It simply ran a large-scale cultural demonstration project by turning almost every middle-class virtue upside down, and then singing and living the new lifestyle. “Let your culture be your politics,” it said, and bombarded the public with a long string of slogans: “do your own thing”; “if it feels good, do it”; “never trust anyone over thirty”; “tune in, turn on, and drop out”; “make love, not war.”

We should not be surprised, therefore, when the counterrevolutionaries of the current Culture War focus upon universities, dedicated as those cultural warriors are to rolling back the cultural changes initiated in the 1960s by feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, the other social justice movements, the anti-war movement, and the counterculture. The revolutionary army seemed to be bivouacked on college campuses in those turbulent years, and universities today are suspected of harboring sixties fugitives who fled the scene of the accident.

Against its will, then, the university is an actor in the Culture War. I use the term “actor” deliberately, because the Culture War is a kind of theater, a theater in which the players plot scenes and follow scripts designed to send cultural messages to various audiences. Just as we spoke of the European Theater and the Pacific Theater in World War II, we now have the campus theater in the Culture War. The objective is to pull the culture to the Left or to the Right. The tactic pursued relentlessly by the cultural warriors of the Right is to demonize universities as the breeding ground of the evil forces of liberalism that are undermining “American civilization.”

The Culture War is a contest for the minds and hearts of the public. Consequently, it must be waged through the communications media. It is no secret that journalism has been changing, that the proliferation of modes of communication has driven journalists to ever more inventive ways of capturing the public’s attention. Entertainment values intrude on the news, sound bites muscle aside thoughtful commentary, and ever shorter news cycles cause a rush to publication without verification. One of the major themes of my story is the difficulty of dealing with complex issues in a media environment that rewards simplicity, one in which the desire for good copy overwhelms the dictates of good sense.

Like all other liberals, I believe that a free press is the bulwark of liberty and democracy. Like anyone who has ever been covered by the press, I am painfully aware that journalists are fallible. Too frequently, reporters don’t get the context right, and commentators don’t get the facts right. Journalists, I fear, are just as subject as other humans to incompetence, venality and self-deception. It is frequently difficult to know which of those failings is the culprit when a story goes awry.

Those intimations of mortality, however, do not worry me very much; they do not threaten the republic. I am more concerned about a different and more subtle phenomenon in the media world. Here is a simple illustration. In the winter of 1994, after I had been at the National Endowment for the Humanities for about six months, the NEH announced that the Jefferson Lecturer for that spring would be Gwendolyn Brooks, the Chicago poet who, in 1950, became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Jefferson Lectureship carries a $10,000 stipend and is the most significant award that an American humanist can win. The roster of Jefferson Lecturers is a Who’s Who of humane letters. The New Republic, edited then by the right-leaning controversialist, Andrew Sullivan, had opposed my nomination. It greeted the news that Brooks would be the Jefferson Lecturer with a full column of sarcasm and ridicule. Charging that Gwendolyn Brooks was not good enough for the honor and that she had been selected only because she is black, TNR screamed that this is just what could be expected from a chairman of the NEH who is as hopelessly politically correct as Hackney!

Aside from TNR’s judgment about a significant American poet and a wonderfully gracious woman, there were two things wrong with this editorial opinion. The Jefferson Lectureship is awarded after careful screening by a committee of the National Council on the Humanities, followed by a discussion and a vote by the full Council. Choosing the Jefferson Lecturer is a privilege that the Council guards jealously. The chairman may participate but cannot control. Second, and more damning, the selection of Ms. Brooks was made several months before I was confirmed, and was made by the thoroughly conservative National Council that had been assembled by Lynne Cheney, my pugnaciously conservative predecessor at the NEH. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

It is easy to see how TNR could make the mistake it made. That Ms. Brooks was my choice fit so well into the story they had been telling about me that they did not bother to check the facts. Truth was the victim of the needs of their narrative. This is the heart of the matter. Something is wrong when the story generates its own facts, rather than the reverse.

Journalists do more than gather and report facts. They tell stories. They select and arrange facts to tell what they hope will be a story interesting enough to grab the attention of the public. As Robert Darnton points out in his convincing portrait of the ethos of the news room, “newspaper stories must fit cultural preconceptions of news.”[4] The first thing a reporter does on being given an assignment is to search the newspaper’s “morgue,” and nowadays probably Nexis as well, to get the background and to see how the story has been handled before.

“Big stories develop in special patterns and have an archaic flavor, as if they were metamorphoses of Ur-stories that have been lost in the depths of time,” writes Darnton.[5] This is true in two senses. Not only is the reporter’s anticipation of the slant of a particular story influenced by how it was previously cast, but reporters in general are heavily influenced by stereotypes and preconceptions about what constitutes a good story. A good reporter is adept at recognizing and manipulating standard images, clichés, angles, and scenarios in order to call forth a conventional emotional response from the editor and the reader.

My own modest gloss on this insight into journalism is that there is a large but finite number of basic stories or plots floating around in our culture, archetypal narratives that carry wisdom and values, and that are recognized as familiar and meaningful by the reader. Americans love Cinderella stories and rags-to-riches stories and triumph-of-the-common-man stories, transfiguration narratives like “Beauty and the Beast,” and stories about the lonely individual standing bravely against great odds, among many others. We never tire of the standard love story, or of retellings of King Lear or Faust, even in modern settings and even with twists. Good stories also must have believable characters, heroes and villains, conflict and resolution, and they might even carry a message: moral flaws bring down powerful and talented heroes; virtue is rewarded; hard work pays off; the world isn’t fair; or pride goes before a fall. The possibilities are many but not endless. The reporter, or indeed the historian, who can fit his story into the plot lines of a familiar narrative, especially one that reinforces important cultural values, has a better chance of captivating his reader.

My visit to Hades in the spring of 1993 left me somewhat singed but also wiser in the ways of the world. As many commentators have noted, had I not been a presidential nominee, the story about me and Penn would not have generated much attention. Bringing me down was a way of embarrassing and thus weakening President Clinton. My fate was to be a voodoo doll in the hands of the President’s enemies.

More important than that, however, I believe my tormentors recognized quickly that the events at Penn could be shaped to fit the critique of the university and of liberalism that already existed in the public mind, having been developed by conservative intellectuals over the previous generation. I was to be emblematic of the cultural elite that was running the country and was out of touch with the people, the elite that since the 1960s had been leading the nation away from the traditional values that made America great, that had sold out to left-wing authoritarianism, that unleashed on college campuses the NKVD of political correctness, that was the sponsor of the rise of minority groups to a privileged status within society, that was anti-Western in orientation, that was in thrall to statism, that was subversive of capitalism, and that needed to be crushed and replaced by the New Republicans. This was a role that I would have declined had I been asked, but I was imprisoned in a story someone else was telling.

As I have thought back on my experience during the spring of 1993 I have come to realize that I survived because I was able to escape from the story that had been created by the conservative masters of mass media. I could do that only when the setting shifted to the United States Senate, an arena in which face-to-face relationships are still important. There, in my old-fashioned way, I could present myself directly to the audience that was to decide my fate. I could tell my own story. Here, similarly, using the old-fashioned technology of a book, I hope to liberate myself for a final time from the grasp of netherworld narrators, and to bring back to the living earth the lessons of my painful journey.