Vice (19 page)

Then, in the final presidential debate in mid-October, Senator
John Kerry
clumsily mentioned Mary in response to a question about whether lesbians and gay men are born or choose to be homosexuals. "We're all God's children," Kerry said. "And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as."

The next day Dick and Lynne went on the offensive. Lynne called Kerry's comment "a cheap and tawdry political trick. . . . The only thing I can conclude is he's not a good man. I'm speaking as a mom." Dick derided Kerry as "a man who will do and say anything to get elected." The mainstream media failed to note the hypocrisy. Mary Cheney sold her sexual orientation to build a professional career in marketing with Coors, yet her family was offended when a Democrat mentioned it.

Her father safely reelected, in 2005 Mary decided it was time to use the privacy her parents had guarded so zealously to cash in. A new publishing imprint of
Simon & Schuster
, run by Dick Cheney's longtime political adviser Mary Matalin, paid Mary a reported one million dollars to write a memoir. The book,
Now It's My Turn,
covers her time on the campaign trail and what it's like to be a lesbian in the Cheney family. Despite a huge publicity campaign in the spring of 2006, by mid-August, Mary's book had sold fewer than 8,000 copies, according to Nielsen's BookScan, which tracks retail book sales. By contrast, John Dean's book,
Conservatives Without Conscience,
released that summer, sold close to 48,000 copies in its first six weeks, also according to BookScan. Simon & Schuster, according to a source who knows the Cheney family, brought Matalin on with the understanding that she would get Mary Cheney under contract. The book, poorly reviewed in most places, was Matalin's first effort.

In 1986, Lynne, at that point an undistinguished writer with limited teaching experience, won a presidential appointment to
head the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
. Lynne's lack of a record proved advantageous in this case. She was a compromise nominee after the Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's first choice,
Edward Curran
. (It was eerily similar to how Dick Cheney would win his job as secretary of defense.) For six years, from 1986 to 1992, she would run the NEH, the largest hinder of humanities programs in the nation.

Lynne managed the NEH with an eye toward the future, both for herself and for the GOP. She worked hard to insulate herself from controversy to avoid being tagged by it later. Proposals that failed to meet her ideological criteria died before they arrived at her desk. If a proposal could remotely offend the right wing of the Republican Party, it received no NEH funding.

When it came to literature, says
John Hammer
, director of the National Humanities Alliance during this period, "she seemed to have the view that the canon was frozen around 1957." Anything that suggested multiculturalism or deviated from a certain right-wing romantic view of American history fell into the unwelcome category. Chicano art was too subversive to support. She overruled her staff and refused to fund a proposal for a documentary on the Pilgrim myth in American history as part of a larger exploration of the role of myth in society. "I learned from one of her close staff that she feared the American public would misunderstand the term 'myth'—they might think it meant something that is simply false," recalls
Don Gibson
, who worked under her at the agency.

The agency's multilayered review process allowed her to exert her influence discreetly. In what came to be known as "the chairman's list," names of acceptable candidates for review panels circulated among the staff. If an undesirable proposal slipped through the first stage of peer review, Cheney or one of her loyalists would subtly lobby at the next level, the
National Council on the Humanities
. After a while, many academics simply stopped applying for NEH support.

During her tenure, Cheney nearly doubled the NEH's public relations department, from ten under her predecessor
Bill Bennett
to eighteen. She surrounded herself with a tightly knit group of lieutenants, whom agency staffers labeled the "fifth-floor mafia." Few of them had serious education experience. Lynne, like her husband, valued loyalty above all. Day-to-day operation fell to
Celeste Colgan
. A Ph.D. in English literature, Colgan served as NEH deputy director, but she had spent most of her career as chief operating officer for a Wyoming lumber company. After Lynne left the NEH, Colgan went to work for Dick Cheney at Halliburton. As part of her responsibilities, she served as a liaison to the Halliburton board's executive compensation committee, which in 2000, despite his lackluster job performance, awarded Dick Cheney a pay and severance package worth $33.7 million.

Even as Lynne earned a reputation as one of the most feared agency heads in the federal government, she scored some notable successes, particularly at streamlining the grant process. She also belatedly embraced the agency's program for the preservation of historical documents, which went on to earn considerable praise. Under her tenure, overall grants for women's studies programs quietly increased as well. Those who regularly worked with Lynne characterized her as not only a brilliant debater but also a gifted conversationalist. "When she was not performing for people around her, she was a lot easier to talk with," says Hammer.

Toward the end of her tenure, Lynne Cheney increasingly spoke out against what she saw as "political correctness" in academia. Less than a month after the Clintons moved into the White House, Cheney announced she was quitting the NEH, despite the fact that nearly sixteen months remained in her term. (Terms are staggered to make it easier to keep the agency bipartisan.) She left the government and moved to the conservative
American Enterprise Institute
. Republicans, rallying behind Newt Gingrich, were preparing for revolution, and one of the strategies for victory would be to exaggerate cultural conflict to demonize their opponents. Lynne would play a significant part in the well-financed effort.

Sheldon Hackney
, the chairman of the NEH who replaced Cheney, would later describe the
Culture War
as "a theater in which the players plot scenes and follow scripts designed to convince an audience that their side is the hero and the other side is the villain"—or, as Cheney described the villains, the "cultural elites."

Less than three weeks before the
1994 midterm elections
, which would end forty years of Democratic majorities in Congress,
The Wall Street Journal
published an op-ed by Lynne. In it, she singled out new
history teaching standards
as an example of the
evil in academia
. With the standards, Cheney and the culture warriors had found the perfect scapegoat. On their face, the standards seemed innocuous. They served as a voluntary curriculum guide to American and world history for teachers of elementary and secondary students. The standards were not offered as course content, but rather as historical themes and areas of study. Along with the standards came a thousand classroom activities to encourage teachers to look at what their peers were doing.

Cheney and her allies conflated the standards with the classroom activities and then judged them by what wasn't included. No mention of Thomas Edison! No mention of Robert E. Lee! No mention of George Washington! Clearly, Academics Who Hated White Men wanted to hide the Founding Fathers from the nation's impressionable school children. It mattered little that by design, the standards didn't focus on names, but were guidelines to spark discussion and evaluate a student's knowledge. For instance, a suggested activity might read, "Analyze the character and roles of the military, political, and diplomatic leaders who helped forge the American victory" in the Revolution, or, regarding the Civil War, "Compare the civilian and military leadership of the Union and the Confederacy." Under the standards, if a student didn't mention Washington and Lee when answering the questions, he would fail the exercise. But try to explain that in a sound bite.

The media lavished attention on the controversy.
Gary Nash
, who with two other colleagues at UCLA had supervised the creation of the standards, recalls that in one twenty-four-hour period beginning on October 26, he opposed Cheney on PBS's
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,
ABC's
World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,
the
Pat Buchanan
radio show, and the
Today
show. Put on the defensive against shrill and scurrilous attacks, Nash and his colleagues lost the battle. Every Cheney zinger required a detailed, audience-losing explanation to rebut.

In January, after the Republicans took the House, Cheney helped secure a 99-to-1 vote for a nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution condemning the standards. "They blitzed the Senate," the NEH's Hackney remembers. "This was like the war resolution on Iraq. It came down to a notion of whether you were patriotic or not."

Ironically, Lynne had originally championed the creation of these same standards. She had picked the majority of the council members who reviewed them. An NEH project officer followed the process on her behalf, providing reports every step of the way. When the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA (whose creation Lynne funded) released the first draft of the standards in October 1992, Cheney wrote one of Nash's colleagues a two-line memo: "What nice work you do! I've been saying lately that the best grant I've ever given is to your standards-setting project." Cheney wrote the note before she recognized the political capital she could earn by attacking the standards.

"We were dumbfounded [by her attacks]," remembers Nash. "She had seen the drafts. She had made it clear she was pleased with the process as well as the product."

In order to explain her prior support, Cheney created a narrative that only insiders could dispute, whereby the standards radically changed after she left the agency. "I was flimflammed," she said.

Her opponents felt the same way. In talking with those who battled Lynne Cheney during the Culture War that raged in the 1990s, a common attitude toward her emerges: begrudging respect. It's not her intellect, mastery of the facts, or scholarship that impresses them. They do not describe her as an admirable or particularly principled foe. What confounded her adversaries were Lynne Cheney's political abilities, her mastery of media manipulation, and her talent at bending institutions to her will.

"It was as if we all had pop shooters and she had a howitzer," recalls Stanley Katz, chairman emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. "I have to say, Lynne Cheney is a minor genius at public relations, at operationalizing her ideology."

The academics and bureaucrats who stood in her way never really had a chance.

Just how far she would go was on display on January 24, 1995. That morning the opinion page of
The Wall Street Journal
featured another op-ed written by Cheney, this one under the provocative title "Kill My Old Agency, Please." In it, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities excoriated the agency she had once run. "In a time when we are looking at general cutbacks in funding for many groups, including welfare mothers and farmers, it is time to cut funding for cultural elites," wrote Cheney.

Cheney knew that eliminating the NEH's paltry $177 million budget would have little impact on the federal deficit, then at $180 billion. (Just a month earlier, Senators had doled out billions of dollars in pork that the Pentagon hadn't even requested, one commentator noted.) As a former chairman of the NEH, she also knew that the endowment leveraged its budget to attract other funding sources many times greater than the grants it distributed. One advocacy group had even calculated that combined, the NEH, the
National Endowment for the Arts
, and the federal Institute for Museum Services generated more than $36 billion annually and supported 1.3 million jobs.

But the focus on facts missed the point. This was political theater. Back at her old agency, those who had once worked with Cheney greeted this drama with anger and astonishment. "It was shocking to those of us who were left behind," recalls one current NEH staffer.

They remembered the memorandum Lynne had written to all NEH personnel when she left in December 1992. The one in which she described her "main accomplishment" as "actively expanding the mandate of the Endowment." She ended the letter by saying, "It has been an honor for me to be a part of this agency's work. . . . I have valued my time here and my association with the fine men and women of the National Endowment for the Humanities."

Now, the "fine men and women" were worried about the future of their agency, if its former director succeeded. "There was real fear that the agency would be abolished," remembers Don Gibson.

The
Journal
editorial served to soften up the terrain for the day's main event, when Cheney repeated her message before the
House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee
. The new Republican House leadership had arranged for a showy hearing on eliminating the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts. "The American people deserve to understand why their money supports artists who submerge a crucifix in urine," Cheney testified. It was the kind of statement that made her critics joke that Cheney could teach a class on how to turn anecdotes into evidence. The image of a crucifix in a jar of urine was offensive, and clearly a questionable use of government funding. But
Andres Serrano
, the artist behind the "Piss Christ" piece, had received support not directly from the NEA, but from a museum that had obtained an NEA grant. The agency was being punished for the decision of an errant curator. Cheney's attacks on ideological intolerance in academia created a similarly false impression. "Political correctness was real, but it was not limited to the left, which was her view," says John Hammer.

At the hearing, Cheney described a humanities endowment bent on brainwashing children to despise their country. The NEH could not be trusted because even benign-sounding grant proposals would be transformed into hate-America screeds. "Many academics and artists now see their purpose not as revealing truth or beauty, but as achieving social and political transformation," Cheney said, rehearsing an argument she would expand in a book published later that year,
Telling the Truth.
"It's easy enough for grant recipients to toss objectivity to the winds since the postmodern view is that objectivity is an illusion—one that the white male power structure uses to advance its interests."