by Lou Dubose
The central thesis of the book—that the president needs more latitude to keep affairs of state secret—is vintage Dick Cheney. Lynne is channeling Dick when she has President Jenner muse, "It seems to me that the history of the presidency in the twentieth century is the history of a gradually weakening institution." But the true meat of the book is found in the subplots. They center on the relationship of two couples—and both resemble the Cheneys.
First there are presidential assistant Dale Basinger and his needy wife Marie. Basinger—like Cheney under Ford—is the very picture of a behind-the-scenes faithful presidential counselor. Basinger would never write a "kiss-and-tell" book when his White House days are over. Lynne's fictional Basinger, like her husband, works to keep his outward demeanor "calm and positive," even if it's just a pose in the face of disaster. "So many staffers took their cues from him, and if their spirits were low, the press was sure to pick it up, and it wasn't long then before the stories started about how demoralized the Jenner staff was," Lynne writes.
But while obsessing about his job, Basinger suffers momentary pangs of guilt over abandoning his family for the grind of the White House. If it bothered Basinger, it was a workload under which Dick Cheney thrived. He described a typical day as Ford's chief of staff as beginning with his arrival at the office at 6:30 A.M. and ending with his departure sometime around 10 P.M. During one six-month period in the midst of the presidential campaign, he took off a single Sunday. Cheney didn't find this a problem, as he loved his job. But in an interview at the time he did allow that it could take a toll on a family. "It does apparently affect their personal lives—plus the strain on marriages and so forth," he said. It would be just one of many sacrifices Lynne would make for her husband's career.
Next to secrecy, the strongest plot thread in Executive Privilege is infidelity. Marie wonders if Basinger is bedding the First Lady's press secretary. He tries to reassure her, but to no avail. "He knew that his being home so little was part of the problem. And part of it was jealousy. She resented the women he saw at work. She saw them usurping her place in his life, and no amount of arguing could convince her that was not the case."
While Basinger truthfully tells a disbelieving Marie that he's too busy to have an affair, this is not the case for the other workaholic Cheney-like husband in the book, Rudy Dodman. White House correspondent for Newstime magazine, Dodman leaves the care of their two-year-old son to his stay-at-home wife, Nancy. She, as Lynne once did, spends her days working on a thesis involving Immanuel Kant. Throughout the book, Rudy is on the verge of straying into the bed of a flirtatious fellow reporter. Nancy, sensing his temptation, muses about how Washington is a place where the power that men amass attracts women. She had already decided that if he slept with another woman, she'd leave him. "There was a basic standard of honesty that had to be met in a relationship, if it was to have any meaning at all."
When queried by a reporter in Rawlins, Wyoming, about whether her husband supported the idea of her writing Executive Privilege, Lynne responded that it wasn't a question of asking permission; it was more like a consultation.
The most notorious of Lynne's fictional books is the 1981 novel Sisters. Written in prose that manages to be both stilted and overwrought, Sisters follows its heroine through a gritty frontier west. During the 2004 campaign, much was made of the breathy and positive treatment of lesbianism in the book. In an attempt to capitalize on the attention, New American Library, which owns the rights, wanted to reissue the now out-of-print novel. Cheney family lawyer and literary agent Robert Bennett called the publisher to request that it reconsider. It seems Lynne didn't think it was her best work. New American Library shelved the reprint. Nonetheless, several websites have made it available online. By excerpting the racier passages, they save the curious from the drudgery of having to read the entire book. In truth, the sex scenes in the novel are fairly tame. But the acceptance of homosexuality they evince contrasts sharply with the way, in public, Lynne handled the lesbianism of her youngest daughter, Mary.
Mary says that when she came out in junior high, her parents accepted her unconditionally. (This didn't stop Congressman Cheney from compiling an anti-gay voting record during this period.) As an adult, Mary was not only living openly as a lesbian, but also using her homosexuality as a professional selling point. She took a job with the Coors Brewing Company to help one of the radical right's deepest pockets market itself to homosexuals and other niche markets. A year before the 2000 campaign, she told the lesbian magazine Girlfriends that she went to work at Coors "because I knew other lesbians who were very happy there."
Yet in Lynne's first major interview of the 2000 presidential campaign, when ABC's Cokie Roberts addressed Mary's open lesbian life, Mary's mother took umbrage. Embracing a gay family member, instead of trying to convert her to heterosexuality, Family-Research-Council-style, would have offended a conservative Christian Republican base that was unaware of her daughter's sexual orientation. "Mary has never declared such a thing," Cheney snapped. "And I'm surprised, Cokie, that you even would want to bring that up."
The outburst served its purpose, cowing most of the media into avoiding the topic for the rest of the campaign. Not surprisingly, Mary's homosexuality returned as an issue in 2004. This time Mary was earning a six-figure salary running her father's reelection campaign. Despite her active campaign role, Mary seldom appeared with her longtime partner, Headier Poe, at events that involved the GOP base. Gay and lesbian activists, incensed by the Republican Party's use of same-sex marriage as a wedge issue, tried to force Mary out of her stealth lesbianism. They started a website, dearmary.com, where more than twenty thousand visitors wrote her letters, most imploring her to use her position to make a statement. The site featured Mary's likeness on a milk carton, to underscore her disappearing act. But Mary remained silent, and so did her parents. There was no public outrage from the Cheneys, even when members of their own party, like Alan Keyes, attacked Mary as "a selfish hedonist" or offered to pray for her soul.
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 h
ave 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.