Lynne Cheney recently told reporters that she doesn't like being called "strident" or "combative." The former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, appointed by Reagan in 1986, showed her moderate side at the Republican National Convention, where she introduced her husband, Dick, the Vice Presidential nominee. She dutifully followed a script that had her praising him as a "fabulous father" and successful fly fisherman. But somehow she wasn't very convincing. A few days later Newsday called her "the woman with the sock in her mouth," and the Chicago Sun-Times named her speech the "worst performance" of the convention, because she "felt compelled to portray herself so, well, lamely."

What was missing from the portrayal was the right-wing warrior who used her post at the NEH to fight the Republican culture wars of the eighties; the ideologue who, after continuing to serve as head of the NEH through the Bush years, resigned following Clinton's election and moved to the American Enterprise Institute to write Op-Ed hit pieces, and later co-hosted the now-defunct CNN show Crossfire Sunday--she was the one "on the right." In her heyday Lynne Cheney was not just a conservative gadfly; after she targeted the National History Standards in 1994, the Senate voted 99 to 1 in support of her call to defund the project. Very few opinion writers ever experience that kind of triumph.

All this is history, but it's history that has suddenly become relevant, because Cheney's friends in high places--the New York Post editorial page, for example--have already endorsed her for Secretary of Education in a George W. Bush administration. Now she's hard at work campaigning for the ticket--to be sure, in her new noncontroversial mode. On the campaign trail in California recently, she played the Laura Bush role and did the wifely thing, visiting an elementary-school classroom for a photo-op with little kids and ironing her husband's shirts. William Bennett, another conservative cultural warrior and a personal friend of hers from the old days, doesn't think this will last. He told the Washington Post, "She'll be hard to muzzle."

Bennett's point is indisputable: If Bush goes to the White House, Lynne Cheney may well lead a revival of those eighties culture wars. Even if she doesn't get a Cabinet post, it's hard to imagine that with her skill and commitment, she would not play a major role as wife of the Vice President. It's true that George W.'s "compassionate" theme represents a renunciation of Gingrich's brand of zealotry, that much of the old Reagan crowd is gone and that the culture wars are mostly history. Still, Lynne Cheney is, for all practical purposes, on the ticket. Everything she's done up to now shows her to be an ideological pugilist, eager to play the role of hit man; at the same time, she has been a master at getting herself into the limelight. Making war on liberals is her forte.

She started as chairwoman of the NEH in 1986 with slender qualifications--a PhD in literature from the University of Wisconsin and a three-year stint as an editor of Washingtonian magazine. Her main qualification seems to have been as wife of a leading Congressional conservative and former Ford Administration Chief of Staff. At the NEH, Cheney, now 59, perfected a method of attack that depends more on hyperbole than accuracy. One of her first campaigns was aimed at a PBS series, The Africans, that she called "propaganda" because it described Africa's historic problems as a consequence of European exploitation. She insisted on removing the NEH's name from the credits and refused to approve endowment publicity funding for the series--actions she termed "a defense of free speech." The controversy enabled her to seize the limelight for her own brand of political correctness.

At the NEH she also criticized colleges for shifting away from traditional Western Civilization courses toward global history and culture. The American experience, she argued, was the high point of world history: "I find it hard to imagine that there's a story more wonderful than being driven by the desire to worship freely, to set off across that ocean, to make a home out of this wild and inhospitable land."

Cheney's initiatives at the NEH aroused cries of dismay from much of academia, but she stumbled only once, in her effort to pack the advisory panel of the NEH with right-wingers, who lacked the requisite qualifications--especially Carol Iannone. Iannone had gained fame for a Commentary article in which she said that giving National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes to African-American women writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker sacrificed "the demands of excellence to the democratic dictatorship of mediocrity." Despite a major lobbying effort by Cheney, her 1991 nomination of Ianonne was killed by the Senate.

• PAGE
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.