Salon: Madame Cheney's cultural revolution

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How the vice president's powerful wife makes sure that historians and other scholars follow the right path.

Stumping for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, vice presidential spouse Lynne Cheney, ferocious culture warrior of the conservative movement, has been trying to soften her image. The controversial former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan and first Bush administrations no longer mentions her signature issues: the evils of feminism, or how liberal academics are teaching students to hate America. Mostly she talks about her grandchildren, beaming with pride that one of them calls her "Grandma of the United States."

Such a sweet old lady would never presume to meddle where she has no authority, would she? After all, Cheney has long shuddered at the horror of Hillary Clinton. "Mrs. Clinton got herself in a certain amount of trouble by operating from a platform where she really didn't have a mandate from the voters to establish policy," Cheney sniped to the Daily Telegraph of London in 2001. And in a Hillary-bashing forum at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2000, Cheney remarked about the then-first lady: "The hypocrisy is the thing that is most distressing."

But now, unelected and unappointed, Lynne Cheney is back in charge at the National Endowment for the Humanities, operating without that pesky "mandate from the voters" through handpicked surrogates in key positions. "It's pretty obvious that she's running the agency," William Ferris, a history professor who headed the NEH from 1997 to 2001, said of Cheney.

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…Angela Iovino, who worked at the NEH during Cheney's chairmanship, recalled a brouhaha about the Aztecs that sent Cheney's culture-war beanie cap spinning off her head. The problem was that Cheney discovered that the ancient natives of Mexico had practiced human sacrifice. "She went nuts on that. She threw her hands in the air and said, 'How can we look into the cultures of these savages?'" Iovino said. "We just looked at each other. What do you say to something like that? We just stared, mutely. She didn't really foster conversation."

The scene was indicative of Cheney's basic ignorance of the world outside American borders, said Iovino, a language expert. "Lynne Cheney is a hardworking woman, but it was hard to talk to her about anything outside the Republican conservative agenda. She rarely knew what language was spoken in what country. She thought Hebrew was spoken in Jordan," Iovino said.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/26/lynne_cheney/index.html