Mr. Middleman Goes to Washington : LEAVING TOWN ALIVE: Confessions of an Arts Warrior, <i> By John Frohnmayer (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 342 pp.)</i>

John Frohnmayer will probably be remembered as the arts enthusiast from Oregon who was brought to Washington to head the National Endowment for the Arts by President George Bush, only to leave a few years later, a victim of the right. His story has been portrayed by many as a kind of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the innocent outsider felled by the Capitol’s cross-fire. Now Frohnmayer has written a memoir of his brief tenure, advertised as the story of a born-again first-amendment supporter. It is a far more complicated and nuanced picture, but even though it has been written as a classic apologia, it is far more damning than the author presumably intended. As such, it makes a telling case study, the story of what happens to a man unsure of his principles and unaware of his motives.

Frohnmayer begins his narrative by telling how energetically he lobbied for the job. A lawyer who prides himself on his First Amendment work, he had earlier “drifted into theology,” earning an MA that the Administration assumed would be a shield against the fundamentalists. But the only question the White House cared about was how he felt about “this Mapplethorpe stuff.” In retrospect, Frohnmayer admits, he was so eager to get the job that he lied to his questioners, promising he would be a team player, that he would indeed censor any more dubious art.

In doing so, Frohnmayer surrendered the defenses that had been built into the NEA charter. Its founders were well aware of the dangers of political pressures on the endowments and therefore established a structure of “peer selection.” Only fellow artists, professors, etc. were meant to decide on applications--they alone were to be the judges of artistic merit. The administrators were meant simply to administer the grants. For years, it worked.

There’s no reason to assume that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson or Jimmy Carter would have been any fonder of provocative, avant-garde art than Bush was. But I can’t recall any successful attacks on the arts during their or other administrations. It was only recently that the Republicans chose to politicize the endowments and the advisory bodies, to impose their own ideological guidelines. Once this happened, it was hard to hold back the opportunistic Congressional attacks of those who wanted to publicize their own agendas.

So Frohnmayer came to a Washington caught up in “the Mapplethorpe stuff.” Senator Jesse Helms had hit pay dirt, and the attacks on homosexuals, artists and pornographers were proving to be effective, if gentler, substitutes for the Willie Hortons of yesteryear. (Frohnmayer does not seem to remember that Helms’ original outrage had been caused by images of black and white men sexually engaged. Frohnmayer believes that obscenity is indeed the issue and is eager to placate all his potential critics on the right.) He wrote ahead to Helms, to “start a dialogue,” assuring him that he would run the NEA in a manner that would please the senator. Helms would later accuse him of duplicity, but Frohnmayer makes it clear that at the outset he felt that he could find a compromise to the obscenity issue. He calls to mind the character in an N. F. Simpson play who asks: “No one could be more opposed to the death penalty than I am, but must we go to the other extreme and abolish it?”

But he soon finds that it takes two to compromise. Helms, having no interest in abandoning a promising political issue, gets Congress to pass an amendment forbidding NEA funding of “obscene” art. Frohnmayer insists on implementing the law, adding the notorious loyalty oath to grant applications--over the opposition of his own very conservative advisory council as well as that of an independent commission. In the book he argues, unconvincingly, that his motivation was to force a lawsuit, proving the amendment’s unconstitutionality. He defends himself against the Los Angeles Times’ Alan Parachini, who attacked this course; but now, he admits, “I don’t claim I had the prescience to foresee exactly how that action would play out,” but “I did so to assure Congress that it had gotten our attention.”

While maintaining that he is seeking a middle way between the artists and the right, Frohnmayer is unable to resist the temptation of flexing his muscles. Early in his tenure, he is confronted by the Artists Space AIDS exhibit controversy, which includes such juicy tidbits as David Wojnarowicz’s attack on Cardinal O’Connor in the context of an exhibit catalogue. Again, The Times’ Parachini was on the case. Frohnmayer admits he could easily have wriggled out of the dilemma by stating that the grant had been approved before his watch. But “I felt that not acting . . . would be a declaration of weakness.” The galleries’ director is portrayed as the “enemy,” “setting him up,” “dumping this steaming, writhing mess on my desk.” Within a few months, this moderate defender of the First Amendment has become an engaged combatant in the culture wars.

It is one of the sadder aspects of reading the book to see Frohnmayer’s view of the artists changing, so that he comes to describe the “radical artists” as “absolute, shrill and unyielding.” In response to continued letters from Helms, he tells his staff to “notify our grantees that our cause was not furthered by their sticking it to Helms or any other detractors in their art work, publications or public messages.” Though Frohnmayer laudably admits that many of his acts were mistaken, this is not one of those instances. Indeed, he seems puzzled that “my staff’s response to my request was sullen.”

It is morbidly fascinating to see this descent into censorship, this de facto surrender, precisely in those moments when no surrender was necessary. The defender of the First Amendment seems not only to have abandoned his cause, but doesn’t even seem to regret having done so. Later on, Frohnmayer admits to having learned from the Artists Space debacle, but only temporarily. So eager is he to placate the right that he soon finds himself again seeking to veto an artistic project, merely to assert his right to do so. The artists have so clearly become the foe that he neglects the forces that will eventually do him in.

For it was within the White House itself that the real opposition would come. Here Frohnmayer’s naivete is so extraordinary as to arouse pity in the reader’s heart. He explains to us that he is directly responsible to the President, whom he rarely sees, but that occasionally John Sununu “dispatches Bill Kristol or Andy Card to impose some policy on us. Seldom was I consulted about the wisdom of (these).” The White House realized that the NEA was a valuable target and was torn between encouraging the attacks and forcing the NEA to give in to them.

As if this wasn’t enough, Presidential Personnel imposes its own choices on him. Frohnmayer suspects his deputy, Al Felzenberg, of getting direct orders from the Administration, contrary to his own. By checking his phone log, Frohnmayer discovers that Felzenberg has had a long conversation with those noted art critics, Evans and Novack, explaining how one Karen Finley is soon to perform in public, covering her naked body with noxious unguents, all at the taxpayers’ expense. He is constantly told that the Republicans need the attacks on the NEA for electoral purposes--but it is the fear of being set up by radical artists that haunts him. Ultimately, Frohnmayer accepts the presence of his eventual successor, Anne Radice, oblivious to her “unbridled ambition and her past conservatism,” he states reassuringly.

Indeed, it is hard to understand how, in gossip-ridden Washington, our hero can have remained so completely out of it. Gradually, it appears, even his own wife can no longer stand his compromises and equivocations, and their marriage is severely threatened. He is frequently asked why he stays on, and his answers to the reader are vague, unwilling to admit failure, feeling that somehow his clinging to power will help the cause.

Why, may one ask, does he not stand up and fight? It isn’t as if he were a career politician, someone who must stay in Washington. And, indeed, he does finally threaten to resign--not over an attack on the arts, but over the powers of his office. Faced with a Congressional recommendation that his own National Council be given final say over grants, he threatens to quit. Even when it is clear that the White House is completely undermining him, he still seeks a compromise, allowing a politically correct, Administration-appointed deputy to review all grants. For months, the White House has been pointing to Lynne Cheney at the National Endowment for the Humanities as a model leader, one who doesn’t hesitate to veto any liberal grant proposals. To his credit, and to her disdain, Frohnmayer refuses to follow suit. Forced to conform, shorn of all power and honor, Frohnmayer still clings on. When finally it becomes clear that the Administration has no further use for him, he “resigns” silently, without a public statement, hoping to stay on a few extra months before the final announcement is made.

It is brave of Frohnmayer to have admitted so much of this. But he seems unaware of the implications of much of what he says, unaware of the degree to which he lost because he surrendered his principles early on. It is this that ultimately makes “Leaving Town Alive” such a depressing book. Frohnmayer is clearly not an evil man, indeed he is a well-intentioned citizen, the kind of person who used to be encouraged to serve his country. But thrust into the Washington maelstrom, he needed a set of very firm beliefs to survive. Instead, his naive hope that he could placate the Helmses and others led him to surrender the few weapons he could have used. His is the sad story of someone who hoped that others were as willing to compromise as he, and who discovered that those who had taken him on would not be placated.