Conservatives Find Much to Applaud in Lynne Cheney

Lynne V. Cheney just couldn’t stop herself. Her friend Kenneth M. Adelman, who had interviewed her for a monthly magazine, gave her the opportunity to edit the transcript.

She went a little too far.

“I told her, ‘Lynne, you can change your answers, but, please, don’t keep changing the questions,’ ” recalls Adelman, chuckling.

Adelman and other Republican admirers say that when Lynne Cheney, a cultural conservative who headed the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 through 1992, feels strongly about something, she proceeds with great intellectual confidence.

“Lynne is just blunt and very operational about what she wants to get done,” said Adelman, a former arms negotiator who has known the Cheneys since the 1970s. He helped Lynne Cheney, who has a doctorate in literature, launch a writing career in 1970 that has since produced three novels and several nonfiction books.

“Right now, Lynne thinks all of Western civilization is in danger from the left,” Adelman adds, “and she has no levity about that.”

The difference between Cheney and her husband, Dick--tapped Tuesday as George W. Bush’s running mate--is rooted in style: If he’s low-key and subtle about his conservative views, she is not. Friends say whether at Washington power dinners or laid-back cookouts at their house in Jackson, Wyo., she is always the more loquacious partner, engaging in a wide range of topics.

In fact, having Lynne Cheney--educator, author, former federal official--on the podium next week at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, even in the role of spouse, is likely to give great comfort to the party’s most conservative supporters.

“She definitely sets conservative hearts to palpitating,” said Marshall Wittmann, a political analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Certainly, she’s more of the conservative movement than her husband.”

“He has the gravitas and she has the Kulturkampf,” Wittmann said of the couple.

‘A Woman of Many Accomplishments’

Introducing Dick Cheney on Tuesday, Bush paid homage to his formidable wife. “She is a woman of many accomplishments,” said Bush of the woman beaming at her husband’s side. “Lynne is an incredibly important member of this team, as well.”

After succeeding William J. Bennett as chair at the NEH, Cheney went about dispensing $100 million a year in grants in the spirit of the Reagan administration that put her there. She iced grants dealing with feminism, multiculturalism and social history. She particularly criticized colleges such as Stanford University that abolished reading lists of the great books of Western culture. Before she left NEH, she proposed that universities adopt a traditional “core curriculum” of 50 semester-hours in culture and civilization, foreign languages, mathematics and natural and social sciences.

Many academic institutions lambasted Cheney for trying to limit academic freedom. She particularly irritated historians in 1995 when she attacked a proposed history curriculum that grew out of an NEH grant. Cheney called the curriculum “a misshapen monstrosity.”

For Gary Nash, the UCLA historian who had co-directed the project, it was a stinging betrayal--and an obvious attempt by Cheney to curry favor with the Newt Gingrich forces. She had, after all, nurtured the process when she was at NEH, Nash said in an interview. But with hard-line conservatives winning the day, Cheney later even called for the abolition of NEH.

Don Gibson, who worked at NEH for 20 years, remembers the time Cheney overturned a grant application for a project dealing with Latin America, saying the topic was too controversial. When Gibson attempted to discuss her decision, he said Cheney cut him off. “You could talk, Don, but the decision is final. It’s political,” Gibson said she told him.

Gibson, who also worked for Bennett, said Bennett might have made the same decision but “would have been willing to talk about it . . . Lynne felt there was a truth and that was it.”

However, Bennett said he found her always open to discussion and intellectual debate.

“Lynne has the great gift of clarity,” he said.

Kept the NEH Out of Peril

While Cheney was at NEH she published half a dozen controversial reports on the state of the humanities. But she is still credited with using her political acumen and connections to keep the NEH free of the ugly divisions that nearly sunk the National Endowment for the Arts.

It will be 60 years ago next month that Lynne Anne Vincent was born in Casper, Wyo. She was a teenager when she met Richard Cheney at their high school. She was homecoming queen and head of a baton league; he was captain of the football team. They went off to separate universities but reunited a few years later and were married in 1964. They went on to pursue graduate degrees. She earned a doctorate in English literature with a dissertation on 19th century British poet Matthew Arnold.

At the same time Lynne Cheney was raising two daughters, she taught at the university level and wrote freelance articles. Cheney told the New York Times in 1979 that it was sometimes difficult “to pursue my own line of work, just because what Dick does is so interesting--it can become totally absorbing. It takes a real effort of will to step back and tell myself I’m going to teach this seminar on Matthew Arnold’s poetry.”

Indeed, she is a steely woman of the West in her ability to be disciplined and work hard.

Once she took to politics and policy, she pursued public life with ease and great vigor. When her husband suffered his first heart attack during his House campaign, she immediately stepped in as a “surrogate candidate” during his six-week recovery. At the same time, she was remodeling an old house and drafting her first novel.

Friends suspect that Lynne Cheney, currently a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, could be a powerhouse campaigner. She has already taken on Al Gore for writing a book about “how the great thinkers of the environment have led us astray.”

Bennett, for one, would love to see her “engage in combat.”

“But we’ll see whether the campaign lets her out,” he said. “She’s got a lot of vinegar in her. But she’s really good.”