Appointment with destiny.

• Author: Gitlin, Todd
• Position: The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture War - Book Review

THE POLITICS OF PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENT: A Memoir of the Culture War by Sheldon Hackney NewSouth Books, $25.95

NOT SO LONG AGO, WHEN AN Ivy League university president nominated to run the National Endowment for the Humanities was pilloried by conservatives for knuckling under to campus radicals, Ralph Reed, the whiz kid of the Christian Coalition, dubbed him "The Pope of Political Correctness," a phrase whose import--both halves of it--was unlikely to be missed by his fundamentalist Protestant legions. The president in question, Sheldon Hackney, born and raised in Birmingham, Ala., was a Methodist, but the wrong kind--a seeker of common ground. He had married into the distinguished liberal Durr family and was not Jesse Helms's idea of a defender of free speech. At the University of Pennsylvania, Hackney tried to reconcile warring students while honoring due process. "One of the most prominent apologists for political correctness," sniffed Sen. Helms.

Sheldon Hackney's apologia pro vita sua is an elegant, persuasive defense of a judicious approach to the culture wars, but it is also an indispensable study of the press, much of which played useful idiot to the crackpot right's crusade against what they took to be campus radicalism as they pumped themselves up for the Gingrich moment of 1994. Led by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which devoted no fewer than seven editorials to Hackney's thought-crimes during the spring of 1993, the press jumped all over Hackney, charging him with despising free speech and truckling under to disruptive nonwhite students. A chorus of reliable pundits chimed in against the demonic Ivy Leagued Rush Limbaugh, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Pat Buchanan, and John Leo, among others. In an uproar of maximum feasible misunderstanding and viciousness reminiscent of the Whitewater froth running concurrently, the press produced a caricature of the actually (in his phrase) "mild-mannered, unassuming" Hackney. The result, when Bill Clinton nominated Hackney to run the NEH, was "not only ... the worst time of my life, but ... an out-of-body experience. I followed the story in the press of some idiot named Hackney, who was either a left-wing tyrant or a namby-pamby liberal with a noodle for a spine. My critics couldn't decide which. Not only did I not recognize him, I didn't much like him either."

To Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, Hackney was the "Crackpot Prez" of the University of Pennsylvania, where...