The Truth & Lynne Cheney - Interview

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2001

Petite second lady Lynne Cheney has taken on big targets--and won. What can we expect now that she REALLY has a megaphone?

SHE MAY BE second lady, but Lynne Cheney doesn't play second fiddle to anybody. Indeed, Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields once wryly described Lynne Cheney as "her own man." Fields added, "As a veep's wife, she can show what's rotten in the culture with the zest and zeal that Betty Ford brought to drug abuse." Cheney has been battling "what's rotten in the culture" ever since Ronald Reagan appointed her chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986. There Cheney was appalled to learn the degree to which some of the nation's most prestigious cultural institutions were in the thrall of the trendy notion of political correctness. She made headlines defunding some of the most egregious of these programs and eventually wrote a book, Telling the Truth, about PC's assault on the very notion that truth exists. But her tenure wasn't just about halting the march of PC--she is also responsible for funding Ken Burns' series on the Civil War.

A Ph.D. in English literature, Cheney has also been an editor at the Washingtonian magazine, a TV pundit, and a novelist. She wrote The Body Politic with Vic Gold. It is a racy novel about the scheming wife of a vice president who ends up dead in bed with a network correspondent!

Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She and the vice president, high school sweethearts in Casper, Wyoming, have been married for thirty-six years. Cheney was a founding member of the Independent Women's Forum.

TWQ editor Charlotte Hays spoke with Cheney in her office at the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. Rushing in from the White House mess and looking radiant in a dark green pants suit, she joked that since her feet didn't reach the floor she had to prop them on the coffee table. She talked about PC, gender studies, her next book, the vice president's cooking, and her favorite poet, William Butler Yeats. As the interview broke up, and she headed for a meeting with her staff she recited:

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

"And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

"Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

"And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

Now when was the last time an interview with a Washington powerhouse ended with a recitation of Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"?

TWQ: Tell us about what you call the attack on truth in our schools and colleges?

CHENEY: That was really the underlying topic of my last book, Telling the Truth. It's postmodernism, the notion that there is no such thing as truth. There's only your version of events and my version and Charles' version and Harry's version, and the one that prevails will be that of whoever is the most powerful. This seems to fly in the face of the way scholarship has proceeded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

When I was nominated to serve as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986, I spoke at my confirmation hearings of the enduring truths that emerge from a study of great authors such as Homer and Euripides, Milton and Shakespeare, and Locke and Montesquieu. I talked about Matthew Arnold, the nineteenth-century poet and essayist about whom I had written my doctoral dissertation. As he saw it, humanistic study is "a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." But I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant--it no longer existed. As these academics saw it, all things we think of as true are really constructs of dominant groups, the creation of the powerful. I think this is a very disturbing development.

TWQ: What has happened to words like "merit, "fairness," and "quality," when used in the academic environment?

CHENEY: They are all seen as representing an unjust regime. Even the idea of competition is regarded with suspicion because it divides people into winners and losers. In a completely egalitarian society, you don't want to have winners and losers, so the thinking goes. It seems to me that expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature--and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it. And so the idea that we are somehow going to get rid of this in order to have a fairer society seems ridiculous on the face of it. It is a poor pedagogical approach.

TWQ: On the surface, multiculturalism sounds as if we simply favor learning about other cultures, and that is a good thing. But you have suggested that there might be a hidden agenda to multiculturalism. Can you explain this?

CHENEY: Well, this is a matter of definition, isn't it? Everyone wants the children in our society, as they proceed through school, to learn about the wonderful contributions that have been made to human civilization by people in all parts of the world. There is no question that this is a good goal and a worthy pursuit. What is often done, though, in the name of multiculturalism is to apply two sets of standards--one to our own culture that everything that's happened here is dead wrong, that Western expansion was totally bad, that our history is a story of oppression; and to look at other cultures and have the opposite attitude. I think multiculturalism is an idea that we need to embrace. It is a good thing, but we need to think of multiculturalism as looking at all the cultures of the world evenhandedly.