Letter to the editor

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Robert A. Haller

A few questions and responses reached us after the publication of the cover of Volume 32 #1 (July/August 2004). One was from a former editor of Afterimage who expressed her surprise but declined to comment in writing on what motivated it. Another was from Robert Haller who called me and confirmed the conversation we had by email. Here are his comments.

Dear Mr. Chalifour,

This brief note is in response to your July/August 2004 cover announcement of the death of President Ronald Reagan. As an actor and media figure one would have expected Mr. Reagan to be very interested in the media arts projects of the National Endowment for the Arts. While he did not seem to particularly care about them, and though his budget director David Stockman proposed to reduce the NEA budget by 50% when Reagan came into office, in true Republican fashion he behaved very differently. The key event seems to have been the appointment of Frank Hodsoll, a White House insider to be the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, replacing the out-going chair, Livingston Biddle. Hodsoll had been a deputy to Chief of Staff James Baker where he had overseen the President's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, as well as a task force on immigration. For the Arts and Humanities task force Hodsoll supervised a band of friends of the Endowment, including former NEA chair Nancy Hanks, Henry Geldzahler, Arthur Mitchell, David Packard, Beverly Sills, Hanna Gray, Barnabas McHenry, Charlton Heston, and Daniel Terra. Predictably this group gave a ringing endorsement to the two Endowments, and funding rose that year from $119 million for the NEA to $143 million.

The outgoing Carter administration had sought $158 million for the NEA. This to and fro juggling of numbers (subsequently with Sidney Yates' House Interior Committee) continued through the eight years of the Reagan administration, but the actual budgets never faced the catastrophic falls that were so often predicted. Hodsoll was an astute diplomat and politician who protected his agency, even to the point of successfully confronting the American Film Institute on the issue of raising funds for film preservation, a task that Nancy Hanks had wanted to tackle but had never dared to actually seize.

Of course the Reagan administration never approached the astounding doubling and redoubling of the Endowment budgets under President Nixon, when Nancy Hanks was chair. But neither did the Reagan administration cave in to pressure like the first Bush administration.

Robert A. Haller

Chair, National Alliance of Media Arts Centers, 1980-82