Maureen Dowd - Americans for the Arts

Americans for the Arts presents
The 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture
on Arts and Public Policy
An evening with
Maureen Dowd
March 24, 2014
Concert Hall
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
Sponsored By:
Ovation
The Rosenthal Family Foundation
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Special thanks to Google for its partnership
in live-streaming the event and the
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National YoungArts Foundation for its support of the artist performers.
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March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
OPENING REMARKS BY
ROBERT L. LYNCH
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from all across the United States will walk the halls of Congress
to meet with your Representatives and your Senators to make
the case for federal support for the arts and for arts education. And I’m here to say that advocacy works—your advocacy
works—because last year alone we, together, not only prevented a 49 percent funding cut to the National Endowment for
the Arts, but we saw that agency’s budget grow by $8 million.
That’s huge.
And that’s only one of some dozen issues that we will be
bringing up to Capitol Hill tomorrow.
We will certainly face new challenges this year; however,
our biggest objective is to strategically position the arts front
and center before Congress and before the White House as an
important economic and educational policy issue in America.
Our biggest objective is to strategically
position the arts front and center before
Congress and before the White House as
an important economic and educational
policy issue in America.
President and CEO of Americans for the Arts Robert L. Lynch
G
ood evening everyone and welcome to the 27th Annual
Nancy Hanks Lecture on the Arts and Public Policy. I’m
Bob Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts,
and I want to thank every one of you for joining us tonight here
at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
We have another great and large crowd this year with 2,200
guests here in the audience, and many more watching on our
Americans for the Arts YouTube channel as we live-stream this
event for the second consecutive year thanks to the support
from Google.
We have a very special evening ahead of us, but first I’d like
to take a moment to talk about a related event that will take
place tomorrow, National Arts Advocacy Day. Hundreds of you
We’ll have a chance to do just that tomorrow, and you’ll be
able to keep track of our activities by following us on Twitter
and using the hashtag #AAD2014.
The real potency of Arts Advocacy Day is the coming together of 85 of the most important national and state arts and
civic advocacy organizations representing more than 100,000
non-profit cultural organizations of every discipline throughout every region of this country. And they come together to
develop a united policy platform for the arts in America.
Could I now ask the Arts Advocacy Day national cosponsors
and the state arts advocacy groups to please all stand and be
recognized?
I also want to thank the hundreds of grassroots advocates
who have come from across the country to help make this
week a success. Also in the audience tonight, we have several
artists who have joined us, including dancers, Liz Lerman and
Dianne Brace, Damian Woetzel and Graham Lustig.
Actors Alec Baldwin and Nancy Stephens are also here
to help us, and Nancy also representing Rosenthal Family
Foundation, a generous sponsor of tonight’s event. We’re also
joined by several of our artist committee members tonight via
Twitter and Facebook, including Yoko Ono, John Legend, Kerry
2 March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
Highly acclaimed Irish stepdancers Declan Crowley, Kiera Daley, Ashley Smith, and Kieran Coleman perform at the 27th Annual Nancy
Hanks Lecture. The dancers are alumni of YoungArts, an organization that identifies and supports the next generation of talented
young artists in the literary, visual, design, and performing arts.
Washington, Ben Folds, and Josh Groban. And they have all
tweeted out about the important advocacy work ahead of us
this week. All in all, their combined tweets have reached over
12.5 million people.
I would like to thank personally the great Americans for the
Arts Board of Directors who along with our staff are enabling
our organization to do these kinds of things—National Arts
Advocacy Day, the Nancy Hanks Lecture—and to work in different kinds of areas for advancing the arts in America.
We also have a number of members of Congress and other
key guests in the audience tonight, including the co-chair of
the Congressional Arts Caucus, Leonard Lance of New Jersey;
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Senator Ed Markey
from my home state of Massachusetts; and Congressman
James Moran of Virginia, who will be receiving our 2014
Congressional Arts Leadership Award tomorrow. Also with us
tonight are the co-chair of the Congressional STEAM Caucus,
Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, Congressman David Cicilline
of Rhode Island, Congressman Ted Deutch of Florida, and
Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine. Thanks to each of
you for being here tonight.
I want to say a special thanks to NEA Acting Chair Joan
Shigekawa, who for 14 months has managed the National
Endowment for the Arts as we wait for a new chair. Joan, thank
you for the great work that you have done. We also have with us the heads of several of our public
sector partner organizations, including the incomparable
Tom Cochran of the United States Conference of Mayors and
Linda Langston and Matt Chase of the National Association of
Counties.
And, of course, our sponsors for the Hanks Lecture, the
Rosenthal Family Foundation and Ovation, the nation’s only
arts television network. And I would like to specifically thank
Ovation’s CEO, Charles Segars, for serving as the honorary cochair of Arts Advocacy Day this year.
And, finally, I would like to recognize one more individual
who actually may not be here yet but who is retiring this year
after a lifetime dedicated to the arts and stepping down from
our Board of Directors after 26 years. Fred Lazarus began his
career as a young assistant to Nancy Hanks, who our lecture
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
is named for. She was then the Chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts who famously grew that agency’s
budget by over 1,400 percent. As President of the Maryland
Institute College of Art for the past 35 years, Fred transformed
that institution, and many believe the city of Baltimore itself,
into a global leader for art, design, and creativity. And as the
founding board chairman of Americans for the Arts, he set forth
our path to become the largest arts advocacy and research
organization for the arts in the country. Please join me in recognizing Fred for his arts leadership.
And now for tonight’s program. When we started putting
the components together for this evening, we quickly realized
a strong Irish theme taking root with Maureen Dowd, Alec
Baldwin, and even myself, presenting this event all within just
a week of St. Patrick’s Day. Additionally, many of us never had
a chance to truly celebrate because of the snowstorm, but
we’re going to fix that tonight with the inspiring music of Zan
McLeod and Celtic Borders. They will be joined by a dazzling
performance of Irish stepdancing by highly acclaimed alumni
of YoungArts, our great partner that honors young performers
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nationwide. Please enjoy.
[Performance: Zan McLeod and Celtic Borders with YoungArts
Alumni Irish Dancers]
Thank you so much, and were they not spectacular? There’s
a book that I want you all to get, it’s called How the Irish Saved
Civilization. Very good reading.
I want to thank Zan McLeod on guitar, Patrick Cavanagh
on banjo, Alex Boatright on the concertina and accordion, and
Katie Henderson on the fiddle.
I also want to thank Young Arts for assembling such a
talented group of dancers from across the country to perform
tonight. Thank you to Kieran Coleman, Declan Crowley, Keira
Daley, and Ashley Smith.
Now, I have many pages prepared for the next introduction,
but I have very clear instructions from the person I’m supposed
to introduce about how that introduction should happen, and
so this is it. There’s no “It’s always my great pleasure,” no unforgettable skits, no “Ladies and gentlemen, 25 years.” No—it is,
“Here to introduce our featured speaker is the Y chromosome.”
The performance also featured the talented Washington, DC-based group Zan McLeod and the Celtic Borders. (L-R) Alex Boatright,
Katie Davis Henderson, Patrick Cavanagh, and Zan McLeod.
4 March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
INTRODUCTION OF MAUREEN
DOWD BY ALEC BALDWIN
Talk about gridlock. They walk along the halls of Congress
and, forgive me, four abreast—never thinking that other people
need to move more quickly to their destination, others with a
greater sense of spatial relationships, others with a Y chromosome. Whether it be to vote, or have lunch, or golf, men are
simply more purposeful and more aware of time and space.
Now, Maureen Dowd has never written that, but I think she
would agree with me because she understands the real differences between men and women.
A lot has been made lately about the
negative effects of male aggression and
maleness in general. This concerns the
Y chromosome community a great deal.
Alec Baldwin (in character as the “Y Chromosome”) introduces
Maureen Dowd.
T
hank you. Thank you all, my thanks to Bob Lynch, to Nina
Ozlu, and everyone at Americans for the Arts for the opportunity to come to Washington and introduce my friend,
Maureen Dowd. That’s right, I said my friend.
Because as I will make abundantly clear over the next few
minutes, Maureen Dowd has been a friend to me and my fellow Y chromosomes throughout her career.
Dowd wrote a book called Are Men Necessary?, but if you
read that book, you’ll learn that Maureen’s take on men and
their relationship with women is as fair and evenhanded as—
well, I can’t think of anything fair and evenhanded in this town
to compare it to.
But, anyway, a lot has been made lately about the negative effects of male aggression and maleness in general. This
concerns the Y chromosome community a great deal.
There was talk recently about the shutdown of the government having been averted due in no small part to backchannel dialogue between female members of Congress. It was
suggested that overly prideful, macho posturing of men on the
Hill had led to the intractable gridlock. Let me ask you, do you
really think it would be any better if women ran the show in the
House and the Senate?
First of all, women have no sense of spatial relationships.
Let’s take the simple task of deciding what restaurant a couple might go to. Why is it that the surest way a man could get
to eat what he wants is by pretending he’d rather eat anything
but that? I think you men in the room understand what I’m talking about. You’re driving along. She says, “What time is it?” You
say, “It’s 6:30.” She says, “I feel like I’m a little hungry.” “What are
you in the mood for?” you say coyly. “I don’t know,” she lies.
Pretending to factor in your input. You’ve been down this road
more than a few times, so while you are craving Japanese food you
say, “Anything but sushi.” She stares out the window and blithely
exhales, “How funny. That’s exactly what I’m in the mood for.”
Now, you end up getting what you want, but can you imagine how this would play out in governmental affairs? A guy from
the gun lobby says, “I will not agree to any legislation that does
not include trigger locks.” And Senator Double Xer says, “Forget
it, I can’t agree to that.”“Bingo,” he whispers to his colleague. Or
some coal guy says, “This Clean Air Act is an abomination. It just
isn’t tough enough.”“Watch this,” says Congresswoman Double X,
taking her pen to it and cutting provision after provision. Is this
what we’re headed toward, more women stacked four abreast
holding the menu of the Members Dining Hall hostage to some
silly game of reverse psychology?
Wait, that’s my phone ringing. It’s Maureen, hold on. Maureen,
what’s wrong? No, you turn right at the Lincoln Memorial. Do
you see it? What’s on your right? Some body of water and a
food cart? Okay, Bob is going to come get you. Bob, would
you send somebody to pick her up, please? Oh and, Maureen,
where do you want to have dinner later? What do I want? Well,
anything but Indian food.Oh, you do. Okay, well, then Indian
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
food it is.And please don’t embarrass us, Maureen, about splitting the check. Okay, I’ll see you soon.
Now, an Australian biologist, Dr. Jennifer Graves, has reported in recent years about the collapse of the Y chromosome.
Three hundred million years ago, according to Graves, the Y
chromosome had 1,400 genes to it; today, it’s down to 45.
She predicts that the Y will be kaput, extinct, gone in the
way of Men-Only social clubs in around 5 million years.
Now, why do you suppose that is? Could it be the strain and
aggravation of living with someone who hates when you talk
about an ex-girlfriend, but think it’s different when she mentions at parties what a great dancer Eduardo was. Or that Sasha
was so fit he could open a wine bottle with his abs. How Tim
was so good looking he couldn’t even walk through the Miami
Airport without 25 women and men giving him their card. Could
it be that the Y is collapsing because it lives with an XX who
wants to talk about something critical, a burning issue like new
sweaters for the dog, or how Y is tired all the time because he
eats too much wheat; she wants to talk about this at 1:30 in the
morning when Y has to be up at 5:30 and give a breakfast meeting speech where they’re serving a lot of wheat.
It’s a miracle I have 45 genes left, and those 45 I have left are
exhausted, trust me.
Maureen knows, Maureen understands. A Catholic school girl,
her dad was a detective, a cop. Maureen knows the difference
between men and women warrants dishing out criticisms of
both in the same measure, just like she spared no political party.
(L-R) Robert L Lynch, Maureen Dowd and Alec Baldwin
5
She dribbled Clinton down the sidewalk with one hand and
George Bush with the other with equal dexterity and brutality.
She’s the Pistol Pete Maravich of political columnists. She knows both men and women in this town crave power,
and that the more women get it, and get used to it, the more
genes they’re going to start losing, too. She dribbled Clinton down the sidewalk
with one hand and George Bush with the
other with equal dexterity and brutality.
She’s the Pistol Pete Maravich of political
columnists.
Everybody knows Maureen won the Pulitzer, but with her
it was no biggie. In fact, she uses it as a paperweight to hold
down her take-out menus in her kitchen cubbyhole. She
doesn’t care about glory or money. She certainly could have
gotten rich writing Nora Ephron-esque screenplays and Tina
Fey-like TV shows.
But no, not Maureen. She didn’t care about money or
status. She could have married any number of famous men.
Eventually, they couldn’t keep up. Their numbers ended up in
that pile of Asian fusion menus underneath the Pulitzer.
Wait, I got a text. Maureen is pulling up.
Words are Maureen’s passion. Ideas, truth, putting the
almost incomprehensibly incomprehensible world of American
politics into some salient perspective, that’s what she does. And
she does it better than anyone.
It’s fitting she’s here today at this great gathering of art
supporters because her writing is a work of art. And Y chromosomes love Maureen Dowd—a gorgeous redhead who can cut
you to pieces in a single sentence—because Maureen, herself,
is a work of art. She went to Immaculata High School. She’s a
Capricorn. Her middle name is Bridget.
Here is a woman who understands men and likes them anyway. A woman for whom the double X status may mean keep
out, danger ahead; it only makes her more alluring.
Ladies and gentlemen, the funny, the brilliant, the gifted
Maureen Dowd.
6 March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
MAUREEN DOWD
The 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
PEELING EELS AND OTHER LIFE
LESSONS FROM THE ARTS
T
hank you, Bob Lynch. Thank you, Irish dancers and musicians. My dad was a champion stepdancer from Ireland,
so that meant a lot to me. And, of course, thank you, Alec.
My favorite of the many show business stories that Alec has
told me is this one. Laurence Harvey was doing a Courvoisier
ad and the ad guys wanted to do the tag line with a more
famous actor who had, as they say, a signature voice, who
could say Courvoisier at the end with a rolling R. Harvey was
on the publicity tour for Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor so he
offered to ask Richard Burton. Burton was a little bit smashed
when Harvey went to the Taylor-Burton suite in the Hampshire
House on Central Park South and begged him to do the tag
line. In that remarkable Welch voice, Burton replied, “I won’t do
it. I can’t do it. I’m too bloody big, bigger than you will ever be.”
Alec, you’re too bloody big to come all the way down here to
introduce me, but I’m so happy that you’re back in public life.
Even if it’s only for tonight. More than anyone I’ve ever met,
you’re in love with the arts. You are celebrated in the arts community both for your incredible talent and incredible generosity,
not only with the millions you’ve given but with your own time
and fierce lobbying efforts. And, of course, your signature voice.
And now that you’ve played a caustic Irish Pulitzer prizewinning New York newspaper columnist on Law & Order, you
can come write my column any time you want. I’d like to see
you take on Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan. The only arts they’re into
are the dark arts.
It is a great honor to deliver the Nancy Hanks Lecture. I am
humbled both by my theme and by my predecessors. And I
must candidly admit I was quite surprised to be asked to give a
lecture on the arts. The arts, after all, ruined my life.
My love life, that is.
When I was 10, my older brother Michael took me to see
Hamlet at the Carter Barron Amphitheater in Rock Creek Park.
I immediately fell madly in love with the moping and, like,
really deep Dane. I couldn’t wait for that crazy girl Ophelia to
get herself off to the nunnery.
I just knew that if I were Hamlet’s girlfriend, everything
would be fine. He would be my project. Who doesn’t love a
fixer-upper – especially one haunted by a ghost? The guy just
needed a good kick in the pantaloons. And a little Zoloft. And,
of course, I’d have to pry him away from his other girlfriend—
his mother.
I grew into a fanatical groupie for Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.
My next fatal attraction was the hot Scot stuck with the castrating wife who gave him advice like “Look like the innocent
flower but be the serpent under it.’’
She reminded me of some scary Queen Bees I knew in
Catholic high school. I was certain that if I were married to
Macbeth, instead of that word that rhymes with witch who was
always taunting him about being “unmanned,’’ he would be
content. No double, double, toil and trouble for us. We’d sit by
the fire in the castle. He’d mention regicide. I’d give him a nice
mushroom meatloaf and a foot rub. . . and a little Zoloft. . . . and
he’d forget all about it.
I even fantasized about being Mrs. Lear. Sure, he was old
and imperious and “as mad as the vexed sea.’’ And my doghearted, serpent-toothed, vulture-eyed, tiger-clawed daugh-
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
7
More than 2,000 educational, cultural, and civic leaders and grassroots advocates from across the country fill the Concert Hall to
welcome Maureen Dowd to the stage.
ters-in-law would have been a handful. But that was a family in
desperate need of a no-nonsense matriarch. And a little Zoloft.
Even howling at the storm, though, Lear seemed like a
better bet than Othello. Who’d want to double date with Iago?
What a buzzkill. And such an egotistical climbing operator, he
should have worked on K Street. Besides, even I had doubts
that I could instill confidence in the tormented Moor of Venice.
As someone once said of Barbra Streisand, we’re talking about
the Grand Canyon of need.
And yet my life—my professional life, my
emotional life, my spiritual life—would
have been impossible without the arts.
So the arts saddled me with a fixation on impossible men. I
console myself with the thought that the impact of the sciences on my romantic life would have been even worse. Imagine
mining data for love. And yet my life—my professional life, my
emotional life, my spiritual life—would have been impossible
without the arts.
For example: Long before it became a staple of political
reporting, I developed an arts quiz for presidential candidates.
I figured it was a way to lure them from auto-replies and shake
out some spontaneity.
Culture has often been viewed with consternation in politics.
Gary Hart was not viewed skeptically by his fellow senators because he dallied with a beautiful young blonde. He was
viewed skeptically because he read novels, and even worse,
wrote them. “They thought I was strange,’’ he told me, “because
I was caught reading Tolstoy and Kierkegaard.’’ Of course, if he’d
been caught with Kierkegaard on “The Monkey Business” yacht
instead of Donna Rice, the course of American politics might
have been very different.
George Bush, father and son, were utterly flummoxed by
requests to do cultural interviews. They both accused me
of trying to put them “on the couch.’’ For them, culture was
synonymous with psychoanalysis. W. admitted to being “culturally adrift.” Pressed to name his favorite cultural experience, he
replied “Baseball.” That’s not even lowbrow. It’s no brow, and
somewhat surprising in the light of his recent accomplishments as a painter of semi-nude self-portraits.
I knew that W. had a tenuous grip on the topic at hand
when I brought up Sex and the City. He shot me a sharp look
and I realized he thought I was asking not about a TV show he
wasn’t familiar with, but actually about sex IN the city.
He had one word for opera: “No.’’
His favorite play is “Cats.’’
8 March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
He had no literary heroes, but tellingly, he was drawn to
movie anti-heroes. He loved Paul Newman’s self-destructive
defiance in Cool Hand Luke and Jack Nicholson’s demonic irreverence.
He liked the Beatles before what he called “their weird
psychedelic period.’’
He was smitten with Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. But
really, who wasn’t? Perhaps that early Russian crush was what
made W. think he could see into Pooty-Poot’s soul, as he called
Vladimir Putin, and blinded him to the fact that Putin was really
the villainous Rod Steiger character.
W.’s father, Ronald Reagan’s vice president, admitted to me
that he fell asleep while watching a Reagan movie, The Santa Fe
Trail. This, of course, was not just a sin against the Gipper; it was
also a sin against the cinema. Michael Curtiz’s historical epic covered Robert E. Lee, George Custer, John Brown, abolitionism, the
struggle over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. If that can’t
keep an occupant of the White House awake, what can?
Poppy Bush said he liked glee club music, which seemed
corny. But given Ryan Murphy’s success in that area, 41 was just
ahead of his time.
He shyly confessed that while his fellow Navy fliers in World
War II ogled sultry pin-ups like Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable,
he had a yen for Doris Day. His favorite actress, he said, was “the
woman in Mrs. Miniver.’’
Perhaps carrying his attempt to seem more red-blooded
Texan than blue-blooded Greenwich guy too far, Poppy told
me his favorite TV snack was pork rinds and his favorite show
was Hee Haw, even though it wasn’t even on anymore. Maybe
he just liked to hear himself say “hee haw.”
I gave Michael Bloomberg the quiz when he ran for mayor
of New York, and he admitted he had never seen the quintessential New York show. Steinfeld, as he called it. It turned out
his cultural landscape was dominated by Bond girls. Especially
Ursula Andress. The best present he ever got was when a
girlfriend presented him with a white dinner jacket and a
Goldfinger video. Maybe she did that he because he was the
man with the Midas touch.
I knew Michael Dukakis would never be president when I
asked him what he liked to do in his spare time and he replied,
“Black mulch. I like to spread black mulch on my lawn.’’ He confused culture with horticulture.
When I pressed him, he admitted to having a crush on
Meryl Streep when she put on a Polish accent. I know that
Sophie’s Choice was a thinking man’s movie, but he was certainly the only man who came away from it thinking of eros.
Dukakis tanked in the arts quiz. He didn’t care about fiction
or poetry or theater. He said he fell in love with his wife, Kitty, at
a performance of The Fantasticks in Boston when she agreed to
leave early and go back to her apartment and talk politics.
His idea of beach reading was a tome called Swedish Land
Use Planning. Not even the Swedish bit could redeem it.
I never got a chance to give Barack Obama the culture
questionnaire, but I did give him a DVD of the first season of
Mad Men once.
“You just think I’ll like this because there’s a lot of smoking in
it,’’ he said accusatorially.
“No,’’ I replied. “I think you’ll like it because it’s about solitude
and because it’s well-written.’’
He looked dubious, but a year later, at a columnists’ lunch
at the White House, he leaned back in his chair to talk to me
over Paul Krugman. “I want to thank you for Mad Men,’’ he said.
He had had his body man, Reggie Love, send for all the other
seasons. “The character of Peggy Olsen,’’ he said, “gives me some
insight into what my grandmother must have gone through in
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
the man’s world of banking in those days.”
The President may not have good taste in New York Times
columnists—his favorite is David Brooks—and he may insufficiently appreciate art historians, but he has a refreshingly
edgy taste in TV. You’d think since his days are filled with power
struggles, he wouldn’t want to kick back with power struggles,
but besides Mad Men, his favorites included Homeland, Breaking
Bad, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, Game of Thrones, and House of
Cards.
So, it’s true, my life would have been a desolate moonscape
without the arts.
My brother Michael, who introduced me to my beloved
Shakespeare, also regularly took me to the American Film
Institute, where I saw Gene Kelly dance for the first time in An
American in Paris and Ava Gardner pretend to sing in Show Boat
and Brandon DeWitt yell “Come back, Shane!” after Alan Ladd.
My family was movie-crazy. My mother kept my brother
Kevin out of school between first and third grades a total of 96
days, pretending he was sick so that he could go to movie matinees with her. I once got in trouble with the nuns because my
mom took me to see Doris Day and Rex Harrison in Midnight
Lace, a remake of Gaslight, not realizing it was on the Legion of
Decency’s list of condemned movies. She was constantly landing in the confessional over movies.
Kevin got so obsessed with Tyrone Power’s Zorro that he
scratched Z’s onto school desks, blackboards, and all the lamps
in our house. He even wore a black mask when he served as a
grade-school safety patrol.
His Zorro imitation ended abruptly one day when a nun,
furious at his scrawled Z’s, lunged at his backside with her
yardstick. As the nun turned ever more scarlet, Kevin parried
her thrusts with his ruler.
“You are a pig and a drunk, Luis Quintero,’’ he shouted at her
as they dueled, “and you shall not long escape the vengeance
of my sword.’’ He did not long escape the vengeance of the
principal.
Even though I grew up in the shadow of the Washington
Monument, the jutting Freudian symbol of a capital under male
dominion for centuries, I knew long before Sheryl Sandberg
that women could lean in – sometimes with a gun, or a rod, as
it was known in my favorite movie genre.
I was raised on a steady diet of femme fatales, who never
worried about being called bossy and never hesitated to
pursue happiness—in all directions. Women down on their luck
but with inner resources—and outer resources to match. Film
noir has one inviolable rule: Deadly is the female.
9
As a character said in Jacques Tourneur’s hypnotic triangle
of Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and Jane Greer in Out of the
Past: All women are wonders because, like martinis, they reduce
all men to the obvious.
As a teenager, I would go around snapping off film noir
lines, even when they weren’t apropos.
“Quite the hacienda,’’ I would say to my mother when she
was cleaning our house.
My new cinematic muse was the
unparalleled Carole Lombard, who once
mused: “I’ve lived by a man’s code designed
to fit a man’s world. Yet at the same time,
I never forget that a woman’s first job is to
choose the right shade of lipstick.”
“You seem like you could be framed easier than Whistler’s
Mother,’’ I would say to my father when he got home from work.
“You look like you took a hayride with Dracula,’’ I would say
to my sister after she got back from a date.
As I got older, I decided my film noir persona was a bit dark,
so I blended in some bright screwball comedy. Being deadly, it
turned out, was not as much fun as being zany.
It became my passionate goal to walk with a baby leopard
and Cary Grant into a Manhattan nightclub, wearing a gold
lamé dress. And to own a black and white deco apartment on
Fifth Avenue full of ibexes. And to host a scavenger hunt on the
Bowery that ended with William Powell butling me. Becoming
my butler, that is.
My new cinematic muse was the unparalleled Carole
Lombard, who once mused: “I’ve lived by a man’s code designed to fit a man’s world. Yet at the same time, I never forget
that a woman’s first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.’’
I went from quoting Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity
to quoting Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Who’s more
fun than Preston Sturges? I wasn’t dating yet, but I practiced
Stanwyck’s great line about her plan to torment Henry Fonda:
“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.’’ And her inimitable
kiss-off: “Oh, tell ’em to go peel an eel.’’ Now that I think about
it, that’s probably what gave me a taste for peeling eels in print.
It’s not my fault that there are so many eels to peel.
You see, nobody invents their own vocabulary. We inherit
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The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
the categories and the forms and the expectations with which
we engage the world. There is no other way. Before you experience life, how can you learn about life?
The short answer to that is culture. You might say it is life
pre-lived. These myriad experiences are delivered through
books, plays, TV, dance, music, and movies.
Before everyone got addicted to little screens, we were
mesmerized by big screens. Movies gave me and other
Americans—and many people living in far-off lands where we
export our movies—an existential vocabulary, a verbal one and
a visual one.
Long before we experience desire and sex, we learn about
desire and sex from men and women on the screen. It’s not
mere mimicry. You feel the romantic essence through something called mirror neurons, but don’t ask me to explain that.
We are given models and anti-models, ideals and anti-ideals.
My first kiss was preceded by thousands of celluloid kisses. I
hoped to live up to them.
Before you experience life, how can you
learn about life? The short answer to that
is culture. You might say it is life pre-lived.
These myriad experiences are delivered
through books, plays, TV, dance, music
and movies.
Movies, like novels, compensate for the poverty of individual experience. They compensate for the inevitable limitations
of every existence, which is always geographically, physically,
temporally, and sometimes economically circumscribed. They
include the excluded. Movies correct for the local. They enlarge
the horizon and stretch the sense of possibility. They anticipate
experiences and give you standards for judging them.
Movies are instructions in how to live and how not to live.
And they also teach you how to get sick and die, because we
can’t experience mortal illness until we experience mortal
illness. What better depiction of a child’s fury at a parent’s fatal
illness than the scene in James Brooks’s Terms of Endearment,
based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, when Debra Winger’s character tells her little boy that she knows he loves her even though
he’s acting like he hates her.
“In a few years,’’ she says, “when I haven’t been around to be
on your tail about something or irritating you, you could remember that time that I bought you the baseball glove when you
thought we were too broke. Or when I read you those stories. Or
when I let you goof off instead of mowing the lawn. And you’re
gonna realize that you love me. And maybe you’re gonna feel
badly because you never told me. But don’t—I know that you
love me. So don’t ever do that to yourself, all right?”
The lessons aren’t always admirable. If you watched James
Cagney smash a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in Public
Enemy, you knew that men could be cruel to women. If you
watched Barbara Stanwyck gun down Fred McMurray in Double
Indemnity, you knew that women could be cruel to men.
Now that Hollywood has fallen into a Spiderman web of
comic book series and hot rod narratives derived from video
games, spending much of its time trying to please 15-year-old
boys, as well as dystopian teenage girl warriors and vampires,
trying to please 15-year-old girls, TV has taken on the role movies once had for many people. The searching heart follows the
talent and looks for instruction where it can.
Long before I ever thought of being a writer, long before I
ever thought I would critique anything, much less leaders of
the free world, I loved to imitate George Sanders playing the
acerbic New York newspaper critic Addison DeWitt in All About
Eve, the scene when Anne Baxter flings open the door of her
hotel room to kick Sanders out and he sneeringly tells her:
“You’re too short for that gesture.’’
And I loved to mimic Clifton Webb playing another tart New
York newspaper columnist, Waldo Lydecker, in Laura, as he dismissed the gorgeous Gene Tierney, playing a young ad executive
seeking an endorsement for a fountain pen. “I don’t write with a
pen,’’ he said. “I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.’’
Long before I ever owned a cocktail dress or even tasted a
cocktail, my taste in fashion was shaped by the movies of the
‘30s and ‘40s. How many men and women learned to wear
clothes from the movies, to walk and dress and wear your hair
and flirt? And in the bad old days, smoke and have your lover
light two cigarettes and hand one to you.
My instruction in fashion echoed the scene in Now Voyager
when Bette Davis is humiliated when Paul Henried sees that
her borrowed dresses have pieces of papers pinned on the
back from her friend, little notes about how to wear them. Like
Davis’s shy spinster, Charlotte Vale, some of us needed coaching
in glamour, and who better than ‘40s Hollywood to do it?
Those days of real glamour—the glittering era of Chasen’s,
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
11
The YoungArts dancers and Celtic Borders musicians meet backstage with Maureen Dowd and Alec Baldwin
Ciro’s, the Coconut Grove and Don the Beachcomber’s—have
now sadly been replaced by Kim Kardashian and the Real
Housewives of Botox. Back then, Hollywood was the greatest
mythmaker of all time—especially about itself.
Without the arts, people would have underdeveloped
imaginations. With underdeveloped imaginations, they would
not lead either meaningful lives or moral lives, because without
the representations of otherness in art, you cannot imagine the
pain or the poverty that someone else is feeling.
Nobody experiences everything. Everybody needs supplements. Everybody starts out too small for certain purposes
and we need to be shown what’s possible. You can’t be a fully
formed human being based only on your own experiences. We
need to see other lives.
Art is precisely such a long and deep and disquieting tutorial for the individual imagination. You will not act to relieve suffering unless you understand it. And if you are not experiencing
it yourself, as I hope you are not, the only way you can understand it is by seeing depictions of it in movies and elsewhere in
the culture.
When it comes to questions of war and peace, the representation of war in movies have had an enormous impact on
what Americans feel. We have learned about the nobility of war
and the cruelty of war.
We’re so war-weary now, it’s hard to believe how many
decades we spent being a nation that saw itself through the
prism of John Wayne and then Sylvester Stallone as Rambo.
We also had All Quiet on the Western Front and Platoon. That is
another way movies contribute to our understanding: They
frame the debate. After all, Rambo and Platoon cannot both be
right. We needed to think.
Movies and TV have educated us similarly about politics,
from the insane idealism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and
The West Wing to the insane cynicism of House of Cards. Think of
the number of people in my business who still can’t get Robert
Redford and Dustin Hoffman out of their minds. When they
Without the arts, people would have
underdeveloped imaginations. With
underdeveloped imaginations, they would
not lead either meaningful lives or moral
lives, because without the representations
of otherness in art, you cannot imagine
the pain or the poverty that someone
else is feeling.
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The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
imagine their noblest selves, it’s not Woodward and Bernstein
but Redford and Hoffman.
And President Obama says he only wishes members of
Congress were as “ruthlessly efficient” as Frank Underwood, the
felonious politician in House of Cards. The President said wistfully: “It’s like, Kevin Spacey, man, this guy’s getting a lot of stuff
done.’’ Actually Frank Underwood got a little too much done
when he killed a journalist. I know there are two sides to every
question, but I’m against that. And you, too, Alec, right?
Then you grow up and become an adult and you start
to have experiences of your own. This introduces the second
phase of a moviegoer’s life. You can compare kisses on screen
to real ones, imagined love and desire to actual love and desire.
Movies now do what novels did in the
nineteenth century: They shake us out of
a complacent acceptance of our given
circumstances. They demand of us a
greater appetite for experience.
You’ll still sit in a dark room and watch other people live, but
you’ll also leave the theater or click off the TV and live yourself.
The strength of the movies is that they allow us to live
vicariously. But that is their weakness, too. Vicarious living is not
the highest form of living. At some point, one must graduate
from one’s influences and live a life of one’s own. We must be
more than a bundle of references.
The enlargement of the self by culture, the correction of
individual limitations by the depiction of other lives, be it the
low life provincial New Jersey primitives on The Sopranos or the
seedy Louisiana lawmen on True Detective, is especially urgent
in a society that is obsessed with shrinking our world down to
smaller and smaller devices, spitting out smaller and smaller
bites of information for people with smaller and smaller attention spans.
As my friend Leon Wieseltier recently told the graduating
class of Brandeis, the technology that has inebriated us, the machines that have enslaved us, “represent the greatest assault on
human attention ever devised.’’ We don’t ask what’s true or false
anymore, good or evil, beautiful or ugly. We just ask how things
work. We game everything now and measure everything,
including our deepest feelings and impulses, for their utilities
and outcomes.
But as Leon observed, “there is no greater bulwark against
the twittering acceleration of American consciousness’’ than an
encounter with a work of art or a book or an image.
“Perhaps culture is now the counterculture,’’ he declared,
adding that “as long as we are thinking and feeling creatures,
creatures who love and imagine and suffer and die, the humanities will never be dispensable.’’
People sometimes complain that movies and TV distort
reality. There’s some truth to that, but they also enable people
to see others’ reality. Movies now do what novels did in the
nineteenth century: They shake us out of a complacent acceptance of our given circumstances. They demand of us a greater
appetite for experience. Emma Bovary was absolutely right to
take romance novels as seriously as she did. How else would
she have escaped, even fleetingly, her provincial existence?
What else could have emboldened her to take that carriage
ride in Rouen? Books set her up, but books also opened her up.
Now Sandra Bullock gets out of her provincial life by climbing
into a rocket. Space opened her up and set her up and opened
her up some more.
This is what I learned from film noir. Film noir is about
ordinary people fallen on hard times, generally with nothing
but their looks and sometimes not even that. Film noir is an important chapter in the great Emersonian saga of American selfreliance: their abiding subject is how to cope with challenges
when you can depend only on yourself, when you’re counting
on lucky breaks, not privileges or connections, in unclear and
treacherous situations.
Film noir, ironically enough, taught me about feminism and
fending for oneself. It taught me there are moments where you
have to be hard-boiled, sometimes 20 minutes worth, even if
later you go upstairs and melt into a puddle of fear and self-pity.
It taught me that, if you pay attention and bake yourself in
the arts and open yourself up to the visions of visionaries, life
can be “quite the hacienda.’’
Thank you.
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
13
CLOSING REMARKS BY AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS
BOARD CHAIR ABEL LOPEZ
A
s we say in Spanish, buenas noches, good evening. I’m Abel Lopez. I’m Chairman of the
Board of Directors of Americans for the Arts. What a terrific night this has been! How fitting
in this month of St. Patrick’s Day that we were treated to such a stunning Irish-themed
performance by the DC-based musical group Zan McLeod and Celtic Borders, as well as some
of the most accomplished Irish stepdancers in the nation who came from across the country for
this event.
These dancers are all alumni of YoungArts, the national organization that exclusively administers the Presidential Scholars in the Arts awards. Please join me in applauding these artists, and
the incomparable Alec Baldwin for his wonderful introduction of Maureen tonight.
I want to also thank all of you, our guests, for joining us tonight both here in the concert hall
and those online who watched via the live webstream that Google provided tonight. And of
course, we are extremely grateful to our venue host for tonight’s activities, the John. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
If you would like to watch tonight’s event again, please visit Americans for the Arts’ YouTube site. And, finally, for those of you
who would like to mix and mingle with your friends and colleagues here, the Kennedy Center will have food and beverages available for sale in front of the concert hall.
We look forward to seeing you again next year at our lecture. Have a wonderful night, and have a safe trip home. Thank you.
ABOUT THE LECTURER
M
aureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as
a correspondent in the paper’s Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four
presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column,
“On Washington,” for The New York Times Magazine. Ms. Dowd joined The New York Times as a
metropolitan reporter in 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The
Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature
writer. When the Star closed in 1981, she went to Time magazine. Born in Washington, DC, Ms.
Dowd received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University (Washington, DC) in
1973.
14 March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
W
ith more than 50 years of service to the field,
Americans for the Arts is dedicated to representing
and serving local communities and creating opportunities for every American to participate in and appreciate all
forms of the arts. From offices in Washington, D.C. and New
York City, the organization provides programs designed to:
1. Help build environments in which the arts and arts
education can thrive and contribute to more vibrant and
creative communities.
2. Support the generation of meaningful public and private sector policies and increased resources for the arts
and arts education.
3. Build individual awareness and appreciation of the value
of the arts and arts education.
To achieve its goals, Americans for the Arts partners with
local, state, and national arts organizations; government agencies; business leaders; individual philanthropists; educators; and
funders. While local arts agencies comprise Americans for the
Arts’ core constituency, the organization also supports a variety
of partner networks with particular interests in public art,
united arts fundraising, arts education, local and state advocacy, and leadership development.
Through national visibility campaigns and local outreach,
Americans for the Arts strives to motivate and mobilize opinion
leaders and decision-makers. Americans for the Arts produces
annual events that heighten national visibility for the arts,
including the National Arts Awards, the BCA 10, and the Public
Leadership in the Arts Awards (in cooperation with The United
States Conference of Mayors), which honors elected officials
in local, state, and federal government. Americans for the Arts
also hosts Arts Advocacy Day annually on Capitol Hill, convening arts advocates from across the country to advance federal
support of the arts and arts education. For more information,
please visit www.AmericansForTheArts.org.
ABOUT OUR SPONSORS
The Rosenthal Family Foundation The Rosenthal Family
Foundation (Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal,
and Nancy Stephens) are proud to support the 27th Annual
Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy. Established by
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal, the Foundation embodies the
belief that individuals fortunate enough to receive unusual
benefits from a society have the distinct obligation to return
meaningful, tangible support to that society—in the form of
creative energy as well as funding. The Foundation encourages
activity and commentary concerned with constructive social
change and recognizes and rewards excellence in individuals
and organizations nationwide. Americans for the Arts is particularly grateful to Hinda Rosenthal, who approached the organization about her foundation becoming a sponsor of the Nancy
Hanks Lecture 14 years ago and whose extraordinary support
helped the program to flourish and grow into a pre-eminent
national forum for dialogue about arts policy.
Ovation is America’s only arts network, whose mission is to
inspire the world through all forms of art and artistic expression. Ovation programming is a one-of-a-kind mix of original
and selectively curated art-centric series, documentaries, films
and specials. Ovation’s signature programming includes The Art
Of, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, and The Fashion Fund. Ovation
reaches a national audience of over 50 million homes and is
available on cable, satellite, and telco systems, such as Time
Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Comcast Cable/Xfinity,
RCN, DIRECTV, DISH, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, Charter, and
Hawaiian Telcom. Ovation is also available on VOD (in both
standard and high definition). Ovation’s diversified viewer
experiences extend across its linear network, the popular
ovationtv.com, and active social presence on Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube and more. Ovation is a cause based-media company
and is deeply engaged with the arts both nationally and locally,
providing more than $15 million in contributions and in-kind
support to community organizations, cultural institutions, and
arts education programs. See the Ovation Facebook page for
the latest information and conversations happening across the
Ovation brand and the arts: www.facebook.com/OvationTV.
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
THE AFTER PARTY
(L-R) Alec Baldwin, Maureen Dowd, Ovation CEO Charles Segars,
U.S. Department of the Interior Special Assistant Zaina Javaid,
and Robert L. Lynch
(L-R) Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI); Americans for the Arts Board
Member Dorothy Pierce McSweeny; Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA);
former United States Secretary of Labor Ann Korologos; and
former United States Ambassador to Belgium Tom Korologos
(L-R) Robert L. Lynch, Maureen Dowd, and Alec Baldwin meet
guests backstage at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) and television journalist Andrea
Mitchell
(L-R) Ovation Executive Vice President of Content Distribution
Brad Samuels; Maureen Dowd; Director of Legislative Affairs for
the Office of Vice President Joe Biden Tonya Williams; and AT&T
Assistant Vice President of Federal Relations Lyndon Boozer
(L-R) Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), Maureen Dowd, Rep. Leonard
Lance (R-NJ), and Robert L. Lynch
15
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The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS LEADERSHIP
As the leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts in this country, Americans for the Arts works with a broad range of
leadership, including corporate, philanthropic, and artistic leaders from across the country. Under the leadership of President and
CEO Robert L. Lynch, Americans for the Arts’ governing and advisory bodies and their leadership are as follows:
Board of Directors
Abel Lopez, Chair
Ramona Baker
Maria Bell
Madeleine Berman
Nolen V. Bivens
Leslie D. Blanton
Charles X Block
Susan Coliton
Theodor Dalenson
Alessandra DiGiusto
C. Kendric Fergeson
Susan Goode
Floyd W. Green, III
John Haworth
Glen S. Howard
Sheila Johnson
Deborah Jordy
William T. Kerr
William Lehr, Jr.
Liz Lerman
Timothy McClimon
Mary McCullough-Hudson
Felix Padrón
Dorothy Pierce McSweeny
Julie Muraco
Margie Johnson Reese
Barbara S. Robinson
Edgar L. Smith, Jr.
Steven D. Spiess
Michael Spring
Nancy Stephens
Ty Stiklorius
Ann Stock
Michael S. Verruto
Charmaine Warmenhoven
Robert L. Lynch, ex-officio
In memoriam
Peggy Amsterdam
Peter Donnelly
Business Committee for the
Arts Executive Board
Edgar L. Smith, Jr., Chair
John F. Barrett
Albert Chao
Joseph C. Dilg
Lynn Laverty Elsenhans
C. Kendric Fergeson
Martha R. Ingram
Parker S. Kennedy
William T. Kerr
Robert Lamb III
Craig A. Moon
John Pappajohn
Kathryn A. Paul
Suku Radia
Roderick Randall
Henry T. Segerstrom
Mark A. Shugoll
Ken Solomon
Jonathan Spector
Steven Spiess
Barry S. Sternlicht
Bobby Tudor
Artists Committee
Jane Alexander
Kwaku Alston
Dame Julie Andrews
Martina Arroyo
Paul Auster
Bob Balaban
John Baldessari
Alec Baldwin
Theodore Bikel
Lewis Black
Lauren Bon
Amy Brenneman
Connie Britton
Blair Brown
Kate Burton
Chuck Close
Stephen Collins
Chuck D
Jacques d’Amboise
Fran Drescher
Patty Duke
Pierre Dulaine
Todd Eberle
Hector Elizondo
Giancarlo Esposito
Suzanne Farrell
Laurence Fishburne
Ben Folds
Hsin-Ming Fung
Frank O. Gehry
Marcus Giamatti
Josh Groban
Mary Rodgers Guettel
Robert Gupta
David Hallberg
Hill Harper
Arthur Hiller
Craig Hodgetts
Lorin Hollander
Jenny Holzer
Siri Hustvedt
David Henry Hwang
Melina Kanakaredes
Moisés Kaufman
Jon Kessler
Richard Kind
Jeff Koons
Swoosie Kurtz
John Legend
Liz Lerman
John Lithgow
Graham Lustig
Kyle MacLachlan
Yo-Yo Ma
Yvonne Marceau
Peter Martins
Marlee Matlin
Kathy Mattea
Trey McIntyre
Julie Mehretu
Richard Meier
Arthur Mitchell
Brian Stokes Mitchell
Walter Mosley
Paul Muldoon
Kate Mulleavy
Laura Mulleavy
Matt Mullican
Leonard Nimoy
Alessandro Nivola
Naomi Shihab Nye
Yoko Ono
Harold Prince
Robert Redford
Michael Ritchie
Victoria Rowell
Salman Rushdie
Martin Scorsese
Cindy Sherman
Gabourey Sidibe
Anna Deavere Smith
Arnold Steinhardt
Meryl Streep
Holland Taylor
Julie Taymor
Marlo Thomas
Stanley Tucci
Edward Villella
Clay Walker
Malcolm-Jamal Warner
Kerry Washington
William Wegman
Bradley Whitford
Kehinde Wiley
Henry Winkler
Joanne Woodward
Kulapat Yantrasast
Peter Yarrow
Michael York
In memoriam
Ossie Davis
Skitch Henderson
Paul Newman
John Raitt
Lloyd Richards
Billy Taylor
Wendy Wasserstein
March 2014
The Americans for the Arts 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
17
ABOUT THE NANCY HANKS LECTURE
Nancy Hanks was President of Americans for the Arts from 1968–1969, when she was appointed chair of the National Endowment
for the Arts, a position she held for eight years. Until her death in 1983, she worked tirelessly to bring the arts to prominent national
consciousness. During her tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency’s budget grew 1,400 percent. This year marks
the 27th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, established to honor her memory and to provide an opportunity for
public discourse at the highest levels on the importance of the arts and culture to our nation’s well-being.
PAST NANCY HANKS LECTURERS
2013 Yo-Yo Ma, acclaimed musician and arts educator
2012 Alec Baldwin, actor and arts advocate
2011 Kevin Spacey, actor and Artistic Director of the Old Vic Theatre
2010 Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Mayor of Charleston, SC
2009 Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center
2008 Daniel Pink, best-selling author and innovator
2007 Robert MacNeil, broadcast journalist and author
2006 William Safire, columnist and author
2005 Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
2004 Doris Kearns Goodwin, journalist and author
2003 Robert Redford, artist and activist
2002 Zelda Fichandler, Founding Director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and
Chair of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University
2001 Frank Rich, op-ed columnist for The New York Times
2000 Terry Semel, past Chairman and Co-CEO of Warner Bros. and Warner Music Group
1999 Wendy Wasserstein, playwright
1998 Dr. Billy Taylor, jazz musician and educator
1997 Alan K. Simpson, former U.S. Senator
1996 Carlos Fuentes, author
1995 Winton Malcolm Blount, Chairman of Blount, Inc., philanthropist, and former U.S. Postmaster General
1994 David McCullough, historian
1993 Barbara Jordan, former U.S. Congresswoman
1992 Franklin D. Murphy, former CEO of the Times Mirror Company
1991 John Brademas, former U.S. Congressman and President Emeritus of New York University
1990 Maya Angelou, poet
1989 Leonard Garment, Special Counsel to Presidents Nixon and Ford
1988 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian and special assistant to President Kennedy
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