It was, as Frank Hodsoll later phrased it, his "last gig on behalf of the arts."
As he prepares to leave the office he has held for the last seven years, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts was at the Otis Parsons Institute Thursday to announce the 68 arts organizations nationwide who are this fiscal year's recipients of the federal agency's $19 million big-buck challenge grants.
"It's always a great pleasure to be anywhere, on any occasion where I bring something other than words," Hodsoll said grinning.
He did not mention, as the papers had that morning, that in two to three weeks, whenever the "orderly processes" are complete, he will leave the Arts Endowment and become the No. 3 official at the Office of Management and Budget. But he did note that "the Arts Endowment is viewed very, very favorably by the Bush Administration at the very highest levels."
Hodsoll's appointment came through so quickly that no decision has yet been made on an acting agency head, prior to President Bush's nomination of a new chairman. Hodsoll said he has already been consulted by Bush aides about a successor. "They've asked my opinion (about candidates) but I think I'd better leave it between me and the White House," and he laughed, "or they'll never talk to me again."
Leading contenders, The Times has learned, include Barnabas McHenry, co-vice chairman of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, chairman of the Empire State Plaza Art Commission, who had been a college roommate of Secretary of State James A. Baker; Schuyler Chapin, former dean of the School of Arts at Columbia University and Lois Burke Shepard, director of the Institute for Museum Services, former head of Republicans Abroad, who represented Bush on arts issues during the campaign. Other names that have surfaced include Beverly Sills and Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The departure of Hodsoll, the fourth chairman in the endowment's 24-year history, was not mentioned Thursday until the Mark Taper Forum's Gordon Davidson got up to thank Hodsoll for his leadership in difficult budget times. "Your willingness to hear new voices and provide the possibility of growth has been very important to all of us."
Whoever in the arts community would have thought that Ronald Reagan's appointee would have earned such praise? Here was Hodsoll--a lawyer, a career foreign service officer, the former head of a corporation representing British firms doing business with the Philippines, a former assistant political adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a deputy assistant secretary for energy and strategic resource policy in the Commerce Department, a deputy U.S. special representative for nuclear nonproliferation, and a deputy assistant to then-White House Chief of Staff Baker.
It did not seem to bode well for the arts community that in his first year Reagan had proposed slashing the arts and humanities budgets in half on the advice of Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman.
Hodsoll said in an interview following the challenge-grant ceremonies that he requested the endowment chairmanship because of Stockman's proposal. "At that point I didn't know what the appropriate amount for the arts endowment should be, but I didn't think it ought to be cut," he said, recalling that when he first proposed going to NEA, Baker suggested he was nuts "or something like that . . . You can say he rolled his eyes."
At the endowment Hodsoll developed key initiatives on arts education to make it a "basic" in education, "a serious, sequential course of study" from kindergarten through the 12th grade so that when "young people graduate from high school they have a degree of cultural literacy--and I just don't mean European or an African or an Asian or a Latin American (literacy) but all of them."
He also proposed a National Medal of Arts to give visibility to the nation's leading artists. With the American Film Institute, the endowment helped establish the National Center for Video and Film Preservation for which the endowment was in part awarded a special Oscar in 1985. And Hodsoll changed the focus of the challenge grants from institutional support to funding projects of "national artistic significance."
And, significantly, he was a strong advocate for the arts. In his last budget, Reagan for the first time proposed raising the endowment's budget to $170.1 million from its present $169.1 million--the extra $1 million to be earmarked for Hodsoll's primary project, arts education. To date, Bush has not changed Reagan's budget request for the arts.
