Leaving Town Alive : Confessions of an Arts Warrior

New York, NY, U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993. First Printing . Hard Back. Fine/Very Good. 6" x 9. 360 pages indexed. Blue paper covered boards with green cloth spine. Dust jacket is NOT price clipped. Brimming with optimism Frohnmayer went to Washingion 1989 to serve a cause in American he believed in, the Arts. Appointed by President bush to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he was abruptly fired two and a half years later in a storm of front-page controversy. This is his lively and startling acocount of his trial by fire in the brutal world of power politics. Taking over the NEA amid the uproar about Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs, Frohnmayer stood at the center of the emotional debate over public funding. On the right was Jess Helms and the fundamentalist proponents of traditional values. Frohnmayer assumed that he could negotiate anything and that everyone had the best interests of the country at heart. He was wrong. The White House just wanted the problem to go away and the right-wing fund-rasers wanted to keep the issue alive as long as possible. In the end Frohmayer entered the fray a First Amendment moderate and he emerged a free-speech radical.