About the Author

SHELDON HACKNEY is currently Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he served four years as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-97); from 1981 to 1993 he was President of the University of Pennsylvania; from 1975 to 1981 he was President of Tulane University. He was on the history faculty at Princeton University from 1965 to 1975, serving as Provost of the University the final three of those years. He is the author of Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton Press, 1969), which was awarded the Beveridge Prize by the American Historical Association as the best book in American History that year and the Sydnor Prize by the Southern Historical Association as the best book in southern history in that two-year period.

Reviews

Presidential appointments can be used effectively or ineffectively. Author Sheldon Hackney reflects on his time as a presidential appointee in The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture War, his memoir of being an unwilling combatant in a major conflict between the left and right during the time the National Endowment for the Humanities was formed. Hackney seeks to dispel lies and misperceptions about his tenure in this inside look enhanced with a foreword by Vernon Jordan. The Politics of Presidential Appointment is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dark side of letting the president choose his co-workers in charge of the country.-- "The Midwest Book Review"

Welcome to Planet of the Apes meets Advise and Consent. It's Newt Gingrich's Washington, where one of America's most distinguished scholars and university presidents is transformed into a tribal sacrifice in the neoconservative culture war. Sheldon Hackney's harrowing and gripping memoir of this bloody political ritual is an essential historical document of a time of primitive madness in the capital.--Sidney Blumenthal, former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton "author of the The Clinton Wars, The Permanent Campaign, and The Rise of the Counter-Establishment"