Bad Timing: Lynne Cheney on George Washington
Publishing a children’s book at exactly the wrong moment
At a time of year when others tell the story of Bethlehem or recite “The Night Before Christmas,” Lynne Cheney is something of an exception. When members of the Cheney clan gather with hot chocolate around the yule fire, Lynne Cheney tells the story of how George Washington crossed the Delaware River in darkness and surprised a garrison of Hessian soldiers. “This is the story that I tell my grandchildren at Christmas,” she writes. Perhaps that needs some explaining.
Lynne Cheney is the wife of the former American vice-president Dick Cheney and a hardened Conservative celebrity in her own right. What is relevant here is that in 1994, as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), she engaged in a very public battle against the National History Standards, a series of recommendations for changes in school curricula that she found too liberal and unflattering to our country. [Disclosure: I taught at the same university as Ross Dunn, one of the principals in the creation of the Standards and one of the authors of History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, a book describing that notable controversy.]
Let me explain that brouhaha.
