A scarcely any questions and responses reached us after the publication of the veil of Volume 32 #1 (July/August 2004) the same was from a former editor of Afterimage who squeeze outed her surprise but declined to note in writing on what motivated it.

A scarcely any questions and responses reached us after the publication of the veil of Volume 32 #1 (July/August 2004) the same was from a former editor of Afterimage who squeeze outed her surprise but declined to note in writing on what motivated it. Another was from Robert Haller who called me and confirmed the conversation we had through email. Here are his comments

Dear Mr Chalifour,

This brief note is in answer to your July/August 2004 overlay announcement of the death of President Ronald Reagan. As an actor and media figure single would have expected Mr. Reagan to be same interested in the media arts concocts of the National Endowment for the Arts. While he did not pretend to particularly care about them, and admitting his budget director David Stockman propos to abridge the NEA budget by 50% when Reagan came into office, in authentic Republican fashion he behaved highly differently. The key event present the appearances to have been the appointment of Frank Hodsoll a White House insider to be the modern chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, replacing the out-going chair, Livingston Biddle. Hodsoll had been a representative to Chief of Staff James Baker where he had overseen the President's Task Force in succession the Arts and Humanities, as well as a task force forward immigration. For the Arts and Humanities task force Hodsoll supervised a band of friends of the Endowment, including former NEA chair Nancy Hanks, Henry Geldzahler, Arthur Mitchell, David Packard, Beverly Sills, Hanna Gray, Barnabas McHenry, Charlton Heston, and Daniel Terra. Predictably this cluster gave a ringing endorsement to the pair Endowments, and funding rose that year from $119 million for the NEA to $143 million.

The outgoing Carter administration had sought $158 million for the NEA. This to and fro juggling of numbers (subsequently with Sidney Yates' House Interior Committee) continued by the and of the eight years of the Reagan administration, if it be not that the actual budgets never faced the catastrophic falls that were in such a manner often predicted. Hodsoll was an astute diplomat and politician who guarded his agency, even to the point of favorably confronting the American Film Institute onward the issue of raising capitals for film preservation, a task that Nancy Hanks had wanted to tackle however had never dared to actually seize.

Of course the Reagan administration at no time approached the astounding doubling and redoubling of the Endowment lots under President Nixon, when Nancy Hanks was chair. if it were not that neither did the Reagan administration cave in to compressing like the first Bush administration.

Robert A. Haller

Chair, National Alliance of Media Arts Center 1980-82

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