The author recounts his extraordinary activities as a student at Cambridge, a Communist, a speech writer for Franklin Roosevelt, and a McCarthy-fighting editor, and reveals his links to the Philby-Blunt spy ring

After Long Silence

Biographies & Memoirs

STRAIGHT,Michael

Professionals & Academics

see notes for publisher info

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

The author recounts his extraordinary activities as a student at Cambridge, a Communist, a speech writer for Franklin Roosevelt, and a McCarthy-fighting editor, and reveals his links to the Philby-Blunt spy ring

Nancy Hanks, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from 1969 to 1977, turned this fledgling organization into a major instrument for government support of the arts—accomplishing thereby a virtual revolution in the public arts policy of the United States. She died of cancer on January 7, 1983; later that year, at the request of Congress, President Ronald Reagan designated the building complex at Pennsylvania Avenue and 11th Street (the "Old Post Office") in Washington, D.C., as the Nancy Hanks Center.
This biography captures the spirit and the flavor of Ms. Hanks's remarkable life, above all during the eight years in which she led the Endowment. Tracing her childhood in Florida and North Carolina through her achievements as a student leader at Duke University, Straight makes clear her conscious effort to find a path with more scope than the usual marriage-and-a-family when expected of Southern women. Nancy Hanks went to Washington and found a job with the Office of War Mobilization. She later worked with Nelson Rockefeller, who became governor of New York, a Republican party luminary, and vice president under Gerald Ford, in addition to being an heir to one of America's greatest fortunes. Her relationship with Rockefeller was crucial to her personal life, and his conception of government and its role and a lasting influence on her career.
Straight examines Nancy Hanks's leadership of the NEA and takes particular note of the intense debate over the role of government in fostering American artistic expression, an issue with roots running back through the New Deal to the early history of the United States. Nancy Hanks took a strong and activist role in the formulation and administration of a national arts policy, and her accomplishments have left an indelible mark on public support for arts in the United States. Straight, who worked closely with Ms. Hanks and admired her despite frequent policy disagreements, deals honestly with both the successes and failures of her efforts. His biography imparts a sense of the reasons why her many friends felt such loyalty to this complex and gifted woman.

Nancy Hanks, An Intimate Portrait: The Creation of a National Commitment to the Arts

Historical

Duke University Press Books

Trial by Television and Other Encounters

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Devon Pr

One family — but not just any family: one of America’s first families, whose lives were intimately and indelibly intertwined with the basic fabric of this country. Powerful but altruisic, artistic yet activist, a family whose story is the history of mid-twentieth-century America. 
"On Green Spring Farm" is a memoir — a series of short anecdotal vignettes, based on journal entries — chronicling two decades of our American history. Unifying the tales is the ever-present backdrop of what is now known as Green Spring Gardens Park, a public garden and Manor House in Virginia. The stories range from the back-room politics of Democratic campaigns for Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson and the founding of the American Veterans Committee, to Jackie Kennedy’s "appropriation" of a family portrait of James Monroe to beautify her White House — all interspersed with colloquial family tales of pets, vacations, illnesses, theatricals and hair-raising misadventures in small aircraft. 
"On Green Spring Farm" provides a window onto another time and place, through which we witness history as experienced by one unusual family. Evocative, charming, funny, rousing and thought-provoking: a Samuel Pepys for our time.

On Green Spring Farm: The Life and Times of One Family in Fairfax County, Virginia, 1942-1966

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