Clinton Said to Have Made NEA Choice : Arts: President apparently won’t announce candidate’s name until he returns from Asia trip. Delay in naming new leader raises arts supporters’ concerns about White House policies.

WASHINGTON —  Waiting.

Sources close to the White House say President Clinton has already chosen a candidate for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts but plans to wait until after returning from his Wednesday-Friday international summit trip to Tokyo, followed by two days in Seoul and several days’ vacation in Hawaii, to reveal his nominee.

The most-rumored candidate at this point is actress Jane Alexander, currently starring on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein’s new play, “The Sisters Rosensweig.” Says Alexander’s press representative, Susan Chicoine: “She has no comment at this point--until something is announced, there is nothing to be said about it.”

(One arts organization representative from the western United States said that during a recent trip to Capitol Hill, members of the House and the Senate did not reveal the candidate’s name but kept referring to the unnamed choice as “her.”)

Whether the longstanding Alexander rumor is validated, however, one thing is certain: It’s been a long wait. And it’s a wait that has affected the mood of NEA staffers, as well as government supporters of the organization--and has led some NEA watchers to question the Clinton Administration’s commitment to the arts.

Others believe that even if the delay represents nothing more than the fact it takes time for new Presidents to get things done, it may influence public perception of the NEA’s status--especially since the NEA has entered the sticky process of seeking a two-year reauthorization and appropriations hearings with only an “acting” chairperson, longtime NEA staffer Ana Steele, at the helm.

Last Tuesday, the House Education and Labor Committee voted for the reauthorization, but the decision still awaits a full House vote as well as Senate proceedings.

Whether not being part of Clinton’s first 100 days has been mostly benign or horribly negative for the NEA depends on who’s doing the talking.

Washington attorney Leonard Garment, who testified on behalf of the endowment during a recent congressional subcommittee hearing on reauthorization, said that sometimes no news is good news for a lightning-rod organization like the NEA--which he termed “an aesthetic Jurassic Park.”

“It does seem to me that the NEA benefits from a fairly low profile--at this point it’s no profile,” Garment said. “The Administration has had enough in the way of controversial, difficult appointments to make, confirm and resolve upon.”

Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), a member of an ad hoc group called Concerned Senators for the Arts, also said there has been no “great harm” in the NEA operating without an official leader. But “I think it would be a great help if the President would make his nomination as quickly as possible,” he added. “(The NEA) needs to have somebody in place the next time a major issue shows up on the horizon.”

Metzenbaum believes the political winds have already shifted in favor of the arts. “I’d say on a scale of 1 to 100, it’s a 100,” he said. “This is an Administration far more sensitive, far more concerned, has far more people in it who are friends of the arts than either Reagan or Bush.”

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During a recent visit to the NEA’s offices in the city’s Old Post Office building, members of the NEA staff--including program directors A. B. Spellman and Brian O’Doherty--said the NEA was not suffering ill effects from the delay.

Like Metzenbaum, Spellman believes that the new Administration has already helped the beleaguered NEA. “This will sound partisan, but it really isn’t,” Spellman said. “The attitude that it is possible for the government to do good is one that has been missing from this town for several years. . . . I say that it is not a partisan position because the arts endowment was built by Republicans as much as Democrats. It was largely built under the Nixon White House . . . but it is something that has been difficult under the Bush Administration.”

But a former NEA staffer called the current mood there “terrible.”

When Clinton was elected, said the former staffer, many NEA staffers were jubilant, sporting lapel buttons that said, “Arrivaderci , Radice”--referring to Anne-Imelda Radice, the acting chairwoman who took over from John E. Frohnmayer, who was ousted from his post in February, 1992, during attacks on the NEA by then-presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan for supporting “obscene art.” Although serving in an acting capacity, Radice immediately made waves by denying grants for exhibitions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Gallery and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery. Both exhibitions included depictions of body parts and genitalia.

That elation quickly faded, the former staffer said, as Clinton proceeded to nominate a candidate for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney, but failed to make a choice for NEA chief. Some had expected that the NEA and NEH nominations would be made concurrently.

“They (the NEA) are waiting and waiting and nothing is happening,” the former staffer said. “Nothing is getting done at the agency because no one can make any decisions, particularly in the area of personnel . . . program directors who have contracts that are up for renewal are wondering what will happen to their jobs because there is no one there to decide. The word one current staffer used for it is malaise .”

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Former chairman Frohnmayer--who after leaving the NEA took aim at Bush’s White House in his book “Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior”--said the negative effect goes far beyond morale problems for the NEA staff.

“I think actually they (the Clinton Administration) are deliberately avoiding this issue,” Frohnmayer said in a conversation at his Capitol Hill home. “It isn’t as though they have forgotten about the humanities and the arts because Sheldon Hackney has already been nominated.

“But I think they see (the NEA) as a divisive issue--akin, perhaps, to gays in the military,” Frohnmayer continued.

“If the Clinton Administration is so timid on this issue that they won’t even nominate anybody, what’s going to happen when the inevitable issues about (government) controls over the arts endowment arise?

“I can understand Ana (Steele)’s reluctance to make policy because she doesn’t have a mandate, but . . . if you stay in that status for too long, you have effectively downsized the enterprise. The signal is that its mission is so unimportant that it can languish indefinitely, and no one will notice.”

Former Frohnmayer foe Radice agrees with him--for once. “I think the most unfortunate thing about the fact that there is no chairman at this time is that there is no one out there to really negotiate in the reauthorization process . . . there is some danger if it’s perceived that needed administrative changes won’t occur.”

NEA spokeswoman Ginny Terzano--consulted because acting director Steele has consistently refused to deal with the press--hotly denied Frohnmayer and Radice’s assessment. “The agency has been moving ahead,” she said. “The fact is that the Administration has been very involved in this process (reauthorization); there were Administration people at every hearing, and we have been working side by side with the White House in determining what is best for the agency.”