It seemed an odd request: Frank Hodsoll, deputy to White House chief of staff James Baker, was suggesting that he chair the National Endowment for the Arts. It was 1981 and the NEA was on the chopping block—a proposal was on the table to cut the agency’s budget by half, as a precursor to phasing it out altogether—and Hodsoll had almost no professional experience in the arts. “Why would you want to do that?” Baker asked. And yet, under Hodsoll’s eight-year stewardship, the endowment managed not only to survive but also to increase its budget appropriation, launching initiatives including the Jazz Masters Fellowships and the National Medal of Arts, and funding the fledgling Sundance Institute. As Kate Moore, one of Hodsoll’s colleagues at the White House and NEA, put it, “He bedeviled the skeptics.”
Francis Samuel Monaise Hodsoll, JD ’64, died July 24 in Falls Church, Va., at 78. The cause was cancer.
With degrees from Yale and the U. of Cambridge, Hodsoll attended Stanford Law School and then joined Sullivan & Cromwell. Later, he worked at the State Department and spent time at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commerce Department, where he met James Baker and was persuaded to join Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and transition team to the White House. As a White House staffer, he worked with the task force that eventually recommended setting up the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. And still, the arts community had its doubts: What would a bureaucrat know about running the endowment?
Hodsoll surprised the naysayers. He had a deep appreciation for the arts and a deft eye for talent, hiring contemporary artist Benny Andrews as visual arts director and celebrated author Frank Conroy as literary director. His focus on funding local initiatives and generating conversations about how best to support the arts “was not matched before or since,” said Robert Lynch, CEO of Americans for the Arts. Just one of the many projects Hodsoll launched was the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, which earned the NEA an honorary Oscar in 1985. Hodsoll accepted the award from actress Glenn Close, and Gregory Peck advised him on how to protect the statuette from tarnishing. There were moments of glitz and glamour during his term as chair, but policy remained Hodsoll’s true passion. At the yearly Sundance Festival, recalled Lynch, Hodsoll came alive during arts policy roundtables—“always the most prepared person in the room.”
Annual Hodsoll holiday cards, Lynch added, would “start off with a sentence or two wishing all a Merry Christmas and then turn to a full page of Frank’s thoughts on current national policy issues.” He “generated ideas like a fire hose,” Moore said. “He was a brilliant man.” With his family, Hodsoll enjoyed camping trips and playing board games; in Trivial Pursuit, his son, Francis, remarked, “he would just slaughter us.”
Besides his son, Hodsoll is survived by his wife of 53 years, Mimi; daughter, Lisa; half-sister; and two grandchildren.
Maggie Ryan, '17, is an intern at Stanford.
