John Frohnmayer prefaces his new and surprisingly vengeful memoirs by telling the story of how he was fired as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by Samuel Skinner, President Bush’s chief of staff, on February 20, 1992. In true Frohnmayerian style, he puts it this way: “Skinner . . . canned my ass.” But the book proper begins with a more idyllic story. It was three years earlier, on a lovely Sunday afternoon in February 1989, that Mr. Frohnmayer, a partner in a successful Oregon law firm, decided to become an active candidate for the chairmanship of the NEA, a post just made vacant by the departure of the then chairman, Frank Hodsoll, for presumably greener pastures at the Office of Management and Budget. True to the prevailing ethos of the Bush administration, Mr. Frohnmayer’s decision was made while playing golf with his wife, Leah, at the Waverley Country Club, which, he writes, “lies lush and green on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon.” He quickly began to solicit support from his own acquaintances and from his brother Dave, then state attorney general and later a (losing) Republican candidate for governor in 1990.

Mr. Frohnmayer’s qualifications for this difficult job were, if not exactly exiguous, hardly brilliant. He had been a member of the Oregon Arts Commission for eight years, and had been chairman of that parochial organization for four of those years. He had once entertained, but then given up, the