Peggy's Torn
Eberstadt, Mary
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 23, NO. 5 / MAY 1990 Mary Eberstadt PEGGY'S TURN The hottest political memoir in a long, long time sometimes makes you wonder: if it hadn't been for Peggy...
...Not only a book but a hit, a smash actually, the most talked-about political book of the season, maybe more...
...Mostly, she tells us (and when she doesn't, lots of other people in the book do...
...She looked me up and down, and I swear her mouth curled...
...Exclamation marks, and similes: A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep...
...Maybe there should be a name for somebody with all those things...
...But about conservatives qua conservatives . . . well, that's something else again...
...And a boy stood up and asked a question, a young kid with a thick southern accent and a speech impediment...
...The gifted columnist": Meg Greenfield...
...Maybe that's because this is a personal memoir...
...But most of all, exclamation marks...
...You can forget about why it is that people who can write perfectly nicely, sometimes beautifully, why it is that when people like that start talking about themselves they put out these long sentences that go whooshing through the pages like a train in an Alfred Hitchcock movie...
...No, the thing about this book is the same old thing about people who live in places like Georgetown and Manhattan and go to the best parties and then tell everybody else how awful the rich are...
...Sometimes funny things are quoted about them without comment: Yeah, said someone across a dinner table, if conservatives are so interested in traditional values how come half of them are faggots—I mean total flaming lulus...
...Pat [Buchanan] asked me to come by...
...As the book puts it, "The shuttle had gone kaboom, leaving the neighborhood optimist embarrassed at the cookout...
...Brilliant": that's Richard Darman...
...A citizen sent him stationery with a nerd with a long nose peeking over a wall and saying "No More Mr...
...That was wonderful, it was like `Flanders Fields.' " After the speech [on JFK] Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had walked up to him [President Reagan] "just glowing" and said in her breathy voice, "Mr...
...Now you may be thinking, Hold on, isn't Peggy Noonan herself a conservative...
...Mary Eberstadt is executive editor of the National Interest...
...conjunctives and capital letters and italics—yes, there are lots of italics—and onomatopoeic spellings and idiosyncratic punctuation and, parentheses (very important...
...Secretary Shultz called me, Admiral Poindexter, Senator Chafee...
...and the answer is yes, she says she is, meaning: she is anti-Communist, anti-abortion, and pro-economic growth...
...Darman called it "perfect...
...as corny and emotional about America as a drunken YAFer...
...Maybe it's Norma Kamali-ist, as in: a wealthy enough, chicly dressed woman who follows the common wisdom of her new class...
...I like it...
...But what's really different is your hair...
...And maybe that's why so many of the things she writes about conservatives make them sound . . . well . . . pretty awful...
...Because although it was horrible the way they died, really a tragedy, in Washington one mourns between phone calls, and before the funerals were over the networks and the newspapers and the magazines and really just about everybody had "found out" who'd written the speech...
...Once he wrote someone a check for a hundred dollars, and the recipient couldn't cash it because it was signed Ronald Reagan and the cashier at the bank said that was worth more than the amount...
...And sometimes there were just those days, like the day the Challenger blew up...
...But as I think it was Diirrenmatt said, no man can survive his biographer, and the funny thing about this book is that the sharpest similes and the most quotable quotes about Reagan show . . . well, show something else about him: . . . the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain...
...And so on...
...she is huge and old and tired, she is carrying her fifth child, and she is huge and old...
...I don't know...
...So you can forget about the taking-credit thing and what some might call the exploitation-of-real-tragedies thing, they're not the problems here...
...She also wrote, briefly, for George Bush, giving him the "kinder, gentler nation" and "thousand points of light" phrases that endure to this day...
...Chapter 8, which takes Reagan as its chief subject, is both the best in the book and one of the finest impressionistic accounts of Reagan in print...
...And I would be shocked that Ben's critical faculties had failed him...
...The West Wing was full of "the daughters of millionaires" like "Miss Catsupfortune" and "Miss Daddysalobbyist...
...Now at this point some people may be wondering, But, didn't ten or twenty other people also write speeches for Ronald Reagan...
...Or maybe the class thing, what with the "Harvardheads" in the White House and the State Department guys with their "little bitty wire-rim glasses and wives named Sydney...
...And you won't find much about those other speechwriters either...
...Ooops...
...Now the thing about this book is, it has gossip...
...the terrible trail of smoke, the weeping families and crowds...
...What indeed...
...she wrote . . . well . . . wonderfully: "Peggy wrote the Pointe du Hoc speech, Mr...
...A story of how a girl who wanted more than that, a rebel with a love of books, goes from waitressing and an obscure college to radio, from radio to writing for Dan Rather at CBS, from CBS to writing for Ronald Reagan at the White House, and finally back to New York...
...A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart...
...Once he went down to Jacksonville, Florida, to meet with a big group of high school students...
...No one could make out what he was saying...
...5 / MAY 1990 Mary Eberstadt PEGGY'S TURN The hottest political memoir in a long, long time sometimes makes you wonder: if it hadn't been for Peggy Noonan's literary gifts to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, why then Michael Dukakis might today be President...
...Then there was this interesting meeting...
...I'm getting ahead of myself in terms of the narrative, but why not...
...The sentence that begins the preceding paragraph—"Then there was this interesting meeting'.!--i...
...a place on the best-seller list...
...Where were we...
...He wasn't in it for the ego...
...a boost by Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books...
...Charles Jones, the manager of the White House mail section, wrote...
...But she is also a writer, and when "you're a writer," she says, "you don't have a side...
...I was at that time partial to long black skirts and soft black boots...
...the Trilateral Commission...
...And it's true that at times he is described nicely, even poignantly: "He is probably the sweetest, most innocent man ever to serve in the White House...
...Grace meets grace": that's Ted Kennedy, responding to a speech by Ronald Reagan...
...Look on this thing this way, and that, and that...
...You have this long, free-flowing hair...
...1 There are some nice words in the book about people who happen to be conservatives, for example Pat Buchanan and Bill Bennett...
...Now anyone who's been to Washington knows you can't leave town without scores to settle and you can bet your Susan B. Anthony that plenty of them are settled here...
...It's the thing about people who call themselves conservatives and then make their names mocking the GOP and all those "creepy little men" in it who will never really Make It or get invited to the kinds of parties and dinners that those who have Made It like to complain about...
...Well, What I Saw at the Revolution,' a memoir by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, is such a book...
...She said why not Peggy Noonan...
...I read your memo...
...he was actually in it to do good...
...Buckley pointed out, it's hard to be indignant about, uh, "taking credit" when Reagan himself didn't seem to mind the networks "finding out" and the papers "finding out" and Random House and the rest of us "finding out" who wrote his words...
...I don't know what to think about jealousy...
...You can even forget, if you like, that every one—every one!—of the people ridiculed in this book is already, as every hostess and journalist and official in Washington knows, Out, Finished, Pass...
...Like a flower was to Georgia O'Keefe, who painted the same ones over and over as if to say, Look here...
...Some said she wrote like a girl...
...PT hen there are the conservatives...
...and as William E Buckley pointed out in National Review a few months ago (in an editorial retracting the magazine's former criticism of Peggy Noonan) (which was published after Peggy Noonan and two of Peggy Noonan's former bosses wrote in and complained about National Review complaining about her) . . . well, as Mr...
...Some authors remember the little people who helped them make it...
...Peggy Noonan remembers it too: the terror of the blank word processor, the horror of the ticking clock, the agonizing urge for a cigarette (just quit, and anyone who's done it knows how that feels...
...That's it...
...You remember the Challenger...
...That's not so bad," she said, "but everybody here at your particular level wears suits with a sort of man-tailored blouse and a scarf or a tie...
...But it's got authenticity this way...
...A man of "high standards...
...It has some nice writing and sometimes some excellent writing, and it also has lots and lots of long sentences with their run-ons and many 'Random House, $19.95...
...I would get it [a draft] back from Ben...
...respectful to rave notices in the Washington Times, in the Economist, in USA Today...
...She wrote during and after the '84 campaign, and she wrote the President's touching farewell speech of 1989...
...What can we do to advance traditional values today...
...I know that sentence should have gone, say, "Sometimes it's hard to get what you want...
...Now the funny thing about the Challenger speech was, it was not only dignified and elegiac, it was also a speech that marked a turning point of sorts for Peggy Noonan...
...And the boy nodded...
...Oh Pat...
...That intelligent woman": Elizabeth Drew...
...Nice Guy...
...Some said they resented how the Times and the Post and the networks always "found out," as the book puts it, who had written a speech the day it was delivered...
...She wrote fine speeches for President Reagan, some of them outstanding: on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, on John F Kennedy, on the heroes of the Challenger space shuttle...
...so if, along the way, she has also reaped a small share of the credit, what's wrong with that...
...There were other complaints too...
...Now you may be thinking, hold on, isn't Peggy Noonan herself a conservative...
...I've always liked him": Dan Rather...
...A story of a girl from a poorish Irish family who grew up in a neighborhood where the commonest sight in the suburbs, the emblem of the age, was a hefty woman heaving down the street, four children straggling behind her as she pulls roughly on the arm of the youngest, whose mouth is ringed like a clown's by a cherry ice...
...But this is a memoir and as in any memoir not everybody in it is ridiculous or laughable or dumb...
...Or maybe it's because "They [the other speechwriters] tended to be sad sacks and complain, and resentment isn't a magnetic personal style...
...W ell, what about it...
...He sent money to strangers and friends...
...excerpts in Mirabella and the New York Times Magazine...
...The members [of Congress] were held together at least to a degree by a leveling crudity, by the common coin of sexual sameness...
...This author remembers the big ones...
...This happened a number of times...
...He and his wife are bright and warm": Donny Graham, publisher of the Washington Post...
...Nancy Reagan] looked down at what I was wearing, which was, unfortunately, a wrinkled khaki skirt and a blue work shirt and heavy walking shoes with white woolen socks...
...When the student finally finished the president leaned forward and said, "You know, I'm awfully sorry, but I've got this hearing aid here, and I can't understand...
...a Galanosist, a wealthy, well-dressed woman who follows the common wisdom of her class...
...Mostly it probably came down to the jealousy thing...
...N ow the fact is, nothing is easily gotten to, all the time, that's worth getting to...
...The President called with thanks...
...Did he write at night, alone, in his diary, like Claudius: "They all think I am unaware, but I know of their m-m-m-machinations, I am not as d-dull as they imagine, or as removed...
...I couldn't believe Regan was jealous, but the others...
...Ann Higgins sent up telegrams...
...and I really hate to admit this, a thirtysomething sentence...
...And I think they probably did...
...When men are in politics together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane...
...An opportunity tale for an opportunity time...
...Some said she was in it for the ego...
...Horatio Alger in Frye boots...
...Maureen Reagan's "face was like the face of Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex when Errol Flynn did something impertinent...
...Well all right, maybe all rich men are thieves . . ." "But my only real complaint was that Darman was a millionaire . . ." Or maybe it was the male thing: "What do you expect, it's a totally masculine culture...
...Open-mindTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 15 ed and fair...
...That's all right," he said, with sympathy and grace...
...please excuse the intrusion, but I want to congratulate you on a great speech...
...Shelley read it too, and she said something interesting...
...And that almost all of the people praised in it are—how did Ronald Reagan put it?—better off than they were four years ago...
...N ow this girl, I mean this woman, became a speechwriter, and not only a speechwriter but the best-knownspeechwriter since at least the Kennedy years, maybe the best-known speechwriter of all time...
...He sent notes to George Shultz on them...
...It's the thing about women who are talented and accomplished and successful and who still carry on as if they are forever getting their livers yanked out like Prometheus...
...I'm even going to do a digression...
...But back to this book, it also has a story...
...Reagan lights up...
...Sometimes conservatives are described in more, well . . . declarative form: . . . well, the hard-core movement people were so . . . well, you know how it is with intense people in an intense environment, and so many of these guys were fish who swam upstream, and add to that the difficult natures that politics often draws and movements draw, and . . . and add all that up and you get . . . well . . . what you get is a bunch of creepy little men with creepy little beards who need something to seethe on (State Department cookie pushers...
...He had courage...
...Now many people would say, Nothing...
...They believe, as the born-inaffluence director Oliver Stone had Gordon Gekko say in Wall Street, "It's a zero-sum game...
...In fact most of the book's best writing—its most insightful and feeling prose—is reserved for Reagan: his boyhood struggles, his consequent feel for the American Everyman, his unflagging, all-embracing sense of humor...
...when I thought of him in those days, it was as a gigantic heroic balloon floating in the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, right up there between Superman and Big Bird...
...The class thing, and the related thing about all those people in government who are . . . well, you know (I won't say it but it rhymes with "bitch"): I know it's not polite, I know class antagonism is distressingly retro, but the problem with the rich in America is that they are often embarrassed by their affluence, ashamed they have more (ashamed they want more...
...But, except for once or twice, you won't find their speeches mentioned in this book...
...And in fact, it was...
...The next morning [after Reagan's speech on the Challenger space shuttle] there was a deluge...
...I reread it the other day...
...Sophisticated, experienced": George Shultz...
...Now it's true that Ronald Reagan (Ronald Reagan, that's who Peggy Noonan wrote speeches for) was also something of a conservative and that many reviewers have remarked upon the kind treatment, the outright adulation, he is said to receive in this book...
...some hate to live for...
...She was a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff between 1985 and 1987...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990...
...It's how my retarded generation talks...
...All agreed: it was a "great speech...
...Solidly glowing front-page reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post book reviews...
...I wanted to say: you know, I didn't have a cigarette...
...Good gossip and good details, mostly about Washington in the mid-1980s...
...And 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 that speech, too, went . . . you know: I still like that speech...
...Ronald Reagan had to call the bank and arrange for it to give the money...
...He would not have changed it much, but he would have written little exclamation points along the margins, and sometimes on some sections he would write, "Excellent...
...President, nobody ever captured him like that...
...I'm so sorry," he said, as he put his hand to his ear...
...Robert McFarlane "decided long ago, as young people sometimes do, that intelligent people speak in an incomprehensible manner...
...Michael Deaver leaked to the press...
...and more...
...A writer of "essays of great beauty, fluidity and knowingness": Francis X. Clines of the New York Times...
...and to this day there are more Americans alive who know PeggyNoonan-wrote-the-Challenger speech than there are people who can tell you the names of more than one of those heroic astronauts...
...In Washington, "men were completely in charge...
...Eager Ben [Bently Elliott, the chief speechwriter...
...No, as T. S. Eliot said somewhere, That is not it at all...
...But you always have your nay-sayers, your wet blankets, your guy who takes his hammer to the Pieta...
...I felt as if I'd pulled together the strings of the highest, strongest kites, tied them together, and handed it off to a man who used it to lift him up high—ten points [in the polls] and fourteen points, and higher...
...ellipses in the original] I think they go home and they fall asleep at eleven-oh-three and get up at five-fortyfive and go jogging and then they eat cereal with the kids and correct their homework at the table and come in at seven-fifteen with their briefcases and say, "Good morning...
...Peggy Noonan What I Saw at the Revolution A book is like . . . a thing in nature, really, so endlessly variable, so variably endless...
...And sentence fragments...
...A man sent words for a song, "They left us looking heavenward...
...George Bush...
...and if you go to Nexis today and punch in "Peggy Noonan" you are bound to find "author of the Challenger speech" close by...
...I don't have enough clothes...
...a "terrific writer for broadcast": Bill Moyers...
...President...
...As Ben Elliott said in a letter to National Review, Noonan "helped to make a great man greater...
...he had "a liking for P-words...
...Also, there was the clothes-andaccessories thing: A secretary told me, "You dress different...
...Then I would read over the speech and realize for the first time that it was actually pretty brilliant, so delicate and yet so vital, so vital and yet so tender...
...Nancy Reagan is "Mommy," "Evita," "the Hairdo with Anxiety...
...If you are a woman and you get the boys mad they will act like baaaaaad boys and send, as a member of the speech committee did, memos that begin, 'You're cute when you're angry!' " (PS: sometimes there was both the jealousy thing and the male thing because "when a woman at work in a male environment draws jealousy there's little she can do...
...That was Jack...
...But in the end the speech came out fine, it really did, because "the staffing process had no time to make it bad...
...I was so excited I dressed nicely, with an expensive sweater and a truly adult Norma Karnali black linen skirt...
...There are some wonderful anecdotes: He had a tact and delicacy so great that I suspect no one has ever been embarrassed in his presence...
...When] the job of head of the Office of Public Liaison opened up...
...She is thirty-two...
...On Larry Speakes: "his face is sensuous and dumb...
...fullpage ads in same...
...Beware the rich, who are overrepresented in politics...
...he slighted speechwriters...
...There were, for example, the "mice," the assistants to Donald Regan and others who took it into their heads to edit speeches...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
