White House Confidential

...It never occurred to him that he didn't have to make a statement...

...Once over lightly In a radio broadcast, this would be OK—the emotional chord would have been sounded, the narrator would not be expected to act as a debater and deal with every idea that is introduced...

...There are three significant problems with this book, which actually seem to be traits of character that come through in the writing...

...What I Saw at the Revolution...

...It is easy to imagine how powerful it must have been over the air...

...The holes in the argument are so much more obvious...

...Probably without meaning to, she uses the same approach in much of this book, and in so doing she demonstrates that the way she writes matters more than what she says: The structural similarity between Rather's broadcasts and Reagan's speeches matters more than the supposed differences in their political points of view...

...He represented the idea that all of us together, the American people, 'hold these truths'—that all men are created equal, that democracy is better than dictatorship, that justice is a standard we must each seek to meet...

...When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Noonan says, she dashed off a statement for Reagan to read...

...First, even by the standards of Reagan-era memoirists and of speechwriters as a class, Noonan seems remarkably full of herself...

...In return it's able to shuck some of the burden of logic and argumentation that writing for the page is supposed to bear...

...Well, who do you think his speechwriter was...

...This book* shows that she is also a skillful raconteur...

...I took it to Ben Elliot, [head of the The book as a whole has the strengths and weaknesses of a speech by Reagan or a commentary by Rather: It is vivid, engaging, moving, and often poetic, but it doesn't stay with anything that might turn out to be very complicated...

...James Fallows, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is the Washington editor of The Atlantic and was chief speechwriter in the Carter White House for two years...

...Noonan recounts a wonderful anecdote about Dwight Eisenhower, who was sitting with his own speechwriters, having won every honor his nation could offer, when suddenly he turned resentful...

...speech writing office] and said, I'll kill, I'll kill, I' 1 kill him if this gets through...

...My sympathies are entirely with Noonan as she fights against the policy nerds, but it's easy to imagine them grinding their teeth about her "delicate yet vital" prose...

...We all bear the marks of our upbringings, and even though Noonan has spent the last 15 years doing professional-class jobs in Cambridge, Manhattan, and Washington, she may feel that her soul is still in Brooklyn...

...In its ideal form, it is poetry...

...Before she joined the Reagan staff, Noonan had spent several years as a writer for Dan Rather...

...But by the time a reader finishes this book, the irony or mystery will have disappeared...

...But in this book she hauls out her working-class credentials so often and so showily that she seems to be using them to mau-mau the "nice young men in blue suits from Brooks" she fought against in the White House...

...The book is dotted with the kind of "transition" that works in a broadcast, with a pause at either end, or as the voiceover for a video shot that implies the transition by itself as the images change...

...He brought back the 'We.— Whoa there...

...She presents it as a kind of delicious irony that she could have spanned the gulf between Rather and Reagan...

...Can't you just hear Reagan, or for that matter Rather, saying it?] Reagan knew this in his bones...

...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...

...If a speech fails, the writer takes the blame, although he's usually fought a losing battle against the policy nerds who've gummed and sucked at the draft until it turned to mush...

...A warrior from the Afghan Mujahedeen resistance comes to the White House for meetings to raise support...

...Her draft contained a quote from the wartime poem about aviators who "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" to "touch the face of God": "The worst edit...I received in all my time in the White House—was from a pudgy young NSC mover who told me to change the quote at the end from 'touch the face of God' to `reach out and touch someone—touch the face of God.' He felt this was eloquent...

...In both jobs, Noonan was doing essentially the same thing—writing words that would be listened to, rather than read on a page...

...I could be reading it wrong, but it looks as if she is using these signals to show that she has it both ways: she's a woman of the people, but she knows as much as the pointy-heads...

...She never mentions any of the points again, and to all appearances never thinks about them...

...Noonan spends half a page presenting the scenes where people challenged her with these questions...and that's it...

...If you're going to write about the "revolutionaries" who served Reagan, you can't just skate past questions of this sort...

...It's different in a book...

...She says that, after she finished hammering out a draft, the speech writing process would typically (!) go like this: "I would get it back from Ben...

...To be clear about this point, there is nothing wrong with being a woman of the people or with knowing a lot about history or art...

...You probably think Doug MacArthur was the great silver-tongued orator of the army...

...I will have meat,' he says...

...It would, however, have been perfect in a speech...

...Random House, $18.95...

...At a dozen other crucial points, Noonan gives a Dan Rather commentary about an idea, rather than writing about it...

...Near the end of his term, she says, "I knew he was one of the great men of our time...

...Ben, alarmed, assured me that he would explain if pressed that you don't really change a quotation from a poem in this manner...

...Noonan quotes, with understandable pride, a radio commentary she did for Rather after John Hinckley was sent to a mental hospital for shooting Reagan and maiming Jim Brady—while poor people guilty of much less heinous crimes were left to rot in jail...

...If they're so high on patriotism, why didn't any of them go to Vietnam...

...She gives phrase-by-phrase accounts of how she drafted her speeches, in a tone that would be appropriate for barbybar recollections by Mozart...

...She understands exactly why the hereditary Democrats of her neighborhood, who viewed John Kennedy as their hero and savior in 1960, came to see Ronald Reagan the same way 20 years later...

...They couldn't possibly understand the emotions of the real America (she would tell them), because unlike her, they weren't from Brooklyn and hadn't ever worked in a diner...

...If they're so eager to support religion, why aren't they ever in church...

...A Buster Keaton-like comic pathos is built into the speechwriter's condition, and Noonan evokes it very well...

...Noonan grew up in a workingclass Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn, where most children of her generation (she is in her late 30s) were the first in their families to go to college...

...Life somehow has never taught her that, if you can't be genuinely modest, even the semblance of modesty is a plus...

...The staffing process had no time to make it bad...

...The commentary was built around a refrain, a kind of chant: "Something is wrong here...

...Unfortunately it can...

...The book has the right mix of gossip, score-settling, and story-telling, and it is usually quite funny...

...On the page, the repeated refrain looks a little bit stupid—of course "something is wrong," we know that already...

...If they're so interested in traditional values, how come half of them are faggots...

...It was me...

...The more serious indication is that the book as a whole has the strengths and weaknesses of a speech by Reagan or a commentary by Rather: it is vivid, engaging, moving, and often poetic, but it doesn't stay with anything that might turn out to be very complicated...

...When she learns that Bud McFarlane has tried to kill himself, because of his humiliation in the Iran-Contra business, she says: "In Washington in the eighties a man would attempt suicide when he thought his career was over, and later he would say, 'I did it because I had failed my country, and failure and defeat are difficult for someone with my admittedly achieving nature to countenance...

...If a speech succeeds, the writer feels underappreciated...

...but] 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...

...When she's not talking about her humble roots, Noonan drops allusions to the world of academics and aesthetes—the Deconstructionists, Gerald Murphy—that seem a little far-fetched...

...After she's called in for a meeting with Reagan, she leaves thinking, "I would be able to say, 'Well, I was meeting with the President the other day, and he says —' for weeks...

...Her speciality was scripts for his five-minute radio commentaries...

...Imagined him raising his hand on the Capitol steps-1)o solemnly swear, will preserve and protect . . . ."' Can such an entertaining book, which is so often insightful about people other than the author, have any defects...

...Noonan says dryly of this style: "Had the benefit of sounding natural and relaxed, the drawback of sometimes being hard to pull off...

...It went almost as written...

...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!' And I would be shocked that Ben's critical faculties had failed him...

...He'd heard it in a commercial...

...There's something to this point, but not as much as Noonan makes of it here...

...by James Fallows Peggy Noonan is a terrific speechwriter, as she showed most convincingly with George Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 1988...

...tell us exactly what the problem is and what we can do about it...

...Noonan is wholeheartedly on the side of Reaganism and of Ronald Reagan, but she does not make Reagan out to be some kind of mental giant or perfect man...

...Class act Second, there is a peculiar class dynamic underway in the book...

...The polite, attentive Filipino steward approaches and holds out his pad, his pencil poised in the air...

...Having come to Washington in her mid-30s, after growing up and working in New York, Noonan usually remains skeptical of the classic Washington vanities...

...To give just one other example, she assures us that: "Someone once said the most important word in 'We the people' is 'We.' [This, by the way, is a for-the-ear-only sentence if ever there was one...

...In print, however, these transitions "And there was another thing:" "There was this about Washington:"—look like ways to avoid thinking out the real connection between ideas...

...So too with Noonan's brief mention of the fervent conservatives who don't practice what they preach...

...For instance, Noonan mentions out of the blue that she has run into liberals who've criticized the young Reagan appointees: If they're so devoted to the family, why aren't any of them married...

...The chapter ends, Noonan moves on, and she wastes no time defending an assertion that, to put it charitably, not all her readers will find instantly convincing...

...Better said than read Finally there is the question of "writing for the ear...

...Writing for the ear," as Noonan describes her specialty, and writing for the eye are different skills...

...Some people are good at both: William Safire, Pat Buchanan, Charles McCarry, and Hendrik Hertzberg, to choose a varied list, were all effective White House speechwriters, and all have been at least as effective writing books, articles, or columns designed to be read...

...what sounded eloquent often looks trite...

...The problem is that both these parts of Noonan's identity in the book seem forced rather than natural, as if they say more about the way Noonan wants to be seen than about what she really is...

...Peggy Noonan has a true gift for ear writing, but this book suggests that she can't really go both ways...

...But people who can write the one way often can't write the other, since the demands of the two styles are surprisingly different...

...It's almost always disappointing to read the script of a broadcast that sounded powerful and moving when you heard it...

...What I Saw at the Revolution is a memoir that goes lightly over her pre-political experiences and then concentrates on the two-plus years she spent working at the White House for Reagan and her later experiences with Bush...

...The Mujahedeen warrior turns his turbaned head...

...One indication is a stylistic peculiarity...

...Considering the generally high regard for herself that comes through this book, it is nice that Noonan also makes gentle fun of the tics she introduced into Bush's convention speech: the bizarre subject-less sentences in which Bush recounted, "Moved to Texas, joined the Republican party, raised a family," and so on...

...Not 'I did it because my anguish is so huge, so ineradicable that to remove it I had to try to remove myself.' and not, 'Because I'll never be president,' which is what he wanted, I think, because he'd been in that Oval Office...

...There are enough delicious moments in this book to earn it a place with Donald Regan's For the Record and Christopher Buckley's hilarious novel, The White House Mess, on the short list of Reagan-era memoirs that are well worth reading as well as enormous fun to read...

...Writing for the ear has to convey its meaning more concisely, with images, touching the emotions as well as the mind...

...Noonan takes him to the White House Mess for lunch...