THE FIRST THING to be said about Peggy Noonan, who rose from all-news CBS radio to the White House speechwriting staff in the first term of the Great Communicator and stuck around long enough to be lip-synched by two different presidents, is that she’s a dandy maker of phrases, often sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs. Listen to her justify her job: “A great speech,” she says, “from a leader to the people eases our isolation, breaks down the walls, includes people: It takes them inside a spinning thing and makes them part of the gravity.” Listen to her describe the people who got in the way of her doing that job: “What I mean is,” she says, “when men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane.” She can even be savage discussing hard-core conservatives on her ideological side: “Well,” she says, “what you get is a bunch of creepy little men with creepy little beards who need something to seethe on (State Dept. cookie-pushers! George Bush! the Trilateral Commission!) some hate to live on….”
The second thing to be said about Peggy Noonan is that for the purposes of this memoir, and her deliverance from ghosting into a more agreeable career, she’s had to invent a literary persona, a sassy tone of voice, a cross circuit of Holden Caulfield and Fran Leibowitz, but right-wing smarty-pants, too, like National Review magazine, with some class animus for seasoning, a weakness for sarcasm, a bratty Irish appetite for grudge, and way too many exclamation marks. This persona works reasonably well, except it sometimes leaves her sounding dumber than she is, as if she had to apologize for her copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, as if she really believed that all liberals are rich and guilty nitwits who went to Harvard and Yale instead of Farleigh Dickinson, and all activists on behalf of the homeless are cruel manipulators of the insane, and only Republicans can talk to janitors, and Paul Johnson and Jean-Francois Revel are intellectual heavyweights, and George Gilder isn’t an idiot when he babbles about “the humane nature of the free market.” To have met Gorbachev and to tell us only that he looks like “a retired hockey goalie” is not just to miss the boat of history, but to jump off after it’s under way, thumbing your nose as you drown. Take that, you Commie pinko.
The third thing to be said about Peggy Noonan is that, almost against her will, she does damage to the president she claims she loves. Reagan’s White House is compared to “a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there is nothing inside.” Of the president himself she says that his intellect was only “slightly superior to average”; that he didn’t hear very much of what was said around him; and that the battle for his mind, and I quote again, “was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” Noonan quotes a friend of the president’s: “Behind those warm eyes is a lack of curiosity that is, somehow, disorienting.” And so is her memoir, however much fun, somehow disorienting. Her real gripe seems to be that they messed with her copy. That was John Reed’s real gripe with the Russian Revolution, too. It always happens to flacks, after which they write for themselves or they die.