What I Saw at the Revolution. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1990 by James Fallows

The top speechwriter for Reagan and Bush

takes you behind her lines.

Peggy Noonan is a terrific speechwriter, as she showed most convincingly with George Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 1988. This book shows that she is also a skillful raconteur. 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 book has the right mix of gossip, score-settling, and story-telling, and it is usually quite funny. (A warrior from the Afghan Mujahedeen resistance comes to the White House for meetings to raise support. Noonan takes him to the White House Mess for lunch. "The polite, attentive Filipino steward approaches and holds out his pad, his pencil poised in the air. The Mujahedeen warrior turns his turbaned head. 'I will have meat,' he says.") 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.

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

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. 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." 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.'...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.

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

A Buster Keaton-like comic pathos is built into the speechwriter's condition, and Noonan evokes it very well. If a speech succeeds, the writer feels underappreciated. (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. "You probably think Doug MacArthur was the great silver-tongued orator of the army. Well, who do you think his speechwriter was? It was me!") 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. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Noonan says, she dashed off a statement for Reagan to read. "It went almost as written. The staffing process had no time to make it bad." 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. He'd heard it in a commercial. I took it to Ben Elliot, |head of the speech writing office~ and said, I'll kill, I'll kill, I'll kill him if this gets through. Ben, alarmed, assured me that he would explain if pressed that you don't really change a quotation from a poem in this manner."

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. Noonan says dryly of this style:

"Had the benefit of sounding natural and relaxed, the drawback of sometimes being hard to pull off. Imagined him raising his hand on the Capitol steps-'do 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? Unfortunately it can. There are three significant problems with this book, which actually seem to be traits of character that come through in the writing.

First, even by the standards of Reagan-era memoirists and of speechwriters as a class, Noonan seems remarkably full of herself. Life somehow has never taught her that, if you can't be genuinely modest, even the semblance of modesty is a plus. She gives phrase-by-phrase accounts of how she drafted her speeches, in a tone that would be appropriate for barby-bar recollections by Mozart. 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. 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. 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." 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.