A Seemingly Very Nice Middle-Class Girl
I'm still puzzled by the Noonan's elevation to savant status on all things conservative. She was, after all, a late comer to the party. When Reagan won his smashing victory in 1980, Noonan was working at CBS for Dan Rather. She was a speechwriter for RR in the White House for only a couple of years. Then she cashed out and cashed in to write a memoir.
Her Reagan books (she has managed to write three books about the man she worked with for less than three years) are revealing when taken together. What I Saw at the Revolution is highly critical of the administration, obsessed with trivia, and seems to accept the media caricature of the man. Each subsequent book becomes more lavish in its praise as the great accomplishments of Reagan become more apparent.
Simply put, Noonan displays no great insight into the man she worked for and what he was doing. She simply paints the portrait most likely to appeal to conservatives while fitting into the media/liberal narrative of the time.
Let us also not forget that Noonan, as Reagan left office, wrote the "kinder, gentler nation" speech for George H. W. Bush. The true Reaganauts recognized that line as a not too subtle jab at the man leaving the Oval Office.
James Fallows's review of her first book is revealing now when read beside her criticisms of Sarah Palin:
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."
*****
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.
***
Second, there is a peculiar class dynamic underway in the book. Noonan grew up in a working class 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. There's something to this point, but not as much as Noonan makes of it here.
***
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.
Class act
Second, there is a peculiar class dynamic underway in the book. Noonan grew up in a working class 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. There's something to this point, but not as much as Noonan makes of it here. 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. 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. 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. 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.
***
Finally there is the question of "writing for the ear." Before she joined the Reagan staff, Noonan had spent several years as a writer for Dan Rather. Her speciality was scripts for his five-minute radio commentaries. She presents it as a kind of delicious irony that she could have spanned the gulf between Rather and Reagan. But by the time a reader finishes this book, the irony or mystery will have disappeared. In both jobs, Noonan was doing essentially the same thing-writing words that would be listened to, rather than read on a page. 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.
HT: The Other McCain
Related:
Taking Peggy Noonan to the woodshed
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