Customer Reviews

What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Peggy Noonan's political coming-of-age memoir is a delight for anyone, liberal or conservative. Noonan, a resolutely middle-class product of Long Island, New Jersey and Fairleigh Dickinson University, wrote first for Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, and then Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

She offers a wonderful recounting of her flirtation with and eventual repulsion from the American left, most vividly in her description of a bus trip to a Washington antiwar protest. It's a dim echo, really, of the intellectual journey taken by her political hero, Reagan.

Her recollection of the Reagan speechwriting shop is as compelling as any scene from Toby Ziegler's office in TV's "The West Wing." It rings true and its very exciting reading, even to this day. Also, her practical advice on political speechwriting is useful and valid whether you are a Democrat or Republican.

Working in that speechwriting shop, Noonan gave Reagan some of his most successful emotional appeals: The D-Day anniversary paean to "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc," the tribute to the Challenger astronauts. She followed that up with one of the most effective political attacks in US political history, George H.W. Bush's evisceration of his 1988 opponent, Michael Dukakis, at the New Orleans GOP convention.

I dock the book one star because of Noonan's lack of objectivity regarding Reagan, whom she loves like a kindly, if remote, grandfather. However, "What I Saw ..." is very much her best work. Her later books are either polemics or treacly valentines. Too bad, because she's such a wonderful memoirist.

Peggy Noonan's memoir of her years in the Reagan White House is beautifully written and highly entertaining. She details the constant struggle between Reagan's speechwriters and his policy drones (the NSC staff is a particular nemesis) to shape the message. In the end, though, Reagan's views come across as his own. It is clear that although he had speechwriters to help him, he was more highly engaged in the speechwriting process than some (see "reader from Atlanta") would have you believe. There are also plenty of examples of where Reagan overruled his timid advisors and spoke out boldly, examples being his Berlin Wall speech and the "Evil Empire" speech. Overall, Noonan's memoirs is a great portrait of some of the pettiness of those who work in government and will makes you yearn again for a President who was "simple" enough to know what he believed without needing a pollster to tell him on every subject from whether to sign a welfare reform bill to where he and his family should take their summer vacations.

Peggy Noonan's account of life in the Reagan White House is clever, insightful and inspiring. Her vivid descriptons of the West Wing and Executive Office make you feel as if you are sitting right beside her as she crafts the speeches that for many defined the Reagan Presidency. In addition, I enjoyed the autobiographical elements of this book--which included Ms. Noonan's background and formation of her political ideology. In a straightforward, unpretentious style, both Ms. Noonan (and her former boss)remind us that there is still an American dream worth achieving.

What an amazingly wide-ranging memoir Peggy Noonan wrote! Read this book if you want to know--

* what it was like growing up in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,
* what it was like to work at a major news network (CBS) as it made the awkward, transition from radio to TV,
* how the White House speechwriting process worked,
* what went on inside the Reagan administration,
* what it was like to be a woman in a field dominated by men,
* what it was like to be a working-class, Fairleigh Dickinson-educated Jersey girl in a town populated by the old boys network and the Ivy League,
* what Reagan was like in person,
* how elements of the conservative movement fought and cooperated in the White House, and
* much, much more.

Having come to Reagan administration from CBS (where she worked for Dan Rather), Noonan spent only a few years at the White House in the mid-1980s -- long enough, though, to write some of Reagan's most memorable and moving speeches, including the Challenger and D-Day speeches -- but she saw, and participated in, so much. She describes her experiences with wit and humor and candor -- and, of course, the wonderful writing for which we've come to know her.

Despite her own conservative politics and love for Reagan, this is not hagiography. Even as she stands clearly in awe of the president, he remains a mystery to her, a distant enigma. She is uncertain whether Reagan's aides are actually manipulating him, or whether it's Reagan who's really doing the manipulating of his aides who seem always to be at odds. And even as she stands clearly in awe of working in the White House, Noonan is quickly frustrated by the in-fighting among staff members, the bureaucratic fights among departments and agencies. This is particularly the case with the "staffing" of speeches, in which each department -- State, for example, and the National Security Council -- reviews a speech and basically tears it apart. Nor are Noonan's impressions of Nancy Reagan and Maureen Reagan particularly positive.

In short, I think it's fair to say that the book is a classic of the genre.

As we move into another policitcal campaign season of lies, spin, and deliberately mis-leading half truths, this remarkable book should be not just read, but studied by every would-be voter. It is 10 years old, but as on target today as when it was written. It gives a "basement" view of the inner-workings of our government unlike any you will read elsewhere, mixing often off-the-wall humor with a thoughtful and serious view of important issues. Noonan's deft put-downs of pretentious "staff" who may be effective politicians but are obviously amateur writers and communicators are a delight. As a former speechwriter in the corporate world (and a one-time political writer) I found it disheartening to read additional evidence of how the spinmeisters of the world have taken communication back to Alice in Wonderland level. Noonan is a gem, and if nothing else is learned from the book, it should be this: Americans need to know they are not just electing a President, they are electing his "staff". This book should be in the library of every writer, and used as a frequent tool and reminder.

I'd read this terrific memoir shortly after it came out and really liked it. So having recently read Dutch (see Orrin's review) and wanting to get a more positive spin on the Gipper, I figured this was as good a book as any. But as I reread it I found something really unexpected and stupefying; to a remarkable degree Dutch appears to have been plagiarized from Peggy Noonan. At first I thought it was just the chatty tone and Noonan's habit of imagining scenes from Reagan's life. But then I got to the point where Noonan has a throw away line about Reagan that struck me as awfully familiar and I recalled that Morris uses it as the central metaphor towards the end of his book. Noonan says that a Reagan aide told her that: "Beneath the lava flow of warmth there is something impervious as a glacier". As I noted in my review of the Morris book, he seizes upon this image of Reagan as a glacier, and while I think he uses it to somewhat dubious effect, what really jumped out at me was that he used it at all, and as near as I can tell it's unattributed. Now to give him his due, he claims that in this instance he was merely reproducing his own diary entry from 1998 (Noonan's book didn't come out until 1990) and I suppose he could be the unnamed source of Noonan's quote, but by that point the similarities in the two texts were just getting to be too much for me to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One central theme that they agree on seems like it may be a puzzle to biographers and historians for years to come, the question of who Ronald Reagan really was. On this point, though she has nearly a schoolgirl crush on him, Noonan is no more forgiving than Morris. The portrait she paints, though generally positive, is of an affable but fundamentally unapproachable figure. She conveys much the same sense as Morris, that Ronald Reagan presented a facade to the world, essentially playing the role of Ronald Reagan in a movie of his own life. Whatever lay behind the mask was not there for public consumption; it was reserved for Nancy and himself.

Now Noonan and Morris, and many critics, are deeply troubled by this. We live after all in an age where the current resident of the White House has no secret self. His presidency has been one long (seemingly interminable) exercise in psychodrama, with himself as the patient and the rest of us as the analysts. And for all the current fashion in singing the praises of the Greatest Generation (see Orrin's review) and their humble service to country, there is a palpable sense that we are dissatisfied with these older folks who don't bare their souls and beg us to feel their pain. It's instructive that when push came to shove, the electorate twice chose Bill Clinton and all his Oprahesque, cathartic, stage show baggage over George Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and competent public servants who couldn't make that same bathetic connection to the voters. It is the generation of Noonan and Morris that is essentially running the country and the culture right now and this is what they seem to want in their politicians. But Reagan, who is actually a little older than most of the WWII generation, came from a time when such openness would have been unthinkable and as the child of an alcoholic father it is hard to imagine how he could ever lay bare his inner being in the way these folks seem to require.

This book is great fun, in particular for the acid sketches and loving portraits of the colorful cast of characters who surrounded the Administration. And the Reagan who emerges from the pages is a complex and fascinating bundle of contradictions, a much richer figure than the Reagan that Morris portrays. While Noonan was frustrated by not penetrating his veneer, the man she reveals seems to be worthy of both the hero worship and the partisan hatreds that he summoned forth.

Noonan herself is an emblematic representative of her times. The casually liberal kid from Massapequa, Long Island who was so repelled by the excesses and nihilism of her generation that she was driven into the arms of the conservative movement. But at the same time she retained her sense of perspective and a healthy skepticism. As a result she offers a seemingly honest and often quite perceptive insiders view of the frequently unattractive machinations of governance as it was practiced in the Reagan Era.

GRADE: A-

I can tell this is a great book because liberals can freely admit to liking it as well.

On her blog DemocracyArsenal.org a former Clinton speechwriter, Heather Hurlburt, complimented the book:

Her politics are not mine. But this book is beautifully-written, vivid and real -- about how young people get their politics, and their jobs; how movements, specifically Ronald Reagan's, form; and how lofty and petty the world of White House politics can simultaneously be. I don't believe it's been equalled.

...and indeed I am certainly NOT one by any stretch of the imagination. Noonan has written one great book about the presidency, life in the White House, speech writing, and the political process and how it interacts with the media. The portions of the book on how she wrote speeches for Reagan and Bush and how they got edited in the staffing process are particularly well-written, insightful, and at times downright funny. Noonan remains loyal to Reagan but she is not so blindered that she fails to note some of the short comings of his hands-off style. Her policy views are sometimes simplistic (you're left wondering if she thinks the world can be governed from what you learn in a Capra movie) but this is after all a memoir and she does a very good job of taking you on her trip. Well worth reading.

I was in college when Ronald Reagan was elected and his character as well as his policies shaped my political thinking in those formative years. Peggy Noonan re-captures that "magic" time in American History with this enjoyable re-telling by someone who was on the inside. This is no "tell-all" in the 1990's sense of the word; there is no disillusionment here. Peggy Noonan came out of her years of service for Ronald Reagan with more respect for the man than when she went in. If only current ex-White House staff persons could say the same! (See George Stephanapolis -All Too Human) This account of Conservatism's heyday (and America's, and freedom's for that matter) makes me yearn for the time when we had a real man of character in the White House. Ronald Reagan created passion in the country and in those who worked for him, and this book exemplifies that passion. It's accounts of the inner workings of the White House, the inner politics; the changes to major speeches that became history are fascinating. The events come alive and take on a current events feel as policies are shaped behind closed doors, speeches are re-written at the last minute, and repercussions are dealt with. If you want an inside look at a pivotal time in American History and an admiring look at one of our Great Presidents, this book is for you.

"Specificity is the soul of credibility," Noonan tells us and goes on to earn her credibility through the detailed descriptions presented in this masterful slice of American history. The quote actually refers to the editing of a canned stump speech edited slighted for various locations so that local politicians and locations distinguish one place from another on the tour.

Noonan allows readers to capture the flavor of the internal fighting among the powers that be in a presidential administration. Nearly everyone can identify with the "experts" being totally wrong in their advice. She discusses several incidences where she was second-guessed by people trying to "help her" improve her speeches and shows how the ones that were unedited were the best received. Virtually anyone in communication can identify with that sort of experience at some level.

There's an element of mystery included. She talks about Reagan giving her a joke, mentioning that someday she could use it when she did other things. When he hung up the phone she says, "he knows something I don't know. He knows I'm going to write about these days." She did and the result tells a lot about human nature, politics, and dysfunctional systems. In spite of the dysfunctions, worthwhile accomplishments were made.