The Time of Our Lives: a Conversation with Peggy Noonan and John Dickerson

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE THE TIME OF OUR LIVES: A CONVERSATION WITH PEGGY NOONAN AND JOHN DICKERSON INTRODUCTION: ARTHUR C. BROOKS, AEI CONVERSATION: JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS PEGGY NOONAN, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2015 EVENT PAGE: https://www.aei.org/events/the-time-of-our-lives-a-conversation- with-peggy-noonan-and-john-dickerson/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM ARTHUR BROOKS: (In progress) – speeches of the great Reagan administration. Peggy’s a CBS News contributor and the author of several books, a lot of bestsellers. This new book, which I recommend to you for your interest, is some of her finest and most memorable columns, most powerful columns from the last few years, “The Time of Our Lives.” Joining Peggy for this discussion is John Dickerson. John is the political director for CBS News and the new anchor – newish anchor of “Face the Nation.” That show is getting more and more notoriety because of the excellence of John. I’m sure you’re watching it, and you should. Just last weekend, he moderated the Democratic debate. Popular press says that he was the winner of that debate. (Applause.) We’re looking forward to the conversation. Whether you’re new to AEI or an old friend, please come back. These conversations are a part of what we do and we couldn’t do them without you. So, with that, please join me in welcoming Peggy Noonan and John Dickerson. (Applause.) PEGGY NOONAN: Thank you. Thank you. JOHN DICKERSON: Thank you. All right. So, Peggy, let’s start with what did you discover when you were going through the process of putting this book together? What was the first thing that hit you looking at all of that material? MS. NOONAN: What I decided to do was pull together 30 years of commentaries, columns, op-ed pieces, essays. The first thing that struck me was that, oh, my God, that material really exists in boxes in the backs of closets, in attics, and in a warehouse out in Queens. I got it all together. I went through it. And a number of things surprised me. One was – one was how much you don’t forget about what you do. We discussed this actually last Sunday. You are going to find when you go through all your work someday, you’re going to think you’re going to find a million things that you don’t remember. You’re going to think you’re going to have fabulous moments where you look at something and say, my God, that’s lovely, and I have no memory of writing it. That’s not what happens. What happens is you remember it all. There was only two or three things that I actually thought I don’t remember that. MR. DICKERSON: When you first started out, why did you keep everything? I mean – so I am the son of a packrat so I understand why – MS. NOONAN: Yes. MR. DICKERSON: – I had all of mom’s things. But why did you, that first thing you filed away that you ever wrote, did you think, I’m going to be famous someday and I’m going to want this or – MS. NOONAN: That’s a reasonable question. I was really surprised I’d kept everything. I think I knew for a very, very long time that I was a writer. And I think I had it in my mind that writers keep what they write. And so when I was a commentary writer at CBS, I would go home, I always had a copy. We used to type on five-ply news writing paper the things that we did at CBS. And I must tell you, it was very tender to see these old scripts that were really from typewriters and not even electric typewriters. I had a manual typewriter. So why did I keep it? I just thought writers keep their stuff. I actually did think that. MR. DICKERSON: And when you went back to look through those old scripts, did you – I mean, they feel different. MS. NOONAN: Yeah. MR. DICKERSON: They smell different. MS. NOONAN: Yes, they do. MR. DICKERSON: Was there a moment you were in the storage locker and was it transporting? I mean, was there a little time travel going on when you were finding these old scripts? I remember Dan Rather was yelling, I need this immediately, or some other – MS. NOONAN: You know what amazed me? The CBS News, which I worked in, which you’ve work in, I used to do daily commentaries which were five-minute shows, which means sort of 1,000-word column, a daily column. Every day there was a column. And I also wrote hourly news broadcasts. So every hour, you know, you had something. The sheer – the sheer – you can’t wait for the muse, do you know what I mean? They sense that you have a deadline, baby, and you are earning a union wage, and you are going to get your $1,000 a week if you do this work. And there’s – and sometimes it turns out well because you’ve got it going on. Sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know. There was something touchingly old about the typewritten stuff. There was something poignant about it. MR. DICKERSON: Was there a trick when you were writing like that at first? Did anybody say to you, here’s how you – when you can’t think of a darned thing and the five sheets of paper in the typewriter are blank and you have 10 minutes left – MS. NOONAN: Yes. MR. DICKERSON: Did anybody say, here’s the – here’s the break-glass thing to do to get yourself to figure out how to have a fast opinion in 10 minutes? MS. NOONAN: No. I can remember as a writer the old fellows in the newsroom telling me, look, if you don’t know how to begin the piece, there’s always, hey, Mabel, listen to this. (Laughter.) I also found that if I – if I couldn’t find the lead to a commentary but I made believe I was talking to a friend about the commentary, I’d write, dear, Joel, I’m writing a piece about and then I’d start going. And then I would see what the lead was, because the lead was what I’d tell my friend, Joel. So, yeah, there was a bit of that. But I learned a lot of magic from the guys in the newsroom, the old newsroom who – that you used to visit as a child, which was the newsroom I worked in in the ’70s and ’80s. MR. DICKERSON: Murrow used that same but instead of Mabel, he used the Lord’s son, which, as a good practicing Catholic, we wouldn’t say out loud. But tell us about the Mount St. Helens lesson you learned. MS. NOONAN: Oh, that was a fabulous small thing. I was a young news writer at CBS News. I was putting together hourly radio news broadcasts, including the 8:00 a.m. World News Roundup, which was a very important CBS radio network show. One morning, half my job was writing the show. The other half was sitting in a little radio studio with a telephone and a tape recorder calling people in the news and doing live interviews with them, then we would cut that into little tapes called actualities and they would be used in the news broadcast. One day, it’s about a week after the Mount St. Helens volcano blew, big volcano, huge story. I’m in the little CBS booth calling around. In those days, there were telephone operators. And I knew the area code for Mount St. Helens. So I called – I got the operator for the Mount St. Helens area, and it was just so cute. I actually would say, my name is Peggy Noonan. I work for CBS News. I’m trying to cover Mount St. Helens. She’s go, hi, Peggy. How are you? And I’d say, look, I have to get fresh audiotape for my bosses so they’ll know what’s happening at Mount St. Helens. And I don’t really at this point know who to call. I’ve been calling people for a week. I need a new name. And they’d say things like, oh, my cousin, Herb, is a city councilman over from Mount St. Helens, and I’ll connect you. So it was a fabulous world of telephone operators. One day, this guy – I get a guy on who’s near Mount St. Helens. And I say, what’s happening there? And he says, oh, everything’s kind of settled down. I guess the big story is that the post office is closed down. We can’t send letters anymore. I said, why is that? He said, well, because after the volcano blew, all the lava went up and then the dust came down and then everybody went out with envelopes, put the dust in the envelopes and went to send it to their friends as mementos. And I found that so hilarious. The lava came out in the machines, in the post office, and broke the machines. Now, that was not grave and important enough information for a great organization like CBS News to use in one of its broadcasts. So I gave my editor some other stuff to use. But I mentioned to this young guy, this bright young kid in the newsroom named Charles Osgood, I mentioned to Charles Osgood what the funny guy had just told me about the post office broke down.

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