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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,

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 “.” 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 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 , I mentioned to Charles Osgood what the funny guy had just told me about the post office broke down. And Charlie Osgood immediately went, that’s the lead. Use that. Get that audiotape. And I was surprised because I thought that’s not interesting to the public. That’s only interesting to us. It made us laugh. And he explained to me, no, no. If it’s interesting to us, it’s interesting to the public. The public is like you. They will appreciate a story like that. The meaning of the ash falling out of the envelopes and people gathering mementos, that means the crisis is over and people are having fun again and sending mementos of the disaster to their friends.

MR. DICKERSON: So it’s a story that interests you, something you might tell Mabel. You’re developing your list of how to be a young writer already.

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, let’s continue with the process. So you’ve been to the storage locker, you’ve got all of this out in front of you. How did you sort all of this material? What criteria did you use?

MS. NOONAN: I read everything I’d written. Now, some stuff was just newscasts that I put aside. Who wants to read newscasts? But everything that was an essay or an op-ed or something that argues for a point of view, I just read everything.

And I literally made three piles, the yes pile for, gee, I love this. The maybe pile for, I don’t know. I’m going to have to have my friends come in and read this. And the no pile, you know. The no pile was easy, it’s like this isn’t good enough. We figured we’d have 500 pages. I got some boxes all over the place. You’ve got to be discerning. Eventually, the yes pile was about this high. And then we had to make it the yes, yes, I love this pile which had to be about that high. And that was just fun. That was just a pleasure.

That gave me a sense, John, that I had had a career, and in the career I had said interesting things that I meant as a contribution, do you know what I mean? I meant as a serious thing. And that’s a fabulous feeling to have, you know.

MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. Worth keeping.

MS. NOONAN: Yes, worth keeping, and then worth putting in a book. I keep saying something horrible on the book tour. The horrible thing I keep saying is – and I can’t stop saying it, as I’m about to prove – and I was teased about it by Mika Brzezinski the other day is that I actually love this book. And I just love it so much that I can’t not tell people.

Today, I was up – I actually got the worse – I was the worst – I had my worst book tour moment today. I was up at the Capitol and I met with Capitol staffers. And I was getting goofy because at a certain point on a book tour, you do get goofy. And I picked up the book and I said, buy this or you’re going to die. (Laughter.) And some of them sort of wrote down, buy this, don’t die. Sorry, I’m going off on – you’re getting your amused look, John.

MR. DICKERSON: No, no. I was trying to figure out what the segue was from that.

MS. NOONAN: Yes. I have no idea. Buy this or you will die is my message.

MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. So you have the yes, yes pile. And you were talking about – you wrote things that have had some weight over time.

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MR. DICKERSON: Was there – and I’ve asked you this before but I’m going to ask you for the benefit of this audience. Was there a through line through the years where you felt like, I’ve been mulling the same ideas; I’ve been interested in character of public people, character as it demonstrates itself in private moments?

MS. NOONAN: Totally. Totally. For one thing, you know, look at your work. I think you will find this – look at your work, see if you find it. The me of 30 years ago sounds exactly like the me of today. I would have thought I would have improved as a writer. I’m quite serious.

But the me of 30 years ago was the me of today, which gave me this feeling, which is just a thought I’m holding in my head, maybe you become yourself earlier than you know, you know?

But I was kind of thinking I’m going to go back and find touchingly awkward youthful pieces. To tell you the truth, I didn’t. It sounded just like me. It could have been written yesterday. That’s one thing.

The second thing is my subject is America, end, full stop. Third thing, I am very – and I could see this as I went through the work. I am very interested in the subject of courage, shown courage, courage in the past, courage that changed history. I’m interested in the meaning of a character, interested, and I write most movingly, to my shock, about the meaning of work, the meaning of work in a human life.

MR. DICKERSON: So your Tennessee Williams piece, I love the line about – and I’m trying to think of a way to ask this so I don’t butcher it and let you tell it, but about the work he did after he stopped being famous.

MS. NOONAN: Yes, which is so touching to me. When Tennessee Williams died, awkwardly in an absurd accident in New York City, in a hotel accident, too young, I think in his 60s, you know, it was a news story. Tennessee Williams had been a great American playwright from “The Glass Menagerie” through “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

But much – and I like very much when people who are important to me or important in general die. I really try to capture the meaning of their lives and/or their work.

And so I was interested in Tennessee Williams. But what interested me most about him and studying him and interviewing people about him before I wrote the piece about him, what interested me so much was that every day he heroically got up and did his work. He sat at a typewriter and he wrote his Tennessee Williams plays after his great inspiration had left him, after his genius had abandoned him, after the muse had departed. He still got up every day and did his work. And I just – it kind of choked me up to think about that.

He was surrounded by a generation of writers and actors, directors and producers who had in various ways, as they used to say in America, sold out, stopped trying to do art, stopped trying for greatness and instead make commercials on TV about wine. And that’s not what he did. Got up every day and he worked. And so I just wanted to bow to that.

MR. DICKERSON: Right. And the nobility of doing that even after it was (easy ?).

(Cross talk.)

MS. NOONAN: Even when he knew it wasn’t going to work.

MR. DICKERSON: Right. How many days can you go without writing?

MS. NOONAN: What a great thing to say. Does writing include making notes on my thoughts and things I hear and observations?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, you know. So you know what it means. If Charlie Chaplin said, I’ve got to go write or I don’t think I deserve dinner. So that’s what I mean. I mean, so sometimes writing notes can feel like you’ve written, even if you – even if it’s not a piece that goes to the editor and people go and see.

MS. NOONAN: OK. I would love to be the kind of writer who has a lovely moleskine notebook that she keeps in the pocket with a lovely Cross pen or whoever makes great pens. Instead I’m a frantic do you have a piece of paper person? Do you have a pencil? I write notes – I am carrying a – on everything. Also, most dishearteningly, on yellow stick ups they’re called, those yellow things that –

MR. DICKERSON: Post-it notes?

MS. NOONAN: Post-it notes. It’s so humiliating if you saw my desk. It’s Post-it notes all over the place. And then I can’t read the handwriting. I do that all the time because I’m very interested, first of all, in the world, and I’m very interested in people. I’m very interested in what’s happening. And I’m very interested in – all right, this is my thought. I think this is correct. Check this out.

So am I doing that a lot? I’m doing that every day of my life. But do I enjoy sitting and writing a column? I do not.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, so two separate things. Yeah.

MS. NOONAN: I just don’t. That’s not the fun part. The fun part is the notes.

MR. DICKERSON: There’s an apocryphal story about somebody interviewing at Time magazine at one point and going into the editor and saying, you know, I really love writing. And the editor didn’t hire them because nobody who writes loves writing.

MS. NOONAN: You know, somehow that’s the way – although two people – no, three people now I can think of who were columnists and very fine columnists really did claim to love it.

George Will, who has said to others that he – on column day, he’s so happy because he gets to write a column. On column day, I have an upset stomach, but he’s happy because he gets to write a column. Bill Buckley loved to write his column and Bill Safire once told me that he loved to write a column.

So there you go. But I don’t and I don’t know understand who love it, although it’s very pleasurable, as they say, to have written a column.

MR. DICKERSON: Yes. Yes.

MS. NOONAN: It’s so – it’s pleasurable to go through your work.

MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah.

MS. NOONAN: Maybe I took so much pleasure in going through the work because I understand I never liked doing it.

MR. DICKERSON: But I guess what I was getting at was the Tennessee William in you, which is to say that writing is what you do. I mean, you don’t go on vacation to get away from those notes. Those notes go with you when you go on vacation.

MS. NOONAN: No. Absolutely. Absolutely. But that’s part of life. Writers record what they record. I would not like it to not do that.

MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. Well, I agree. So you wrote also in this context, writers have to proceed through life with an attitude of openness. Do you think that’s still true of the people who write about politics these days?

MS. NOONAN: Oh, that’s a great question. It should be true of people who write about politics. You should be – I mean, the thing I said there in the introduction is you want life to wash over you and through you. You want to be responsive. You want to be observant. You want to be right here, right now, do you know what I mean? That’s what writers ought to do.

I suspect those who – if you mean writers on politics, those who go on the campaign trail and watch politicians do their thing up close, day after day, my goodness. After a while, that would become rote, stale, difficult, as it does for the politicians themselves. It’s that sort of what you meant?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, I meant also columnists too. I mean, whether there’s – you feel like – I mean, whether that sense of openness you see still see it out there in the writing. I mean, Buckley and – there was an openness to Buckley and Safire even though they came from a point of view and had an ideology.

MS. NOONAN: Yes. And Buckley and Safire were thinking aloud. I like the sound of thinking aloud. I love the sound of a columnist working out his or her thoughts right in front of you. And you can follow the thoughts and see where they wind up. That to me is kind of interesting and fun.

Are you referring in part to this thing – there’s – in the introduction to the book, which, if you don’t buy, you’ll feel you never truly lived. (Laughter.)

MR. DICKERSON: Which is a slight improvement from dying. Yeah.

MS. NOONAN: In the introduction to the book, I describe the different kinds of columnists that there are. I mean, there are columnists who don’t declare their views on anything. But, of course, you discern their views on things. There are columnists who are conservatives with no enemies to the right, liberals with no enemies to the left. There’s the pure information columnist who asks, you know, how will it all end? We’ll see. There’s all different kinds of – you know, there’s all different kinds of ways to be a columnist.

I think I – I try to keep fresh in part by I write a lot about politics, which means necessarily I’m writing about what takes place in this great city. But I don’t live here. And I don’t have friendships and relationships and enmities that I know of in this city. And it helps me sort of see more clearly and be more responsive not to be emotionally enmeshed and financially enmeshed. Do you know what I mean?

MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. Yeah.

MS. NOONAN: This place has a lot going on that I’m very happy I’m apart from.

MR. DICKERSON: Let’s talk from – move to –

MS. NOONAN: Because I live in New York, the clean, nice, moral place.

MR. DICKERSON: I was going to say. Yes.

MS. NOONAN: But that’s really not what I mean but New York doesn’t bother me because I’m not in finances. Do you know what I mean? It’s sort of – I’m not – I don’t have to be enmeshed there in a way either.

MR. DICKERSON: Let’s talk about speechwriting. And we’re going to have questions at the end here, so if – all the things that I’ve forgotten to ask about you can – you can ask about.

So speechwriting. We’ve talked about this before as well. But one of the things I love that you said in the Harvard talk that you gave was being able to intuit what Reagan meant and felt without him even being there.

Somebody else who had worked in the White House said that you knew a good president because you could think of the three things they wanted when they weren’t around and you couldn’t talk to them but you knew because they were clear and you could operate pretty much knowing where you were going to get, and, then, finally, you talked to the principal or the president and they would give you their specific view.

But let’s talk a little bit about that, what that was like with , knowing what he wanted. And there’s obviously a specific case we’ll talk about, the speech on the Challenger that you worked on with him, but just that quality of leadership.

MS. NOONAN: Chris Matthews, who had been a for Jimmy Carter, once said to me, we met when I was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan. And Chris in his blunt and direct way said immediately to me, I’m so jealous. And I said, what are you jealous of? And he said, you know every day what your guy thinks. I never knew what my guy thought. It was very frank and that was how he felt on that day, but I understood what he meant. Those of us who worked for Ronald Reagan, first of all, we were philosophically – we were conservatives, and so we had a sense of conservative reality, of the conservative cannon of how conservatives think. We were conservatives.

Second of all, we knew everything that Reagan had read. I knew him less than the other , but I had followed him for many years and admired him. I could at least to some degree anticipate his thoughts. I could also anticipate how he might put something. I could also, if I came up with something that I thought was bright or funny, I’d have a sense of whether or not he’d think it was bright or funny, do you know what I mean, and whether or not that would work for him.

What was easy about it was you would just do your best, throw in the ball best you could. And, at the end of the day, he was going to let you go forward and do it that way, or he was going to say, so sorry, that doesn’t work.

I told a story earlier today when he first – this to me speaks of the great sweetness of that man. When I wrote my first speech for Ronald Reagan, it was a little Rose Garden speech. And it was announcing – I was brand new in the White House. I didn’t know how to do anything. I’m brand new. I didn’t know where my office was. And they give me – they assign me the teacher of the year speech. Ronald Reagan’s going to announce who’s the teacher of the year in the Rose Garden. So I was idiotic enough to be excited. Oh, my God, I get to write the teacher of the year speech.

So I knew it should be short and I knew it should be two or three pages. But I was young and I was so eager to prove myself. And I was so on fire. So I did write a speech that said, hello, the teacher of the year is Miriam Smith from Columbus, Ohio, and this is what she’s done, and let us now talk about a serious defense of the West. And I did a history of U.S. frustrations with the Soviet Union and a defense of the West. Edmund Burke was right, but so was Whittaker Chambers. So it was 10-pages long.

So I loved it. I thought, isn’t this exciting? My boss took it, went over it, and he kind of laughed but he didn’t change it. And he sent it in.

And Ronald Reagan went through the speech before the teacher of the year ceremony, and he really nicely put just without a ruler but a straight line through about 80 percent of the speech. He connected the adequate beginning with the rather sweet fourth paragraph and then jumped to page five.

But then he wrote a note up on the top that said, “Dear Peggy, welcome. It’s so great to have you here. How I would have loved to have given this speech, but there just wasn’t the time.” (Applause.) And it was like, do save this. Maybe next time we’ll do it.

And I, because I knew nothing and I was new, I thought he meant it. I thought I had done a great speech but, unfortunately, we had just run out of time. And I gave it to my boss who read Reagan’s note and laughed.

MR. DICKERSON: Yes. Yes. And not enough time in the history of mankind.

MS. NOONAN: Yes, exactly.

MR. DICKERSON: Did you find any of those handwritten notes when you back and you were looking through your things?

MS. NOONAN: No. I only have copies of that. Believe it or not, in the Reagan era, if the president wrote you a note, it all had to go into the official file. You never got to keep the real stuff. I only had the autographed pictures. That’s all I have from him, and a letter after he was president.

MR. DICKERSON: So tell the story of intuiting, and then we’ll have questions in about five minutes, but that intuiting what he wanted on the day of the Challenger disaster, which was amazing, the speech you worked on with him.

MS. NOONAN: This is – in the book, there is a lecture that I gave at Roger Porter’s wonderful class on government at Harvard University. The class is populated by young people who will probably go into government. Roger Porter asked me, tell them about a day that you worked in government that turned out to be a significant or important day for you.

And I thought immediately of the Challenger speech day because I wanted to communicate one thing to them. We all have jobs. We go into work. Each day is the same. Things can get boring pretty quickly but you’ve always got to remember, someday you may go in and the world will blow up. The world will seem to turn upside down. And that boring, stupid day from which you expected nothing will be a day when you have to bring – it turns out it will be a moment where you have to bring your best self straight into the work you’re doing. And everybody around you is going to have to do their best work at that unexpected moment and you never know when that moment will be.

So that’s what I wanted to tell them. So to tell them that, I told them this story of the Challenger blowing up, obviously a big shock, obviously a very painful moment in America we’d never had lost men and a woman in flight before. I did not have to – this thing happened. It was really awful. The speechwriting office was exploding because that night was supposed to be the State of the Union address. So everything’s changing. Everything’s moving. Phone calls are being made. I just went to my boss and I said, Ben, I’m going to start writing a speech for the president because, you know, he’s going to have to speak on this and he’s going to have to speak on it soon because this is big. He said, yeah, you’re right, go ahead, go do it.

So I start working. And I just started to channel how would Reagan put this, what would Reagan feel. As I’m starting to work on it and starting to comb through the thoughts that I thought Reagan would have, a woman from the National Security Council ran in, said, who’s doing the speech. Ben sent her to my office. She had taken notes on everything Reagan had said in the previous hour, in the Oval Office, when he found out about what had happened, et cetera, to some reporters who were there.

So she gave me that and that became the spine of the speech, you know? I knew exactly what Reagan thought. So I put the speech together. The speech – there’s a number of things to say. One is that when you do a speech for a president, at least in the past, you could do good work, but when it is staffed out to 500 people who get to comment on it, they can kill it. They don’t mean to kill it. They can ruin it. They don’t mean to. You know, they’re just doing their thing and they’re trying to make their own contribution, but they will often do it in a clunky or bureaucratic or crazy way. (Laughter.)

All right, the thing about the Challenger speech is we had no time. There was no time to staff it, no time at all. So it could not be bled of meaning. Do you know what I mean? All right. Quick anecdote. The speech ended with a quote from a poet, young poet who had died in World War II, named John Gillespie Magee, Jr. He had written a book called – he had written a poem called “High Flight.” That poem ended with the words, “and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God,” I think it was.

As I, working on the speech for Reagan – as I was working on it, I kept seeing CNN over and over again repeat the video of these poor astronauts we had just lost. The last video picture of them was them waving goodbye as they went from the NASA holding place out to the capsule. And you know, they were waving goodbye with these big gloves, you know, from their astronaut uniforms and it was so touching. And so said, as I watched that over and over, I remembered this poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., which I had learned in seventh grade in the public schools in Massapequa, Long Island. Why did it enter my head? I don’t know. It just did. I wrote that as the end of the speech, and I knew I had to write two endings because I absolutely knew if Reagan knows that poem, “High Flight,” and cares about that poem, he is so going to end that speech with those words. But if Reagan does not know that poem, he will not care about those words. He will think that’s just not right and he’ll end it sooner.

So I did two endings. We put on the TV. The president comes on to speak in the afternoon, he looked stricken. He looked dashed. He looked upset, as indeed he was. He got to the end of the speech, and he did quote the John Gillespie Magee, Jr. poem. The president left that day – he left the Oval Office feeling that the speech had not been a success. It had failed to do something essential. I think he didn’t know exactly what it was, but it had failed. I watched him on TV. I was sensitive to his feelings. I picked up his sense of failure. And I went home so doubly sad. We were also sad about what had happened. And then I went home sadder still because it’s very painful in life when there is a moment that asks for you to meet it and you do not.

However, something happened overnight. Reaction came in. People started saying things. I came in to work the next day. Tip O’Neill had called. He found a little schmegegge (ph) like me, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives found an obscure speechwriter to say, you did good work for your country yesterday. That’s still so touching to me. I’m not sure what happened in this world. George Shultz called. The president called. He says – the first thing he says to me was, how did you know I knew that poem? And I said, oh, Mr. President, I didn’t know you knew it, but I kind of thought you might. And he explained to me how, indeed, he did because it was written on a plaque outside his daughter Patty’s school. And when he would take her to school, when she – in grade school – when she was a little girl, he would sometimes stop and read the plaque.

I asked him – he was very honest with me about his feeling of unsuccess at the end of that speech, that it didn’t, as Lincoln said, scour, it didn’t break the ground. I asked him – so he was honest about that and I asked him, well, Mr. President, how did you know – what changed your mind? How did you know that at least it had attempted to meet the moment? And he told me – well, the first thing he said was, well, you know, Frank Sinatra called and Frank Sinatra didn’t call after every speech. (Laughter.)

So there were moments when you forgot with Reagan that he had come up in show business and there were moments when you remembered. And what Frank Sinatra was telling Ronald Reagan was, Ronnie, it landed. Do you know what I mean?

There were a number of ways that we figured it out. But anyway, that was a dramatic day. It was a day when everybody did their best. That’s all. Just everybody did their best and took seriously what should have been taken seriously.

MR. DICKERSON: We’re going to open it up for questions because I have about a dozen more and that’s not fair. So just right here.

Q: Is there a microphone?

MR. DICKERSON: There is a microphone.

Q: Hi. My name’s Elaine Middleman. First I have to say, you both are exceptionally good-looking journalists. (Laughter.) And I think you could be second cousins or something. You look – anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to ask. But I’m from Indiana and I just – I’m going to get chocked up here, but I just spent the afternoon thinking about Congressman Lee Hamilton, who just got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

MS. NOONAN: Yes.

Q: And so did William Ruckelshaus and Senator Richard Lugar did two years ago. And the president campaign, one headline of one candidate was something like his advisors are concerned that he doesn’t know foreign policy, and they’re really having trouble teaching it to him. And other candidates seem to be just trying to position themselves – Democrat or Republican – you know, to be against somebody else or something. And it just – it was just so striking to me, the contrast between Congressman Hamilton, Senator Lugar, and what we’re facing today.

MS. NOONAN: I’m not sure what to say about that. I think you’re saying that they seem to have been more serious and knowledgeable public servants in the past than what you’re seeing right now.

Q: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

MS. NOONAN: OK, that is what you’re saying. (Laughter.) I never know the answer to things like that. One answer is a weary everything deteriorates, oh, my God. (Laughter.) What is the third law of thermodynamics? Sooner or later everything turns to something unpleasant. (Laughter.)

I take comfort in this. I worked for a great president and yet there were people who said, what the hell are his qualifications? He’s a movie star. Do you know what I mean? And yet, he turned out to be, in my view, in the view of many Americans, according to the polls, the last unambiguously successful two-term president in the . But there were people who dismissed him as a rightwing nut-job, showbiz, grade B actor, host, know nothing, who, yeah, did have two terms as governor of California, but beyond that was really nothing.

So I am ever hopeful that surprising – that good things will come in surprising packages. But let me be frank. I don’t think that a candidate for president of the United States should be taken all that seriously if he needs to be taken aside once a week by advisors who try to, quote, “get him smart” in terms of foreign policy. You ought to be running in part because you are smart in terms of foreign policy.

Q: I’m Roberta Stanley. I happen to be a former reporter. You speak in such a constructive, respectful way in commentary relating the news, your observations to people. To whom or what do you attribute that classy approach?

MS. NOONAN: Oh, what a fabulous question. (Laughter.) Thank you so much. Why, it’s just natural. (Laughter.) I’m a little shy on TV. If you mean TV, I’m a little shy on TV. And so I never get so comfortable I go like this with somebody. Do you know what I mean? Or really want to get in fights. Beyond that, we’re talking about serious things, big, grownup things, we should act like grownups, right? We’re based in Washington and New York. We’re talking about the politics of our great nation. Young people are watching. We shouldn’t make it base and vulgar and dumb and merely partisan. Do you know what I mean? We should try to be grownups and show each other the respect that we are due, you know?

Sometimes, when I’ve been on a panel in the past – so I’ve only been doing the Sunday shows for about the past 10 years. I never did them before that. And I found out that the other people on the panel were surprised because I would listen to them respectfully and smile and nod like tell me more. And sometimes I felt they were looking at me like, why are you smiling and being polite? (Laughter.) And I’d think, oh, because I am polite. (Laughter.) Do you know what I mean? So I don’t know what to say about that beyond, you know, a certain – all of our children need to see us acting like adults. That’s all.

Q: Did you have a mentor?

MS. NOONAN: I don’t think I did. But in a way, I had a million mentors. I mean, a million people at CBS and people I admired, people I admired in the White House who were dignified, yeah, and gave the other person maybe the benefit of the doubt and tried not to act like jerks.

MR. DICKERSON: The gentleman here.

Q: Hi. I’m a big fan of your writing, but I’m curious, on the speech that the first President Bush gave when he gave his acceptance speech in 1988, the whole read my lips thing, which, of course, got to be very controversial, can you talk about the genesis of the speech and also was it your idea to have him say, read my lips, or was it his idea?

MS. NOONAN: Well, President George H.W. Bush, in 1988, when he decided to run for president, decided that he was going – he had to make it very clear to the Republican base, to a Republican base that had been skeptical of him that he was not going to back any new tax increases. And so in his announcement of his run for the presidency, in ’88, he said there – he said something very colorful, although I can’t remember what it was, but it was like, there will be no new taxes from my administration, period, full stop. This was simply his program. This was his policy. It was only part of his policy, but it really was part of his policy.

When he got around to working on his acceptance speech, a very heavily vetted, very staffed speech, in which a number of things were changed, I wrote it always from the beginning with his no-new-taxes pledge in it. But I know just along the way that pledge was being taken out by someone in the staffing process. And I would put it back in. Here was my thought. And I would put it in very seriously.

Two thoughts. One is, well, I agree with this and I think Bush should see it. But the other is, this is Bush’s decision and nobody else’s, not some little mouse running out in campaign headquarters – (laughter) – you know, with one of these great new writing machines, the word processors, where you hit delete on a sentence. Buddy, that’s not your decision. That’s George H.W. Bush’s decision.

Another thing, however, so this makes three things, is I thought – and I’m trying not to go too long, but I felt very strongly that if George H.W. Bush declared from the beginning of his presidential run that he was not going to raise taxes, said throughout the presidential run that he was not going to raise taxes, and then after winning the GOP nomination doesn’t put it in the announcement, in the acceptance speech, that will actually be a scandal, and that will make the party start to go boom. And so I thought, don’t do that. So I kept putting it back. And eventually, George H.W. Bush just decided, do it. It would have been quite a story if he hadn’t and became quite a story that he did.

MR. DICKERSON: Here comes the mic.

Q: First, my name is Barbara Dallow (ph) and I want to say you’re one of my writing heroines, so thank you for your good work, your wonderful work. I love to write, and I have for many years mostly for myself. Now I’m concerned about the speed demanded by Internet news and Internet politics and that it takes away from the quality of writing and the ability to do thorough research on a story. Could you comment on that?

MS. NOONAN: Yeah, I understand your concern. The Internet is 24/7, 365, it’s popping every minute. I believe the people who write and edit at political websites and also at very thoughtful magazines and websites are under intense pressure to keep moving product, to keep putting forward work that gets a lot of clicks, a lot of readers. You know, one of the worst things that has happened with the technological change that has swept what we do is that in the old days, the New York Herald Tribune would come out and, you know, they’d put Walter Lippmann, the columnist in a nice place on the editorial page. But nobody really knew how many people were reading him. It was just kind of agreed Walter Lippmann is an interesting guy, a lot of people are reading him.

Now, young Walter Lippmanns, their work is judged by the number of clicks they get, so that it’s known if they’re running traffic. It’s known if they’re getting attention. This is terrible. You never want to quantify these things because sometimes, you know, it’s horrible to quantify what people are reading because things that are worthy and serious and sometimes things that are unpopular and divisive and tough are very worthy of attention and you can prove that they’re not getting it. And so you’ll assign if you’re an editor less interesting things to less interesting writers. I said that badly, but you know what I mean, right? Is that –

MR. DICKERSON: As a less interesting writer, I do. (Laughter.)

MS. NOONAN: Now, John – it’s good for John. John gets a lot of clicks, and it’s fabulous for him. But I think it’s tougher for some others. Anyway, I hate that it’s all quantified.

Here’s my concern in what you say. I came up in one of last ages of very rigorous, very rigorous grammatical and usage days. You’d better have your grammar right. You’d better have your usage right. That sentence better hold. Do you know what I mean? The editors were extremely, highly literate, and got to take their leisurely time over a piece that would be on the front page of the Times tomorrow. I think standards have fallen a bit and everyone is under so much intense time pressure to get the new piece up, get it splashed out there, you know, get it done, that it has led to a certain deterioration in editing, which leads, inevitably, to a deterioration among writers because writers learn by being corrected as I learned by being corrected. Sorry.

MR. DICKERSON: All the way in the back there.

Q: Yes, my name is Kami Butt, I’m with the Pakistani Spectator. My question is about, during Iran-Contra affair – (inaudible) – what do you think about the role of media. They were giving the impression that, you know, U.S. is ruled by some kind of tugs. There was no sense of morality. Whereas, after that event, I’m a Muslim, but I used to go to All Saints Church where John Poindexter, he was a national – used to go. His wife was a pastor there. And he was a very regular guy. I mean, very honorably person and very –

MS. NOONAN: Yes, he was.

Q: – patriotic person. But the media gave very, very bad impression about these people. So what are your thoughts on that? Thanks.

MS. NOONAN: Look, I wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan called “When Character Was King.” And I wound up doing two rather searing chapters on Iran-Contra, which was the worst moment in the Reagan administration’s history. It was a mess. And it was due in part to managerial misfeasance. So that’s just what it is. Did the press blow it up, make it more colorful, make it more dramatic, use it to be a cudgel to hit Ronald Reagan and all those who were conservative in his White House over the head with? Yeah. But did Ollie North and Bud McFarlane help the press do that by baking cakes in the shape of keys and by dealing in exotic ways with exotic people representing other nations and making very poor decisions and seeming to be unmanaged? Yeah.

So, you know, I mean, it’s been said over the years. I don’t know who first said it that with the – the general feeling among the mainstream media is that Republicans and conservatives are either stupid or evil. But there’s no two choices beyond that. Iran- Contra was used by the foes of Reagan and his White House to prove that he wasn’t stupid. He was evil. Do you know what I mean? That’s how it was used. And what the heck? These things happen. We’ve seen them all. The moral of the story is try not to hand people a scandal that they can harm you with. That’s all.

Q: Peggy, you came up through CBS news. To me, it was the gold standard when I was growing up.

MS. NOONAN: Me, too.

Q: Your heroes back then and then today, who do you read and watch and you don’t ever want to miss?

MS. NOONAN: I read all columnists because I want to know what they’re up to. And I’m also self-conscious about the idea that, you know, all columnists are in the idea and observation and argument business. And I would be very embarrassed if there was a major columnist, who, the same week had a column that I had – we both had a column in the same week, within a few days, and he made a point and I made the exact same point. Do you know what I mean?

Now, sometimes that’s inevitable because somebody makes a point that is actually the one point you feel has to be made. But I keep up with everybody because I know, you know, this is – various professional reasons to want to. I also read all the other columnists because I identify very seriously with their desperation. (Laughter.) Do you know what I mean? To come up with a topic, to come up with something worthy of their readers, you know? And I respect their lone cowboyness. You know columnists are kind of out there on their own now, especially women columnists, which I go into in the introduction to the book that your life would be tragic without reading. (Laughter.)

Heroes, I don’t know about heroes. I so admired the great men and women of CBS News when I was coming up. They were professionals. Some of them had fought in World War II, Korea. I mean, they’ve been there for the wars. They had invented a form called broadcast news writing, literally they had invented it. They were pros, they were tough. They didn’t know what to make of young people like me. In the mid to late 1970s, a flood of baby boomers, all of us – half of us were women, which already was surprising. In the CBS News room, which was about 90 percent male and middle age male, were these young kids, who were 27 years old, wearing tight jeans, Frye boots. I had long blond hair and aviator glasses. We all had aviator glasses, and we looked like some invading Martian army to these fabulous old men who’d cover the Battle of the Bulge, you know?

And they – but they taught me fairly. They taught me well. I can’t say they were heroes, but boy, do I think the world of them? Yes.

MR. DICKERSON: We’ll have to have this one be the last question. I think we’re running out of time.

Q: Thanks. Adam Higgins, such an admirer of your work. I wanted to ask about spirituality, knowing that – spirituality, knowing that it’s important to you. You’re book on John Paul the Great was beautifully personal. You’ve written about the church, about Francis, it occurred to me with the question that was asked about the sort of graceful way that you approach things, just – obviously this is a huge subject, but just the role that your faith has played in your life and in your work and the way you approach those things.

MS. NOONAN: I just think it’s all essential to me. Sargent Shriver was once asked, describe yourself in single words, but in order of importance. And I read his list. It was like in Look or Life Magazine when I was a kid. And he started with – he said, Sargent Shriver described Sargent Shriver by saying Christian, man, husband, father, patriot. Do you know what I mean? But he started with Christian. And I was not a very religious kid, but I was struck by that and I thought, boy, I bet people who are religious really feel that way.

I don’t know. My way of writing is to just let you have it, just tell you what’s going on in my head, in my heart, my soul, my psyche, whatever the word is, my energy is going to my work. But all of that comes from an essentially Christian self, by which I mean nothing more than the fact that I believe the Christian story.

I don’t know where to go to beyond that, but if it’s essential to you, how boring and inauthentic and somehow insincere for you to hide it. I just never felt I had to hide it. So I write about it – or you can see it infusing my work in a way that I kind of think, you know, some people really won’t like this, but they’ll put up with it. And some people won’t like it, so they’ll say, well, I’ll read her next week, but not this week. And some people will like it and think, oh, isn’t that nice; I feel that way, too. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t take courage and it doesn’t take anything. It’s just being who you are. That’s what I think.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, we’re glad you’re who you are, Peggy.

MS. NOONAN: Thank you, John Dickerson. (Applause.) Aren’t you nice? Thanks a lot.

(Cross talk.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Noonan will be signing books now. If you could line up down the center aisle and then head to left, we will get started as quickly as possible.

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