House, no speechwriter had spoken to Mr. Reagan in more than a year. “We wave to him,” one said.
In the absence of an actual president, this resourceful child of a large Irish Catholic family sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building and invented an ideal one: she read Vachel Lindsay (particularly “I brag and chant of Bryan Bryan Bryan / Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion”) and she read Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whom she pictured, again ideally, up in Dutchess County “sitting at a great table with all the chicks, eating a big spring lunch of beefy red tomatoes and potato salad and mayonnaise and deviled eggs on the old china with the flowers almost rubbed off”) and she thought “this is how Reagan should sound.” What Miss Noonan had expected Washington to be, she told us, was “Aaron Copland and ‘Appalachian Spring.’” What she found instead was a populist revolution trying to make itself, a crisis of raised expectations and lowered possibilities, the children of an expanded middle class determined to tear down the established order and what they saw as its repressive liberal orthodoxies: “There were libertarians whose girlfriends had just given birth to their sons, hoisting a Coors with social conservatives who walked into the party with a wife who bothered to be warm and a son who carried a Mason jar of something daddy grew in the backyard. There were Protestant fundamentalists hoping they wouldn’t be dismissed by neo-con intellectuals from Queens and neocons talking to fundamentalists thinking: I wonder if when they look at me they see what Annie Hall’s grandmother saw when she looked down the table at Woody Allen.”
She stayed at the White House until the spring of 1986, when she was more or less forced out by the refusal of Donald Regan, at that time chief of staff, to approve her promotion to head speechwriter. Regan thought her, according to Larry Speakes, who did not have a famous feel for the romance of the revolution, too “hard-line,” too “dogmatic,” too “right-wing,” too much “Buchanan’s protégée.” On the occasion of her resignation she received a form letter from the president, signed with the auto-pen. Donald Regan said that there was no need for her to have what was referred to as “a good-bye moment,” a farewell shake-hands with the president. On the day Donald Regan himself left the White House, Miss Noonan received this message, left on her answering machine by a friend at the White House: “Hey, Peggy, Don Regan didn’t get his good-bye moment.” By that time she was hearing the “true tone of Washington” less as “Appalachian Spring” than as something a little more raucous, “nearer,” she said, “to Jefferson Starship and ‘They Built This City on Rock and Roll.’”
The White House she rendered was one of considerable febrility. Everyone, she told us, could quote Richard John Neuhaus on what was called the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment. Everyone could quote Michael Novak on what was called the collapse of the assumption that education is or should be “value-free.” Everyone could quote George Gilder on what was called the humane nature of the free market. Everyone could quote Jean-François Revel on how democracies perish, and everyone could quote Jeane Kirkpatrick on authoritarian versus totalitarian governments, and everyone spoke of “the movement,” as in “he’s movement from way back,” or “she’s good, she’s hard-core.”
They talked about subverting the pragmatists, who believed that an issue could not be won without the Washington Post and the networks, by “going over the heads of the media to the people.” They charged one another’s zeal by firing off endless letters, memos, clippings. “Many thanks for Macedo’s new monograph; his brand of judicial activism is more principled than Tribe’s,” such letters read. “If this gets into the hands of the
In the absence of an actual president, this resourceful child of a large Irish Catholic family sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building and invented an ideal one: she read Vachel Lindsay (particularly “I brag and chant of Bryan Bryan Bryan / Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion”) and she read Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whom she pictured, again ideally, up in Dutchess County “sitting at a great table with all the chicks, eating a big spring lunch of beefy red tomatoes and potato salad and mayonnaise and deviled eggs on the old china with the flowers almost rubbed off”) and she thought “this is how Reagan should sound.” What Miss Noonan had expected Washington to be, she told us, was “Aaron Copland and ‘Appalachian Spring.’” What she found instead was a populist revolution trying to make itself, a crisis of raised expectations and lowered possibilities, the children of an expanded middle class determined to tear down the established order and what they saw as its repressive liberal orthodoxies: “There were libertarians whose girlfriends had just given birth to their sons, hoisting a Coors with social conservatives who walked into the party with a wife who bothered to be warm and a son who carried a Mason jar of something daddy grew in the backyard. There were Protestant fundamentalists hoping they wouldn’t be dismissed by neo-con intellectuals from Queens and neocons talking to fundamentalists thinking: I wonder if when they look at me they see what Annie Hall’s grandmother saw when she looked down the table at Woody Allen.”
She stayed at the White House until the spring of 1986, when she was more or less forced out by the refusal of Donald Regan, at that time chief of staff, to approve her promotion to head speechwriter. Regan thought her, according to Larry Speakes, who did not have a famous feel for the romance of the revolution, too “hard-line,” too “dogmatic,” too “right-wing,” too much “Buchanan’s protégée.” On the occasion of her resignation she received a form letter from the president, signed with the auto-pen. Donald Regan said that there was no need for her to have what was referred to as “a good-bye moment,” a farewell shake-hands with the president. On the day Donald Regan himself left the White House, Miss Noonan received this message, left on her answering machine by a friend at the White House: “Hey, Peggy, Don Regan didn’t get his good-bye moment.” By that time she was hearing the “true tone of Washington” less as “Appalachian Spring” than as something a little more raucous, “nearer,” she said, “to Jefferson Starship and ‘They Built This City on Rock and Roll.’”
The White House she rendered was one of considerable febrility. Everyone, she told us, could quote Richard John Neuhaus on what was called the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment. Everyone could quote Michael Novak on what was called the collapse of the assumption that education is or should be “value-free.” Everyone could quote George Gilder on what was called the humane nature of the free market. Everyone could quote Jean-François Revel on how democracies perish, and everyone could quote Jeane Kirkpatrick on authoritarian versus totalitarian governments, and everyone spoke of “the movement,” as in “he’s movement from way back,” or “she’s good, she’s hard-core.”
They talked about subverting the pragmatists, who believed that an issue could not be won without the Washington Post and the networks, by “going over the heads of the media to the people.” They charged one another’s zeal by firing off endless letters, memos, clippings. “Many thanks for Macedo’s new monograph; his brand of judicial activism is more principled than Tribe’s,” such letters read. “If this gets into the hands of the
Similar Books
