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

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

PEGGY NOONAN, who spent two years as one of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters, and subsequently rendered outstanding service to George Bush at the turning point of his presidential candidacy, i a tough, talented, and savvy lady. But in page after page of her memoir, What I Saw at the Revolution, she also comes across as a prima donna, a veritable Maria Callas of ghostwriters, both in talent and in temper. Small wonder that her White House years were characterized by as much acrimony as acclaim.

Not that Miss Noonan lacked grounds for frustration. Some of her less able male colleagues obviously resented her and did their best to trip her up. And several more fair-minded members of the senior staff were appalled by what they came to view as her canine taste for publicity. Speech-writers--and especially presidential speechwriters--are paid to write speeches, not to take bows. Too often, Miss Noonan seemed to revel in playing Edgar Bergen to Ronald Reagan's Charlie McCarthy. She posed for illustrations in Esquire in an article that identified her, while still on the job, as the woman who put words in the President's mouth. Poor form thought this was by traditional standards, Miss Noonan had, at least, actually written the speeches she took credit for. This has not been true of everyone in that position. As she says: "in the White House ... people lied with gay abandon, and I was constantly taken aback. Actually, I'm still taken aback."

Me too, Peggy. As Ronald Reagan's director of speechwriting from 1981 to 1983, long before your arrival on the scene, I witnessed more than one case of filched credits, including a memorable column in the New York Times in which William Safire, fueled by a false leak, attributed the "Everyday American Hero" theme in Mr. Reagan's 1982 State of the Union to the wrong writer. Although the actual creator of that line (and the final rewriter of the address), I made no effort to get a correction; I thought the ploy had played well but was just a little corny, and when the next few State of the Union addresses ran the device into the ground, I was more than happy to preserve my anonymity.

Fortunately, there is a lot more to Miss Noonan's book than abundant excerpts of her speechwriting. When not settling scores, she shares real, if sometimes overdrawn, insights about what it is like to work in the White House and on a presidential campaign. Long before most people, she understood what makes George Bush tick, which was why she was able to sculpt his New Orleans acceptance speech to perfection, crafting it into the ideal medium for introducing the "real" George Bush, with his personal and professional strengths and virtues, to a hitherto uncertain electorate. In this alone, Peggy Noonan made a lasting contribution to American politics. Despite her ambivalence about the current President's well-bred WASP origins, and her emotional identity with the former President's humbler, Irish-American roots, she is much clearer about George Bush.

The faults of What I Saw at the Revolution are those of a talented writer whose hyperbole and emotion sometimes outspace her sense of proportion. At one point, swept away by her gift of the gush, she actually says that Ronald Reagan "was to popular politics what Henry James was to American literature. He was the master." Besides being a silly analogy, this is probably a great deal more flattering to James than to Reagan.

"His whole career, in fact, was proof of the superior power of goodness to gifts," our Peggy oozes. "'No great men are good men,' said Lord Acton, who was right, until Reagan." Perhaps Jeane Dixon, whom Miss Noonan cites in another context, would be kind enough to pass this revelation on to the shades of George Washington, Thomas Aquinas, and a few of history's other great and presumably good men.

In the end, despite all her adulation and analysis, Peggy Noonan still is baffled by the "inner" Ronald Reagan. She posits childhood family traumas, a Depression upbringing, and the merging of theatrical illusion with symbolic reality to explain this most likable yet self-contained of public men. He both attracts and bewilders her, as he has most of us who had the experience of working with him. What Miss Noonan does appreciate--and recounts at delightful length--is her favorite boss's Hibernian sense of humor, a gift and addiction she shares, and one that wins her back the reader's affection again and again despite her forays to wilder, less rewarding shores.

At her worst, Peggy Noonan fits the last line of Marianne Moore's Spenser's Island: "I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish." At her best, she brings an Irish wit, whimsey, and intuition to the human side of politics, and the follies and foibles of that grossest if not greatest of games, statecraft.

Mr. Bakshian served as a speechwriter to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. A member of the National Council on the Humanities, he writes and broadcasts on politics, history, and the arts.