The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  We did that for years, hitchhiking back and forth, the vulnerable old lady and the child.

  I remember bouncing around in the back of pickup trucks watching the trees go by. I remember a big diesel truck that smelled like oil or gas and there was a big dog in the cab and we all squished in. I remember salesmen in short sleeves smoking with their arms out the window.

  I never told people this story until the past year or so and when I told my son, now a man, I said, at the end, wonderingly, “And nobody killed us.”

  My son reflected. “That should be the title of your next book,” he said. This is my next book so I decided to put it in here.

  The point of course is that while I was not quite protected as a child, the prevailing American culture itself at that point still functioned as a protective force. Things hadn’t been let loose to such a degree. The messages, permissions, incitements and inducements of the culture were not rough, lowering, frightening.

  Life then wasn’t Arcadia, there was murder and mayhem because humans are humans, and “history is an abattoir”—but there was a greater feeling extant of safety on the street. Parents could say to their kids, essentially, “Go out and play in America,” and know they’d come back OK that night. People don’t feel that so much anymore, and it’s a real loss. (It is right here to note that life would not have been so safe for a little girl and an old woman of color; the world might not have been so kind. But the larger point, that everyone was at least a little safer, I think maintains.) Sophisticated Europe, I learned years later, had looked at our culture—its blandness, its innocence, its babyish assumption that the good would triumph—and saw it a culture of children. We were more appropriately understood as a culture for children. And you know, that’s not the worst thing.

  Here is my concern. There are not fewer children living stressed, chaotic lives in America now, there are more. There will be more still, because among the things America no longer manufactures is stability. And the culture around them will not protect them, as the culture protected me. The culture around them will make their lives harder, more frightening, more dangerous. They are going to come up with nothing to believe in, their nerves essentially shot. And they’re going to be—they are already—very angry.

  So that is the story. When I speak of my concerns about the cultural air all around us it is not abstract to me. I will always feel America’s culture saved me when I was a child, preserved my optimism, allowed me to be hopeful for the future, allowed me to become myself.

  * * *

  A quick word on what’s in this book. There are essays that appeared in various media outlets, all noted, and columns from the Journal. They are divided by subject matter. I’ve corrected a few mistakes in grammar and usage and removed some references that are now so obscure they puzzled me. I haven’t changed any meaning or shaded any thought. I’ve changed a few titles because they were originally done in a rush and no longer seem right for the piece. All pieces are dated and can be found under their original title, with their original art, on the Internet.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Lecture

  In the fall of 2009 I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. I was asked by Professor Roger Porter, with whom I had worked in the Reagan White House, to speak to his class on “The American Presidency.” Many of its members traditionally hope to enter government, and he asked that I speak to them about my experiences as a speechwriter. This is the lecture I gave.

  There are many ways to view and approach political speechwriting. I think of speeches as the literature of politics. I always have. I did the day I walked into the White House in the spring of 1984. I think of speechwriting as… writing. It is not, to my mind and in my experience, “messaging,” it is not “communications,” it is not “media management”—it is not any of those things.

  It is writing.

  In a way it is an attempt to think, and to think aloud. In the thinking aloud you are attempting to persuade as to the validity of one’s thoughts, views, philosophy, stands, decisions.

  I always thought of speechwriting as a stream breaking off the big river of American literature. American literature is the Mississippi and there are many streams that flow from it—playwriting, novel writing, short story writing, the essay, poetry. Speechwriting to my mind, at its best, is one of them.

  Why do presidents have speechwriters? (After all, they all rose in part by being able to speak on their own.) Because they cannot at the same time be president and write speeches. They have to do one or the other, they can’t do both.

  Presidents often speak four, five or six times a day—within the White House complex, in the Executive Office Building, in the Rose Garden, in an executive agency. They speak in venues that are heavily covered and those that are covered by no press at all.

  They speak a lot. And everything they say counts. A president speaking sloppily and popping off about the economy can send the Dow Jones spiraling down a thousand points. Speaking offhandedly about foreign affairs, he can make an ally doubt the alliance. So it all counts.

  Presidents cannot write all those speeches. They cannot take the time, they cannot get the solitude, and at the same time do everything else they have to do.

  What is it to write for a president?

  It’s heaven. Your work matters, it’s serious and you can take it seriously. You work with a president of the United States. As Bill Moyers said to me 25 years ago, how many in all American history have been lucky enough to do that? He guessed the number at that time was 20,000.

  You should be young—maybe in your 20s or 30s, not past your early 40s. Arthur Schlesinger, speechwriter and aide for JFK, once told me, “No one should be a speechwriter after 40. For one thing, with writers the legs go first and you can’t run through the halls anymore.”

  For another, over 40 you ought to be writing only your views, and in your voice, in your style—not Jack Kennedy’s, not Harry Truman’s or Ronald Reagan’s. David Gergen, who introduced me today, writes as David, and I write as myself, and I think if we two were asked to write a speech for someone again we would be very poor speechwriters, because the person we were writing for would wind up sounding just like David Gergen or just like me, when they should be sounding just like them.

  I want to jump to one experience I had as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

  There are many different sorts of speeches and addresses—the speech of ceremony and high state, the partisan speech, an inaugural address, an acceptance speech, “Rose Garden rubbish” as it’s called, relatively unimportant speeches. Though in the modern media age, as I say, no presidential speech is ever unimportant.

  All these speeches are different but the same. Because a president is giving them, and in the giving of them he is leading, he is speaking for and to the nation.

  I want to speak quickly here of what might be called the speech of emergency. Something happened. It was unexpected. It has to be addressed—literally.

  One speech of emergency is the Challenger speech. Do any of you remember it? January 28, 1986, 23 years ago.

  In Washington it was a brilliantly sunny day. In the speechwriting department it was a slow day. No one expected much. In speechwriting, the big work had been done for that week, and that was the State of the Union speech that was to be given that night. It was a big day for the president, therefore, but not for the speechwriters, for whom the work had been done, the speech put to bed by two gifted speechwriters, Josh Gilder and Ben Elliott, the latter of whom ran Reagan’s speechwriting office.

  The president had already gone through the speech many times, made changes and edits. It had gone through staffing. The president probably had rehearsed it.

  It’s a pretty day, late morning, 11:30 or so. The president was meeting in the West Wing with a handful of the nation’s television anchors, giving them a preview of what would be in that night’s speech, an off-the-record conversation.

 
I was in my office catching up with stuff, talking on the phone. CNN was on the TV set to my left. The picture was on but the sound was off. Suddenly I see out of the corner of my eye something odd on the screen. It’s showing a big blue sky, deep blue, brilliant, but cutting through the sky in the middle of the screen a deep, dense, discrete funnel of white cloud. And the funnel has been broken, as if the cloud itself had exploded and pieces of it shot crazily into the air. I thought: What the heck is that?

  I hang up the phone. CNN had been covering the launch of the space shuttle Challenger from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and clearly something had happened.

  I hit the volume, put up the sound. Nothing. Just the sound of static—spooky static. No one’s saying anything. And then the CNN anchor for the launch, and Mission Control, are coming on, the anchor’s saying “Something appears to have happened,” and all you hear is the crackle of an empty line from Mission Control. Then you hear ground control saying things like “negative contact” and “loss of downline.”

  And then the CNN cameras cut to the people in the stands who’d been invited to come watch the launch. And the camera shows a woman, late middle age, and she is leaning against a man, maybe her husband, and she is looking up and she has started to cry.

  And you know: a dreadful tragedy has occurred.

  I watched, rapt. And so did everyone in America. (A study later said 85% of the people of the country knew what had happened within an hour—85%, an amazing percentage of people.)

  Finally a statement came, I think from a press guy. There has been “a major malfunction,” the vehicle has exploded.

  Within the next hour it all became clearer. There had been a terrible accident, the Challenger blew up 73 seconds into its flight.

  A seal on the solid rocket booster had failed, hot gas hit an external fuel tank, it all blew apart.

  We all wanted to think there were survivors. It is funny, the power of human denial. We all hoped somehow there had been survivors, and we hoped this while we knew there were not, could not have been.

  A search and recovery process began.

  It was during that hour that a little girl walked into my office. She was the daughter of Ben Elliott who had for reasons I cannot recall taken his daughter to work that day. She was a child of 7 years, and my friend. She used to walk into my office and play on the floor.

  She walked into my office and said, “The teacher was on the shuttle. Is the teacher all right?”

  And it dawned on me: Every schoolchild in America was watching the launch of the Challenger because something unique had been done, there was a teacher on board, a civilian, not a professional astronaut but a public school teacher named Christa McAuliffe. And so schools throughout America had brought TV sets in so the kids could watch the teacher go into space with the astronauts.

  And I knew Oh man, they are kids, they are not going to understand this.

  And I knew too: The president is going to have to speak about this today. He is going to have to make a speech.

  I started to write it. I called my boss, Ben, who was watching the coverage in shock like everyone else, and I said Ben I am writing the speech and he said Good, get going.

  Now here I will tell you there is something Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters had that a lot of other presidential speechwriters did not have, never had, and it is this: We knew what Ronald Reagan thought. We knew how he thought. We knew his views, his approach, we knew how he talked, we knew his philosophy. We knew him.

  A speechwriter for Jimmy Carter once said to me, You guys were so lucky—we never knew how Carter was going to come down on any issue, we never knew where he’d stand, what he was gonna say.

  But Reagan was vivid, he was clear, he had a philosophy that was well known to us.

  So the writing. Where do you begin?

  If you’re Reagan you begin with the facts: Something terrible has happened. We all witnessed it. This is what we know so far.

  Then… well, then what exactly?

  At this point I was told the president was not able to speak to us—he was being briefed, he was talking to NASA, he was also talking to the anchors. He’s meeting with aides, he’s handling a crisis, they’re trying to figure out what to do about the State of the Union that night.

  But he trusts us. He knows his speechwriters know him.

  At this point a woman runs into my office. Her name was Karna Small, an aide on the National Security Council. Karna had just been with the president in various meetings. She had taken notes on everything he’d said. Karna ran the notes in to me, knowing we’d be doing the speech.

  The notes of what Reagan had just said to the anchors became the spine of the speech.

  This is what he said:

  He talked about the sacrifice of the families of the astronauts. He spoke of how this was a national tragedy with everyone in America saddened. He spoke of space as the last frontier. He said we’ve grown so used to dazzling success in space that this tragedy comes as a special shock. It was for him traumatic. And one of the anchors asked him about the schoolchildren watching. He said, “Pioneers have always given their lives on the frontier… but we have to make it clear to the children that life goes on, it continues.” He said he couldn’t put the teacher out of his mind, and her husband, and her children.

  He would speak to the nation after the search and rescue efforts were suspended. That took two or three hours. In that time I worked on the speech and got it into a limited form of the staffing system.

  So what did the president say in his five-minute address? And it had to be five minutes because… it was the old days. Ronald Reagan was going to speak, appropriately, and lead, and set a tone. But he wasn’t going to horn in on your grief, or dominate the moment, or swan around or make it about him.

  He had certain things he had to say at the top. He had to speak to the families of those we knew had died. He had to speak to the brokenhearted people of NASA, of the space program. He had to speak to the nation. He had to speak to the nation’s kids, while saying to them what was appropriate to say to adults. The point being he had to speak to those who were 8 and those who were 80, in the same speech.

  He said we are “pained to the core” by what happened. We have never had an event like this, and because of that we have forgotten the courage it takes to go into space. The seven in the crew overcame the dangers. They were daring, brave, saw the challenge and met it with joy.

  Reagan said to the schoolchildren:

  And I want to say something to the children of America, who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it’s hard to understand but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted—it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future—and we’ll continue to follow them.

  Then to America and the world, a statement of resolution: “We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here—our hopes and our journeys continue.”

  And then the ending of the speech.

  While I had worked, over two hours or so, I had seen CNN using, over and over again, the last videotape of all the astronauts and crew walking that morning toward the space shuttle, in their space suits. And awkwardly, humorously, with heavy-gloved hands, they were waving goodbye.

  I’m watching that over and over. I suddenly remembered a poem I learned in the seventh grade at McKenna Junior High in Massapequa, Long Island. It was a poem called “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. He had been a pilot who volunteered for the Canadian Air Force in 1939, an American who got in as the war began in Europe. In his poem, about the joy of flying—an unusual joy back then, for not many flew—in the poem he spoke of the sensation of breaking free from gravity, breaking “the surly
bonds of earth,” going upward so high he felt almost he could touch the face of God.

  There was something transcending about the poem, not transcendent but transcending. It was a real attempt to define a particular kind of joy and make you know it.

  And so I put it at the end of the speech.

  Here’s what I knew. Reagan was going to get the speech and change what he wanted, but if he said those words from the Magee poem, if I heard them on TV, it was going to be because Reagan knew that poem and it mattered to him. He wasn’t going to say the words unless he knew the poem. And I just had a feeling he did, but only a feeling.

  We got the speech through the editing process, there was no time for people to fuss too much with it, by which I mean to make not necessary changes but dithery and unnecessary ones. Sometimes people in a White House think a speech is a fondue pot and they all want to put in a fork.

  The president gets it, reads it, makes his changes.

  He comes on national TV, live from the Oval Office. He’s sitting at the president’s desk, which used to be the place presidents sat when they addressed the nation. They don’t always do that now, it is unusual when they do. They stand and use a telegenic or dynamic background. But back then they didn’t think so visually in terms of backdrops and such, they sat at the big desk.

  Reagan gives the speech, gets to the end, and I hear him say of the Challenger crew “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them—this morning, as they prepared for their journey, and waved goodbye, and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

  Now Reagan, during the speech, looked stricken. I could see it, he was upset.