The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Months later while going through papers for this book, I got from a warehouse the old journals and scripts from my CBS days, and found the tribute to Williams. And attached to it with a paper clip was a typed note I’d written when I filed away the script, after that day at Frank E. Campbell’s. “The casket, in the middle of the room, was open. I looked down on a lonely genius I’d never seen in life.”

  Human memory, the odd way it works, is the damndest thing.

  Britain Remembers a Great Briton

  Mrs. Thatcher is with Wellington and Nelson now.

  The Wall Street Journal: April 22, 2013

  London

  The funeral of Margaret Thatcher was beautiful, moving, just right. It had dignity and spirit, and in that respect was just like her. It also contained a surprise that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was a metaphor for where she stood in the pantheon of successful leaders of the 20th century.

  The Right Honourable the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, LG, OM, FRS—so she was called on the front page of the service program—was a great lady, and the greatest peacetime prime minister of England in the 20th century. She unleashed her nation’s economy, defeated selfish bullies who before her had always emerged victorious, and stood with the pope and the president against Soviet communism. The main project of her career was to advance the cause of human freedom and individual liberty. As David Cameron’s education minister, Michael Gove, noted the other day, she saw economics not as a science but as one of the humanities. It wasn’t about “immutable laws,” it was about “the instincts and values” of human beings, their sense of justice and rightness. She was eloquent, stirring and had tons of guts. And of course she was a woman, the first British prime minister to be so. She made no special pleading in that area and did not claim to represent what we embarrassingly call women’s issues. She was representing England and the issues British citizens faced. She did not ignore her sex and occasionally bopped political men on the head with small, bracing recognitions of their frailty. “The cocks will crow, but it’s the hen that lays the eggs,” she said. She noted that if you want anything said get a man, but if you want something done get a woman. All this she uttered in a proud but mock-stern tone. She was no victim. An oddity of her career is that she was routinely patronized by her inferiors. It seems to have steeled her.

  A supporter told me in London of her frustrations with staff. She said once to her aides: “I don’t need to be told what, I need to be told how.” Meaning I have a vision, you have to tell me how we can implement it. That stayed in my mind. Politics now, in England as well as America, is dominated by politicians who are technicians. They always know how to do it. They just don’t know what to do.

  Thatcher’s funeral was striking in that it was not, actually, about her. It was about what she thought it important for the mourners to know. The readings were about the fact of God, the gift of Christ, and the necessity of loving your country and working for its betterment. There were no long eulogies. In a friendly and relatively brief address, the bishop of London lauded her kindness and character. No funeral of an American leader would ever be like that: The dead American would be the star, with God in the position of yet another mourner who’d miss his leadership.

  The pageantry, for an American, was most moving. The English as always do this brilliantly, but I wonder if they understand—they must, but it’s not something they acknowledge—that when they bring out and put forward their splendor they are telling the world and themselves who they are and have been. Leading the procession into St. Paul’s was the lord mayor of London, in velvet coat, breeches and buckled shoes. On his coat he wore Sir Thomas More’s gold chain of office, taken from him before he was killed. Imagine a nation that puts such a man to death, contemplates it, concludes in the end it was wrong and now proudly displays the saint’s chain at its greatest events. When I saw it I thought of a recent trip to the Vatican. Touring its archives, we were shown one of its proudest possessions: a letter from Galileo.

  Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they’re great.

  It mattered that the funeral was in August and splendid St. Paul’s, mattered that Thatcher’s coffin, placed under the great dome, stood directly over the tombs of Nelson and Wellington in the crypts below. (Marcus Binney in the Times said conservatives will note the above; happy to oblige.) This placing of Thatcher with the greats of the past, and the fact that the queen and Prince Philip came to her funeral, as they have for no prime minister since Churchill in 1965, served as an antidote to British television coverage surrounding her death.

  It was terrible. They could not in any sustained way mark her achievements or even show any particular respect. All they could say was that she was “divisive and controversial,” although sometimes they said “divisive and—well, really divisive.” Anchors reported everything as if from a great distance, with no warmth; they all adopted the cool, analytical look they use when they mean to project distance. But as Tony Blair’s aide Peter Mandelson, speaking at the think tank discussion at which Mr. Gove appeared, said, “to decide is to divide.” He was quoting Mr. Blair.

  And the more decisive, the more divisive.

  In the past week left-wing political groups held death parties, all heavily reported, and threatened to demonstrate at the funeral. The head of the London police seemed to invite them to come. (Less important, but worth mentioning: The White House embarrassed itself by not sending a delegation of high-level current officeholders. Did the British notice? Oh yes. It’s another way they think we’re slipping.)

  All this—the media, the left—had the effect of telling people: You’ll look stupid if you speak in support of Thatcher, you’ll look sentimental, old. And it may be dangerous to attend the funeral—there could be riots!

  I wonder if certain people pushed this line so hard so that the day after the funeral they could report no one came.

  So then, the surprise that was a metaphor.

  At the end of the funeral they all marched down the aisle in great procession—the family, the queen, the military pallbearers carrying the casket bearing the Union Jack. The great doors flung open, the pallbearers marched forward and suddenly from the crowd a great roar. We looked at each other. Demonstrators? No. Listen. They were cheering. They were calling out three great hurrahs as the pallbearers went down the steps. Then long cheers and applause. It was electric.

  England came. The people came. Later we would learn they’d stood 30 deep on the sidewalk, that quiet crowds had massed on the Strand and Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. A man had held up a sign: “But We Loved Her.”

  “The end is where we start from.” That is T. S. Eliot, whose “Little Gidding” she loved. When they died, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher were old and long past their height of power. Everyone was surprised when Reagan died that crowds engulfed the Capitol; people slept on sidewalks to view him in state. When John Paul died the Vatican was astonished to see millions converge. “Santo Subito.”

  And now at the end some came for Thatcher, too.

  What all three had in common: No one was with them but the people.

  Margaret Hilda Thatcher, rest in peace.

  * * *

  A story I couldn’t tell in the column:

  When I went into St. Paul’s Cathedral for Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral, the ushers, looking at my ticket, kept gesturing me forward. This was surprising: I wasn’t a member of an American delegation, part of an official party or a close friend. But the ushers in each section kept gesturing me forward, in the direction of the great church’s altar. Finally I was directed to the ninth row, only eight behind Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. I felt mild dismay: They had put me in someone else’s seat and that someone would come, and then we’d have to figure out where I was to be. But the minutes passed, the pews filled and no one came. Just before the service began I turned and looked at the pews behind me. My eyes met those of a middle-aged woman a few
rows back. I did not know her. It was as if she read my mind and saw my confusion. “She loved you,” she mouthed.

  Later I found her in the crowd. She had worked with Mrs. Thatcher in the years after her prime ministership. “She always read your columns. She wanted you here. And there.”

  Columnists never know who’s reading them, who’s agreeing or shaking their head, who they have a relationship with, or an appointment with, when the column goes up or the paper comes out. I was very moved to find Mrs. Thatcher was a reader.

  I had met her a number of times, talked with her. We had great talks about the world. She was eager in her retirement, which is when I knew her, to share her insights and experiences. When I think of those conversations what I remember first is a time we shared a weekend as house guests of a mutual friend on Long Island. We stayed up late two nights. On the last, she remembered being a child in wartime Britain and listening on the radio to Winston Churchill rally the nation. “Westward look, the land is bright…”

  Thanks from a Grateful Country

  For a man who changed the world, Ronald Reagan sure was modest.

  The Wall Street Journal: June 7, 2004

  He was dying for years and the day came and somehow it came as a blow. Not a loss but a blow. How could this be? Maybe we were all of us more loyal to him, and to the meaning of his life, than we quite meant to be.

  And maybe it’s more.

  This was a life with size. It had heft, and meaning. I am thinking of what Stephen Vincent Benét, a writer whom he quoted, wrote on the death of his friend Scott Fitzgerald. “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you’d better.”

  Ronald Reagan was not unappreciated at the end, far from it. But he was at the beginning.

  * * *

  His story was classically, movingly rags-to-riches; he was a nobody who became a somebody in the American way, utterly on his own and with the help of millions. He was just under 10 when the Roaring Twenties began, 16 when Lindbergh flew the ocean; he remembered as a little boy giving a coin to a doughboy leaning out a window of a troop train going east to the ships that would take them to the Marne and the Argonne Forest.

  Ronald, nicknamed Dutch, read fiction. He liked stories of young men battling for the good and true. A story he wrote in college had a hero arriving home from the war and first thing calling his girl. Someone else answered. Who is calling? “Tell her it’s the president,” he said. He wrote that when he was 20 years old.

  Many years later, in middle age, he was visited by a dream in which he was looking for a house. He was taken to a mansion with white walls and high sparkling windows. It was majestic. “This is a house that is available at a price I can afford,” he would think to himself. And then he’d come awake. From the day he entered the White House for the first time as president, he never had the dream again.

  His family didn’t have much—no money, no local standing—and they were often embarrassed. Jack Reagan was an alcoholic and itinerant, a shoe salesman who drank when things were looking up. They moved a lot. His mother was an Evangelical Christian who was often out of the house helping others or taking in work at home. (Like Margaret Thatcher’s mother, and Pope John Paul’s, too, Nell Reagan worked as a seamstress at home, sewing clothes for money.)

  Dutch and his brother, Moon, were often on their own. From his father he learned storytelling and political views that were liberal for the time and place. In old age he remembered with pride that his father would smack him if he ever said anything as a child that showed racial or religious bigotry. His mother gave him religious faith, which helped him to trust life and allowed him to be an optimist, which was his nature.

  He wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist, a writer. Then he wanted to be a sportscaster on radio, and talked his way in. Then he wanted to be an actor. He went to Hollywood, became a star, did work that he loved and married Jane Wyman, a more gifted actor than he. They were mismatched, but she proved in her way to be as old-school as he. In the decades after their divorce and long after he rose to power, she never spoke publicly of him, not to get in the news when her career was waning and not for money. She could have hurt him and never did.

  He volunteered for action in World War II, was turned away by doctors who told him with eyesight like his he’d probably shoot his own officer and miss. But they let him join behind the lines and he served at “Fort Roach” in Los Angeles, where he made training and information films. After the war, Ronald Reagan went on the local speaking circuit, talking of the needs of veterans and lauding the leadership of FDR and Truman. Once a woman wrote to him and noted that while he had movingly denounced Nazism, there was another terrible “ism,” communism, and he ought to mention that, too. In his next speech, to industry people and others, he said that if communism ever proved itself the threat to decency that Nazism was, he’d denounce it, too. Normally he got applause in this part of the speech. Now he was met by silence.

  In that silence he built his future, becoming a man who’d change the world.

  The long education began. He studied communism, read Marx, read the Founders and the conservative philosophers from Burke to Burnham. He began to tug right. The Democratic Party and his industry continued to turn left. There was a parting.

  A word on his intellectual reflexes. Ronald Reagan was not a cynic—he did not assume the worst about people. But he was a skeptic; he knew who we are. He did not think that people with great degrees or great success were necessarily smart, for instance. He had no interest in credentialism. He once told me an economist was a fellow with a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end of his chain and no watch on the other. That’s why they never know what time it is. He didn’t say this with asperity, but with mirth.

  He did not dislike intellectuals—his heroes often were intellectuals, from the Founders straight through Milton Friedman and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. But he did not favor the intellectuals of his own day, because he thought they were in general thick-headed. He thought that many of the 20th century’s intellectuals were high-IQ dimwits. He had an instinctive agreement with Orwell’s putdown that a particular idea was so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it.

  He thought that intellectuals, like the great liberal academics of the latter half of the 20th century, tended to tie themselves in great webs of complexity, webs they’d often spun themselves—great complicated things that they’d get stuck in, and finally get out of, only to go and construct a new web for mankind to get caught in. The busy little spiders from Marx through Bloomsbury—some of whom, such as the Webbs, were truly the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived—through Harvard and Yale and the American left circa 1900 to 1990.

  As president of the Screen Actors Guild he led the resistance to a growing communist presence in the unions and, with allies such as William Holden, outargued the boutique leftism of the Hollywood salons. But when a small army of congressional gasbags came to town, Ronald Reagan told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood could police itself, thank you. By the time it was over, even his harshest foes admitted he’d been fair. In the 1990s, an actress who’d been blacklisted, her career ruined, was invited by historians of Hollywood to criticize him. She said yes, she remembered him well. He was boring at parties. He was always talking about how great the New Deal was.

  He wanted to be a great actor, but it never happened. He was a good actor. He married Nancy Davis, a young actress who’d gone to Smith. On their first date, she told me once, she was impressed. “He didn’t talk, the way actors do, about their next part. He talked about the Civil War.” They had children, made a life; she was his rock.

  In 1962 he became a Republican; in 1966, with considerable initial reluctance, he ran for governor of California. The establishment of the day labeled him a right-wing movie star out of touch with California values; he beat the incumbent, Pat Brown, in a landslide. He completed two successful terms in which he started with a huge budget deficit, left behind a modest surplus, cut taxe
s and got an ulcer. About the latter he was amazed. Even Jack Warner hadn’t been able to give him an ulcer! But one day it went away. Prayer groups that did not know of his condition had been praying for him. He came to think their prayers healed him.

  In his first serious bid for the presidency, in 1976, he challenged his own party’s beleaguered incumbent, the hapless Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan fought valiantly, state by state, almost unseated Mr. Ford, and returned from the convention having given one of the best speeches of his life. He told his weeping volunteers not to become cynical but to take the experience as inspiration. He promised he wouldn’t go home and sit in a rocking chair. He quoted an old warrior: “I will lie me down and bleed awhile / And then I will rise and fight again.” Four years later, he won the presidency from Jimmy Carter after a mean-spirited onslaught in which he was painted as racist, a man who knew nothing, a militarist. He won another landslide.

  Once again he had nobody with him but the people.

  * * *

  In his presidency he did this: He outargued communism and refused to accept its claim of moral superiority; he rallied the West, rallied America and continued to make big gambles, including a defense-spending increase in a recession. He promised he’d place Pershings in Europe if the Soviets would not agree to arms reductions and told Soviet leaders that they’d never be able to beat us in defense, that we’d spend them into the ground. They were suddenly reasonable.

  Ronald Reagan told the truth to a world made weary by lies. He believed truth was the only platform on which a better future could be built. He shocked the world when he called the Soviet Union “evil,” because it was, and an “empire,” because it was that, too. He never stopped bringing his message to the people of the world, to Europe and China and in the end the Soviet Union. And when it was over, the Berlin Wall had been turned into a million concrete souvenirs, and Soviet communism had fallen. But of course it didn’t fall. It was pushed. By Mr. Know Nothing Cowboy Gunslinger Dimwit. All presidents should be so stupid.