The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  About the people in the bleachers, he said, “The most striking thing was the enormous friendliness, the bantering.” In Hitler’s Germany, “I saw crowds, I’d go to the other side of the street.” Here, no sense of looming threat. “That I would say was a very American part of my experience.”

  He was “enchanted” by the game—“the subtlety, the little nuances—you can watch what the strategy is and how they judge what the opponent is likely to do by the way the fielders position themselves.… It is a game that combines leisure with highly dramatic moments!”

  And there was the man called Joe DiMaggio. The factory workers would sort of say, “If you take a look at Joe DiMaggio,” you will learn something about this country. DiMaggio was “infinitely graceful” as a fielder, “he would sort of lope towards the ball… nothing dramatic, he didn’t tumble, he didn’t strut, and he made it look effortless.” He didn’t “stand there wagging his bat… He would just stand there with his bat raised… He was all concentration.”

  Years later they met, and Mr. Kissinger, faced with his boyhood idol, that symbol of those early years, was awed. It was like being a kid and meeting a movie star: “I didn’t know exactly what to say to him.” They became friends. “He had a fierce kind of integrity.”

  So Henry Kissinger learned some things about Americans, and America, thanks to a bunch of Italian guys in a brush factory downtown. They were good to him. They were welcoming. Probably when they or their people were new here, someone was good to them.

  That is American friendliness. Here is American openness—meaning if you are open to it, it will be open to you. Mary Dorian was an uneducated Irish farm girl with no family to speak of and no prospects. She came to America on her own, around 1920. She wrote to the one girl she knew, a distant cousin in Brooklyn, to ask that she meet her at the ship. Mary landed at Ellis Island, went to the agreed-upon spot, and the cousin wasn’t there. She had forgotten. Mary, my grandmother, spent her first night in America alone on a park bench in lower Manhattan.

  She went on to find Brooklyn and settle in. She joined an Irish club and a step-dancing club. They didn’t have anything like that back home. We make a mistake when we worry that sometimes immigrants come here and burrow more into their old nationality than their new one. It’s not a rejection of America, just a way of not being lonely, of still being connected to something. She met her husband in an Irish club, and she got a job hanging up coats in a restaurant. Then she became a bathroom attendant at Abraham & Straus on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. When she died in 1960, a lot of black people came to the funeral. This, in a Brooklyn broken up into separate ethnic enclaves, was surprising, but it wouldn’t have been to her. They were her coworkers from A&S, all the girls who worked in the ladies’ room, and their families. They loved her.

  When she died, Mary Dorian had a job, a family and friends. She had come here with none of those things. She trusted America, and it came through.

  As for the old hatreds:

  There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen. He was traveling with his younger brother—they, too, were fleeing the Nazis—and a steward. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan’s West Side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching the bustle of disembarking, and then the boy saw something. “Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters,” he remembered this week.

  He was startled. Something with Hebrew letters—that was impossible back home. He asked his father, “Is that allowed?”

  And his father said, “It is here.”

  It is here.

  The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with the freedom he was given here.

  Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don’t. Maybe we just have to remember who we are—open, friendly, welcoming and free.

  Happy Fourth of July to this tender little country, to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

  On Letting Go

  How we become American.

  The Wall Street Journal: June 29, 2007

  Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday’s holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who’d been my uncle Johnny’s best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony’s sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.

  The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who’d been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don’t remember anyone saying that. When Anthony’s mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it “the old country.” Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.

  But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned—as far as he could tell—we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in “Bang the Drum Slowly” says, “This handed me a laugh.”

  This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become “American,” but they have to want to first.

  It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.

  * * *

  I don’t know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don’t know if they were “loyal to America.” I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she’d heard about America before she got here. She said, “The streets were paved with gold.” All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.

  When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who’d been my grandfather’s boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I’d found had sent me to him. He told me he’d been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father, my great-grandfather, said goodbye. He said, “Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again.”

  My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He’d cast his lot. That’s an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family, the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that’s what you treasure.

  A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it’s no longer necessary
to make The Decision. They don’t always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you’re an immigrant now, you don’t have to let go. Which means you don’t have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn’t have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.

  And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It’s one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It’s why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.

  * * *

  It happens that I know how my grandfather’s sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a commonplace book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she’d died. It’s a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. “I am going back to Glenties…”

  But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called “Thanksgiving.” There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: “So it’s home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars.”

  Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who’d made her decision, cast her lot and changed my life.

  I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.

  God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.

  “To Old Times”

  The Wall Street Journal: August 24, 2007

  Once I went hot-air ballooning in Normandy. It was the summer of 1991. It was exciting to float over the beautiful French hills and the farms with crisp crops in the fields. It was dusk, and we amused ourselves calling out “Bonsoir!” to cows and people in little cars. We had been up for an hour or so when we had a problem and had to land. We looked for an open field, aimed toward it and came down a little hard. The gondola dragged, tipped and spilled us out. A half dozen of us emerged scrambling and laughing with relief.

  Suddenly before us stood an old man with a cracked and weathered face. He was about 80, in rough work clothes. He was like a Life magazine photo from 1938: “French farmer hoes his field.” He’d seen us coming from his farmhouse and stood before us with a look of astonishment as the huge bright balloon deflated and tumbled about.

  One of us spoke French and explained our situation. The farmer said, or asked, “You are American.” We nodded, and he made a gesture—I’ll be back!—and ran to the house. He came back with an ancient bottle of calvados, the local brandy. It was literally covered in dust and dry dirt, as if someone had saved it a long time.

  He told us—this will seem unlikely, and it amazed us—that he had not seen an American in many, many years, and we asked when. “The invasion,” he said. The Normandy Invasion.

  Then he poured the calvados and made a toast. I wish I had notes on what he said. Our French speaker translated it into something like “To old times.” And we raised our glasses knowing we were having a moment of unearned tenderness. Lucky Yanks, that a wind had blown us to it.

  That was 16 years ago, and I haven’t seen some of the people with me since that day, but I know every one of us remembers it and keeps it in his good-memory hoard.

  He didn’t welcome us because he knew us. He didn’t treat us like royalty because we had done anything for him. He honored us because we were related to, were the sons and daughters of, the men of the Normandy Invasion. The men who had fought their way through France hedgerow by hedgerow, who’d jumped from planes in the dark and climbed the cliffs and given France back to the French. He thought we were of their sort. And he knew they were good. He’d seen them, when he was young.

  * * *

  I’ve been thinking of the old man because of Iraq and the coming debate on our future there. Whatever we do or should do, there is one fact that is going to be left on the ground there when we’re gone. That is the impression made by, and the future memories left by, American troops in their dealings with the Iraqi people.

  I don’t mean the impression left by the power and strength of our military. I mean the impression left by the character of our troops—by their nature and generosity, by their kindness. By their tradition of these things.

  The American troops in Iraq, our men and women, are inspiring, and we all know it. But whenever you say it, you sound like a greasy pol: “I support our valiant troops, though I oppose the war,” or “If you oppose the war, you are ignoring the safety and imperiling the sacrifice of our gallant troops.”

  I suspect that in their sophistication—and they are sophisticated—our troops are grimly amused by this. Soldiers are used to being used. They just do their job.

  We know of the broad humanitarian aspects of the occupation—the hospitals being built, the schools restored, the services administered, the kids treated by armed forces doctors. But then there are all the stories that don’t quite make it to the top of the heap and that in a way tell you more. The lieutenant in the First Cavalry who was concerned about Iraqi kids in the countryside who didn’t have shoes, so he wrote home, started a drive, and got 3,000 pairs sent over. The lieutenant colonel from California who spent his off-hours emailing hospitals back home to get a wheelchair for a girl with cerebral palsy.

  The Internet is littered with these stories. So is Iraq. I always notice the pictures from the wire services, pictures that have nothing to do with government propaganda. The Marine on patrol laughing with the local street kids; the nurse treating the sick mother.

  A funny thing. We’re so used to thinking of American troops as good guys that we forget: They’re good guys! They have American class.

  And it is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own. The actor Gary Sinise helps run Operation Iraqi Children, which delivers school supplies with the help of U.S. forces. When he visits Baghdad grade schools, the kids yell, “Lieutenant Dan!”—his role in “Forrest Gump,” the story of another good man.

  * * *

  Some say we’re the Roman Empire, but I don’t think the soldiers of Rome were known for their kindness, nor the people of Rome for their decency. Some speak of Abu Ghraib, but the humiliation of prisoners there was news because it was American troops acting in a way that was out of the order of things, and apart from tradition. It was weird. And they were busted by other American troops.

  You could say soldiers of every country do some good in war beyond fighting, and that is true enough. But this makes me think of the statue I saw once in Vienna, a heroic casting of a Red Army soldier. Quite stirring. The man who showed it to me pleasantly said it had a local nickname, “The Unknown Rapist.” There are similar memorials in Estonia and Berlin; they all have the same nickname. My point is not to insult Russian soldiers, who had been born into a world of communism, atheism and Stalin’s institutionalization of brutish ways of being. I only mean to note the stellar reputation of American troops in the same war at the same time. They were good guys.

&nbs
p; They’re still good.

  We should ponder, some day when this is over, what it is we do to grow such men, and women, what exactly goes into the making of them.

  Whatever is decided in Washington, I hope our soldiers know what we really think of them, and what millions in Iraq must, also. I hope some day they get some earned tenderness, and wind up over the hills of Iraq, and land, and an old guy comes out and says, “Are you an American?” And they say yes and he says, “A toast, to old times.”

  A Cold Man’s Warm Words

  Jefferson’s tender lament didn’t make it into the Declaration.

  The Wall Street Journal: July 2, 2010

  The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.

  It was July 1, 2, 3, and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.

  The tensions over slavery had been wrenching, terrible, and were resolved by brute calculation: to damn or outlaw it now would break fragile consensus, halt all momentum and stop the creation of the United States. References to the slave trade were omitted, but the Founders were not stupid men, and surely they knew their young nation would have its date with destiny; surely they heard in their silence the guns of Fort Sumter.