The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

  * * *

  Let me focus for a minute on the presidency, another institution in trouble. In the past I have been impatient with the idea that it’s impossible now to be president, that it is impossible to run the government of the United States successfully or even competently. I always thought that was an excuse of losers. I’d seen a successful presidency up close. It can be done. But since 9/11, in the four years after that catastrophe, I have wondered if it hasn’t all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too… impossible.

  I refer to the sheer scope, speed and urgency of the issues that go to a president’s desk, to the impossibility of bureaucracy, to the array of impeding and antagonistic forces (the 50-50 nation, the mass media, the senators owned by the groups), to the need to have a fully informed understanding of and stand on the most exotic issues, from avian flu to the domestic realities of Zimbabwe.

  The special prosecutors, the scandals, the spin for the scandals, nuclear proliferation, wars and natural disasters, Iraq, stem cells, earthquakes, the background of the Supreme Court backup pick, how best to handle the security problems at the port of Newark, how to increase production of vaccines, tort reform, did Justice bungle the anthrax case, how is Cipro production going, did you see this morning’s Raw Threat File? Our public schools don’t work, and there’s little refuge to be had in private schools, however pricey, in part because teachers there are embarrassed not to be working in the slums and make up for it by putting pictures of Frida Kahlo where Abe Lincoln used to be. Where is Osama? What’s up with trademark infringement and intellectual capital? We need an answer on an amendment on homosexual marriage! We face a revolt on immigration.

  The range, depth and complexity of these problems, the crucial nature of each of them, the speed with which they bombard the Oval Office, and the psychic and practical impossibility of meeting and answering even the most urgent of them, is overwhelming. And that doesn’t even get us to Korea. And Russia. And China, and the Mideast. You say we don’t understand Africa? We don’t even understand Canada!

  Roiling history, daily dangers, big demands; a government that is itself too big and rolling in too much money and ever needing more to do the latest important, necessary, crucial thing.

  It’s beyond “The president is overwhelmed.” The presidency is overwhelmed. The whole government is. And people sense when an institution is overwhelmed. Citizens know. If we had a major terrorist event tomorrow half the country—more than half—would not trust the federal government to do what it has to do, would not trust it to tell the truth, would not trust it, period.

  It should be noted that all modern presidents face a slew of issues, and none of them have felt in control of events but have instead felt controlled by them. JFK in one week faced the Soviets, civil rights, the Berlin Wall, the southern Democratic mandarins of the U.S. Senate. He had to face Cuba, only 90 miles away, importing Russian missiles. But the difference now, 45 years later, is that there are a million little Cubas, a new Cuba every week. It’s all so much more so. And all increasingly crucial. And it will be for the next president, too.

  * * *

  A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls—bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn’t wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They’re thrown all over her desk and bureau. She’s not rich, and they’re inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, “It’s affluence,” and someone else nodded, but I said, “Yeah, but it’s also the fear parents have that we’re at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They’re buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case.” This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.

  Let me veer back to the president. One of the reasons some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush’s leadership the past year or so is that he makes more than the usual number of decisions that seem to be looking for trouble. He makes startling choices, as in the Miers case. But you don’t have to look for trouble in life, it will find you, especially when you’re president. It knows your address. A White House is a castle surrounded by a moat, and the moat is called trouble, and the rain will come and the moat will rise. You should buy some boots, do your work, hope for the best.

  * * *

  Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford’s lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950–2000. It’s called “Symptoms of Withdrawal.” At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn’t gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. “Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta.” Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’” Mr. Lawford continued, “The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of ‘maybe we shouldn’t go there.’ Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on.”

  Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family—that it might “fall apart.” But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about… the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

  And—forgive me—I thought: If even Teddy knows…

  * * *

  If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even prevalent, how are people dealing with it on a daily basis?

  I think those who haven’t noticed we’re living in a troubling time continue to operate each day with classic and constitutional American optimism intact. I think some of those who have a sense we’re in trouble are going through the motions, dealing with their own daily challenges.

  And some—well, I will mention and end with America’s elites. Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.

  This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

  I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously,
took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to: “I got mine, you get yours.”

  You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

  Not all of course. There are a lot of people—I know them and so do you—trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They’re trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on tracks.

  That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

  Politics in the Modest Age

  Is a humble postpresidency imaginable today?

  The Wall Street Journal: July 17, 2014

  “I’m just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen.” So said an overwhelmed Harry S. Truman to a boisterous, affectionate crowd that surprised him as he ventured to a private home in Washington for a farewell lunch soon after his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, was sworn in as president of the United States. It was January 20, 1953.

  Later, a regular Baltimore & Ohio train with a special car attached would take Truman and his wife, Bess, from Union Station westward, to their home in Independence, Mo. Thousands saw them off at the station. “So long, Harry!” they cried, as if they knew him. “At 6:30, with the crowd singing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ the train began pulling slowly out of the station, until it was beyond the lighted platform. It had been a long road from Independence to the White House, and now Truman was going home.” (This is from David McCullough’s magisterial 1992 biography, “Truman.”)

  And he really did go home. He had, for almost eight years since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, been the most powerful man on earth, the wager and completer of wars and saver of Europe. In his diary Truman wrote of Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who led in his country’s hour of need and then, work done, returned to his plow. It is what George Washington did. Heck, it’s what Calvin Coolidge, like Truman from modest means, did.

  Truman would go back to being “just anybody again.” But there was something people didn’t know. He was—amazingly, this wasn’t a lie—pretty much dead broke.

  Mr. McCullough: “He had traveled home from Washington unprotected by Secret Service agents and there were to be none watching over him. He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his army pension of $112.56 a month.” He had saved a little from his salary but put it in government bonds. In his final weeks as president he took out a loan from a Washington bank to tide him over.

  He wasn’t sure how he would make a living. His great concern was not to do anything that might exploit or “commercialize” the office he’d just left. He was offered small fortunes to associate himself with real estate companies and other corporations but he turned them down. Mr. McCullough: “His name was not for sale. He would take no fees for commercial endorsements or for lobbying or writing letters or making phone calls. He would accept no ‘consulting fees.’” Offered a new Toyota as a demonstration of harmonious relations between the U.S. and Japan, he refused: It might look like a product endorsement. Anyway, he believed in American cars.

  His transition was hard. He had become used to the pressures of the office and felt lost without them. He missed the people he worked with, especially Dean Acheson, his secretary of state and closest friend. And he missed “those bright lights.”

  But he worked it out. He rented office space in Kansas City, where on the day he arrived thousands of letters were already waiting for him. (The letters never abated, which I know because a dozen years later, as a teenager, I would write one, expressing my admiration and requesting his autograph. “Harry Truman, State of Missouri,” I wrote on the envelope. That was all that was needed. He promptly and sweetly wrote back.)

  The former president had to relearn things—how and whom to tip in restaurants, how to call a cab—that presidents don’t have to do. For this unassuming man there were humbling moments. One day he walked by a road project and asked the man in charge if he didn’t need a good straw boss. The man looked at him, looked at the workers, looked back at Truman and smiled: “You are out of a job, aren’t you?”

  Truman took part in the planning of his presidential library, trekking to possible sites, drawing what he thought it should look like—his grandfather’s house. The federal government contributed nothing, Truman did the fund-raising himself.

  He agreed to write his memoirs and signed a big contract—$600,000. But it was to be paid over five years, and the first payment came on delivery of a manuscript, so he had to hustle. It was a struggle. “I’m not a writer,” he wailed, not as a complaint but an assertion of his predicament. He got help and didn’t hide it. On notes toward a first draft he scrawled, “Good God, what crap!”

  He and Bess took a break to visit friends back in Washington; Truman drove all the way. That was challenging because cops stopped him to warn about speeding but really to get autographs, and patrons of diners surrounded him to watch him eat.

  When the book came out it sold fine and earned respectful reviews. But friends thought Harry’s pungent, blunt manner of expression had been squashed down and evened out by collaborators, or perhaps by self-consciousness. A bigger disappointment was money. With the cost of staff, researchers and office rent, his net profit, he figured, was only $37,000 over five years. He was shocked he had to pay 67% federal and state income taxes. Truman had supported high tax rates for broad government services pretty much all his political life. There was a sense in his letters this was the first time he personally felt the cost of the policies he’d professed. He called the taxes “crushing.” He pushed for a bill in Washington for office money for former presidents, and—rightly, fairly—got it.

  Truman wasn’t financially secure until five years after he left the White House, when he sold family farmland whose fields he had worked as a boy. It made him sad: He liked thinking of himself as a farmer. But if he hadn’t sold, he said, “I would practically be on relief.”

  He died the day after Christmas 1972, age 88, and his death was not only marked but mourned. A friend had described to the New York Times Magazine how he had achieved happiness: “Harry feels that he’s square with the world, that he gave it his best, and got its best in return.”

  God bless him, he did.

  * * *

  Why are we talking about Harry Truman? You know.

  We live in a time when politicians relentlessly enrich themselves. We are awed and horrified by the wealth they accumulate, by their use of connections, of money lines built on past and future power. It’s an operation to them. They are worth hundreds of millions. They have houses so fancy the houses have names. They make speeches to banks and universities for a quarter million dollars and call their fees contributions to their foundations. They are their foundations.

  They grab and grub. They never leave. They never go home. They don’t have a “home”: They were born in a place, found a launching pad and shot themselves into glamour and wealth. They are operators—entitled, assuming. They “stand for the people.” They stand for themselves.

  So I just wanted to note how it used to be, when leaders thought they had to be respectable. When they were respectable.

  “Harry Truman, not a money-grubbing slob.” Who, years ago, imagined that would come to be remarkable?

  Acknowledgments

  Many to thank:

  At the Wall Street Journal the redoubtable James Taranto, my editor of fifteen years; the chief of the editorial page, Paul Gigot; editorial features editor Mark Lasswell, and his predecessors, Tunku
Varadarajan and Max Boot; deputy editorial features editor Howard Dickman; and Rupert Murdoch. Thanks too to the production editor Angela Morris, arts/graphics editor Kate LaVoie, and the artists whose work has given such a lift to mine, including Martin Kozlowski and Chad Crowe. At Forbes I thank my friend of many years Steve Forbes, and the memory of Jim Michaels. At CBS, my thanks to David Rhodes.

  At Twelve, a group of professionals do what they do brilliantly, with judgment, creativity and dispatch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book come together so seamlessly, and as such a coordinated group effort. My gratitude to my editor, Sean Desmond, who’s both old school (he reads the manuscript then reads it again, pursues the vision, keeps it all going) and new (a marked appreciation for the lay of the technological land). He is a great professional operating within a great calling. Thanks also to Twelve’s publisher, Deb Futter, as charming as she is committed, and to my friends Brian McLendon, Paul Samuelson, Libby Burton, the trained poet, Bailey Donoghue, Catherine Casalino, Yasmin Mathew, Antoinette Marotta, and Thomas Whatley. I thank Jamie Raab, the president of Grand Central Publishing, and Michael Pietsch, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, for employing all of them and joining so enthusiastically in this venture.