The poster girl and hired pen of the Reagan revolution has a few not-so-kind-and-gentle things to say about Dan Quayle, single moms, and the President’s penis

CHANCES ARE THAT everything you will remember about George Bush twenty-five years from now (other than a brief desert war) came from the pen of Peggy Noonan. A thousand points of light. A kinder, gentler nation. Read my lips: No new taxes. All were crafted by a scrappy Irish-Catholic speechwriter from Massapequa, Long Island, for the inarticulate son of Yale, born, in Ann Richards’s words, “with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

Although Noonan was initially drawn to die White House by Ronald Reagan, whom he adored, she soon found it was Bush who most desperately needed her help. Were it not for the galvanizing speech she wrote for the 1988 Republican convention, it is unlikely Bush would have been elected. Bush, a man from the elite world of WASP wealth, was out of couch worn the very segment of ethnic, working-class Democratic America Noonan comes from. ln an odd way, it was a perfect fit.

As I think about this disparity, Peggy Noonan sit across from me at Manhattan’s Mark Hotel taking delicate bites from a slice of honeydew melon. Her wavy blond hair has recently been tinted red and cut short. A bad sinus infection cause her eyes to well up with tears, which has the effect of turning her already abundant sincerity slightly syrupy. After we exchange pleasantries, I ask her how he races Bill Clinton, and Noonan immediately leap into a discussion of her favorite topic: die presidency.

“JFK’s power was that he was a natural star; Reagan’s tremendous presence came from the fact that he had natural belief,” she explains. “When I first saw Clinton, I wondered about his personal power, which is considerable, and realized mis: He’s got charm; he’s got political and philosophical beliefs. But most important, he believes in himself, he believes in his charm, and he believes,” she pauses dramatically, “in his destiny.” After waiting two beats for that to sink in, she concludes her speech with a near coda that sounds soo polished I suspect I am not the first to hear it: “I guess I’m pro-charm, Robert, but charm itself is not a belief. And charm is certainly not a good enough reason for Bill Clinton to be president.”

And he should know. Enormously charming herself, Noonan has in recent years also proved to be an astute judge of the political process. After a career in which he was a newswriter for Dan Rather and a speechwriter for two presidents, she turned her hand to writing her own book, What I Saw at the Revolution, a perceptive and entertaining memoir of her life in the Reagan era that spent four months on The New York Times best-seller list and made her a wealthy woman.

Since then, she has moved back to New York and spends her time writing for a variety of magazines, appearing on television, and cutting a wide social swath—often seen in the company of such media heavies as Mort Zuckerman, Jeff Greenfield, Joan Rivers, Diane Sawyer, Lesley Stahl, Pete Peterson and his wife, Joan Ganz Cooney. She has also written a second book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Random House), something of a sequel to her first. If being a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution wasn’t exciting enough, Noonan now sets her sights on the Clinton regime from what she calls her “front-row seat on the end of the liberal era,” an experience she describes, in one of her favorite phrases, as “simply delish.”

Second memoirs pose die same problem as second novels: You live only one life, and unless you are, say, Churchill, there usually isn’t much material left over. Fortunately for Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution was chockablock with the big issues—Reagan, Gorbachev, international-arms summits, Ollie North—leaving plenty of personal material for later books.

Now that the Reagan-Bush era is finally over, Noonan has turned to her own life. The new book gives us a guided tour of her varied urban world, moving easily between accounts of her Bible-study classes (the other members ask her to forgo reading horoscopes) and Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes (“I don’t care what the President does with his penis”). As in her first book, Noonan is at her beet when being irreverent or just plain mean—Clinton’s presidency is “just a small burp from history’s digestive system,” and there is a scathing indictment of liberals’ belief in “Fucking as an Entitlement”—but dull when she muses on the eternal questions of ‘life,” which, she describes without irony, is both “a big interesting mess” and “a strange old dog.”

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is by turns maddening and delightful. It reflects the jumble of liberal sentiments and conservative politics that make its’ author so intriguing. For Democrats still recovering from the Reagan era Peggy Noonan may be the only thing we can thank it for: a Republican with a sense of humor. “Peggy is the kind of Republican that even Democrats like,” offers Esquire political commentator Walter Shapiro, who is a friend of Noonan’s. “She has many of the social attributes of a good liberal Democrat, but she just happens to hold different political opinions.” Dan Rather, her ex-boss, says he loves her political complexity. “She is walking, talking proof that the conservative and liberal labels are outdated.” Former Nixon speech writer and current New York Times columnist William Safire fairly gushes when asked about her: “Peggy is an important thinker because she understands American values more deeply than most conservatives do. She makes me glad to be a Republican.”

As we chat, and Noonan works her way from honeydew to cantaloupe (and then on to my granola-and-yogurt parfait), I struggle with the fact that I like her, too. After all, as a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican, we probably fall on opposite sides of all the defining social and political issues of our time. This is the woman who was convincing America that Ronald Reagan was a kindly old man while I was rooting for his impeachment. Still, I find that I am drawn to her, to the unabashed preaching, the unpredictability of her opinions, the you-and-I-know-better-than-that intimacy that comes when she drops her voice to a whisper and looks you in the eye.

Although Noonan is extremely nervous as we talk, she has a talent for putting her interlocutor at ease even when he is not: he is master of the knowing look, the concerned squint, the suggestive, flirty smile. As we fall into a somewhat more relaxed patter, l realize that her personal popularity and speechwriting talents flow from the same stream. Noonan is a gifted listener, and like many such people, she i also a marvelous mimic, as I discover when our romp through the history of the presidency picks up speed. As she tumbles from one president to the next, an image fixed itself in my mind’s eye: a virtual reality Mount Rushmore, the faces of recent presidents fusing together to form a seamless, blurry whole.

After a lifetime spent poring over political speeches and biographies,  Noonan has perfected the cadences and gestures of America’ most famous public figures: Jack Kennedy’s hard “Baston” accent, Johnson’s sly Southern snarl, Reagan’s grandfatherly air, Bush’ adverb-slaughtering twang, Clinton’s husky sincerity—she does them all, playing each role complete with the appropriate body language.

Suddenly forcing her shoulder up to her ears, she becomes Nixon, barking: “I love women and politics. They’re the real haters!” Why, I ask, was Reagan so inspirational? “Because he made us proud again when he said things like”—she slip into an uncanny Gipper, winking and nodding with a slightly tremulous voice—“Come on, now, we can do it. We’re Americans! We’re not little short people.” Gesticulating resolutely, bringing a thumb down on her clenched fist and biting her lip as if her life depends on it, she becomes “Slick Willy” himself: “Aaah feel your pain ” she drawls. Her eye even begin to glisten.

lt is an extraordinary performance, and l am reminded of Nietzsche’s description of Wagner as a “Tremendous ear.” Nothing escapes Noonan. As a social commentator, her savage talent for ferreting out someone’s falseness is the flip side of her gift for intuiting what truth sounds like when translated into presidential prose. Noonan’s real genius,” says Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet, “is that she uses the language of the ordinary and the everyday. She is a poet of the spoken word.”

But beneath her disarming wit and easygoing manner, I see three distinctly different Peggy Noonans at work. First and foremost is “Peggy the Propagandist,” the Leni Riefenstahl of American politics who so skillfully translated the Reagan revolution into middlebrow theater, complete with patriotic rhetoric and inspirational red, white, and blue bunting. Then there is “Peggy the Republican Pinup Girl”: Her high cheekbones, ready smile, and reassuring, no-nonsense manners are the friendly face of conservatism. Finally, as in her latest book, there is “Peggy the Right-Wing Anna Quindlen,” a wise columnist pondering the travails of motherhood, the importance of family values, the funny things children say, America’s basic goodness.

In between writing and raising her seven-year-old son, Will, Noonan spends a lot of her time these days giving speeches—something that has raised her estimation of the men he used to write for. When I ask whether composing for her elf is more difficult than writing for ochers, she waxes positively Noonanesque: “Robert, I must say this: yes and yes and yes. First, you have to find your own voice, and then you must make it sound unselfconscious, which is difficult. Neither Reagan nor Bush ever took me aside, God bless them, and told me how exhausting it is to keep your concentration for forty-five minutes.”

Noonan left the Reagan White House in 1986 to work full-time on What I Saw at the Revolution, briefly returning to politics as Bush’s head speechwriter for his 1988 campaign. after Bush was elected. Noonan chose New York over a permanent White House job, although she was smuggled back to Washington to write his State of the Union address in 1992, (in a moment of inspired humor, a Bush aide registered Noonan at the Jefferson Hotel as Greta Garbo). Despite desperate pleas for help from Bush during his disastrous reelection effort, she resisted the temptation to return to the political battlefield. “There was a complete policy vacuum in Bush’s second campaign that no speech could have filled,” she explains. “The best I could have done was help him to lose with class.” Noonan now stays at arm’s distance from politics—the only public figure she would consider writing for, she says, is the Pope. Still, she maintains close relationships with important Republicans like Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett, both of whom are frequently mentioned as future presidential candidates.

Despite these ties, Noonan doesn’t yet see any Republicans she thinks would make strong candidates in 1996. Does that mean she, will, by default, vote for Clinton? “I’d prefer any Republican to the incumbent, about that l’m certain,” she says cheekily. “Even Dan Quayle?” I ask, trying to outcheek her. Noonan pauses, clears her throat, and puts on her best prim voice: “Dan Quayle is a very, well, special figure in American politics. He is actually very intelligent and competent. But 90 percent of the people in this country think he has the I.Q. of this melon,” she says, pointing to what remains of the cantaloupe on her plate. “And when 90 percent of your country thinks that you are by nature a very stupid person, l don’t think you have much of a future in presidential politics.”

Since we are speaking of Quayle l ask her how she felt as a single mother, when he attacked Candice Bergen’s Murphy Brown character for wanting to have a child on her own. “Are you asking me whether I am Dan Quayle’s worst nightmare?” she responds pertly. “Perhaps. But to be frank, I agreed with him. He said it in a heavy-handed way, but what he really wanted to do was show concern about the problem of illegitimacy, not to judge single mothers themselves,” she says. “What you celebrate, you encourage, and when you celebrate single motherhood with a marvelous character like Murphy Brown, you are influencing the minds of young kids who don’t know any better. And that’s not good,” she says, imitating Dana Carvey imitating George Bush, “that’s baaaad.”

But, I press her, if Murphy Brown was maligned because she made single moms look too good, then doesn’t the attack apply equally to an intelligent, attractive, and successful single mother like Noonan herself? She looks at me with a combination of pity and contempt, which reminds me of a scene from What I Saw at the Revolution where she and a condescending State Department “Harvardhead” argue about a speech she has written for Reagan: “He brought in his breath in a way that made me think of how missionaries must have sounded years ago when pressed on fine points of Scripture by the savages.” Undaunted by my thickness, Noonan continues, “Quayle’s only problem was that he meant to show concern but just ended up sounding judgmental, and who wants a smug white man’s opinion on how they live their lives? The problem with many conservatives is that they are too often preachy and judgmental, which is why I make such an effort not to be.”

I’m stunned. Does Peggy Noonan really chink of herself as a particularly reluctant judge? I remind her of a funny passage from Life, Liberty in which he and another mother chat while their children play. Aware that Noonan is a writer and that writers are always looking for material, the woman gravely insists that their utterly inane conversation is strictly “off the record.” What she forgets, however, is that a writer also always gets the last word, and Noonan eviscerates the poor woman in print: “She was perky, as idiots often are,” she writes. After a hearty laugh Noonan admits that yes, there are times when she might be just a teensy bit judgmental, pausing a second at the memory of the scene before concluding dryly, “Anyway, that woman was just a stupid little bitch.”

Hardly the sentiments of someone who dream of writing speeches for the Pope. And—for me, at any rate—that is part of her appeal. For all her sincerity, Noonan has a bit of the bitch in her, too. For all her espousing of family values and Christian ethics, she’s not someone you want to tangle with.

Now in her early forties, after years of government service and public life, Noonan says this is a turning point for her—a time to consider her options and perhaps move in new directions. She is working with Joan Ganz Cooney on a PBS series about cultural values, and she is also eager to write for Hollywood, perhaps using her sensitive ear to adapt works of fiction for the screen.

As we leave the Mark Hotel and walk down Madison Avenue on this brilliantly frigid day, Noonan is reluctant to tell me where she is heading. Eventually she admits she is going to her Bible-study group; today’s topic is the Holy Spirit. “I have been weaving in and out of a serious engagement with my faith since 1980,” says Noonan. “Recently, I’ve become absolutely fascinated by religion, although I don’t quite know how it fits into my life yet.” Noonan describes her religious awakening in Life, Liberty: “Maybe I am converting from a person who approves of Christianity to a Christian, from a person born into something to a person living something… who is animated by it.” She now goes to mass several times a week, has consulted Cardinal O’Connor on spiritual matters, and, recently, addressed a group gathered in Washington for a National Prayer Breakfast meeting where Mother Teresa was the keynote speaker.

“She was marvelous. In fact, l think she might just be a living saint she was such a powerful speaker, it was a thrill being in the same room with her.” Noonan describes the scene with a novelist’s eye for detail: an enormous, chandeliered ballroom, filled with 3,000 of the most influential journalist and politicians in America—Bill Clinton and Al Gore included—all rapt before a holy woman from way outside the Beltway who used her speech to rail against abortion. Stooping over slightly and drawing the sides of an imaginary shawl to her face, Noonan—obviously delighted—effects a nasal little-old-lady voice as she intones Teresa’s shockingly illiberal message: “Birt’ control eez a veahry, veahry bat’ thing!”

As a doorman ushers Noonan into the darkness of a posh Upper East Side building, I wonder whether Saint Peggy is on her way to adding yet another role to her dizzying cast of characters.