Peggy Noonan

Thirty-two years into his career as a writer of books, Bob Woodward has won a reputation as slipshod (“Wired”), slippery (“All the President’s Men,” “The Final Days”), opportunistic (“Veil”; everything) and generally unaware of the implications even of those facts he’s offered that have gone unchallenged. As a reporter he’s been compared to a great dumb shark, remorselessly moving toward hunks of information he can swallow but not digest. As a writer his style has been to lard unconnected sentences with extraneous data in order to give his assertions a fact-y weight that suggests truth is being told. And so: On July 23, 1994, at 4:18 p.m., the meeting over, the president gazed out the double-paned windows of the Oval Office, built in October 1909 by workers uncovered by later minimum wage legislation, and saw the storm moving in. “I think I’ll kill my wife,” he said, the words echoing in the empty room. I made that up. It’s my homage.

Mr. Woodward has been that amazing thing, the boring fabulist.

The Bush White House has spent the past five years thinking they could manage him. Talk about a state of denial.

Now he has thwarted me. I bought “State of Denial” thinking I might have a merry time bashing it and a satisfying time defending the innocent injured.

But it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony. (It is well documented, with copious notes.) What is most striking is that Mr. Woodward seems to try very hard to be fair, not in a phony “Armitage, however, denies it” way, but in a way that—it will seem too much to say this—reminded me of Jean Renoir: “The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.”

His Bush is not a monster but a personally disciplined, yearning, vain and intensely limited man. His advisers in all levels of the government are tugged and torn by understandable currents and display varying degrees of guile, cynicism and courage. As usual, prime sources get the best treatment—the affable Andy Card, the always well-meaning Prince Bandar. Members of the armed forces get a high-gloss spit shine. But once you decode it and put it aside—and Woodward readers always know to do that—you get real history:

The almost epic bureaucratic battle of Donald Rumsfeld to re-establish civilian control of the post-Clinton Joint Chiefs of Staff; the struggle of the State Department to be heard and not just handled by the president; the search on the ground for the weapons of mass destruction; the struggles, advances and removal from Iraq of Jay Garner, sent to oversee humanitarian aid; the utter disconnect between the experience on the ground after Baghdad was taken and the attitude of the White House—“borderline giddy.” This is a primer on how the executive branch of the United States works, or rather doesn’t work, in the early years of the 21st century.

There is previously unreported information. Former Secretary of State George Shultz was top contender for American envoy to Baghdad, but there were worries he was “not known for taking direction.” Spies called “bats” were planted in American agencies by American agencies to report to rival superiors back home.

After Baghdad fell, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who appears to be the best friend of everybody in the world, went to the White House and advised the president to fill the power vacuum immediately: The Baath Party and the military had run the country. Remove the top echelon—they have bloody hands—but keep and maintain everyone else. Tell the Iraqi military to report to their barracks, he advised, and keep the colonels on down. Have them restore order. Have Iraqi intelligence find the insurgents: “Those bad guys will know how to find bad guys.” Use them, and then throw them over the side. This is advice that has the brilliance of the obvious, and not only in retrospect.

Mr. Woodward: “‘That’s too Machiavellian,’ someone said. The Saudi notes of the meeting indicate it was either Bush or Rice.”

It’s isn’t clear if “too Machiavellian” meant too clever by half, or too devious for good people like us. Either way it was another path not taken. The newly unemployed personnel of the old Iraqi government took to the streets, like everyone else.

*   *   *

To the central thesis. Was the White House, from the beginning, in a state of denial? I doubt denial is the word. They were in a state of unknowingness. (I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.) They were in a state of conviction: They really thought Saddam had those WMDs. (Yes, so did Bill Clinton, so did The New Yorker, so did I, and so likely did you. But Mr. Bush moved on, insisted on, intelligence that was faulty, inadequate.) They were in a state of propulsion: 9/11 had just wounded a great nation. Strong action was needed.

Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The young, mid-level guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going “Ooh, aah, you can’t do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there’s nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it’s needlessly aggressive!” Those guys from State—they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who’d been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, “The intelligence doesn’t support it, we see no WMDs,” the Bush men knew who not to believe.

History is human.

We are talking past each other, the left and right in America. I suppose we always did, but I’m noticing it more. We have different intellectual styles (rather too emotive, arguably too linear), start with different assumptions, and recognize different data. We could be speaking different languages. Which is odd, since all half the country does is talk. (The other half puts roofs on houses.) You’d think they’d find a way to break through.

And so I come to Bill Clinton and Fox News Channel. A week after it aired, the interview still dominates the dinner party. Did he rouse his base? I think so. Did he remind everyone else of what they find objectionable in him? I know so.

But in Manhattan this week at gatherings of hungry liberals—they are feeling frisky, they can smell victory coming, though this is not necessarily indicative of anything, as Manhattan liberals are traditionally the last to know, and occasionally and endearingly concede they are the last—the conversation wasn’t really about Clinton, but Fox News.

One can’t exaggerate how large Fox looms in the liberal imagination. They see it as huge and mighty and credit it with almost mythical powers. It is a propaganda channel whose mission it is to destroy the Democratic Party. That’s part of why Clintons’ performance had such salience. Finally he was standing up to an evil empire.

It is odd that they are so spooked. In October America is set to become a nation of 300 million. What a big country. Fox News’s average evening prime-time viewership is less than two million. Its average daytime is less than a million. And if my mail is an indication, they’re already Republicans. Fox’s power is that it is an alternative to the mainstream media. It did not take its shape by deeply inhaling liberalism and slowly breathing it out.

*   *   *

The left sees Fox as a symptom and promoter of anarchy. The old unity, the old essential unity one used to experience when one turned on the TV in 1950 or 1980, has been fractured, broken up. We are becoming balkanized. Fox, blogs, talk radio, the Internet, citizen reporters—it’s all producing cacophony, and heralds a future of No Compromise. No one trusts the information they’re given anymore, as they trusted Uncle Walter. This is bad for the country.

It is an odd thing about modern liberals that they’re made anxious by the unsanctioned. A conservative is more likely to see what’s happening as freedom. It isn’t that honest and impartial news lost its place of respect, it’s that establishment liberalism lost its journalistic monopoly. And it was a monopoly.

Not everyone believed Uncle Walter. Uncle Walter, and Chet and David, were all there was. But while they reigned, Americans were buying “Conscience of a Conservative” by Barry Goldwater, and Reagan was quietly rising way out in California, and Spiro Agnew and Bill Safire were issuing mainstream hits like “effete snobs” and “nattering nabobs.” In the time liberals think of as the last great unified era, Americans were rising up.

The new media did not divide us. The new media gave voice to our divisions. The result: more points of view, more subjects discussed, more data presented. This, in a great republic, a great democracy, a leader of the world in a dangerous time, is not bad but good.

But nothing comes free. All big changes have unexpected benefits and unanticipated drawbacks. Here is a loss: the man on the train.

Forty and 50 years ago, mainstream liberal media executives—middle-aged men who fought in Tarawa or Chosin, went to Cornell, and sat next to the man in the gray flannel suit on the train to the city, who hoisted a few in the bar car, and got off at Greenwich or Cos Cob, Conn.—those great old liberals had some great things in them.

One was a high-minded interest in imposing certain standards of culture on the American people. They actually took it as part of their mission to elevate the country. And from this came…”Omnibus.”

When I was a child of 8 or so I looked up at the TV one day and saw a man cry, “My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!” He was on a field of battle, surrounded by mud and loss. I was riveted. Later a man came on the screen and said, “Thank you for watching Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III.’ “ And I thought, as a little American child: That was something, I gotta find out what a Shakespeare is.

I got that from “Omnibus.”

Those old men on the train—they were strangers, but in the age of media a stranger can change your life.

And because the men on the train had one boss, who shared their vision—he didn’t want to be embarrassed that his legacy was “My Mother the Car”—and because the networks had limited competition, the pressure to live or die by ratings was not so intense as today. The competition for ad dollars wasn’t so killer. They could afford an indulgence. The result was a real public service.

Now the man on the train is a relic, and no one is saying, “As the lucky holders of a broadcast license we have a responsibility to pass on the jewels of our culture to the young.” In a competitive environment that would be a ticket to corporate oblivion at every network, including Fox.

TV is still great, in some ways better than ever. Freedom works.

And yet. When we deposed the old guy on the train, it wasn’t all gain. No longer would the old liberals get to impose their vision. But what took its place was programming for the lowest common denominator. Things that don’t make you reach. Things you don’t want to teach. Eating worms on air-crash island with “Jackass.”

*   *   *

I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was saying. “You mean it’s gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the dictatorship of the retarded.”

Yes, he said. And it’s not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that’s what they should be missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When conservatives say there’s nothing to miss, they’re wrong. We lost some bias, but we lost some standards, too.

This is what I was thinking as I walked this week along the siren-filled streets of New York: The temperature of the world is very high.

We have a global warming problem, and maybe it’s due to an increase in the output of heated words. And they too can, in the end, melt icecaps.

“The Pope must die.” “The Holocaust is a lie.” “I can still smell the sulfur.”

The last of course from the democratically elected president of the republic of Venezuela, population 26 million, which helps keep America going economically by selling it, at significant profit, oil.

His remarks were startling. No one wants to dignify them with a response. But that’s a mistake. Because the world heard them.

*   *   *

U.N. speeches are, by history and tradition, boring. You daydream to them. This is not all accident, not only the result of the fact that a nation’s diplomats don’t usually come from the more scintillating parts of its elites. (They rose to the U.N. in the first place because they didn’t fatally offend anyone back home.) Their speeches are dull because they know divisions can be dodged or blunted by a heartening vagueness. And so their words are blankets, not bullets; meant to envelop, not pierce.

But here was Hugo Chavez Wednesday to the General Assembly:

The “pretensions” of “the American empire” threaten “the survival” of mankind. The world must “halt this threat.” The American president talks “as if he owned the world” and leads a “world dictatorship” that must not be allowed to “be consolidated.” Bush will spend “the rest of [his] days as a nightmare.” The U.S. government is “imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal,” a “hypocritical” empire that only pretends to mourn the deaths of innocents. But not only the Mideast will rise. “People of the South,” “oppressed” by America, must “strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle.”

That’s not vague. It’s a call to arms.

The administration quickly moved to dismiss it: More bilge from the buffoon, more opera bouffe. We won’t comment or dignify.

The right doesn’t want to take him seriously (we don’t need more problems), and the left doesn’t want to see him clearly (we gave birth to that?). But Chavez’s speech achieved a great deal, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.

He raised his own standing. He got the world to look at him. He emerged in the speech as heir to the dying Fidel Castro, who he was careful to note is still alive and kicking. Chavez doesn’t want to be the current Fidel, the old man in soft fatigues, but the Fidel of 1960, who when he went to the U.N. pointedly camped in a hotel in Harlem, and electrified the masses. Chavez even followed his speech with the announcement he was giving heating oil to the needy of the Bronx. You know what they said in the Bronx? Thanks! It went over big on local TV.

He broke through the clutter. Everyone this weekend will be discussing what he said—exactly what he said, and how he said it.

He shook things up. His speech was, essentially if implicitly, a call to resistance, by any means, to the government of the United States.

He broadened his claimed base. Chavez made the argument that it is not America versus Saddam or America versus terrorists but the American Empire versus all the yearning people of the world. He claimed as his constituency everyone unhappy with the unipolar world.

He acknowledged a particular reality by putting distance between the current administration and the American people. This is not so much new as shrewd, and telling. It is an unacknowledged fact known to every diplomat in the world that the people of the world like Americans. Old Europe and new, Africa, people on the ground all over, have some acquaintance with the particular American character of openness and generosity. We turn our faith, and guilt at good fortune, into do-gooding. We send money, bring bandages and overtip. The world has met us. (This by the way is our biggest foreign-policy strength.) Those who attack America are forced to speak highly of Americans, and Chavez did, which allows him to reach potential new allies here. People don’t mind being told they are very fine but their government is very wicked. He gave new cover to critics of America. Jacques Chirac to Condoleezza Rice the next time he throws a snare: “You think I’m bad? Chavez would kill you!”

*   *   *

America has seen this before, seen Krushchev bang his shoe on the table and say “We will bury you.” We grew up watching our flag being burned on TV. So it’s tempting to think this is part of a meaningless continuum.

But the temperature of the world is very high, and maybe we’re not stuck in a continuum but barreling down a dark corridor. The problem with heated words now is that it’s not the old world anymore. In the old world, incompetent governments dragged cannons through the mud to set up a ragged front. Now every nut and nation wants, has or is trying to develop nukes.

Harsh words inspire the unstable.

Coolants are needed. Here is an idea. Don’t try to ignore Chavez, answer him. With the humility that comes with deep confidence, with facts, and with some humor, too.

There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party. Some Democrats responded with spirited indignation the day after Chavez spoke. It was rousing. But Chavez’s charges were grave, and he claimed America’s abuses could be tracked back a century. If the Democrats seek to speak for America, why not start with a serious and textured response, one that isn’t a political blast-back but a high-minded putting forward of facts? This would take guts, and farsightedness. Rebutting a wild-eyed man who says you can find redemption reading Noam Chomsky is a little too much like rebutting a part of your base.

As for the administration, it is so in the habit of asserting, defending and repeating, it barely remembers how to persuade and appeal. It speaks starkly and carries a big stick. It feels so beleaguered on a daily basis, and so snakebit, that even its mildest players have taken refuge in gritting their teeth and tunneling on. They take comfort in this: They think Chavez helps them. See what we’re up against? But that’s not a response, it’s a way not to respond. It doesn’t help, because it doesn’t even try to cool things down. Which is no good, because the temperature of the world is very high.

Autumn is the true American New Year. This is when we make our real resolutions.

The perfect fall has two things, present pleasure (new exhibits, shows, parties) and something to look forward to—for the political, the upcoming election.

Which is my subject. My resolution is to try in a renewed way, each day, and within my abilities, to be fair. I find myself thinking so much of William Meredith’s poem about the advice he’d received from older writers: “Look hard at the world, they said—generously, if you can manage that, but hard.”

In light of that, my sense of things: They say the election is all about Iraq. It’s not. It’s about George W. Bush. He dominates the discussion, or rather obsesses the discussers.

He is talking a lot lately, out there in America, and in the Oval Office. People don’t say as often as they used to, “You watch Bush’s speech last night?” Or they don’t ask it with the same anticipation and interest.

I think that Americans have pretty much stopped listening to him. One reason is that you don’t have to listen to get a sense of what’s going on. He does not appear to rethink things based on new data. You don’t have to tune in to see how he’s shifting emphasis to address a trend, or tacking to accommodate new winds. For him there is no new data, only determination.

He repeats old arguments because he believes they are right, because he has no choice—in for a penny, in for a pound—and because his people believe in the dogma of the magic of repetition: Say it, say it, to break through the clutter.

There’s another reason people don’t listen to Mr. Bush as much as they did. It is that in some fundamental way they know they have already fully absorbed him. He’s burned his brand into the American hide.

Pundits and historians call Mr. Bush polarizing—and he is, but in some unusual ways. For one thing, he’s not trying to polarize. He is not saying, “My team is for less government, your team is for more—my team, stand with me!”

Mr. Bush has muddied what his team stands for. He has made it all come down to him—not to philosophy but to him and his certitudes.

What is polarizing about him is the response he elicits from Americans just by being himself. They have deep questions about him, even as he is vivid to them.

Americans don’t really know, deep down in their heads, whether this president, in his post-9/11 decisions, is a great man or a catastrophe, a visionary or wholly out of his depth.

What they increasingly sense is that he’s one thing or the other. And this is not a pleasant thing to sense. The stakes are so high. If you woke most Americans up at 3:00 in the morning and said, “Tell me, looking back, what would you have liked in an American president after 9/11?” most of them would answer, “I was just hoping for a good man who did moderately good things.” Who caught Osama, cleaned out Afghanistan, made it proof of the possibility of change and of the price to be paid by those who choose terror as a tactic. Not this historical drama queen, this good witch or bad.

The one thing I think America agrees on is that George Bush and his presidency have been enormously consequential. He has made decisions that will shape the future we’ll inhabit. It’s never “We must do this” with Mr. Bush. It’s always “the concentrated work of generations.” He doesn’t declare, he commits; and when you back him, you’re never making a discrete and specific decision, you’re always making a long-term investment.

This can be exhausting.

And yet: You know he means it when he says he is trying to protect America. You know his heart is in it. You know he means it when he says there are bad guys and we will stop them. And that has meaning.

With all this polarity, this drama, this added layer Mr. Bush brings to a nation already worn by the daily demands of modern individual life, the political alternative, the Democrats, should roar in six weeks from now, right? And return us to normalcy?

Well, that’s not what I sense.

I like Democrats. I feel sympathy for the hungry and hapless, identify with aspirations, am deeply frustrated with Mr. Bush. More seriously, I believe we are at the start of a struggle for the survival of the West, and I know it is better for our country if both of its two major parties have equal responsibility in that struggle. Beyond that, let’s be frank. Bad days are coming, and we’re all going to have to get through them together, with two parties, arm in arm. It’s a big country.

But I feel the Democrats this year are making a mistake. They think it will be a cakewalk. A war going badly, immigration, high spending, a combination of sentimentality and dimness in foreign affairs—everyone in the world wants to be free, and in exactly the way we define freedom at dinner parties in McLean and Chevy Chase—and conservative thinkers and writers hopping mad and hoping to lose the House.

The Democrats’ mistake—ironically, in a year all about Mr. Bush—is obsessing on Mr. Bush. They’ve been sucker-punched by their own animosity.

“The Democrats now are incapable of answering a question on policy without mentioning Bush six times,” says pollster Kellyanne Conway. “ ‘What is your vision on Iraq?’ ‘Bush lied us into war.’ ‘Health care? ‘Bush hasn’t a clue.’ They’re so obsessed with Bush it impedes them from crafting and communicating a vision all their own.” They heighten Bush by hating him.

One of the oldest clichés in politics is, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” It’s a cliché because it’s true. You have to have belief, and a program. You have to look away from the big foe and focus instead on the world and philosophy and programs you imagine.

Mr. Bush’s White House loves what the Democrats are doing. They want the focus on him. That’s why he’s out there talking, saying Look at me.

Because familiarity doesn’t only breed contempt, it can breed content. Because if you’re going to turn away from him, you’d better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don’t appear to have one.

Which leaves them unlikely to win leadership. And unworthy of it, too.

Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We’ve all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn’t always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar.

The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Ironworkers of New York’s Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, “My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I’m saying ‘no way.’ Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling.”

Rudy Giuliani said it was like an earthquake. The actor Jim Caviezel saw the second plane hit the towers on television and what he heard shook him: “A weird, guttural discordant sound,” he called it, a sound exactly like lightning. He knew because earlier that year he’d been hit. My son, then a teenager in a high school across the river from the towers, heard the first plane go in at 8:45 a.m. It sounded, he said, like a heavy truck going hard over a big street grate.

*   *   *

I think too about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes—the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.

Something terrible had happened. Life was reduced to its essentials. Time was short. People said what counted, what mattered. It has been noted that there is no record of anyone calling to say, “I never liked you,” or, “You hurt my feelings.” No one negotiated past grievances or said, “Vote for Smith.” Amazingly —or not—there is no record of anyone damning the terrorists or saying “I hate them.”

No one said anything unneeded, extraneous or small. Crisis is a great editor. When you read the transcripts that have been released over the years it’s all so clear.

Flight 93 flight attendant Ceecee Lyles, 33 years old, in an answering-machine message to her husband: “Please tell my children that I love them very much. I’m sorry, baby. I wish I could see your face again.”

Thirty-one-year-old Melissa Harrington, a California-based trade consultant at a meeting in the towers, called her father to say she loved him. Minutes later she left a message on the answering machine as her new husband slept in their San Francisco home. “Sean, it’s me, she said. “I just wanted to let you know I love you.”

Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department’s Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. “I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids.”

Firemen don’t become firemen because they’re pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he’s going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she’d played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. “He was thinking about us in those final moments.”

Elizabeth Rivas saw it that way too. When her husband left for the World Trade Center that morning, she went to a laundromat, where she heard the news. She couldn’t reach him by cell and rushed home. He’d called at 9:02 and reached her daughter. The child reported, “He say, mommy, he say he love you no matter what happens, he loves you.” He never called again. Mrs. Rivas later said, “He tried to call me. He called me.”

There was the amazing acceptance. I spoke this week with a medical doctor who told me she’d seen many people die, and many “with grace and acceptance.” The people on the planes didn’t have time to accept, to reflect, to think through; and yet so many showed the kind of grace you see in a hospice.

Peter Hanson, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 called his father. “I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building,” he said. “Don’t worry, Dad—if it happens, it will be very fast.” On the same flight, Brian Sweeney called his wife, got the answering machine, and told her they’d been hijacked. “Hopefully I’ll talk to you again, but if not, have a good life. I know I’ll see you again some day.”

There was Tom Burnett’s famous call from United Flight 93. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told his wife, Deena. “I love you, honey.”

These were people saying, essentially, In spite of my imminent death, my thoughts are on you, and on love. I asked a psychiatrist the other day for his thoughts, and he said the people on the planes and in the towers were “accepting the inevitable” and taking care of “unfinished business.” “At death’s door people pass on a responsibility—’Tell Billy I never stopped loving him and forgave him long ago.’ ‘Take care of Mom.’ ‘Pray for me, Father. Pray for me, I haven’t been very good.’ “ They address what needs doing.

This reminded me of that moment when Todd Beamer of United 93 wound up praying on the phone with a woman he’d never met before, a Verizon Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. She said later that his tone was calm. It seemed as if they were “old friends,” she later wrote. They said the Lord’s Prayer together. Then he said “Let’s roll.”

*   *   *

This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they’d guess. And this: We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar.