Peggy Noonan

No one takes conventions seriously. They’re not where democracy happens anymore. They’re mere enactments of politics, not the real and gritty thing. And yet we have to have them because they serve a purpose: They provide the platform for the big speech.

The big speech—the acceptance speech of the presidential nominee—is always important. It can be revealing, it can be inspiring and it can give you insight. It can make you give a candidate a second look, or a first; it can make you turn away from him for good.

A week from tonight John Kerry gives his acceptance speech. If it is good or great it will be turned into a million commercials and will be cut up and quoted so often on TV that people who don’t see it will think, a year from now, that they did. If it is good or great it will inspire a lot of memorable bad writing from the newspaper poets—The Knight of the Woeful Countenance who dazzled the crowd from the moment he rode forward and unfurled his banner. If it’s a poor or merely average speech it will be a reason Mr. Kerry lost if he loses.

*   *   *

Normally an acceptance speech is an opportunity for a candidate not to unveil his beliefs but to restate them in a way that breaks through to the public mind. In Mr. Kerry’s case, since the average American probably doesn’t know what he stands for beyond the idea that he can’t stand George Bush, the speech is an opportunity to paint himself anew. He is not “Not Bush,” he is “Kerry Who Believes in . . .”

In what? Mr. Kerry is a “liberal,” or a “progressive.” What is that these days? He could tell us. He might take this opportunity to actually redefine what liberalism is, and rescue it from its dread L-word status as the thing Democrats are and can’t admit. Conservatives aren’t afraid to call themselves conservative. They even do this when they’re acting like liberals. Mr. Kerry should tell us what liberals intend with regard to domestic policy. Another way to say this is: The past half century liberals have won a great deal—Social Security, Medicare, civil rights, the megastate. What exactly do they want to win now?

Some say Mr. Kerry must use the speech to make his position on Iraq clearer. In purely political terms there’s little benefit in this. When you’re cloudy you’re not a clear target. There’s no difference between Bush and Kerry on the war except people know Mr. Bush means it and assume Mr. Kerry doesn’t. This gives Mr. Kerry a certain flexibility. It is the one area where his lack of sincerity is a plus. To the extent he can, he should leave it alone, which is to say damn Mr. Bush in general terms and keep walking.

Mr. Kerry has a problem with rhetoric. He doesn’t have his own sound. You may hate Mr. Bush’s sound but it’s his, and a lot of people like it. He sounds normal, which for all its pluses and minuses as a style does tend to underscore the idea that he is normal. Mr. Kerry and his speechwriter, Bob Shrum, have long relied on a sort of proto-New Frontier sound that is the rhetorical default position for lost Democrats. Now is their chance to reinvent the Democratic sound. JFK himself came forward as JFK. He didn’t present himself to the world with a cigarette-holder, a jut-jawed chin and rimless eyeglasses. That is to say, he did not make believe he was FDR, the party’s giant who’d died just 15 years before. JFK knew to be JFK. Kerry should be Kerry. This is assuming there is a Kerry. For argument’s sake, let’s.

Mr. Kerry should give us something fresh and awake—true to him while being new from him. It should not be orotund. He might consider surprising everyone by approaching things in a low key, plain-speech way. In conversation he doesn’t sound weird, but on the stump he often does. (It’s odd that we’re in a time when candidates seem more compelling when they’re not making speeches. They seem more interesting when they’re overheard talking. It used to be just the opposite.)

Will Mr. Kerry get real and be plain as a plank, or will he “ask not”? Don’t ask. A prediction: People do what they know how to do, and for decades Mr. Kerry and Mr. Shrum have been doing the JFK thing. And it will please many in the hall. But it won’t play as well in America. Mr. Kerry is one of those rare public men who never get over self-consciousness in public. He’s also that rare athlete who seems to lack physical grace. (In these things, oddly, he’s like George Herbert Walker Bush.) He seems affected because he’s self-conscious, and this is compounded by an air of premeditation. In all the pictures of him taking part in sports he always has the perfect right gear on, striking sort of the right pose. He seems to be enacting sports more than enjoying them. He always seems to be enacting rather than enjoying. This is why John Edwards in comparison seems normal.

Mr. Edwards is going to be bigger than the Democrats and Republicans think. You can talk about how vice-presidential nominees don’t make a difference, or about how they can maybe lose it for you but not win it, but watch him. He’s going to be a better candidate than Mr. Kerry (which the campaign seems to be conceding with their latest ads, which feature not Mr. Kerry talking about the future but Mr. Edwards vouching for Mr. Kerry).

Mr. Edwards has the sun on his face. He’s a happy man, and happy candidates have unseen power. He has successfully hidden his desire for personal power behind a “people vs. the powerful” populism, and he sees no reason to believe he’s going to get busted now. The compelling personal story—he’s a one-man John Grisham novel—the kids, the smile. His wife looks and acts like a normal American woman who didn’t turn her accomplishments into a gritty sense of entitlement and whose engine is not a robust resentment.

*   *   *

Which gets us to Hillary. It’s a great favor to her that she won’t be giving one of the big rabble-rousing speeches. When she speaks to a sympathetic audience eager for red meat her voice becomes high, harsh, grating—the first wife that your nice husband fled. People think the evil woman Meryl Streep plays in “The Manchurian Candidate” is Hillary because, well, they’ve seen Hillary make a speech. She’s better in interviews where her voice is conversational and her chuckle ever-ready. If Mr. Kerry wins, no one will remember she didn’t speak. If he loses she doesn’t want to be part of the retrospectives on How the Democrats Turned America Off.

Recently I wrote a column on a particular anxiety I’ve been feeling regarding the coming election and the prospects of President Bush. I stated that some voters may be feeling or come to feel that history has simply become too dramatic the past few years, and one way out of the drama might be to change presidents, and hire Mr. Kerry to, in effect, make things more boring and force history to calm down. This has given rise in the blogosphere (see this Instapundit entry, for example) to a question: Do I, and others who have written on this subject, think that what might be called the new nervousness should compel the Bush administration to stop fighting the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and change its policy in the war on terror? Should we, in a word, withdraw?

My answer is no. We cannot leave Iraq and should not leave Iraq. Certainly lately, since the transfer of sovereignty, things seem to be looking up, but that may well prove temporary. But the great reason, as I have written before on Iraq, is that there’s no way ‘round it but through it. We have to stay, and we have to win. I define winning as the yielding up of, at the least, a relatively stable society unafflicted by governmental sadism and dictatorship, and, at the most, a stable society in a fledgling democracy that demonstrates, with time, that the forces of Arab moderation, tolerance and peacefulness can triumph. Such an outcome would give so much good to the world. What a brilliant beacon this Iraq could be, and what a setback to terrorists, who thrive in darkness.

I do not feel America is right to attempt to help spread democracy in the world because it is our way and therefore the right way. Nor do I think America should attempt to encourage it because we are Western and feel everyone should be Western. Not everyone should be Western, and not everything we do as a culture, a people or an international force is right.

Rather, we have a national-security obligation to foster democracy in the world because democracy tends to be the most peaceful form of government. Democracies tend to be slower than dictatorships to take up arms, to cross borders and attempt to subdue neighbors, to fight wars. They are on balance less likely to wreak violence upon the world because democracies are composed of voters many of whom are parents, especially mothers, who do not wish to see their sons go to war. Democracy is not only idealistic, it is practical.

*   *   *

What I wrote about a few weeks ago was my fear that the American people have grown or are growing tired of the heightened drama of the times. Americans like drama in their lives—they like graduations and first jobs and prizes and the birth of a baby in the family; they like triathalons and great stories and local mysteries. They like movement and action on a personal level. But they do not want it on a historical level if they can avoid it. They don’t want to send their sons, or daughters, off to war. They don’t like that kind of excitement, or they don’t like it for long. This is part of why we used to be called Isolationists. We weren’t and aren’t—we just have a bias for peace. Can that bias be overcome? Of course. Pearl Harbor overcame it. The Soviet desire to expand and impose communism overcame it. Sept. 11 did too.

Which gets us to Mr. Bush, and Mr. Kerry, and which of the two is likelier to make things historically boring again.

You may say history will never be boring again, and I’d agree with you. And you may say “Bush and perseverance” is the way to achieve progress, that victory in Iraq and against terrorism is the only path to something like the old boredom, and the old safety. I’m with you there, too.

Or you may decide that Mr. Kerry, by jumbling things and murking them up and speaking French will, by his very presence, tend to calm things down because—well, because he doesn’t really seem deeply wedded to any particular principle, or even to long-term strategic thinking in the national interest. And the world can tell, and a good portion of the world will like him all the better for these flaws. And so will some voters.

That’s my anxiety. If I am right, what can the president do to address this problem? How to approach an electorate that I believe respects Mr. Bush and likes him, but that is also capable of letting his contract expire and hiring Mr. Kerry for four years?

*   *   *

Here is a criticism I have spoken of but not written of regarding President Bush. When you are president and you are doing hard things in history like making war, and you are doing it in the jingle-jangle of the modern media environment, you have a kind of moral responsibility to make it clear that you hate war, really hate it, and love peace. This would seem obvious, but is not. Men and women in the midst of planning war forget to say it and insist it. Sly old FDR didn’t forget, though. Lincoln didn’t forget it either. He always made it clear he thought the impending and then ongoing war a painful tragedy. Mr. Bush has not made it clear, or has not repeated often enough, that he hopes for peace, yearns for peace, loves it. He seems part of the very drama he has been forced to wage, and seems sometimes to enjoy it.

This is delicate. A leader cannot seem ambivalent about crucial actions and decisions, and he can’t seem so weighed down by the facts and implications of those decisions that people begin to wonder if he’s lost his fight. There’s a reason people like a happy warrior. A happy warrior tends to be a winning warrior. And yet. In the world we live in a leader must seem almost palpably yearning for life and peace even as he makes tough decisions that will soon deny either or both to some.

Lately I am reminded of something I learned from a pollster. I always thought I never learned anything from pollsters when I worked in politics, but this has stayed with me long enough to realize I absorbed a lesson. It was in the mid-1980’s, I was a speechwriter for President Reagan, and we were working on a speech he would give on Central America. The speech centered on attempted communist incursions and mischief in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere. The president gave the speech, and explained U.S. interests and intentions: We will help this pro-democracy group here, that democratically elected government there.

As I remember it, shortly after the speech was given, the president’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, a smart man, came in and met with the speechwriters. He wanted to give us a read on how the speech had gone over. I remember silently disagreeing with several of his points but being struck by this one. I can’t give you quotes so I’m going to give you what I remember Mr. Wirthlin saying in italics. People think we are declaring war all over the place, he said. We probably harrumphed back something like ‘Well, we’re in a war.” Mr. Wirthlin told us, You’re getting people nervous, as if America is launching a war here and here and here and here.

I imagined in my mind a map, and all the countries we had referred to as having problems that had to be addressed. I wondered if in other people’s minds, as they had listened to Reagan, they weren’t seeing something like a World War II planning map, and some captain with a pointer saying “We’ll commence the bombing runs here and here at 0800.”

And I thought, in time: Mr. Wirthlin may be right. There must be an equally candid but less unnerving way to speak of these things. Sometimes when you’re doing the hardest things you have to speak in the softest language.

People get nervous. And they’re not wrong to be nervous. Experience has taught them to be. Life is hard, and we all fear loss. I have had a very few conversations with Margaret Thatcher, and each time she has said something wise, but maybe the wisest was this. It was years ago, after she had lost power following an attempt to change the poll tax in Britain. She told me she had learned that in politics one must “never underestimate people’s fears.” At the time I thought that a surprising thing for the Iron Lady to say, or think. Those who know her well would know if she was saying what she’d always thought, or what she’d just learned, or relearned.

But it was knowing about human nature, and I think a little more of that kind of knowledge is what we need more of from the Bush administration. It won’t make things boring again, but it might make people feel better, and that’s not bad.

The Kerry-Edwards rollout has been almost flawless, a triumph of image that obscured uncomfortable realities. The two senators are not, as the Boston Herald merrily front-paged yesterday morning, “THEY’RE LEFT OF TED!” They are the son of a mill worker and the husband of an ‘umble immigrant.

Wednesday morning’s unveiling of the Kerry and Edwards clans at the leafy Heinz compound in what looked like exurban Pennsylvania, but which they repeatedly referred to as “Pittsburgh,” was a handsome Kennedyesque photo-op in which Mr. Kerry’s elder daughter—long, blond ponytail, lithe and chic—seemed to play the part of the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and tall, dark-haired Chris Heinz seemed like the late John Jr. The Edwardses’ towheaded children looked like John-John and Caroline when they lived in the White House. It was all very glamorous in a way that Democrats like (Hyde Park, Hyannis, Clinton in Hollywood—we like big houses and boats, we have a secret weakness for wealth!) and Republicans don’t (We’re clearing brush here, get out of the way! We sleep in two twin beds held together at the posts by old rubber bands!) Teresa Heinz had the best line of the day: “Pittsburgh taught me to be an American.”

Tuesday’s Edwards announcement was also well done, slightly weird but only mildly so for Mr. Kerry. The solid week of head-fakes on who the choice would be was brilliantly executed. It not only built what suspense could be built, it forced the networks to keep rolling out minibios of Dick Gephardt and Tom Vilsack and Dianne Feinstein. This made it look like the Democrats had a deep bench. It made it look as if Mr. Kerry had a lot of serious prospects to choose from. In 1988 Vice President Bush literally kept his choice a secret by telling no one around him until the day of the announcement of Dan Quayle. Jim Baker was as surprised as Tom DeFrank. Mr. Bush was surrounded by leakers who advanced their position with the press by feeding them tasty morsels. Mr. Bush couldn’t be sure any of them would keep the formation to themselves. Mr. Kerry must have felt pretty much the same. He must know that the primary lesson of “I, Claudius” is now the primary rule of all political campaigns: “Trust no one.”

*   *   *

I continue to wonder why an accomplished athlete like Mr. Kerry handles his body with such unease. He never seems to know what to do with his arms and hands. They fly away from him. His physical actions do not seem coordinated with his expression, with what his face is doing and his eyes are seeing. And so he has taken to pointing. When he goes on stage he looks out at the audience and then makes a face as if he’s surprised to see a friend standing over there to the right, and another over there to the left. He lurchily points at them with his long arm. Sometimes he gives them a thumbs up. Sometimes it ends with a finger flutter.

He does this because Bill Clinton did it. Mr. Clinton did it because someone told him that pointing in a commanding way while the cameras click makes him look like a leader. It also makes him look as if he has friends in the audience. I used to go to Mr. Clinton speeches and watch him point. I’d swing my head around to see who he was pointing at. He was never pointing at anyone. No one knew who he was pointing at. They always thought it was the guy behind him or the girl over there. But they liked it. Anyway, the Point is a perfect Time/Newsweek cover, and often has been.

I remain impressed by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s palpable boredom and disinterest in playing the part of Mr. Kerry’s wife. Tuesday, when Mr. Kerry first came out and started to do the pointing-at-my-friends-in-the-crowd thing, he took her hand and whispered in her ear something like, “There’s Bob Smith.” Meaning, “I want you to look with me at Bob and smile.” She couldn’t hear him and shook her head, twice. Then finally when she heard him she smiled wanly as if to say, So what? She stifled a yawn on stage too. I love her.

By the way, Republicans tend not to point at the crowd in this way. They wave. I think it’s because their mothers taught them pointing is rude. Someday, in 2008 or 2012, there will, however, be a Republican pointer. And we will know history has truly changed. Because that man’s mother will not have taught him that pointing is rude, for she was working 18 hours a day in a law firm, and forgot.

In his Tuesday announcement, Mr. Kerry was 20 minutes into his remarks before he said anything interesting: “John Edwards and I would never think about sending young Americans . . . into harm’s way anywhere in the world without telling the American people the truth.” This is going down into Michael Moore territory, and it’s going to be a big theme. He also talked about American independence from oil. That’s been an issue for 30 years, but this time it may take off.

Before that Mr. Kerry did nothing but boring boilerplate—John Edwards “shares American values”—all that vague stuff. What does that mean? It means someone’s focus group said “they like the word values” But they like it when it has meaning, when it is connected to issues that mean something, not when it’s just some dumb word cynically thrown out for the boobs. Boobs are sophisticated now. They may be sophisticated beyond their intelligence, but they know rote words used to please them are rote words used to please them. And they’re not impressed.

*   *   *

By the way, I continue to be impressed by how Mr. Kerry plays Vietnam. He served four months in Vietnam, and everyone thinks it was years. It’s like a guy showing up on the History Channel talking about the Pacific war, and breaking into tears as he remembers the bombardment. Gray head, sagging face, old aviator glasses. And then the interviewer says “Tell us how long you were there?” And the old guy chirps, “Oh, four months! Scratched my arm, got my ticket punched, and got out of Dodge!” If Mr. Kerry had not led with his weakness—if he had not boldly gone forth from day one presenting his candidacy as one of a Vietnam hero—the whole subject would at this point in the campaign be not a theme but an embarrassment.

The way he’s played it, putting the spotlight on his weakness—that has been a triumph of image that obscured uncomfortable realities too.

LONDON—There is much to be said about this city, where I am on vacation, but my first thought is that the English continue to love flowers, and Mayfair’s homes—windowsills, little garden areas created around front steps and between small shops—are bursting with them. I can never remember the names of flowers, but the ones I’m seeing are white and yellow and rose-colored and pink and deep red. and tall and stately or short and rough looking or kind of peeping up and looking brave. They are just gorgeous.

This seems true of every neighborhood I’ve been in, and also of the small terraces on the modest high-rises on the way in from Heathrow. The rain and sunshine have been intermittent the past week, and the flowers are not dry but full of juice, and brilliant. It all reminds me of a nice block in Brooklyn Heights, where the flowers lately also look particularly vibrant.

When I was a young woman I found all beauty and fascination in people. I found flowers boring. I ignored them when I saw them, or turned away. I think I felt they got in the way of my understanding Kafka and Sartre. I think I also thought flowers were something old ladies do to make things prettier because they don’t understand the tragedy of life. Now I think people who put flowers all over the place are the only geniuses. They know flowers are an unasked-for and essentially unearned bit of beauty given to us perhaps to suggest other, greater beauty to come. They’re in Einstein-land, gardeners, and thinking of eternity. And I thought they were just retards with spades. Anyway, flower people are generous. They make everything look prettier, at no charge and for your enjoyment, even though they’ve never met you. So here’s to flower power, and thank you, London from this American traveler.

*   *   *

But let me be pundit-y for a few sentences. The Brits had bannered on all their newspapers the other morning the picture of Paul Bremer waving goodbye to Iraq. The early transfer of sovereignty to Iraq has hit everyone here, friend of the invasion and foe, as a brilliant stroke. Leaving early, and with such modesty—it was a pleasure to be here, let us know if there’s anything we can do—tends to undermine charges of U.S. imperialism. President Bush is feeling triumphant—one can tell even from here—and the Western press is looking very irritable indeed. They don’t like to be surprised, they don’t like it when Mr. Bush scores one, and they don’t like it when the troublemakers they’ve been so banking on to prove their point that Iraq was a fiasco don’t even get a chance to stop the turnover.

Hand it to Mr. Bush: He’s got guts. And whatever happens in the coming election, his administration will be remembered as one of the most consequential in modern political history. He did things, and they were all big and meaningful, and they will have implications for decades.

But let me share a thought I’ve been having that is not so jolly. It has to do with Mr. Bush’s re-election prospects and a worry I have. History has been too dramatic the past 3 1/2 years. It has been too exciting. Economic recession, 9/11, war, Afghanistan, Iraq, fighting with Europe. fighting with the U.N., boys going off to fight, Pat Tillman, beheadings. It has been so exciting. And my general sense of Americans is that we like things to be boring. Or rather we like history to be boring; we like our lives to be exciting. We like history to be like something Calvin Coolidge dreamed: dull, dull. dull. And then we complain about the dullness, and invent excitements that are the kind we really like: moon shots, spaceships, curing diseases. Big tax cuts that encourage big growth that creates lots of jobs for young people just out of school.

No, I am not suggesting all our recent excitement is Mr. Bush’s fault. History handed him what it handed him. And no, I am not saying the decisions he took were wrong or right or some degree of either. I’m saying it’s all for whatever reasons been more dramatic than Americans in general like history to be.

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he’s a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry. He’ll never do anything exciting. He doesn’t have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn’t stand for anything, he won’t have to take hard stands. He’ll do things like go to France and talk French and they’ll love it. He’ll say he’s the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he’ll say it in French and perfectly accented and they’ll all go “ooh la la!”

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let’s hire someone who’ll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless.

I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. “A return to normalcy,” with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

OK, readers, tell me I’m wrong. Or if you think I’m right or part right, tell me what Mr. Bush can do about it.

June 9, 2004, approximately 5 p.m., U.S. Capitol:

What I was thinking was: Everyone here brought their souls. We are all these physical repositories of ourselves, of our characters and personalities and ambitions. But everybody is a soul, has a soul, and all these people gathered for the funeral of the great man of their lives, and they brought their souls.

I tell you this because it somehow has to do with what followed.

Many, not all, were aging or old. They had run the country 20 and 30 years ago. They had lived lives of import and meaning. But they were not this afternoon their official selves, their old formal selves, but something else.

*   *   *

We were in the Mansfield room, just off the Capitol Rotunda, a big tall gold-trimmed room ringed with old oil portraits of great men—Jefferson, Adams. The ones who made their country. As I stood near the entrance looking out at them, I had a visual memory of a book party long ago, in 1990 I think, in the sizeable outdoor yard of William Safire’s house in suburban Maryland. It was late springtime or early summer. A sudden breeze came up, strong and out of nowhere, and hundreds, thousands, of small petals and pieces of pollen filled the air, and fell upon our heads. Like a benediction. It seemed barely noticed by the busy talkers, who laughed and shook their heads and continued talking. But it was beautiful. God is here.

At the Capitol, there were 100 or so of us in the room, friends and colleagues and co-workers of Ronald Reagan. Air Force One would soon bring back to Washington his flag draped coffin. From Andrews Air Force Base a cortege would take him to the Capitol. The senators and congressmen were already massing in the Rotunda, where they would receive him. There would be a ceremony, and speeches. Then the politicians would leave, and the friends and colleagues of Ronald Reagan would depart the Mansfield Room to enter the Rotunda and say goodbye to the old man we loved, and loved in a way, some of us, that we didn’t even understand until we saw the coffin.

In that room, the Mansfield Room, there was a lot of laughing and remembering. “Remember the time . . .?” “Were you here when they put Jack Kennedy to rest?” Over here Jack and Joanne Kemp, leaders of the 1970s revolution that became part of the ‘80s revolution. Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser. Judge William Clark, his second. Ed and Ursula Meese, who were there from the early days, in California. Paul and Carol Laxalt—Paul was a senator from Nevada, part of the Western rebellion that lit the country in the 1970s, Carol bubbly as champagne. Jim Miller, Reagan’s budget director, still a big serious man in a big serious suit, and his wife. Bill Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, and his wife, Elaine.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, dignified, gutsy, with great cheekbones and still-saucy or potentially saucy eyes. Somewhere along the way, I have always felt, she made a decision. She chose to follow the academic and analytical part of her nature—”There is a difference between totalitarian governments and authoritarian governments and we must acknowledge it”—and not perhaps other parts of her inner self, parts perhaps less definitive and constructive, and perhaps more merry. But that kind of decision was true of a lot of people there, and always is when leaders are gathered. The pope felt the promptings of an artist, and followed call. Life is options up to a point, and then it’s decisions made.

Ann Dore McLaughlin, Reagan’s labor secretary, and her husband, Tom Korologos, just back from Iraq for George W. Bush. They stood together looking beautiful. A late marriage; they glowed. Al Haig and his wife. I am fascinated by Mr. Haig. Portrayed as rather too intense in Oliver Stone’s cinematically dazzling and historically demented “Nixon,” Mr. Haig did in fact help run the government as the Nixon administration ended, and helped talk him into resigning when that was the right thing to do for the country. He earned his pride. By the time he was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state it was clear he did not enjoy what might be called creative chaos in foreign affairs, and his pride at that point was such that he regularly threatened to resign. Reagan was patient, for a while. And then Mr. Haig was gone, and George Shultz, standing right over there, took his place.

Tricia Nixon Cox her husband, Ed, and their son, grown taller now than his father, were there. I said hello. She is a New Yorker, as were many in the group. Her father was the last president before Reagan to die. He did not have a state funeral. He was buried instead in relative quiet, in his beloved California. He had been the first and only president to resign from office, and thought putting the country through a state funeral was the wrong thing to do. In 1960 he had refused to contest an eminently contestable presidential election because he didn’t want to put the country through it, he felt it was the wrong thing to do. Richard Nixon, even when portrayed compassionately, is shown bathed in sweat and resentment. But he had a class—a patriotism—that has not been appreciated and understood. I said to Tricia that I would never forget the last time I saw her father, in a news clip on television, sobbing great racking sobs at the funeral of his wife, Patricia. I had been taken aback by his heartbreak. “Thank you,” Tricia said. “It’s really not known—no one knows how much he loved her, and what a good marriage they had. He adored my mother.” It is a wonderful thing to know that about your parents.

Dan and Marilyn Quayle were sitting over there—he grayer and she unaged, with short, chic hair. Their son studied in China and married a Chinese girl. Everyone talks about globalization and immigration, and these are fine abstractions, but the Quayle family is now part Chinese and the Bush family is part Mexican, and maybe you think that means nothing but it means plenty. Over here in a corner Sen. Pete Dominici watched the TV monitors waiting for Air Force One to land with the Reagans at Andrews. He had tears in his eyes. They were the only unexpected tears I saw that day.

Over here the great Hugh Sidey, historian of presidents, tall and gray. And Gayle Burt, former social secretary for Nancy Reagan and former wife of Richard Burt, of the famous-in-the-’80s two Richards. Richard Burt was at State (squishy! soft! an establishment-loving undersecretary for George Shultz), and Richard Perle was at Defense (hard liner! prince of darkness! Right wing nut!). I watched them both in those days. They had quite a bureaucratic war. And you know what? They were a good team. Maybe they fought each other, but they were a good team, as pragmatist Jim Baker and conservative Ed Meese were a good team, and conservative William Clark and pragmatist Mike Deaver. You know why? Because it all worked. Life is a mess and nothing is perfect and there were zigs that should have zagged, and no one got everything he wanted, but it all worked, and the country profited. You need 20 years of looking back to figure this out.

It was such a coming together.

*   *   *

I was standing looking out the big entranceway toward an arched and high-ceilinged hall. There a beautiful young man in a white jacket was giving my son a ginger ale from a small bar just beyond the doorway. My son—6 feet tall, in his first suit, with a sober tie and cufflinks, also his first—was taking the plastic cup of ginger ale in his hand and talking to a very beautiful woman, Blaine Trump, down from New York with her husband, Robert. I saw them say hello, say my son take the ginger ale when a rude man rushed by and knocked the glass from his hand.

Only he wasn’t a rude man. He was a frightened man, and he was trying to save our lives.

The man walked quickly and heavily and placed himself in the huge doorway of the Mansfield room. He had on a brown wool sports jacket.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” he barked. The old lions in that room looked at him and turned away. They thought him a functionary sent to tell us the body would soon land in Andrews. They continued talking.

“Quiet! Quiet!” He was ordering us now. I was standing just to his left, and when he said “Quiet” the second time I looked at him. His voice was under control and his face was inexpressive, but his carotid artery, just above his collar, was pounding. As this thought registered—something is wrong—he said, “We are evacuating the Capitol! Now! This is not an exercise! We are evacuating. Leave the Capitol. Now.”

My eyes met my son’s and I gave him the chin up-deadeye look that parents give children to say: I’m coming.

I walked through the doorway and took his arm. In the halls there was running and shouting, scores of people rushing by. Someone in a uniform called out, “Incoming unidentified aircraft, 60 seconds out.”

We were moving now, down the hall and toward an exit onto the great Capitol steps. There someone called, “Aircraft incoming.” George and Charlotte Shultz were behind me, Joan Rivers was over there with Tommy Corcoran. You never know who you’ll die with.

As we moved down the Capitol steps a guard yelled “Run for your lives! Ladies, take off your shoes, run for your lives! Go north. North!”

Ed Meese ran with two new knees—he’d just had replacement surgery. Oatsie Charles, a great Washington social figure, a friend to all for a long time, was in a wheelchair pushed by her grandson Nick, who is at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. When they got to the Capitol steps two cops stood at each side of the wheel chair, picked her up, and carried her down the long steps.

I said to my son, “Hold my hand and don’t let go, we can’t get separated.” About halfway down the steps I suddenly wanted to share some thoughts on history. I slowed a little. I was very angry to be driven from our Capitol by terror scum. My son was too, and said of them words boys don’t normally say in front of their mothers. I wanted to speak to him about the vagaries of history, how it is a wonderful and exciting thing but there are moments when it gives you agita. I literally said “agita,” a word I don’t use much, a word from my childhood listening to the Italians next door. I had slowed my descent, and people were rushing past. This is when a generational transfer of power occurred within my family.

My son turned to me and in a tone both soft and commanding he said, “Mom: Move it.”

And I realized: Yes, son, of course, this is no time for a disquisitions. We ran to the bottom of the steps and toward the street. By now I was thinking that perhaps 60 seconds had passed. I was also thinking: These things are not exactly precise. I thought: I did not expect when I put on my shoes this morning that I might die in them today. I thought: Medium-sized plane, an imperfect hit—our guys are scrambling up there now. Above the dome—we will get it, and it will come down. But if a medium-sized plane hits the Capitol grounds, exactly what happens? That is, how wide the conflagration? How wide the fireball? Would we be safe in the park over there? Where?

A Capitol Hill cop was yelling, “This way, this way!” Another yelled, “Run for your lives!” A Capitol Hill worker, a young heavyset woman in what I think was a cafeteria uniform, broke down in sobs. I wanted to go to her. A friend ran to her and put her arms around her and walked with her. My son and I holding hands and moving fast as we could. I thought of the scene in “Empire of the Sun”—I did not want to lose my son in the melee, and if it came to it I didn’t want him to die alone. People were running and yelling and sometimes screaming.

We wound up in a group—Oatsie and Nick, Robert and Blaine Trump. We met up after a few blocks and surveyed the options. If the plane was going to hit and the plane was carrying bad stuff, nukes or chems or bios, we’d want to be in a big solid place. Union Station, three blocks away. Run for it. Inside is coolness and marble and communications and TVs in a nice cool bar. We all thought: They might bomb the station. I thought: If they’re gonna take out the Capitol with nukes, they won’t bother with the station today.

So we ran there. I heard reports later of pushing and shoving and people falling as the evacuation from the Capitol began. I saw none of this. I saw people running. And I saw Capitol Police standing their ground, directing people toward what they thought was the safe area, and I saw them running toward the Capitol to help people who needed them. I saw nothing but excellence. If these people had been at Pearl Harbor they would have manned the guns. I’ll tell you who else stood their ground: the photographers for the news services and newspapers. Those crazy bastards took pictures of us running and then moved closer to where we were running from to get more dramatic pictures of the last to leave. Shooters, they are something.

*   *   *

We got to the station, got Oatsie and Nick up the right ramps, got into some tall cool bar. We were dripping with sweat, which soaked through OUR shirts. I forgot to tell you it was 92 degrees at 3 p.m. We were heaving from running and catching our breath. The bar had kids and commuters talking on phones and flirting and drinking, they had no idea what had happened we asked that they put their big Jumbotron TV on. When Oatsie was rolled, in she was asked by a waiter what she would like. She said, “I would like a cool, dry chardonnay.” I said that sounded just about right. My son wanted a Japanese beer. He had earned it.

We settled in. I asked Oatsie Charles who was the first president she’d ever seen with her eyes. She said, “Franklin D. Roosevelt.” She told us of him, and of her friend JFK. “He had natural charisma—just natural charm.”

We listened to her stories of history as the drums beat for Ronald Reagan on the jumbo TV. And at that moment on a Sony Jumbotron in a little table in a railroad station bar, we watched the body of Ronald Reagan arrive at Andrews and be met by a car. There were other people there in the bar and they were young office workers, commuters talking on cell phones and flirting and laughing. I got up and went to the bar, I introduced myself and told them we’d been evacuated and now we were watching our friend who we’d loved come home to us from California and I asked if they’d like to join us. I asked if they’d like to join us. They were so wonderful—kind and sweet, and they nodded and lowered their voices. And a few came and turned their seats to join our small group and watch our friend come home.

And so we mourned Ronald Reagan, in a room full of strangers who for once were not strangers, in Union Station, as Oatsie Charles told us about FDR and JFK and what it was like to know history. We were all together. And let me tell you: Our souls were there.

All week people who had waited in line to see Ronald Reagan’s casket at the Rotunda would walk up to me wherever I was, introduce themselves and say, “There were these young soldiers and sailors, we waited on line six hours, and we all got in at 2 a.m., and as they rounded the casket they would stop, every one of them, and salute.” Or, “Did you see the American Indians in full ceremonial dress who came and stood in silence?” And, “We were in bed at home and it was 10 at night and we were watching the news and suddenly we looked at each other and said: We gotta go. So we got the train schedule and took the overnight and got to Washington at 7 a.m. and stood on line.”

All week I received e-mails from strangers.

Ms Noonan, I thought you should see this—an e-mail from my brother’s friend: “I just witnessed something truly touching. I’m in Anchorage on business and I was sitting in a noisy restaurant when someone turned the TV to Ronald Reagan’s sunset burial service. The entire restaurant went quite. The noisy weekend crowd, full of jaded, cynical business travelers like me, went almost completely silent. When they lifted up his casket to carry it to his final resting place, the crowd spontaneously stood up. It was truly a remarkable moment. I don’t suspect I’ll see anything like it again.”

And this, from a woman who watched the proceedings on C-Span:

Between 2 and 4 AM the mourners were continuing through the rotunda, with quiet shuffling sounds of the changing guard, and little else. I prayed with mourners, for the Reagan’s but also my family intentions. Then all of a sudden I could hear a young child crying moderately loud. It continued, evidently as the family walked thru and paid their respects, for some time. It was not rash, but a little distracting, and I did turn the sound down so as not to wake my husband in the middle of the night. I thought, “Here came a family in the middle of the night, with a young child, and was not turned away, even though the child made some noise. Ronald Reagan would have approved.” I was moved to tears.

Then I went about my night work of changing loads in the washing machine, and was getting my yogurt snack from the refrigerator, when I heard the unmistakable voice of a young toddler “talking.” For the next few minutes (as long as it took to get thru the prayerful line) the child said in a delightful, sweet voice; dah! Dah! DAH, in different inflections and tones, sometimes a little softer, but mostly in positive, questioning, curious, joyous, and uplifting sounds about every 3-4 seconds. Dah! dah! . . . DAH! I laughed, AND cried. Ronald Reagan would like this too. How wonderful to have this young, happy sound to honor a very positive leader.”

And this, from a New York-based Wall Street Journal editor who stood in line at the rotunda:

I stopped by to see what the line was like to view Reagan’s casket in the Capitol at 3 a.m.—there were still tens of thousands of people and more showing up. The amazing thing was that everything was so orderly. There were hundreds of children some five and six years old or younger waiting in line and some people sleeping in the grass and some older people sitting down, looking dehydrated (and being cared for). But everyone was filing through the line, following the rules. No one seemed to be ducking through the ropes to cut ahead as the line zig zagged ahead, even as everyone was told the wait was five or six hours more—so long that they would likely not reach the front of the line before viewing hours were over. Water was handed out, but those waiting in line didn’t toss the empty bottles on the ground. They piled them as neatly as they could in piles interspersed through the line. Although sometimes the mood was somber, people were mostly happy, telling stories. Some were telling stories about Reagan.

I’ve never felt so comfortable in such a crowd and I think tens of thousands of people had an experience last night that they will not soon forget. They were all there to pay their respects to President Reagan. The lines though were long, arduously so. But the wait shaped the mood and after several hours it became part of the experience, instead of something that must be endured on the way to something meaningful. I think the behavior of the crowd spoke to the innate goodness within people, a message central to Reagan himself.

We all experienced history together the past week. We were all part of it. Didn’t matter if you were watching at home sitting in a big brown La-Z-Boy or getting to salute the old man in the church as they brought him back down the aisle. Some were lonely because they weren’t there; some were lonely because they were. Life is complicated. But he brought us all together for one last time, wherever we were, didn’t he? I could feel it. Everyone could feel it.

*   *   *

The morning of the state funeral hundreds and hundreds of us were in line to get into the Cathedral. It was to start at 11:30, but we are Republicans: we were in line at 9:15. I saw Bob Kimmitt, formerly of the National Security Council, and Marlin Fitzwater, former Reagan press secretary, who sometimes came into my office to lie on the couch and smoke his cigar and hide out from reporters. Hundreds who worked in Reagan’s White House were in line, on the sidewalk. Six or seven feet above us, to the right, was a black cast-iron fence that marked the beginning of the high lawn of the Cathedral. Suddenly at the fence, looking down at us, were Sam Donaldson and Barbara Walters. They had come by to say hello. Sam called down to us in a merry way, and we answered. Then I said to everyone around me, “In honor of the boss, when Sam talks to us let’s cup our ears and say, ‘I can’t hear you!’ “ Everyone laughed.

Sam said something. We put our hands to our ears. “We can’t hear you!,” we chanted. Sam called down something else. “We can’t hear you!,” we chanted. “It’s the helicopter! Sorry!”

It was so small and yet it was a lovely moment. Reagan would have laughed. Did Sam understand it? Ah, not really, I don’t think. But we did.

*   *   *

One of the things not sufficiently remarked upon the past week: The music, from California to Washington and back to California again, was old music, old American music, and it was beautiful. We have abandoned so much of the core of American music. And then a state funeral comes and the death of a president, and suddenly we are allowed to hear the old songs. “Going Home,” the hymn they played for FDR as they took him from Warm Springs, Ga., to Washington. All the stanzas of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—”In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea.” “The Navy Hymn,” also known as “Eternal Father Strong to Save.” “Abide With Me.” “Ave Maria”—a great song of the Catholic Church, and yet they don’t play it unless it’s a special person’s wedding or a special person’s funeral.
This music is part of our patrimony, every bit as much as the trees and mountains. Our children, in our civic life, have for a generation been denied these songs. The moral and artistic equivalent of river polluters have decided we need to hear—I don’t know, what songs do they play now in school, at events? “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”?

We need a new environmental movement—a musical conservation movement aimed at saving and preserving the old songs. The rivers and mountains and plains are so beautiful and need saving. But what have you lost if you lose the sound of your ancestors’ souls singing? Even more, I think.

*   *   *

Another happy moment: The Washington social figures Buffy and Bill Cafritz—”social figures” doesn’t quite express what they are, which is Washington people in a position to keep it going who do keep it going—called a dinner in a Capitol Hill restaurant for their friends, the old Reagan California hands, on Wednesday night, when they all arrived in town.

It was a dinner for the old kitchen cabinet—the ones who were there 40 and 50 years ago to tell Ronald Reagan: Please, enter politics. Charlie Wick and his wife, Mary Jane, Reagan friends since the 1950s, were there. The Deavers, Merv Griffin, Oscar and Lynn Wyatt. And others. They made toasts to each other that were sweet and intelligent. Mary Jane thanked Buffy for always being there when they came east; Buffy told her nothing was easier than being a friend of the Wicks.

I do not normally make toasts at dinners because my thoughts sometimes collide when my brain hears my voice; when I speak it’s from words on paper. But there was no paper. So this night I hit my fork against my glass and asked to be heard. I told them there was something I’d always wanted to say to them, to the old Reagan friends. I told them I had watched them for decades. I saw them be the Reagans’ friends when the Reagans were on top of the world. And I saw them be the Reagans’ friends when they were old and sick and out of power. I saw them be the Reagans’ friends when they were dancing in the East Room. And I saw them be the Reagans’ friends when each of them—all of them—became the focus of criticism and even disdain for their closeness to the Reagans. I saw them be the Reagans’ friends when there was everything in it and when there was nothing in it, and the quality of the friendship didn’t change. And this week, when we are toasting Ron and Nancy, I wanted to toast them for the kind of friends they were.

Everyone nodded, and then Mary Jane Wick, who carries within her face the perfect architecture of lost beauty that will never leave, explained to me what the friendship was about. It wasn’t just affection, though it was affection, she said. It wasn’t just that the Reagans themselves were loyal, though they were. And it wasn’t just that they were easy to be with and fun. It was that early, back in the kitchen cabinet days, in the 1950s and ‘60s, they put their lives behind Ronnie because they felt the country needed what he stood for. It needed him! They felt California needed his leadership. It wasn’t just him, she said, it was what we knew he would do—shrink government, expand freedom.

I hadn’t quite known they felt that way, or heard anyone say it. Friendship as a patriotic act.

Then the dinner broke up and there was a lot of laughter and at the end Charlie Wick, who loves to sing, who burbles with the old standards, sang some songs, and Oscar Wyatt and I joined in. It was some kind of wonderful evening and some kind of wonderful history as they told stories of their friend and governor and president.

*   *   *

I’m afraid there is yet more I want to say about the past 10 days, so soon I’ll have a piece called “What I Saw When We Were Evacuated From the Capitol the Afternoon Reagan’s Cortege Arrived.” Subheadline: “ ‘Unidentified aircraft one minute out, run for your lives!’ “ It was something, and worth trying to capture, I think, for those who’ve never witnessed or been part of such an evacuation.

Here’s a preview: There is something in American staff and security workers that continues to be coolly, calmly, even unthinkingly heroic. As all the visitors and guests and tourists ran from what they were told was the imminent impact of a presumably enemy aircraft, the Capitol staff stood their ground. Better. I saw a young black woman in a Capitol Police uniform simultaneously point tourists toward safety as she ran, resolutely, toward the Capitol she thought was about to be leveled. They were like New York City firemen. They are something.

What was the meaning of the past remarkable nine days? You cannot stop the American people from feeling what they feel and showing it. From the crowds at Simi Valley to the hordes at the Capitol to the men and women who stopped and got out of their cars on Highway 101 to salute as Reagan came home—that was America talking to America about who America is.

It was a magnificent teaching moment for the whole country but most of all for the young, who barely remembered Ronald Reagan or didn’t remember him at all. This week they heard who he was. The old ones spoke, on all the networks and in all the newspapers, and by the end of the week it was clear that Ronald Reagan had suddenly entered the Lincoln pantheon. By Friday it was no longer a question, as it had been for years, whether he was one of our top 10 presidents. It was a question only whether he was in the very top five or six—up there with Lincoln and Washington. An agreement had been reached: the 20th century came down to FDR and RWR.

What is important now is that we continue to speak of the meaning of his leadership. Not bang away about what a great guy he was—there are a lot of great guys—but what huge things he did, not because he had an “ideology” but because he had a philosophy, a specific one that had specific meaning. He was the great 20th-century conservative of America. He applied his philosophy to the realities of the world he lived in. In doing so he changed those realities, and for the better. This is what we must pass on.

I think of the moments of the past week in Washington: George Shultz reaching out spontaneously and with such heart to touch the coffin in the Rotunda. Al Haig too. I was there and saw how moved they were.

Walking into a room in the Capitol Wednesday before dusk: A handful of people were standing together and gazing out a huge old white-silled window as the Reagan cortege approached down Pennsylvania Avenue. The sun was strong, like a presence. It bathed the women in glow. One was standing straight, with discipline. Her beige bouffant was brilliant in the sun. I approached, and she turned. It was Margaret Thatcher. It was like walking into a room at FDR’s funeral and seeing Churchill.

The cortege was coming toward the steps. We looked out the window: a perfect tableaux of ceremonial excellence from every branch of the armed forces. Mrs. Thatcher watched. She turned and said to me, “This is the thing, you see, you must stay militarily strong, with an undeniable strength. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated.”

To my son, whose 17th birthday was the next day, she said, “And what do you study?” He tells her he loves history and literature. “Mathematics,” she says. He nods, wondering, I think, if she had heard him correctly. She had. She was giving him advice. “In the world of the future it will be mathematics that we need—the hard, specific knowledge of mathematical formulae, you see.” My son nodded: “Yes, ma’am.” Later I squeezed his arm. “Take notes,” I said. This is history.

*   *   *

Inside the Washington National Cathedral the day of the state funeral: When the television cameras broadcast from inside the cathedral at 11:30 a.m., everyone—dark clad, many distinguished, all 3,000 of them—stood in complete silence as the doors opened for the Reagan family. It was so silent that all you could hear was the metal point of the vicar’s staff hitting the marble floor as he processed down the aisle. Oh what a sound. It sounded like tradition. Majesty.

But before the cameras were there, an hour and two hours before, it was the last gathering of the clans. The room rocked with affection and laughter. We were hugging and shaking hands. Oh, it was beautiful. I saw Mari Maseng Will, whose job I had taken in the White House when she moved up from speechwriting. In those days—only 20 years ago, and yet in some respects so long ago—there were, as there are now, a half dozen White House speechwriters, and, by what was then fairly recent tradition, one woman among them. I hadn’t seen Mari in years. She looked beautiful and tall but also now distinguished. I asked how she felt after the past few days, our lives passing before our eyes. “I feel young again,” she said. I laughed and said “God, me too.” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, all the people of 1984 were there again, and talking and gesturing, but now after all these years they were free, unburdened, fully able, and eager, to appreciate each other. Man, the love and respect in that room.

Just in my line of sight was an extraordinarily wide variety of people in the assemblage. The people inside that cathedral who were not there by virtue of their position—senators, congressmen, diplomats—were people who actually loved the Reagans. My eye went from a grieving Mikhail Gorbachev to Joan Rivers to Jim Billington of the Library of Congress to Oscar De la Renta, from Antonin Scalia to Buffy Cafritz, from Clarence Thomas to Merv Griffin, from Prince Charles to Oatsie Charles.

The Reagans knew everyone; they really reached out into all spheres. The Carters didn’t know everyone; they were Georgia. The Bushes don’t know everyone. The Clintons knew Hollywood, but Hollywood didn’t love them; it just embraced them. The Reagans were loved by the ones who knew them. It’s nice when you see this. The last first couple of whom I think it could be said were the Kennedys.

I was walking down the aisle when someone called to me and said, “Peggy, Natan Sharansky”: a small balding man who looks like a shy accountant. He was in the gulag when Ronald Reagan was president. He was in solitary confinement, and when word would reach him of Reagan’s latest anticommunist speech, he would tap out in Morse code a message to his fellow prisoners. And now he was here, a free man, at the funeral of Ronald Reagan, who got him out of the gulag, which was run by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was right over there. Oh life, what a kick in the pants it can be. All I could do as it all flashed through my mind was ask if I could put my arms around him, and all I could think of say was, “Oh, Natan Sharansky.” A beautiful moment for me.

When the funeral was over, when we came down the steps and out of the Cathedral, I saw Tom Daschle and Byron Dorgan and Sen. Reed from I forget where, standing together, talking. I thought: Good for them for being here and showing such respect. So I went over and introduced myself and told them it was great to see them and it was a beautiful day for all of us. They were sweet and friendly and we all laughed and shook hands. This was another good moment to have at Ronald Reagan’s funeral.

Many great things were said about Reagan, especially the words of Baroness Thatcher, the Iron Lady. What a gallant woman to come from England, frail after a series of strokes, to show her personal respect and love, and to go to California to show it again, standing there with her perfect bearing, in her high heels, for 20 hours straight. I wonder if the British know how we took it, we Americans, that she did that, and that Prince Charles came, and Tony Blair. One is tempted to fall back on cliché—”the special relationship.” But I think a lot of us were thinking: We are one people.

*   *   *

The morning Americans stood in line and filed in to see the flag-draped coffin in the rotunda, Sen. Rick Santorum called together some old Reagan hands to speak to senators and staff about the meaning of Reaganism. It was one of those moments when everything seemed to come together. Ed Meese spoke so movingly of the Reagan he knew, the one who came out of the Midwest and into California. Jim Miller, his former budget director, spoke with bracing clarity of the real economic facts of American life before Reagan, and American life after. Richard Perle, who had been in the Defense Department, spoke of Reagan the tough negotiator of the end of the Soviet Union. I spoke on a lesson we can draw from Reagan’s life. C-Span was there and, I’m told, used our remarks as a kind of voiceover for the pictures of people going to the and viewing the flag draped coffin. I felt blessed to be there. This is what I got to say:

Thank you. I am honored to be here. After the drama of the past few days I am officially farklempt, and I fear I may perhaps lose my voice this morning. I am very happy to see the senators here, but I am happiest to see Orin Hatch, because if I lose my voice he can stand up and sing.

I speak on Mr. Reagan. In such a big life, such a multifaceted life, there are many lessons. And you can wonder which One Big Lesson you should take away from watching him. I have a thought, but I think it is perhaps personal, or in a way intimate. It has to do with how we live our lives. Which is always the great question of course, How to live?

Ronald Reagan once summed up John F. Kennedy. He went to a fund-raiser for the JFK Library at Ted Kennedy’s house in 1984. Reagan said of Kennedy, “As a leader, as a president, he seemed to have a good, hard, unillusioned understanding of man and his political choices. . . . [He] understood the tension between good and evil in the history of man—understood, indeed, that much of the history of man can be seen in the constant working out of that tension. . . . He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country. . . . He was fiercely, happily partisan, and his political fights were tough—no quarter asked and none given. But he gave as good as he got, and you could see that he loved the battle. . . . Everything we saw him do seemed to show a huge enjoyment of life; he seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump on board and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey; it’s ungrateful not to. I think that’s how his country remembers him, in his joy.”

When it was over, Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Onassis, walked up to President Reagan and said, “Oh, Mr. President, that was Jack.

And now I think: that was Reagan, too. And that should be us.

It’s a short ride. Even the longest life is a little too short. You get some time; what do you want to do with it? You want to bring your love to it. And by bringing that love, be constructive, add to, help build and rebuild just by your presence, just by showing up.

How did Reagan do this? He felt something was true. He studied it; he questioned it; he read about it. He concluded it really was true. But he knew that what was true was unpopular, and it would hurt him if he held it high. He held it high anyway. That was his way of showing his love.

Are we a government that has a country, or a country that has a government? We are the latter; hold it high. Can dictators who run a country the size of a continent in the name of a life-killing ideology, can they push freedom around? They cannot. Say it, hold it high. Is there a natural thing within man that tells him God is real and good, real as a rock, good as clean water—is that thing, that knowledge, natural to man? Yes it is. Hold it high. Should we as a people try to rid ourselves of the natural expressions of this natural knowledge? No. We must keep that and guard it and love it. We must hold it high.

And in the meantime—in the meantime life is not all seriousness and a somber understanding of history, and the work of making life better. Life is beautiful. Life is the best horse on the best ranch and the best ride to see the best sunset. Laugh, have a good time, enjoy it—it’s beautiful.

And so he said of John Kennedy, “Sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school, and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book, I want to say that nothing is ever lost in that house, the White House. Some music plays on. I have been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, ‘And another thing, Eleanor!’ Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a mustachioed fellow saying, ‘Bully! Absolutely ripping!’ Walk softly now and you’re drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room, where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s a story I’ve been told. And it’s not a bad one, because it reminds us that history is a living thing that never dies. . . . History is not only made by people, it is people. And so history is, as young John Kennedy demonstrated, as heroic as you want it to be, as heroic as you are.”

Well, Ronald Reagan’s music plays on. That’s a wonderful thing. I hope tomorrow we give him a standing ovation. I hope speakers say things that make us laugh. And afterwards, have a good lunch with your friends and raise a glass to him, and to his era, and its meaning. And then go, and have a meeting, and make a plan to make our country better. Thank you.

It was wonderful to be in the Capitol that day, the day everyone was coming to see him. The old halls echoed.

*   *   *

I will probably be telling, in this space, more as the weeks and months go by. I hope you don’t mind, but there are so many stories.

Let me end here with one. I had one of the greatest moments of my life in Washington as we laid Ronald Reagan to rest.

The Heritage Foundation and the White House had quickly thrown together a gathering of Reagan alumni in the Old Executive Office Building, which I noticed the old-timers still call “the Old EOB” but which has been renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and which President Bush calls “the Ike.” I have a feeling that’s going to stick.

It was a great group. Former secretary of state George Shultz spoke, and domestic advisor Marty Anderson, and Reagan’s final chief of staff, Ken Duberstein. Judge William Clark spoke about Reagan’s religious faith, and Michael Reagan came in, embraced everyone and talked about his love for his father and his gratitude to God. It was beautiful. Karl Rove spoke too, impromptu, about how Reagan remade Republicanism. Dick Cheney came and listened. A lot of people did.

When I stood to speak, I looked out at the hundreds there, and what I saw when I looked at them was what I knew to be true. These people had suffered for Reagan. They were the midlevel people, the special assistants and deputy assistants and counselors in the offices and departments. They had thrown themselves on hand grenades in that White House, they had taken hits. They were conservatives in the 1980s who believed in Reagan. And they were unsung.

Schultz, Anderson, Clark, me—we were sung. But these people . . .

And as I looked out at them I thought of the most unsung hero of all. His name was Bentley Elliott. He went by Ben. He ran Ronald Reagan’s speechwriting department from 1982 through 1986. He hired most of the speechwriters. He shaped and refined Ronald Reagan’s speeches, directing themes and approach. He was a great writer. Ronald Reagan said a lot of famous things, and he said them in part because Ben Elliott got them past the bureaucracy, past the powerful so-called pragmatists, so Reagan could consider them, rewrite them, underscore them. But Ben is the one who got the draft to him.

Ronald Reagan could do and say anything he wanted—he was the president. But every time Ben fought the bureaucracy to get the right draft to Reagan—to get the president’s own conservative views to him—Ben made an enemy. He faced a million swords, and without bureaucratic protection. In politics, friends come and go but enemies accumulate. By the time the bad guys got him, Ben looked like a human pincushion.

We owed him so much. Making his position even more difficult, and painful, there were those on his staff and around him who wanted his job, or who wanted him removed because he didn’t assign them enough speeches. They were right, he didn’t. He didn’t because he was protecting them. Dick Darman, our boss of all bosses, would read a draft from one or another of them and he’d call Ben and say, “If I see another speech by him I will fire him, he is over.” And he meant it. So Ben would hide them to save their jobs.

Only he made one bureaucratic mistake: He didn’t tell them. Because he didn’t want them to feel insecure and oppressed. He didn’t want to add to the bitterness of that tough White House. Ben was like “Mister Roberts” in the 1955 film—he protected the crew but the crew didn’t know, and some didn’t care. Some of the writers were so gifted—Mari, Josh Gilder. Ben worked Josh to the bone. But they were a mixed group, as all groups are. There was one speechwriter who wrote the same speech over and over, or rather he wrote a good one in 1982 and a good one in 1988, and I think he spent the rest of his time getting haircuts. There was another who didn’t write but only kibitzed. When Washington gets around to a National Hack Memorial, and it no doubt will, he’ll probably pose for the statue. Another looked like a malignant leprechaun and spent most of his time on the phone telling columnists what the president was about to say. What a crew. And Ben protected them all. And me, too, and not only because I was a conservative but also because I was the only woman there.

Ben kept it all together. And it worked. When he left the White House he never said a word, never spoke of his experiences, never went on TV for interviews, never wrote a book. He left Washington, burrowed down into corporate communications, worked for two families, and became a serious and ardent Christian, so that his faith, and not politics, became the central animating fact of his life.

At that great gathering of unsung heroes of the Reagan era, I got to speak of Ben. I got to sing him.

And when I said his name the crowd burst into the biggest applause of the day. Because they knew who Ben Elliott was. Becky Norton Dunlop, who had taken her own hits for RR, took to her feet for her own standing ovation.

And Ben Elliott was there. He was in the audience with his wife, Troy, and his daughter Grace, 11, who did not know her father was a great man, or rather might not have known he was great in this particular way.

It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life to give this man a small part of his due. When it was over, we hugged—what a hugging time it has been—and I told him I loved him.

And there followed, for me, the sole unaffectionate moment of the whole three days. In honor of Ronald Reagan, it was candid.

The Hack was in the audience. He approached me in his greasy political style and said, “I’m so glad you honored Ben.” He put his hand on my waist. This was a mistake.

“It’s more than you ever did,” I pointed out. Hack had been on TV with pictures of him and Reagan, recalling with modesty his small contribution to the president. He was right. It was small.

He said that he’d always tried to honor Ben. I pointed out that this was a lie. Nor had haircut boy in his book. Didn’t they know Ben had saved their jobs? They were only there because of him.

At this Hack smiled slyly. “Well, I never wrote a book,” he said.

“No, you’d have to be literate to do that,” I pointed out.

Afterward I told old Reagan hands about our exchange. They would laugh and say, “Yes!” Because, as I say, they knew the Ben Elliott story. And now someone has put it in print.

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. And I am thinking of what Stephen Vincent Benet, 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 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 on 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 1900-90.

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, out-argued 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 ‘90s, 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 taxes 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 out-argued 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.

He pushed down income taxes too, from a high of 70% when he entered the White House to a new low of 28% when he left, igniting the long boom that, for all its ups and downs, is with us still. He believed, as JFK did, that a rising tide lifts all boats. He did much more, returning respect to our armed forces, changing 50-year-old assumptions about the place of government and the place of the citizen in the new America.

What an era his was. What a life he lived. He changed history for the better and was modest about it. He didn’t bray about his accomplishments but saw them as the work of the American people. He did not see himself as entitled, never demanded respect, preferred talking to hotel doormen rather than State Department functionaries because he thought the doormen brighter and more interesting. When I pressed him once, a few years out of the presidency, to say what he thought the meaning of his presidency was, he answered, reluctantly, that it might be fairly said that he “advanced the boundaries of freedom in a world more at peace with itself.” And so he did. And what could be bigger than that?

*   *   *

To be young and working in his White House at that time in human history, was—well, we felt privileged to be there, with him. He made us feel not that we were born in a time of trouble but that we’d been born, luckily, at a time when we could end some trouble. We believed him. I’d think: This is a wonderful time to be alive. And when he died I thought: If I’d walked into the Oval Office 20 years ago to tell him that, he’d look up from whatever he was writing, smile, look away for a second and think, It’s pretty much always a wonderful time.

And then he’d go back to his work.

And now he has left us. We will talk the next 10 days about who he was and what he did. It’s not hard to imagine him now in a place where his powers have been returned to him and he’s himself again—sweet-hearted, tough, funny, optimistic and very brave. You imagine him snapping one of those little salutes as he turns to say goodbye. Today I imagine saluting right back. Do you? We should do it the day he’s buried, or when he lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda. We should say, “Good on you, Dutch.” Thanks from a grateful country.

Television will be full of reports this weekend of the festivities surrounding the 60th anniversary of D-Day. This has me thinking of why we still talk about the invasion, why television news producers are certain we are interested, and why the programmers of movie channels believe we will want to see “The Longest Day” again, and “Saving Private Ryan.”

The Normandy invasion was a great moment in history (brave men joining together to do the right thing) and a definitive moment (the Nazi hold on Europe was loosed; in less than a year Berlin would fall). These are reasons enough.

But there is this, too: We are human and love stories that show humanity as brave and selfless. It exalts us. We need to be exalted. It is hard to get up in the morning and pull on your socks and enter the day. It is hard to be a bus driver. But it is easier when you can think better of your passengers.

When you think man isn’t much, when you think human beings are pretty low as beings go, it leaches love from you. It leaches love from your soul when you think we’re all nothing much, we’re dust in the wind, it’s dog eat dog. When you can see us as more than that, it helps you enter each day. It helps you live. We think about D-Day, and Harry the King at Agincourt, and George Meade at Gettysburg, to help us live.

*   *   *

Once a sociologist had a wonderful idea. He asked soldiers just in from battles what their first thought was when they saw a nearby soldier shot. This is what they reported they thought: I didn’t get shot. Not Poor Joe, or Where is the sniper? or If Joe bought it I better move, but I didn’t get shot. The second and third thoughts were different, but the first was relief: I am alive.

When a doctor told me of this I thought: Yes, that is us. We’re all like that. And it’s not so bad. We are human and imperfect. We’re damaged.

And we think of the imperfect and damaged humans of D-Day, people like us, made of the same clay. Only we’re not clay, we’re more than that. They held the line, took the hits, moved the line forward, bought that real estate, paid for it in blood, burrowed in, defeated their fear, pushed aside their egotism, took back a continent. And at least one old dazed French farmer, according to the book and movie of Cornelius Ryan’s great popular history “The Longest Day,” walked through the shooting and on to the beach carrying a bottle of Calvados to give to France’s liberators. And that is part of the human story too.

The men of D-Day had their “I didn’t get shot” moments and pushed forward anyway. They didn’t run—”I’m pushing my luck!”—they stood their ground.

This is very moving. And it is a good thing for us to remember about ourselves.

*   *   *

There’s a lot of talk again, windy and mindless talk by or professional talkers, that we are marking D-Day with such great attention because we are baby boomers, and by definition inadequate, not members of a greatest generation. We were handed an easy ride by history: we must tip our hats.

Well, of course we should tip our hats, but not to a generation. To individuals. To the wonderful men who took the beach, and other beaches, some of whom still hold those beach heads, in World War II. A lot of Boomers—not all by any means, for many of them have had terrible adversity, and are unknown heroes—got a relatively good ride for a relatively long time. But history isn’t kind forever. Those young jogging gray-heads who are 50 now and running the networks and the schools and the Army: history has given them a job and will give them a job, and it will not be a job for sissies. Don’t write them off until their work is done.

I have been paying attention to the graduates of Ivy League universities. Every one I see the past few weeks is beautiful. They are tall and handsome and gay-spirited; they are strong and laughing and bright. I ask them what they are going to do now. I am repeatedly told things like, “I want to go into TV.” And “I’m going to drama school.” And “I’m going to journalism school.” It occurs to me that all young people who graduate from elite American universities now want to go into communications. It’s a whole generation that wants to communicate.

But what do they want to communicate? They don’t seem to have a clue. For this is a question that involves the area of Deeply Held Beliefs, and as far as I can see it the deeply held beliefs of these particular graduates is a uniform leftism whose tenets involve reciting clichés. They believe racial and sexual diversity is good, peace is better than war, religious fanaticism is bad. But they don’t want to spout clichés—that’s not why they went to Cornell. And they know their work will not draw attention if it is marked by tired and essentially noncontroversial ideas. No one thinks war is sweet, there’s no market for racial segregation or male chauvinism.

I see no sign they are going to start thinking anything truly unusual for their time and generation—that religious conversion can be a wholly beneficial and life changing event, for instance, or that breaking with liberal orthodoxy might be the beginning of wisdom.

It must leave them finding it a challenge to speak of their beliefs in an interesting way. They often seem to fall back on attitude—wit, irony, poking fun at the thick-witted—in place of sustained thought, or meaning. And still they want to communicate for a living. I think of this problem as “big mike, no message.” They are trained in the finest points of communication, but when they turn on the microphone, they have nothing serious to say.

To be fair, young people often have nothing serious to say. You earn seriousness and learn seriousness. I am wondering if these beautiful young people will earn and learn. Maybe Ivy League graduates have always seemed a little removed from life, a little rote in their thinking. Maybe these eager young people will turn out to have interesting thoughts.

But they do remind me of something that occurred to me one day about 30 years ago. I was watching on TV one of the great movies of the British new wave of the 1960s. I think it was “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” I thought to myself: British acting is simply the best in the world, England is drenched in great acting now. Then I realized it had been for generations—Gielgud, Redgrave, et al. Then I thought: Hmmmm. The rise of England’s acting class the past century seems to coincide perfectly with the fall of its power as a wealthy and powerful nation that made a difference in the world—an exploring nation, a conquering one.

I wondered if the loss of a kind of national manliness, or force, tends to coincide in modern nations with a rise in expertise in the delicate arts. Then I thought: I wonder if in general one can say of Western nations that the loss of one tends to be accompanied by a rise in the other. In the case of England I think that is so. I have wondered for 30 years if I would come to think it of America. I have not. But the rise of the young graduates who all want to communicate but have no idea what they want to communicate has me thinking about it again.

*   *   *

European bureaucrats continue to resist references to God or Christianity in the new constitution they are drafting for the European Union. This is a fascinating battle and revealing of our age. They are in the final drafting stages. Tuesday’s New York Times reported, “The issue of whether the most ambitious document in European Union history should include a reference to the Continent’s Christian heritage is . . . an emotional, theological wrangle over the meaning of culture, history and faith. The paper quoted France’s foreign minister, Michel Barnier, as saying his country would not bow to pressure to inject religion into the document, noting the final draft should be “secular.” The constitution is expected to be finalized in two weeks in Brussels.

It seems to me the question is not, “Will the architects of the new Europe bow to the reality of God and include him in the central founding document of their vast new union?” The question is, “Will a group of atheist and agnostic European bureaucrats be forced to mention a deity in whom they do not believe in order to appease lesser and ignorant people who unfortunately have a lot of votes?” Europe is a post-Christian society on a continent devoted to the material except when it is considering astrology, witchcraft and worshiping rocks.

A year ago Pope John Paul II weighed into the argument—actually by speaking of it publicly he started the argument—when he criticized the drafters of the proposed constitution for leaving out all reference to Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage. He suggested the bureaucrats were unhistorical and frankly ungrateful. They are indeed, and rather soulless too, but that is precisely what the modern ruling classes that run Europe are. And that is who the bureaucrats represent.

Is it better if the drafters bow to pressure and, like hypocrites, add a few soulful sentences in which they do not believe so as to fool the dumb people who do? Maybe not. Maybe they should be what they are. It’s less confusing that way. And the nonelites of Europe will perhaps more readily see what they are, and understand what they’re getting into when they join the EU.

*   *   *

NBC reported Monday night that there is a new movement in California to ban smoking on public beaches. This is much more serious than the fact that if the law passes young people on beach blankets will no longer be able to break the ice by asking, “Got a light?” The NBC report came on right before I watched Tom Selleck chain-smoke through “Ike.” It looked like such a liberated thing to do, smoking without care or guilt.

There is a great lie out there that they didn’t know smoking was dangerous in Ike’s day, but of course they knew. They knew because they coughed, they knew because their lungs ached, they knew because when they smoked it produced phlegm, they knew because doctors told them smoking aggravates tuberculosis, they knew because they have brains, and they knew because smokers were addicted and there is some rough knowledge within the human soul that when you’re addicted to something it’s probably not good for you. They knew it was dangerous. Hitler was dangerous too. The world was dangerous. They were planning the biggest amphibious invasion in all of human history. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

I have come to hate the banners. No, I don’t smoke. I just believe in the right of people to be human, to be imperfect and messy and flawed. I don’t dislike the banners because they’re prissy bullies, though that is reason enough. I dislike them because their work forces us to look at the shift in values in our country in our time. As I watched the NBC report, I actually thought to myself: I want to make sure I understand. If you smoke a cigarette on a beach in modern America you are harming the innocent. If you have a baby scraped from your womb, you are protecting your freedom. If you sell a pack of cigarettes to a 12-year-old boy you can be jailed, fined and sent to Guantanamo Bay with the other killers. If you sell a pack of contraceptives to a 12 year old boy in modern America you are socially responsible citizen.

For reasons that call for an essay of their own, and as we all know, the banners of cigarettes are on and of the left, and the resisters of the banners are on the right. Once the banners of liquor were of the right and its legalizers of the left. The banners of drugs were on the right and the legalizers on the left.

Why did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? What was the logic? And please, if you are on the left, would you answer this question for me? How come the only organ the left insists be chaste is the lung? What is this pulmocentrism? Why are lungs so special? Why can’t you endanger your own lungs? Why don’t you care as much about livers? Don’t the Democrats have a liver lobby?

I think that it is true that there is no individual human on earth that I hate. But when I think of the banners I think of what the old news producer told the bureaucrat who fired him in a cost-cutting campaign in “Broadcast News.” At the end of their meeting the bureaucrat asked in unctuous tones if there was anything he could do to help. The producer thought. “Well, I certainly hope you die soon,” he said. A great cinematic moment. I wish the banners would go away and stop bothering our country.

*   *   *

The presidential election began to take shape this week, almost in spite of itself. Did you notice? In a series of interviews and speeches President Bush made it clear he is running on three things: Iraq, and its profound promise for a better world in spite of the struggle; faith-based social reform, which is to say the allowance of the reality of God in certain publicly financed organizations aimed at helping the young and the stressed; and the legitimacy of his tax cuts, both their practical benefits and their inherent justice.
This seems to me pretty smart as a way to go, and clear.

John Kerry, meanwhile, emerged with a new approach: future terrorism on U.S. soil is the great issue of our time, and Mr. Bush has not done enough to make America safer. It is smart of Mr. Kerry to get to Mr. Bush’s right on this, and it will make the administration sharper. Mr. Kerry’s is also an unanswerable challenge: There will of course be terror events down the road, and deadly ones, and it will always turn out that the government could have done more, for it always could have.

Mr. Kerry is also applying a kind of argumentative prophylactic: If al Qaeda hits before the election, he warned you. He is planting seeds so that your first thought, on the day of an event, is not I will support my president in this time of crisis but Bush didn’t keep us safe, fire him!

But Mr. Kerry continues to have a major internal structural problem. It is that he can always tell you his position, or his latest position, but he can somehow never quite explain to you the thinking behind it. He continues to seem unable to explain the philosophy and logic. It leaves one assuming his problem is that his thinking relies on an old and cliché-riddled leftism that is not so much thought through as declared and imposed.

It is a paradox. Mr. Kerry is more naturally articulate than Mr. Bush. He is facile with words and speaks in structured sentences and paragraphs. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, speaks in bursts, in little gusts of words. And yet Mr. Bush manages to communicate why he is thinking what he is thinking, what logic is guiding him, what philosophy is guiding him. When he speaks of the practical and moral benefits of faith-based approach to federal spending, you understand why he stands where he stands. He explains it. His words are plain but serviceable. They do the job.

Mr. Kerry doesn’t give you the feeling of comfort you get when you understand someone. He’s going to have to become a candidate who can explain why he stands where he stands if he wants to go beyond the impression he currently gives, which is that he’s a haircut with a person attached.