Peggy Noonan

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.

“The Justice Department and the FBI plan to ask for the public’s help today in locating several suspected terrorist sympathizers, including some whose names have not been made public before. The bureau probably plans another public push to find Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a Pakistani woman who has a doctorate in neurological science and has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University in the Boston area, as well as in Houston. The FBI also could seek help locating a man Siddiqui has been linked to, Adnan G. El Shukrijumah. He is a suspected al Qaeda member who spent time in Florida, and his name has come up in interrogations of captured al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed.”
—Washington Post, May 26

“The FBI has apologized to a man it arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings, hours after he was cleared of any wrongdoing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation detained Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield for two weeks after investigators thought they had matched his fingerprint to one found on a bag of detonators in Madrid. Last week, US officials released the 37 year old Mayfield after Spanish police said the fingerprints belonged to an Algerian man.”
—Voice of America, May 27

“In April, an FBI bulletin to law enforcement agencies warned of possible truck bombs. A source familiar with the government’s threat discussions said yesterday that truck bombs are a primary concern. ‘I’m more worried than I was at Christmastime,’ said one senior U.S. intelligence official, comparing the ‘election threat’ to the canceling of specific airline flights around the holidays. He said the U.S. government is convinced there are as yet unidentified al Qaeda operatives residing in the United States, waiting for the word to launch plots.”
—Washington Post, May 27

“The so-called ‘War on Terror’ started by U.S. President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington has led to a ‘new wave’ of human rights abuses, campaign group Amnesty International said.”
—Bloomberg News, May 26

*   *   *

It’s kind of crazy out there. So this might be a good time to say: Let’s do our best as a people to catch and imprison terrorists. Let’s get ‘em. Let’s make it our highest national priority. Let’s find those who mean to end the lives of hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. Then, once it looks like all or most of the bad guys are captured, let’s turn our national attention to studying how we could have done it better, more gently, more justly, more competently. But first the capture, then the criticism.

It is terrible for Mr. Mayfield that he was mistaken for a Madrid bomber. It’s awful that he was arrested. He’ll probably sue the government and win damages. But whatever he does, he’s still alive, and the U.S. government has cleared him and apologized to him in front of the world. It is better to be alive and free after a false arrest than it is to be dead and maimed and the victim of a terror bomb. When you are dead it doesn’t matter who apologizes. When you’re dead you can sue nobody, though the trial lawyers association will probably change that eventually.

It is too bad Amnesty International is worried about possible U.S. insensitivity in apprehending potential terrorists. No doubt there has been and will be roughness. But mostly Amnesty is talking about this because they don’t really like us, they don’t know what time it is, they have to do something for a living, they think we’re more competent than we are, and they still don’t understand Sept. 11.

They will understand terrorism better after the next attack. But Americans don’t have to wait. We were there. We can cut to the chase. Let’s aggressively, passionately and with no ambivalence pursue bad guys. Let’s give as much respect, assistance and credit to the searchers as we can. And if we have to hold symposiums and commissions to criticize them for overexuberance and unnecessary roughness, let’s do it later, like in 2016, when this is over and our children have been allowed to grow up.

*   *   *

In New York right now we are planning our Memorial Day weekends. We know we are in a difficult historical time, but we do not dwell on it. We don’t always even think. We free-associate, like this: I should get a new dress for the graduation at the Saks sale. They could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Meg would love one of those little Chanel knockoffs from the street vender. If New York is bombed while we’re in Boston, where will we stay? If Boston is bombed while we’re at the graduation, how will we get home? Bring cousin Holly’s number in northern Connecticut. Pick up mascara.

From the dire to the banal. No, not from one to another but both interweaved. Having the jits and planning the party. People are dieting because summer’s coming and wondering if an al Qaeda hit on New York would trigger a food shortage.

My general sense is that New Yorkers don’t really think anything bad is going to happen right now. The government gives a lot of warnings, it’s not as if they’re shocking. And they always issue the warnings in a sort of helpful but not helpful way. They don’t know precisely what to fear but they’re somewhat alarmed; they don’t know what precisely to tell you but they’d like you to share their alarm, so that if something bad happens, they told you. In New York we don’t really expect the Next Big Bad Thing to happen when we’ve been warned it will happen. We expect it to happen when it isn’t expected. We assume that increased levels of chatter means increased levels of surveillance, which means increased levels of safety. Al Qaeda likes to surprise us. They don’t move when we expect. It’s all head-fakes.

This should mean that New Yorkers expect trouble when we are not being told by the government to expect trouble. But that’s not true either. Because when we’re not being warned about trouble, we forget to think about trouble. We’re thinking about the school meeting or the car or the price of steak.

When I go through the Lincoln Tunnel at a relatively quiet time in terms of government warnings I think, “Nothing will probably happen today, it’s quiet.” When I go through the Lincoln Tunnel at a terror alert time I think, “Nothing will probably happen today, there’s security all over and the terror-cell guys in Jersey City are probably playing cards.”

Then I emerge from the tunnel and realize I’ve been thinking about nothing but terrorism.

It is a weird time in American history. Someday someone will capture it, in a great novel. Maybe in 2016, when we’ve caught all the terrorists, and we’re at our children’s and grandchildren’s graduations.

Did you hear about the college commencement speaker who was almost booed off the stage Sunday because his commencement address was an anti-Bush rant? The speaker was E.L. Doctorow. The college, God bless it forever, was Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island.

Newsday reported that Mr. Doctorow—or, as Newsday put it in the first paragraph, “E.L. Doctorow, one of the most celebrated writers in America”—gave a 20-minute address “lambasting President George W. Bush and effectively calling him a liar.” It didn’t go over too well. Mr. Doctorow announced to the crowd that he himself is a storyteller. But the president too, he said in a flight of dazzling cleverness, is a storyteller. The president’s stories are not so good thought “because they are not true.”

This is where the booing began.

“One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us,” Mr. Doctorow continued. “That was an exciting story all right, it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true.” Mr. Bush told stories about Saddam Hussein, that he “was in league with the terrorists of al Qaeda. And that turned out to be not true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of these stories.”

This is where the crowd began to boo most lustily. Mr. Doctorow stopped his speech. There is the suggestion he was surprised. (By the way if he were a conservative, Newsday would have described him as “conservative writer Ed Doctorow, who had a bestseller in ‘Ragtime’ in 1974,” not “one of the most celebrated writers in America.”)

The president of the university called for calm. “We value open discussion and debate,” he said. “For the sake of your graduates, please let him finish.” The response to this was telling. Most of the faculty—the faculty, not the students—responded with a standing ovation. Mr. Doctorow finished his speech, attacking Mr. Bush on taxes and terrorism, and accusing him of wanting to subpoena libraries “to see what books you’ve been taking out.”

Newsday said many parents and relatives of the more than 1,300 undergraduates were “livid” over the address. Frank Mallafre, who had traveled from Miami for his granddaughter’s graduation, said, “If this would have happened in Florida, we would have taken him out” of the stadium. Bill Schmidt, 51, of North Bellmore, N.Y., shared the outrage. “To ruin my daughter’s graduation with politics is pathetic,” the retired New York police captain told the paper.

On Sunday night a Hofstra official said that while Mr. Doctorow had the right to his views, he violated the unwritten code that college commencement speeches should inspire and unite a student body. But a Hofstra faculty member came to the fore, defending Mr. Doctorow. “I thought this was a totally appropriate place to talk about politics because that’s the world our students are entering,” sociology professor Cynthia Bogard told Newsday. “I only wish their parents had provided them a better role model.”

Wow. Think of what a role model Prof. Bogard is. What a fool. What a snob.

*   *   *

I want to explain to Ed Doctorow why he was booed. It was not, as he no doubt creamily recounted in a storytelling session over drinks that night in Sag Harbor, that those barbarians in Long Island’s lesser ZIP codes don’t want to hear the truth. It is not that they oppose free speech. It is not that the poor boobs of Long Island have an unaccountable affection for George W. Bush.
It is that they have class.

The poor stupid people of Long Island are courteous, and have respect for the views and feelings of others, and would not dream of imposing their particular views on a captive audience that has gathered to celebrate—to be happy about, to officially mark with their presence—the rather remarkable fact that one of their family studied and worked for four years, completed his courses, met all demands, and became a graduate of an American university.

This indeed is something to be proud of.

Did Eddy Doctorow know that? Did he care? I don’t think so. Did he understand that what the students needed from him—after all, he has lasted a long time, has been a member of a profession, has won the favor of the elite media for lo these many years, and manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill—was perhaps a sense of . . .

All right, I give up. I don’t know what they needed from him. America hasn’t been the same since the dream of socialism so rudely ended? What will we do for a sense of communitarian ideals now that Marx is gone? “God may not exist but we need to tell stories about him nonetheless?”

Fast Eddy Doctorow told a story at the commencement all right, and it is a story about the boorishness of the aging liberal. An old ’60s radical who feels he is entitled to impose his views on this audience on this day because he’s so gifted, so smart, so insightful, so very above the normal rules, agreements and traditions. And for this he will get to call himself besieged and heroic—a hero about whom stories are told!—when in fact all he did was guarantee positive personal press in the elite media, at the cost of the long suffering patience of normal people who wanted to move the tassel and throw the hat in the air.

I am a conservative. I have spoken at three college commencements. Each time I spoke I talked about the students, and the life ahead of them, and the nature of their achievement. I spoke to them about them. I didn’t tell them Jimmy Carter is a retard or Bill Clinton is a pig. It would have been wrong to do that. It would have been boorish. It would have deserved boos.

I’m glad that’s what Eddy Doctorow got this Sunday from what appear to be his intellectual and moral superiors on Long Island. Go Hofstra.

I notice lately everyone I talk to has a new insight or a big theory. In the past week I bumped into two journalists who with cool eyes watch the national scene. The first was in Washington. She told me she’d just been taken aside by a savvy Democratic operative who told her, “It’s going to be a landslide. It’s feeling like 1980 out there.”

I wasn’t sure what this meant, so I asked, “A landslide for whom?”

“He said Kerry,” she said. Oh. Interesting if true, meaning interesting if he’s seeing something most of the rest of us aren’t.

The second journalist, in Manhattan, told me she’s hearing that in focus groups, voters are lately consistently expressing broad and deep affection for President Bush. Even when the leader of the focus group tries to draw them out on Mr. Bush’s negatives, she said, they don’t go there. The leaders says something like, “What about Iraq?” and they’ll say, “That’s not Bush, it’s his advisers.” That’s interesting if true, too.

Lots of swirls of information and misinformation out there. The political class is more fully engaged than ever in the big drama. It’s odd: they have never been so obsessed with who the president is, and at the same time so fundamentally disrespectful of presidents.

*   *   *

I don’t have a Big Theory to share, but I’ve been thinking a lot about someone who’s more important than pundits, and that’s a woman I spent a few hours with last week. She’s a middle-aged, middle-class, suburban middle-of-the-roader.

Some of the things she said surprised me. For one thing, she often votes Republican but isn’t sure she’ll vote for Mr. Bush. Also, she brings no crusading temperament to it, but she is very much against the Iraq war.

I will call her Anna, because that is not her real name. I can’t quote her because it wasn’t an interview but a conversation, and I wasn’t taking notes. But the meaning of what she said, if not her exact words, is in italics.

Anna lives in a $250,000 three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that never quite jelled aesthetically (the highway is 200 yards away, and the whoosh sound the traffic makes when it isn’t drowned out by birds gives you a feeling not of movement forward but of hubbub and rush) and never quite jelled in human terms either, at least for her.

She told me the neighbors seem nice but she doesn’t really know them. Which is odd, as she’s lived there 22 years. But people move in and out—this is the great move-in-and-out nation. Years ago she still stopped by with a Pyrex dish of baked ziti when new people moved in, but not so much anymore. In their old neighborhood, when the kids were young (they have three, all college-educated, grown and living on their own), they got to know the neighbors, but not now. You get quieter. Your family grows. Your grandchildren become everything.

In the house now are just Anna and her husband, who’s semiretired. They’re in their late ‘60s, getting a little achy, thinking about full retirement.

*   *   *

Someone once said, “Show me the headlines when a young man was 20 and I’ll tell you what he thinks.” The headlines when she was in her 20s and 30s were about Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations. She and her husband were young and earnest—he’d been a Marine—and they couldn’t understand the anti-American rhetoric of the kids. They couldn’t understand how anyone would dodge the draft. But now she thinks she thought that way because she was young.

Anna is not romantic about presidents. She figures we hire ‘em and fire ‘em. She thinks politicians are pretty much in it for their own reasons. But it’s also true that if she met the president tomorrow her eyes would dance. This is the modern democratic paradox—”Presidents are nothing. I just met the president!”

As for wars—Vietnam, Nicaragua, anything in Africa, the Mideast, whatever—she has come to believe one thing: None of them were really necessary. War is never good and usually not right. The communists invade Long Island, you have to fight. Otherwise—they rarely have to be fought. You can always sort of put it off. Talk, give a little here and there, make a deal. Don’t have a war. Men have war not because they’re brutal but because they’re romantic, they get all excited. The flags and parades. And they take things very seriously, like oil and geopolitics.

Anna is not a pacifist, she just thinks man likes war too much, and when you look back you think: What was that about? Couldn’t they have avoided that?

She voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. She’s by nature a Republican, which she thinks of as the more boring and mature party. Boring is good in government. Exciting is for “Ryan’s Hope.” But she likes Democrats too. They’re more rascally. But Clinton—he was very smart and he had a great economy but he was a bum. Not just the sex but the money and the pardons and Hillary probably walked out of there with a couch on her head! Bush is a better person. He gets in and 9/11 comes and he handles it. He brought respect back. But he’s always too eager to get involved in things. He pushes too much. He’s pretty impetuous! It was good in Afghanistan, we got rid of those nuts. But Iraq—I don’t know. Iraq is very—who knows? Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was the right thing—but now we’ve got this antiwar mess and it’s 10 troops today and the Israelis and the Gaza strip and fighting and suicide and kids with backpacks and—what a big mess.

*   *   *

Anna is going to vote in November. That’s not in doubt; she always votes. But she isn’t sure who she’s going to vote for.

She’ll make up her mind. It’s not like they say on TV, that there will be some picture and it will crystallize for her “Yes Bush” or “No Bush.” It’s more like she’ll be imagining “more Bush” and the world that brings, or “let’s hire Kerry” and the world that brings. And she’ll vote for the better world she imagines.

And oddly enough she’s starting to feel a little like Mr. Bush can be let go because maybe he has already done the job he was meant to do. He did what we hired him for. He got us through 9/11, he led us through, he got the Homeland Security Department. He cleaned out Afghanistan. Then he moved into Iraq, he fought hard. And maybe that’s the job he was supposed to do. And maybe now we can let him go. Maybe Kerry’s supposed to handle it the next few years. He’ll get us out of Iraq as soon as possible because he’s a Democrat and they don’t want to be there. He didn’t put us in there, so he has no personal issues in getting us out. He’ll work better with other countries because he’s kind of their type—he’s like Chirac, he probably kisses ladies’ hands. He won’t raise taxes too much, because the Republicans in Congress won’t let him. He won’t do anything radical, because the country won’t let him. We could hire him for a few years, let him get things more stable, and then fire him. Put the Democrats in charge of the war; they don’t like war. Put them in charge of the economy; Wall Street seems to bounce when they’re in, funny thing.

Anna knows the world of her children and grandchildren is going to be tough. She wishes everyone were preparing for it, though she isn’t sure there’s anything you can do to prepare. But it would be good, she feels, if Mr. Bush were trying to get the suburbs safer. What do we do if New York is hit? Besides have a lot of water, which is down in the basement waiting. (Does bottled water turn bad after a while? She intends to check this.)

She’s leaning Kerry. But she’s not sure. And she has some issues with him, too.

*   *   *

It’s a mistake to make too much of chance conversations with likely voters, especially ones who are a little older than the average. But our conversation suggested a few things to me. One is that it could be a surprising year. That’s always true of course, but one does have the sense no one has a lock on almost any group in this cycle. Everything feels fluid.

If I were George W. Bush I might be thinking that down the road but not too far down, it might be a good idea to start making clear two things. One, why I am indispensable—a delicate thing to communicate, but something re-elected incumbents always have to get across sooner or later. “I am leading us in the right direction and my work is just begun.” And the other is to make the case that a Kerry presidency would not be a lunge toward greater stability, that it would not be a “return to normalcy,” that Mr. Kerry wouldn’t right things but make them worse, bringing more trouble.

A one-two punch: If you stand with me, I’ll get the peace and prosperity we seek; and if you go for him it will make the world less safe and the country less healthy.

I share an obsession with Tony Soprano. This startles me and makes me unhappy because it has been my experience that once my inner fears are echoed in the outer culture, some kind of grim critical mass has been achieved, and trouble ensues. (Does this sound oddly egocentric, even for a pundit? I think it may. Yet it’s true.)

On Sunday’s “The Sopranos,” Tony stayed up one night channel-surfing. This is not unusual for Tony. His sins keep him awake. Or rather a perplexing question about his sins: Why has the committing of them become so joyless? Why don’t they yield happiness?
He comes across a documentary about the potential use by terrorists of the nearby Port of Newark. The Port of Newark, the biggest port on the eastern seaboard, receives millions of ship containers each year; the feds say they can check only 2%; terrorists could easily smuggle in a dirty nuke.

Tony becomes alarmed. He knows Port Newark. The mob is there, his people are there. It is corrupt, lazy, badly run. Suddenly he realizes there’s nothing between his home and kaboom but a chain-link fence and a mall.

He shares his new anxiety with everyone, sounding like a crank. When a bartender doesn’t respond with the appropriate anxiety Tony becomes enraged and beats him up. Tony has anger problems. So does al Qaeda.

*   *   *

Here’s the obsession I share with Tony Soprano. The Port of Newark is my big fear. When I send out my intellectual radar screen to see what anxiety pings present themselves each day, Newark always comes up first. For Tony’s reasons and others.
Port Newark is just beyond the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. A hit on Newark would cause panic in al Qaeda’s great target, New York—stock market crash, terror in the streets. A hit on Port Newark would deal a blow rich in practical and symbolic terms.

We know that members of al Qaeda are familiar with the Newark area. Many of the terrorists who hit the World Trade Center in 1993 lived in northern New Jersey.

But there’s more and for me it’s more central, and the reason my pings began. New Jersey is becoming the center, in America, of the movement for cloning. Its governor just signed the most liberal cloning bill in the United States. There is money in cloning research, and status: We’re the coming intellectual center of science! We’re not just the Meadowlands and the mob, we’re Princeton and Einstein! There is greater suburban affluence to be gained, and higher tax revenues for politicians to spend on community centers built through no-bid contracts by big contributors. The Robert Torricelli Psychotherapy Institute for the Differently Abled. The Jim McGreevey Carpal Tunnel Trauma Research Facility.

Whenever I think of cloning, I think of Sam Ervin during the Watergate hearings. He quoted the Bible to Richard Nixon’s malefactors: “God is not mocked.” Indeed he is not. Once we can have cloning, we will have cloning. Once we can have cloning we’ll be cloning replacement-part humans to make new hearts for aging baby boomers. We’ll throw the rest away, or mine these beings for other organs and elixirs. Once we have cloning, we’ll start growing cloned armies. Why shouldn’t they fight for us? Once we have cloning, a lot of things will happen, including that we’ll be opening the mouth of hell.

New Jersey is now so confused about what is important, what is needed, and what time it is in history, that they are not only bravely and quite mindlessly going forward on cloning; their political figures are in the news because they feel this is a helpful time to go head to head with the Roman Catholic Church. The Democratic leader of the state Senate has announced he’ll leave the church because of its unfortunate stand against abortion. The governor, criticized by the church for his position on abortion, has announced he won’t receive communion anymore. The church is in a hard place. American cardinals and bishops, afflicted by the sex-abuse scandals they allowed to fester, seem to have lost their standing to persuasively instruct Catholics on moral matters. Rome doesn’t quite believe this, but it’s true. And if Rome directly involves itself—no one challenges John Paul’s moral standing—it will look like the Vatican is meddling in American politics. Which won’t play well in America, for about 28 reasons. In Kerry vs. the Vatican, Kerry would win.

But back to Jersey. Let us posit that its politicians are in politics; let us posit that they are not showily doing all this on the front page of the Newark Star-Ledger because they are deeply principled men in spiritual anguish; let us posit that they are pols who know the plays. Meaning they know the people of Jersey will approve of their stand, or at least not disapprove.

And they are, I believe, correct. Poor Jersey! When I was in high school and college there, it was, I believe, a more soulful place.

*   *   *

On “The Sopranos,” one sees a plot twist being signaled: Tony and Carmella will stay together, and Tony will attempt to extricate himself from his life, removing himself and his family to the Hudson River Valley farm where he spent some happy boyhood summers. On the farm, in the last scene, he is smoking his cigar, full face to the camera. We are left to wonder if it will work. Will Tony find out that sin is a trap, that, as someone once said, happiness is a cat? (Chase it and it will run from you, sit quietly and do your work and it will come and curl itself at your feet.) We will be left to debate it the next day, at the HBO water cooler.

This being “The Sopranos,” signaled plot twists are usually head fakes—we haven’t seen the Essex County prosecutor in a while—but it makes sense. Because Tony wants to get away from Port Newark. He thinks the world has reached some terrible critical mass. He’ll probably soon start talking about cloning. Being a mobster he would be a particular kind of conservative—aware of the bottom line, free of illusions about who human beings are, open in his own sick way to the idea of God, or at least the practical benefits to society of others believing in God—and would immediately intuit what cloning is. At least until A.J. needs a new kidney.

Here’s the point: Bad things are coming, and we all know it. But most of us can’t afford to buy a farm in the Hudson River Valley. Most of us can’t afford to buy the safety of being far, far away on a lake in the mists. Many of us are stuck living near Port Newark.

What are we to do? This is the great domestic policy question of our time. Why doesn’t our government provide us all with the means to survive an expected nuclear, biological or chemical attack? Why doesn’t our government provide us with what I think of as a “get out of Dodge” kit—a protective suit, a regulation gas mask, information on which direction to walk in, or rather run in, and how soon, after Port Newark, or Times Square, or the Sears Tower, or the Shrine Auditorium, is hit? Why aren’t they doing this?

More on that soon.

Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it’s a world-wide story. Did the abuses occur? Obviously. There are pictures, testimony, an apology Wednesday from the U.S. general who now runs the prisons and denunciations of the abuse as “un-American,” (Donald Rumsfeld) and “not the America I know” (George W. Bush). Is the scandal an inspiration to our enemies? Most assuredly. Were the acts acceptable? Of course not. Must they be investigated and justice meted out? Yes, and surely will be.

It was necessary that President Bush go on Arab TV, announce the investigations, and swear that justice would be pursued. But there is no getting around that this is all good news for our foes in a time of war. Violent Islamic extremists will be happy at the propaganda boon and delighted to see their convictions of American depravity illustrated and seemingly legitimized before the world.

*   *   *

How disheartening is it for those who are not our foes? Let us count the ways. 1. It is what it is on the face of it—cruel and unusual treatment of enemy combatants or detainees by those who represent and fight for our country. 2. It forces us to think that some Americans are capable of this. This is demoralizing. 3. The scandal can and will be used by the mischievous and malicious at home and abroad to attempt to tarnish the character of the troops we’ve so come to respect and feel grateful for. This is most unjust. These men and women have enough troubles. We already ask them to be warrior/peacekeeper/cop/doctor/diplomat, and they shouldn’t have to worry about this. 4. The scandal suggests to the world that there are a (small) number of U.S. troops who are capable of these actions, which is mortifying, and which gives rise to a defensive, “That is not who we are.” As indeed it is not. The humiliators could hardly have more heavily humiliated their country.

Because we are a free-press, free-expression nation in the media age, we tell the world our sins. Many will not receive the latest in a way that involves jumping up and down and exclaiming, “See the fruits of free inquiry, what a country!” Publication of the photos and reports we’ve seen so far inflames our enemies in a time of active war. This is a danger to us. At some point down the road some terrorist will testify that it was the picture of his masked and naked countrymen posing behind them that sealed his commitment to jihad. And yet there is no way around this. In fact this scandal is like a little metaphor for the Iraq experience itself: Whatever your opinion was, there’s now no way round it but through it.

The best we can do is what we’ve done and had no choice but to do: Reveal these things for all the world to see. Redress, reform, repair, reprimand and remove.

*   *   *

I find that I cannot shake a memory of something I read years ago in one of Shirley MacLaine’s memoirs. The work of Ms. MacLaine might seem an odd thing to reference here, but bear with me. I write from memory. She was a young movie star. It was the 1950s. She had appeared in a film that was at least implicitly critical of the United States. She came under fire from some critics: Why can’t you people in Hollywood be more positive? Your work encourages anti-American propaganda. She didn’t think this was true, but she wasn’t exactly a world-class thinker so it didn’t matter. What did matter is what she threw away at the end of her story. She went to an international film festival and talked with an anti-American intellectual. He told her something like, “The first time I ever thought maybe your country was something special was when I saw your movie and saw how critical Hollywood is allowed to be. You must really have some kind of freedom.”

When I read this I believed it, and still do. You do reveal something about yourself by telling uncomfortable truths. You reveal good faith. You reveal that you’re trying to get it right. This is not so terrible. It is something the dim might miss, but the intelligent are likely to get. And God bless this earth, there are a lot of intelligent people.

The president said of the U.S. on Arab TV that “we have nothing to hide.” He no doubt meant there are things that we would wish to hide, but that we refuse to.

*   *   *

But let’s not get too optimistic. The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can’t. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I’ve never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.

But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo—she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.

Every now and then you witness a small moment that is actually a big moment. Maybe it alerts you to something surprising that’s going on, or maybe it illustrates what you already know but in a new way, one that can’t be dodged or avoided.

It happened to me the other day at a play, a press preview of the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansbury’s “Raisin in the Sun.” I love this play. I’ve seen it several times, but I hadn’t seen it in years when I settled into my seat.

It has gotten more attention than most shows, mostly because it features the Broadway debut of rap mogul P. Diddy, the former Puff Daddy, who apparently has decided to go by his birth name, Sean Combs. That’s how he’s listed in the playbill.

The play was wonderful. I urge you to go. It’s an important piece of work, and I left moved and excited. I hadn’t realized when I first saw it, decades ago, and saw the movie, also decades ago, that “Raisin” was a landmark play. But it is. It captures with wit and heart a great moment in time. It tells of a black family living on the cusp of cultural liberation in 1950s America. We see them face questions of daily life—what is it to be a man, what is familial loyalty?—as they wrestle with great cultural questions. Shall we, as black Americans, assimilate and become like white Americans? Can we turn back to our African roots to find the truth of our people? Does the older generation have a clue what kind of changes are sweeping the young, or are they too busy surviving to feel the winds of change? Are they in the habit of second-class citizenship?

These ideas were new then. It was all untried. Young people would do, and in time history itself would decide if they’d done right.

The family whose story is told is an intact nuclear family. It is clear they are not special because they are intact and functioning—they’re average, like everyone else. Everyone works hard—cleaning woman, chauffer—and everyone has dreams. Phylicia Rashad as the mother is transcendent. She is going to make you cry. She’s a great actress, and I didn’t know it. I thought she was just a persona with a particular kind of dignity, but she is an artist.

Audra McDonald as a young woman married to a ne’er-do-well son is equally brilliant. Sean Combs on the other hand is not a person of artistic talent. The problem is not that he acts like a high school sophomore, though he does—he registers surprise by bulging his eyes and making an O with his mouth. It’s that the thing for which he has become famous—strutting and rapping with a jaded slack-jawed look—is not a facet of his talent but the whole of it. When he sings a snatch of song you realize, Oh my God, he can’t even sing. I thought rappers could sing but choose not to. Who knew?

But here’s a funny thing: there’s something moving in it when you realize that he made it as a star in America through sheer will, through a bulldozer’s determination. That also is something you get from God, and he got a lot. It took guts for him to do Broadway and bring new people into the theater for the first time, so I suspect he’ll get a pass from the critics. This play is going to be a hit because he’s in it. (At the curtain call he gallantly kissed Ms. Rashad and then Ms. McDonald—and Ms. McDonald got this look on her face that said, “Don’t gallantly bend to kiss my little cheek when I just carried your sorry ass for three hours.”)

*   *   *

I was so moved by the show in part because the audience was full of people who were not your basic Broadway theatergoing types. They had come for P. Diddy and found themselves enthralled by a play. They were so responsive that in a scene where a mother slaps her daughter the whole audience went “Oh!” So did I. When the character based on Lorraine Hansbury breaks out in a tribal dance we didn’t just laugh with delight, we hooted and hollered. The audience was alive. It was so moving and got me kind of choked. I thought, Maybe this is like what it was like when Shakespeare wrote, “You tell him, Romeo—Juliet no, don’t!”

But I must tell you of the small moment that was actually a big moment. (There’s a possible spoiler coming up, so if you don’t know the story and mean to see the play, stop here.) An important moment in the plot is when a character announces she is pregnant, and considering having an abortion. In fact, she tells her mother-in-law, she’s already put $5 down with the local abortionist. It is a dramatic moment. And you know as you watch it that when this play came out in 1960 it was received by the audience as a painful moment—a cry of pain from a woman who’s tired of hoping that life will turn out well.

But this is the thing: Our audience didn’t know that. They didn’t understand it was tragic. They heard the young woman say she was about to end the life of her child, and they applauded. Some of them cheered. It was stunning. The reaction seemed to startle the actors on stage, and shake their concentration. I was startled. I turned to my friend. “We have just witnessed a terrible cultural moment,” I said. “Don’t I know it,” he responded.

And I can’t tell you how much that moment hurt. To know that the members of our audience didn’t know that the taking of a baby’s life is tragic—that the taking of your own baby’s life is beyond tragic, is almost operatic in its wailing woe.

But our audience didn’t know. They reacted as if abortion were a political question. They thought that the fact that the young woman was considering abortion was a sign of liberation. They thought this cry of pain was in fact a moment of self-actualizing growth.

Afterwards, thinking about it, I said to my friend, “When that play opened that plot point was understood—they knew it was tragic. And that was only what, 40 years ago.” He said, “They would have known it was tragic even 25 years ago.”

And it gave me a shiver because I knew it was true.

*   *   *

Lorraine Hansbury died in the mid-1960s when she was only 35 years old. She didn’t know how things would turn out. She didn’t know that a poor family that is also a nuclear family would seem exceptional, that a young black intellectual could indeed become a person of substance and respect, a doctor, and that this, 35 years later, would not seem unusual. That the struggle for racial equality would also be a long one, with many twists and turns.

She would be surprised perhaps by how some of the dramatic themes she introduced played out. The whole play is about moral choices—taking chances to make things better. She had a moral mind. She thought the great question of her time was whether the different races in America could learn to treat each other with justice and grace. I can’t imagine she’d guess that members of an eager audience in the year 2004 would have become such moral dullards that we wouldn’t understand something as basic as an abortion, and what it is. If she were alive now I wonder if she would be surprised, or shocked, that that moment no longer worked as a dramatic plot point because the audience had changed so much in its understanding of the basics.

So much progress followed the 1960s, in so many ways, but applauding abortion isn’t progress. It’s ugly. And I’m writing this with an odd little hope. That you might go see this great play, and when the moment comes that the young woman announces she might end the life of the child she is carrying, that you would sit quietly and think about what that moment means. And if anyone cheers or hoots or hollers, give them a look. Let them see your silence. Lead with it. Help the people around you realize: Something big is being spoken of here. And we know what it is. And it is nothing good.