Peggy Noonan

State of the Union addresses are usually reviewed in terms of “eloquence,” or “drama,” or how the overnight polls register the public’s reaction. But for sheer seriousness, for the depth and scope of the information imparted, the president’s State of the Union the other night was, simply, staggering.

I’m not sure everyone fully noticed, but about five minutes into it George W. Bush laid the predicate for what will no doubt prove a costly war marked by high casualties some of which, perhaps many, will likely be civilian.

That is what he was saying when Mr. Bush asserted that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction aimed at the West, that Iraq continues to hide its WMDs, that old allies such as the Philippines are increasingly overrun by those who want the West dead, that the Mideast and Africa are the home of similar and connected terror movements. Nineteen men caused havoc on Sept. 11, he said, but the camps they were trained in have pumped out 10,000 more, “each one a ticking time bomb.”

The president was blunt in unveiling what will perhaps be known as the Bush Doctrine. And that is that the United States will no longer hope for the best in the world and respond only after being attacked; we will, instead, admit and act on the facts of the WMD era and actively search out our would-be killers wherever they are and whoever supports them and shut them down dead. The Clinton model of inadequate response based on ambivalent feeling is over; likewise the Bush I model of cat-herding coalitions and anxious diplomacy is over, though coalitions and diplomacy are nice, especially when everyone agrees to do the same thing at the same time in the same way.

This is about as big as presidential statements get. Where and when will America move next? Mr. Bush did not say. How long will it take? Ten years. Or, as he put it, this “decade” will be “decisive” in “the history of human liberty.” This was not rhetoric. In fact, the speech was blessedly free of the faux poetry that is often mistaken for eloquence. Mr. Bush’s eloquence is in his plainspokenness, in the fact that each word is a simple coin with a definite worth. The speech was fact-filled, dense and not airy. Its main point was to tell the American people we are in the fight of our lives and that we had better win, and will.

*   *   *

It was not a laundry-list speech, as State of the Union addresses usually are. It was not a laundry list because we are at war, and so there are essentially only two items on the president’s list, the war and reviving the economy that, among other things, supports the war.

Mr. Bush also is not by nature given to laundry-list speeches. One senses he understands that politicians who do them are trying to obscure the fact that they don’t have a philosophy. They hope the adding up of program upon program will give the appearance of philosophy. But Mr. Bush has a philosophy. It is conservative. Freedom is the God-given and natural state of man, the government exists to protect man’s freedom, and the greatest and most reliable freedom protector in all of human history is: us.

That’s what “Let’s roll” means to him. Let’s be us.

For a man who is famously not smart Mr. Bush certainly is smart. The president seems to me these days to be operating as a person of essentially two halves. The first half is Sheer Gut—a sharp and intelligent instinct, an inner shrewdness, an ability to see the bottom line, decide priorities, and see the difference between what is desired and what is needed. The second half, as the liberal pundit Bill Schneider said on CNN after the speech, is “character.” People can tell, Mr. Schneider said, that when Mr. Bush says he’s going to do something he actually means to do it.

A great gut plus a reliable character is maybe the exact perfect mix for any president, but certainly for a wartime president.

*   *   *

On non-war issues the president continued to paint himself merrily and sympathetically as a man who stands for giving the little guy the tax cuts he needs . . . for using honest faith to answer public problems . . . for a strong defense, a strong military, a pay increase for the soldiers sailors and Marines who put themselves in harm’s way so we can sleep safely at night. He put himself forward as the man who stands for winning the war and encouraging the rise in well-grounded patriotic feeling.

Mr. Bush’s opposition at the moment appears to have been reduced to agreeing with the president on just about everything and then saying, “But let’s make sure we don’t run a deficit!” Mr. Bush is talking life and death, love and honor and they’re running around talking like accountants. The Democrats of Congress seem at the moment to be acting like liberal Republicans during the Great Society, always worried about the cost of things and never the meaning. Without a message they wince; they are acting like what H.L. Mencken said of the Puritans, that they lived in constant fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.

And I am not sure the coming deficit will have much traction as a political issue for the Democrats. The public by and large seems to know that (a) there’s a war on, (b) we all want whatever defense systems or weapons that can keep us alive to be bought and deployed, and we’ll worry about the cost later when we’re still alive, as opposed to dead, and (c) oh heck, Ronald Reagan said we’d grow our way out of the last deficit and we did, let it go.

I quoted Bill Schneider praising Mr. Bush. After his speech, the liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the president’s words were “galvanizing.” Chris Mathews compared him to Jack Kennedy. The New York Times said Mr. Bush has “soared to new heights.”

*   *   *

In the old days elite opinion held that Mr. Bush was a scripted trust-fund dullard whose rise was greased by luck and birth. Those were the days. Those of us who stood with Mr. Bush then were a small and hardy band of criticized contrarians. It was fun. We had secret handshakes and everything. Now everyone’s in on the act.

It is not, in general, good for presidents to be so universally praised. Politicians are made dizzy by love. They lose their edge, their purpose, and coast. But Mr. Bush has earned this support, and in any case wartime is a good time to unify behind a president—particularly this war, particularly this president.

And it’s also true that those who once dismissed Mr. Bush and now praise him are demonstrating an honesty and high mindedness that is wonderful to behold after the sapping, sour 1990s. It really is refreshing—literally refreshing—to have a president people admire and can follow cleanly again.

I know a man who once ran a big international company, who had done very well in life and was happily retired. Years after he left the company, it went public in an IPO that would make all the company’s officers even richer than they were, which was already pretty rich. The company’s retired executives got together and decided to press for a piece of the pie. They had to fight for it, and it got messy, but in the end they all got some more money.

I asked my friend, during the controversy, why the retired members were fighting so hard. Had some fallen on hard times? No, he said, not to his knowledge. Did they need the money for immediate and pressing concerns? No, he said, not that he knew of. “Then why is this such a big deal to them if they’re already rich?” He looked at me with the kind of face people get when they hear something truly inexplicable. And then he said in a pleasant, explanatory tone, “Everyone wants more.”

It was my turn to get the inexplicable look. Because not everyone wants more, or at least not everyone wants more in circumstances like that. The idea of getting into a struggle to squeeze out another $5 million when you already have a $100 million seemed to me absurd, a misallocation of energy and interest. It’s not as if you can buy a better steak if you’re already that rich. It’s not as if you can buy a better anything. So why fight for another five?

*   *   *

I have thought of this conversation ever since the Enron scandal began. Enron’s officers, its leaders and top dogs, were really rich. They created a big company out of nothing and did very well. But then when things went bad—when their own decisions, apparently, drove the enterprise south—they made sure they would stay rich. They did this by quietly selling off their stock while the peons below them were not allowed to. While the peons below watched the worth of their stock erode, and then fall, and then plummet. The big guys had to stay rich. Everyone wants more.

It is, to me, an amazing, an almost unbelievable story. And I bring a particular and personal knowledge to it.

You have heard the past few weeks of journalists, political figures and others who were advisers to Enron or served on its board. I was not an adviser or board member, but in 1997 I spent two days in their Houston headquarters touring the place and meeting with their top officers to get to know the company so I could work on a speech with the CEO, Ken Lay, and work with his people on the CEO’s letter in an upcoming annual report. They wanted the report to be interesting to read, like Jack Welch’s famous letter to shareholders at the beginning of General Electric annual reports. I’d never done work like that before and wound up never doing it again, in part because I wasn’t good at it, and in part because I realized I just didn’t get modern big business.

*   *   *

The people I dealt with at Enron were mostly middle-level workers, and they were terrific—smart, dedicated and loyal to their company. They worked like dogs. They’re probably among those who just lost much of their money. One of the things they believed in as good public policy was deregulating the sale of consumer electricity in America. I supported it too but had reservations about it. I understood the basic arguments: that deregulation held the promise of lower energy costs for consumers, cleaner and more efficient energy, profit for private sector investors in those companies that would compete to provide energy, such as Enron, and, ultimately, a spur to more inventions that would make consumers’ lives better.

Deregulation was part of the reason Enron asked me to come down and talk to them. For I had told an Enron worker I’d met in Manhattan that making the case for the deregulation of anything these days, especially a commodity that has been a public utility since before almost everyone in the country was born, would be difficult.

When I went down to Houston, I met with Enron’s No. 2, Jeff Skilling, and told him I felt Enron would have a big problem in persuading the American people to support deregulation. The reason? Two words: Too complicated.

He told me that deregulation of electricity is certainly not complicated.

Well, I said, maybe you’re right, but this is how I see it. American consumers have a myriad of choices on almost everything now, which is wonderful in the abstract but often hellish in the particular. For instance, telephones. When I was a kid you got a phone from the phone company. There was only one phone company, so you didn’t have to do research. They came and put in the jack and you called your friends. You didn’t even choose the color of the phone when I was a kid; all the phones were black. Everyone had the same kind of phone and the same service. It was easy.

Now there are 50 phone companies, 50 kinds of phones, 50 kinds of service, 50 package deals, five different phone bills every month, phone companies calling at dinnertime to sell their wares, secret codes to get our messages. And it sometimes makes you feel like you wish there could be one big phone company again, and one black phone.

I told him that it is fabulous that we have such choice, such progress, but that it’s burdensome too. I sometimes miss the simplicity of the old, limited world. And I thought if I did, some others did too. Asking people to make individual decisions about what local electric company to use just might be one item too many on the average consumer’s Daily Decision List.

Mr. Skilling got a sort of dark look as I spoke. And finally he said, impatiently, that phone deregulation has made telephones not more expensive but less. “Do you know what it costs to call London now compared to the way it was?”

I said I didn’t, and thought: Most people even today, in 1997, aren’t calling London all the time. That’s not how normal people judge progress. And anyway it’s not the point. Life has gotten too complicated for a lot of people, that’s the point.

*   *   *

Let me tell you what I saw when I was there. I saw cavernous rooms with big monitors on the walls, and on desks too. The monitors and computers were blinking out numbers. I remember the numbers and words on the screens as bright green. Young future Masters of the Universe were standing with phones, monitoring the numbers, saying things, buying and selling. I met with a woman famous in the company for being in charge of putting big natural gas pipelines into Central or South America and India. She seemed intense and intelligent and, like the men, very Armani but kind of Texas Armani—everyone well tailored but with more gold, more colors than Wall Street people, who are sort of more gray-hued.

I thought Ken Lay intelligent, soft-spoken, somewhat opaque. At one point I met Mr. Lay’s wife. It was just after I returned from Houston, and I met with him in an Enron suite at a hotel in New York. Mrs. Lay was visiting New York and had just come in from a long day of shopping. I was introduced to her and what I remember was she was wearing beautiful soft tailored black leather slacks. They were like movie-star pants. And I thought: Boy, these people have a lot of money.

And I thought, they spend a lot of money. That was one thing that hit me hard in Houston: They were “hemorrhaging money!” as Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy said. They were building this and tearing down that, they were, they told me, talking to legislators in various state houses, lobbying to get deregulation bills passed. All of it seemed expensive, labor-intensive, time-intensive.

And it all seemed so tentative, so provisional. The Enron building was huge; the Enron sign outside, the big tilted E, was huge; the gold earrings on the women executives were huge; the watches on the men were huge; the paychecks were huge; the company’s ambitions were huge. But all of it seemed to depend on things that were provisional. If they are able to build the big pipeline in India, it will be great and profitable—provided it happens. If they are able to get states to deregulate electricity, and Enron is able to provide it, and it all goes well, it will be great and profitable—if it happens. If the Central or South American pipeline goes through and works and runs a profit it will be great—if it happens. An empire built on ifs. It all seemed so provisional.

*   *   *

I went away for a few weeks and worked hard and tried to put together a speech and make a contribution to the annual report, but none of it really worked. Mr. Lay used at least part of the speech I worked on, about deregulation and its challenges. Some of what I tried to write for the annual report made it in. But mostly my contributions weren’t helpful, and I think for two reasons. One was that the guys at the top, and in the middle, seemed unable to communicate to me exactly what it was the company was doing to make money. So I didn’t absorb the information and make it understandable to others. The other was that I think I sensed a sort of corporate monomania at the top—if you can’t understand what we’re doing then maybe you’re not too bright.

But the key part was that I couldn’t help them explain their mission because I didn’t fully understand what their mission was. I understand what the Kenneth Cole shoe company does. It makes shoes and sells them in stores. Firestone makes tires. I couldn’t figure out how Enron was making its money, what exactly it was selling, and every time I asked I got a kind of gobbledygook answer or a cryptic one, like “The future!”

We should all have a realistic sense of our limits, and I decided that one of mine is that I don’t have a mind that appears to be able to understand the complexities of modern big business. But my dimness was in this case helpful to me. It meant I would have not a long relationship with Enron but a short one that lasted about a month. And it allowed me to make another choice. A friend, on being told I’d been to Houston and was working on an annual report, told me: “Get paid in stock, that company is golden.”

But it didn’t seem golden to me, it only seemed confusing. So I sent them a bill, charging, if memory serves, $250 an hour for the 100 to 200 hours I worked, which is more than a first-rate psychiatrist and less than a first-rate lawyer. This is what I used to charge for speeches in those days when I did them.

I never worked for Enron again. I stayed in touch with a few of the midlevel people for a while, but they all left in time. I’d think of them now and then, wonder how the company was doing, read or hear that it was No. 1, top in the field, golden. Until it wasn’t anymore.

*   *   *

I’m speaking of all of this because I feel I have to in order to write about Enron. And I have to write about Enron because I have strong views about the scandal.

I am a conservative, and so a Republican. I believe that conservatives and Republicans have a special responsibility, as the party that stands for free markets, to see to it that free markets work, and are not abused, gamed or finagled. Republicans and conservatives have, I believe, a special responsibility to come down hard on people who cheat their shareholders and their employees.

Obviously the primary question at the moment is whether anyone from Ken Lay on down literally violated the criminal code. The Justice Department is investigating. This is good. But it seems to me the administration might consider a special prosecutor in the case, too.

President Bush yesterday changed his tone about Enron, admitting that what its leaders appear to have done angers him. That’s good. But more anger is needed, or rather a greater and more obvious commitment to get to the bottom of the scandal.

Representatives of Enron, as everyone knows, met with Vice President Dick Cheney’s office before the administration put forward its energy bill. Congress is demanding the notes and records of those meetings. The vice president is refusing, on principle: It would be a violation of executive privilege. Mr. Cheney explained the other night to Tom Brokaw that the principle is an important one: A president and vice president simply have to preserve their ability to meet with and talk candidly with citizens and groups on policy issues, and the candor is compromised if all the details of every meeting are made public.

He is no doubt correct, and his arguments would, one suspects, be upheld by the courts.

But the administration could both insist on the principle of executive privilege and, in this case, waive it. Just waive it. They could announce that Congress can, in this special case, see all of the notes and materials on the Enron meetings.

Why should the administration consider doing this? Because the Enron case is special—huge, damaging to individuals and damaging to faith in free markets. Because, as I’ve said, Republicans have a special responsibility as the free market party to support the transparency of those markets. And there is a third reason, which is merely political, but then politics is rarely mere. If the administration continues to resist the request for documents and fight in the courts, its victory may well be Pyrrhic and its potential loss even more painful. Because as long as the administration doesn’t come forward with everything, the issue remains alive and potent for the opposition’s use.

(Yes, Enron was, like most big corporations, a corporate whore in terms of its contributions. It gave to both parties; it gave to both Clintons. But the Republicans will be hard-pressed to shake the Democrats’ insistence that this was largely a Republican problem. And in any case it would be good to see just how Enron operated politically in its dealings with both parties—which is to say, it would be good for the public to have more information about big business and politics, not less.)

Finally, those who insist the law should change with respect to accountants certainly seem to be correct. It appears to be a conflict of interest when an accounting firm that audits a company also receives millions of dollars for consulting—that is, millions for advising the company on business decisions even as they’re getting millions for reviewing its books. This is what appears to have happened with Arthur Andersen and Enron. It’s hard to understand why and how this is legal.

*   *   *

It’s not true that everyone wants more. It’s not true that “everyone does it.” And it’s not true that free markets are rigged, a sucker’s game. But it does seem that the party that stands for free markets and free economic dealings has a special responsibility to make sure that those who abuse them are given one big Texas whippin’.

Someone once said the White House is the only sieve that leaks from the top, but the Bush White House is, so far, famously leak-proof. Or rather almost leak-free.

And that is amazing.

How could it be? How did it happen? And is there any chance it will continue?

*   *   *

The Bush White House doesn’t leak because George W. actively and affirmatively does not want it to.

From 1981 to 1993, George W. Bush spent 12 years of his life, from the ages of 35 to 47—the years of full adulthood when you absorb Life’s Major Lessons—watching leaks almost kill the administration in which his father was vice president, and then arguably destroy the administration in which his father was president.

Dubya learned to hate leaks. And to hate leakers. And boy do his people know.

Here are some of the leaks Dubya witnessed in the Reagan-Bush era. A year into Ronald Reagan’s first term, his most influential domestic adviser, David Stockman, went to the liberal Atlantic Monthly magazine and spilled into its pages the darkest night of his dark soul. The tax cuts were evil, the deficit irresponsible; spending can’t be controlled; we’re in “an economic Dunkirk”; supply-side theory is nothing more than “trickle-down economics.” Mr. Stockman was speaking of course at the exact moment in history when the economy, as Mr. Reagan prophesied, was beginning to burst from its old constraints and yield the Great Abundance, which, for all its ups and downs, is with us still.

But Mr. Stockman’s leak was truly destructive, not only to Mr. Reagan personally but to his administration’s standing as an earnest and believable entity. For it gave Mr. Reagan’s great nemesis, the American establishment, enough ammunition for the next 20 years of propaganda. “It was all smoke and mirrors, his own budget director admitted it.”

Mr. Reagan soon said he’d had it “up to my keister” with leaks, but, being Ronald Reagan, he ultimately treated Mr. Stockman with mercy. Mr. Stockman repaid him by suggesting in his memoirs that if Mr. Reagan had been a real leader he would have canned him. Mr. Stockman then left for Wall Street, where he prospered in the greatest peacetime economic expansion in all of U.S. history—which resulted from the policies he’d done so much to denigrate. Life is funny.

*   *   *

George W. Bush saw that leak and more. He saw the ketchup-is-a-vegetable leak, the White-House-staff-in-constant-turmoil leaks, the Iran-contra leaks in which operatives on Capitol Hill and in the independent counsel’s office whispered to the press that Vice President Bush was soon to be named, subpoenaed, indicted.

It was all so damaging. The Reagan-Bush years were a leak feast, and every morning sophisticated White Houseians woke up to grab the Washington Post to find out what reporter David Hoffman had today. They’d read, interpret, analyze, deconstruct. I can remember conversations in the halls of the Old Executive Office Building in which Joe would say to Bob, “I know that was Frank’s unattributed quote in the Hoffman piece, no one else around here would use a word like ‘coruscating.’ ”

I knew a man who was an infrequent but truly gifted leaker. He was so good at it that he managed to leak in other people’s language. One of the man’s enemies was a guy down the hall who had the habit of punctuating other people’s remarks with “Absolutely!” My friend the leaker would use “Absolutely!” in his unattributed quotes so his enemy would be the first suspect.

George W. Bush in those days witnessed a political culture in which Lee Atwater was leaking against Ed Rollins to Time in one office and Ed was simultaneously leaking against Lee to Newsweek in another. I remember hearing one story of a 1984 Reagan campaign staffer who leaked so much and so often about strategy—he never came up with any strategy, he just heard about it at meetings and then spent the rest of the morning on the phone telling reporters what we were going to do next—that one day one of his bureaucratic foes locked him in his office and told him he was going to watch the outside lines, and if one of them lit up he’d come in and drag him straight to his boss. Everything was strangely quiet for a few hours, so the fellow poked his head into the leaker’s office and found him under his desk—literally under his desk—with someone else’s phone in his hand, leaking.

This really happened.

*   *   *

Part of the reason for the leaking in the Reagan-Bush era, especially the Reagan era, was that both White Houses were riven by a left-right split, by philosophical and ideological divisions. People leaked bad stuff about Team Conservative to help Team Liberal. In the Bush administration it all culminated in the most destructive leak of all.

In 1991-92, when Budget Director Dick Darman, a liberal Republican, wished to give his version and view of Bush 41’s tax-cut pledge and its rescission, he went to his friend Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post. The Post of course is the Washington establishment newspaper, read by all Washington powers and all embassy staffs, which wire home its contents. And so when Mr. Darman leaked to the Post, part of his intention was to make his claims, memories and point of view the Official Version.

But Mr. Darman got tripped up. Mr. Woodward had told Mr. Darman he was interviewing him for a book to be published down the road and Mr. Darman, as an old friend, took this at face value. But once Mr. Woodward had everything he wanted from Mr. Darman and others, he informed the budget director that, unfortunately, he has an agreement with the Washington Post that any time he discovers major news while working on a book he has to share it with the paper’s news desk.

And so, shortly before Election Day 1992, with President Bush struggling against the odds to hold onto his presidency, the Post published a series saying that Mr. Bush never meant the tax pledge, never intended to keep it, and the president’s own pollster had been eager to raise taxes from day one.

It was devastating. And Dubya was watching it all. And he hated what he saw.

One of the things he saw, by the way, was not only that leaks were destructive, but they were uniquely destructive to conservatism. Liberals had big media, elite media, establishment media, from the newspapers to the networks, to leak to. It was the liberal pipeline: Turn it on in the Post or Times and it will flow into ABC and CBS. Conservatives didn’t have a media structure to effectively leak to. They had small weekly papers like Human Events, the fortnightly National Review, the brand-new Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. But there was no Non-Liberal News Alternative in those days, no conservative media infrastructure, no Rush, no Drudge, no Internet, no Fox News Channel.

So Dubya learned that not only did leaks destroy but they tended to destroy conservatives. And Dubya was a conservative.

*   *   *

From the minute he went into politics, in Texas, at the top, the governorship, George W. Bush let his people know: Leak and you are out. He told them they could be frank with him and frank with each other in meetings, that he needed their candor and expected disagreement. But as soon as he read about it on the front page of the Houston Chronicle, you are out of here. He let them know he would find out who did the leaking, for leaking is something he understood. He had spent 12 years watching the masters.

Mr. Bush also surrounded himself in Texas with tight, talented and competent people as opposed to visionaries and venturesome thinkers. Visionaries and venturesome thinkers talk; communicating is what they do. They fall in love with their ideas, and come to dislike those who oppose them. They sometimes lash out at them; they sometimes leak.

When he got to the White House, Mr. Bush kept his Texas staff and added on people he respected from his father’s term—people who to a man hated the culture of leaks and had been damaged by them in their previous lives.

*   *   *

So: Mr. Bush’s White House doesn’t leak. But how does Mr. Bush enforce his No Leak Law? In a way he doesn’t have to. It enforces itself. It’s in place; he brought it with him; it’s there.

But there’s more. On deep background I spoke to someone I know/have never met/once had lunch with in the Bush White House/Executive Office Building/Cabinet. He/she/it did not want to be identified. I asked, “How do you guys/gals/things get the word that you can’t leak? How does the White House enforce it?”

The man/woman/top aide/peon answered—this is a real quote, which on the rules of background I’m not supposed to use but so what: “Let me close my door. The reason this place doesn’t leak is because people have to look up and down the hall before they talk. Killing leakers might have a deterrent effect!”

But he/she/it said it was interesting, no one ever tells you not to leak, it’s just something you pick up. There are signs and signals. They are expressed institutionally.

Certainly Mr. Bush showed his resolve on leaks when, after Sept. 11, classified information he’d shared with some congressmen wound up in the press. Mr. Bush came down hard, spared no feelings, slammed the Hill and ordered a directive limiting the dissemination of U.S. intelligence. Jake Tapper of Salon compared him to “a master hitting his dog with a rolled up newspaper.”

The Bush White House is a White House of empires—Karen Hughes’s empire, Karl Rove’s, Josh Bolton’s, Andy Card’s. The people who work for them take their cues from them. If Ms. Hughes doesn’t leak, her empire doesn’t leak. And Karen doesn’t leak.

I called Mary Matalin and asked her why this White House doesn’t leak when every other White House she ever worked in did. She said, “There’s this notion (in the press) that this White House is just so well disciplined and well organized. They think it’s run like a camp!” But the real key to the success of the No Leak Law is simple: “Because we have a common agenda we’re not trying to advance any position but the president’s. So we don’t use the vehicle of leaks to advance our own agenda. The Washington press thinks of leaking as ‘conflict leaking’—you leak to them to advance an agenda that is apart from the president’s, or to force an argument in a certain direction. We don’t have that. There aren’t any separate ideological or policy vents, we’re here to advance his policy. Previous administrations, you didn’t like the way it was going you’d leak it out in the press.”

Then she said something no White House aide in modern history has ever felt compelled to say, “We do leak!” she insisted. “We leak stuff all the time about what we’re doing and why, but it’s not conflict leaking.”

And they leak what Mr. Bush wants leaked. “He speaks in English not just to America but to us. He makes the agenda clear. It’s not unclear, there’s no guessing, what he’s thinking or wanting or going—he’s straightforward.”

There’s another way Mr. Bush enforces the No Leak Law, and it’s that he appears to obey it himself. He doesn’t leak. He doesn’t share with an aide details of a conversation he had with a Democratic senator and then wave his hand as if to say, “Make sure the Post finds out.” He doesn’t leak against Democrats. He doesn’t leak against Republicans. He doesn’t against his staff.

Previous presidents have, thinking they had to become part of the game. Mr. Bush just thinks he had to shut the game down.

*   *   *

What is the public benefit of the No Leak Law?

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy often chose not to meet with his top military and civilian advisers as they gathered down the hall trying to come up with options on what to do about the Soviet missiles aimed at America from 90 miles off the Florida coast. JFK’s instinct: When the president is in the meeting some people become inhibited, some are afraid to be candid. And what he needed was their uninhibited candor.

So he didn’t go. He was briefed later, by his brother and others, and made his best choices based on the best thinking.

In the Bush White House it’s the press that isn’t there, at the meeting. It is “briefed later,” by “others,” such as Don Rumsfeld in his daily news conferences.

The president gets what he needs to hear, the public gets what it needs to hear, and there are fewer harem-scarem headlines, which in wartime even more than at other times is a good thing.

But—a big but—has a bright and industrious little serpent attempted to invade this leakless Eden?

Yes.

Guess who’s working on a book on Dubya’s first year, or Dubya’s first year and the war, or the Afghan war, or the continual fighting between State, Defense and the National Security Council over Dubya’s first year, the war and Afghanistan?

Big Bad Bob. Woodward, that is. He is reported to be hammering all over the place looking for leaks, trying to make them spring. Who would be his sources? I can guess and so can you, but the more sophisticated and experienced guesser would be one George W. Bush.

I wonder how he intends to handle it. I wonder what he’s doing about it. I wonder if the No Leak Law will prevail or, if it doesn’t, I wonder if Mr. Bush will choose to cooperate, and have his people cooperate, on the old theory that if you cooperate with certain people you’re paying a kind of protection money: Talk and the whole story won’t be told to your disadvantage, refuse to talk and you’ll be portrayed as the fool. “In this town,” as Bob Novak once famously said, “you’re either a source or a target.”

Wonder what Mr. Bush and his people will choose to be. Wonder if they’ll figure out a way to be neither.

There’s a small but telling scene in Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” that contains some dialogue that reverberates, at least for me. In the spirit of Samuel Johnson, who said man needs more often to be reminded than instructed, I offer it to all, including myself, who might benefit from its message.

The movie, as you know, is about the Battle of the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. In the scene, the actor Tom Sizemore, playing your basic tough-guy U.S. Army Ranger colonel, is in charge of a small convoy of humvees trying to make its way back to base under heavy gun and rocket fire. The colonel stops the convoy, takes in some wounded, tears a dead driver out of a driver’s seat, and barks at a bleeding sergeant who’s standing in shock nearby:
Colonel: Get into that truck and drive.
Sergeant: But I’m shot, Colonel.
Colonel: Everybody’s shot, get in and drive.

“Everybody’s shot.” Those are great metaphoric words.

*   *   *

Let me tell you how they seem to apply metaphorically. An hour before I saw the movie, I was with friends at lunch, and they filled me in on the latest doings in our beloved country while I was away. Cornel West is very, very angry at Larry Summers for suggesting that Prof. West shouldn’t essentially perp-walk his way through the halls of academe. A Secret Service agent—a presidential Secret Service agent!—had a hissy fit when an airline pilot refused to let him board a plane carrying his gun with dubious paperwork. The agent is not only threatening a lawsuit, he says he doesn’t want money when he wins. He wants the airline to be forced to give sensitivity training. I thought: I think someone needs sensitivity training all right, but I don’t think it’s the airline.

Just after the movie, I picked up Ellis Cose’s latest book, “The Envy of the World,” about the “daunting challenges” that face black men in 21st-century America. I read and thought, Earth to Ellis: Everyone faces daunting challenges in 21st-century America.

Because everybody’s been shot.

What does that mean? It means something we used to know. It means everyone has it hard, everyone takes hits, everyone’s been fragged, everyone gets tagged, life isn’t easy for anyone.

*   *   *

I turn on morning television and see Rosie O’Donnell referring again to the fact that her mother died when she was young. This of course is very sad, and Rosie has spoken of its sadness very often, and with a great whoosh of self-regard. Her sympathy for her loss made me think, the other day: She doesn’t really know that other people lost their mothers when they were young. She doesn’t really know that some people never even had mothers.

She doesn’t know everybody’s been shot.

I put on HBO and see their new young poet’s show. Young poets—well, they say they’re poets; I guess they’re more like performance artists—come on and sort of strut around a stage and yell, and the more authentic their anger seems, the more the audience applauds and hoots. These poets seem attached to their separateness and in love with their grievance. “I am one angry Lebanese lesbian,” “I am one angry NewYorican mother-lovin’ whatever.” They pour out their pain. But they don’t actually seem to be in pain. They all look like they went to Brown and hang out downtown and have invested fully and happily in the Misery Industrial Complex. They look like they want an agent.

They’re not old enough or, in spite of Brown, bright enough to know: Everybody’s been shot.

A young friend of a friend is still so depressed by Sept. 11 that school and social life and going to a show are now out of the question. “I’m staying home. I’m hurting.”

I know, I said a few days ago when we talked. But everyone’s hurting, I explain. Then I thought of Tom Sizemore. “Everyone’s been shot,” I said, “ya gotta get in and drive anyway.”

*   *   *

When I was a child in the old America, people said things like, “It ain’t easy.” Then they’d shrug. Or, “Whatta ya want, life ain’t easy!” I think people actually sighed more in those days, issued forth big long sighs that said: Life is hard. There was a sort of general knowledge that each day would not necessarily be a sleigh ride, and that everyone hits bumps along the way, and some of them are really hard, and everyone sooner or later hits them.

But now, more so than in the past, something has grown in our country, grown perhaps because of good things like psychotherapy and bad things like group-identity politics. And that something is an increasing tender regard for one’s own sensitivities and quirks and problems and woes—twinned with a growing insensitivity to everyone else’s quirks and problems and woes.

This is not progress. If we became more aware of others instead of demanding that others be more aware of our needs, we would probably get a better fix on life, a better perspective, a better sense of everyone’s context. We’d wind up more patient with others, more sympathetic. We could actually wind up sensitive to someone other than ourselves.

*   *   *

I sound earnest today. I am earnest today. But I will make this more fun. The week included the story of a congressman, who through no fault of his own, was humiliated, treated with great insensitivity. I am speaking of John Dingell, the Democrat from Michigan. Mr. Dingell, as you know, is an important veteran congressman who has grown used to—how to put it?—asserting his needs and seeing to it that they are met.

John Dingell was trying to get on a plane the other day when his artificial hip set off a magnetometer. He pointed out that it was an artificial hip, and I suspect he pointed out that he was a member of Congress who does not fit the prevailing terror profile. But you know what the security guards did? They took him into a side room, made him take off his pants and wanded him. John Dingell had to stand there in his underpants proving he wasn’t carrying a gun.

When the story became public, the secretary of transportation called him and apologized. Mr. Dingell waved him off and told him it was OK, he understands, everyone’s doing his job.

Now that’s someone who knows that everybody’s been shot.

One year ago he stood before us, right hand raised, a new president chosen by a shade less than half the American adults who are responsible enough to bother to vote. He had been certain of victory and shocked by the closeness and the Florida aftermath. The weekend before the polls opened, Al Gore strained for every vote; George Bush went home early, making the almost fatal decision of responding with what seemed wan disinterest to a well-wired last minute revelation of a drunk driving incident in his past.

And it all seems so long ago.

He is not the minority president anymore, he is the president. His approval ratings are in the 90s. He saw that happen to his father, whose popularity was at 90% a year before he was voted out. Because George W. Bush remembers this well he does not operate under the illusion that 90% of the people think he’s just great, and mean to rehire him in 2004. He thinks of polls as thermometers: Today he is at 98.6, hale and healthy. Tomorrow he may run a fever. Things change.

He knows his father’s popularity slid in part because his father saw his numbers as a jewel you could wear. He didn’t have to do anything with his popularity, he just had to wear it. This works if your luck holds and doesn’t if it doesn’t. The economy began to falter. People looked at him and thought: “I’m getting laid off and he’s walking around with a jewel called ‘The American People Love Me.’ I think I’ll take it away from him.” They did.

George W. Bush watched and learned.

A year ago he stood before us and spoke of “the angel in the whirlwind.” In the last year he found whirlwind and angel, and the finding changed everything.

*   *   *

Sept. 11 did many important things. Somewhere on the list is this: It gave shape, purpose and meaning to the new president’s presidency. On Sept. 10 the Bush administration was about faith-based social assistance, tax cuts, an improved military—the modern conservative agenda. And like all agendas it had many parts, and the parts became a blur. That happens in politics. Sept. 11 blew the blur away. The presidency is now about two things: ridding the world of madmen who seek to terrorize, and making America safer from weapons of mass destruction. Everything else comes after that.

He has become, as everyone has pointed out, a leader. Our leader, the American president. There are some who knew he always had this potential, had the gift of figuring things out quickly, deciding, delegating, saying what he was doing and why, getting folks to see things his way. A year or so before he announced he would run for president I read a quote about him from the Texas Democrat Bob Bullock. He and George W. had become friends as they worked together during Mr. Bush’s first year as governor. Bullock was smart and tough. And when he was asked about Mr. Bush, shortly before he died, he said, “Let me tell you about that fellow. He’s going to be a president, and he’s going to be a great one.” I watched him closely after that and read everything about him. In time, I came to think: Bullock is going to be proved right.

One of the things I realized about Mr. Bush in the late 1990s was that his politics were different from his father’s in an interesting and subtle way. His father was a low-budget liberal who accepted liberalism’s assumptions but thought Democrats spent and taxed too much. George W. is a high-budget conservative, who believes in conservatism but doesn’t worry too much about spending money to, say, reform the military. And, it seems, a high-budget conservative is what he will continue to be as president.

Mr. Bush continues to prove that he is not eloquent, and that he does not have to be. People need a plain speaker who’ll tell them what he thinks and why. Mr. Bush does this. He does it with the words of the average American, simple flat words. I like the way he talks because I understand it. Bill Clinton was always issuing great smoggy clouds whose meaning I could not fully decipher. Mr. Bush gives you arrows of speech that have a target and land. It’s good.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush is not obsessed with his legacy. This is good because it suggests he is emotionally and intellectually mature, which is how we want our presidents to be. When you walk into the presidency as a fully formed adult your first thought is “What should I do first and how and when?” When you walk into it with more vanity than sense, more hunger than purpose, your first thought is of what history will say of you. This is like moving into a new neighborhood and deciding the first thing you’ll do is find out if the neighbors like you, as opposed to the more constructive, “I think I’ll cut the grass, paint the house and join the civic organization.” Mr. Clinton spent all his time thinking about his legacy, and by the end he had one: He was the president who spent his time thinking about his legacy while Osama made his plans. He wasted history’s time. Mr. Bush isn’t like this. Be grateful.

Mr. Bush works well with the competing personalities around him. He keeps Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz close, listens, seems to have an acute sense of what each can give him. He appreciates Mr. Powell’s power as a leader and man of respect, and means to keep him close. He will have to, in 2002, which he has called “a war year.” That war has many fronts and there are many ways to move forward on each; the war can become bigger or smaller, hotter or cooler, wider or narrower. When he makes his decisions he will announce them, explain them and argue for them with a striking plainness. The quality will be needed, and it is good that the president has it.

I have not read a newspaper in seven days, nor heard a news report, gone online, or called the States in four. Apparently you’re all well, or I would have heard about it on the beach. I find it very easy, for the first time in three months, not to know what is going on. It is a real pleasure. When the young man at the beach comes to sell newspapers, I do not call out to him as I did last year. I have no idea what columnists are saying. Shortly before I left home I heard that Charles Krauthammer had compared the American Battle of Afghanistan, in terms of historical impact and implications, to the battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this at dinner on Christmas night to a large table of beloved friends. A teenager piped up, “We few, we happy few, we band of Afghans.” The educational system of our country is not a complete dud.

*   *   *

I am in Mexico. It is warm, in the high 80s, and humid, but softly so. We are on a little bay in a little town on the western coast. In the Spanish-language daily there is no talk of Osama and war, only of Argentina and its financial/political crisis, which for those who live here is of great importance.

On the porch this morning there were hummingbirds floating above the pink-red bougainvilleas. A big ceiling fan turned slowly. A little boy, the three-year-old son of friends, walked in with tiny, half-inch-wide lemons and oranges. “Smell,” he said as he put them to my nose. They had a full, sweet citrus smell. I told him they were fruits specially grown for infants. He thought about this and walked away.

*   *   *

Overnight a huge white cruise ship dropped anchor in the bay. It looks very important and mighty. A local friend told me that it doesn’t dock because the town would charge it too much, so instead the ship sends little launches full of tourists to town. But they don’t walk through the town and buy things, they are met by a bus at the docks which takes them to a local and newly discovered archeological dig. There they walk around and look at it and ask questions and then get back in the bus and back to the ship. This all strikes me as not fully courteous. It is only fair if you’re going to use the town’s roads also to go to its shops, which are very nice, and give them money in return for products.

There is a little local agitation about all this. But it made me think of a subplot for a movie. A small and obscure town in Mexico is going broke. It is never frequented by tourists or cruise ships, for there is nothing there. The locals decide they must change this, or they will all have to leave and seek a living elsewhere. And they don’t want to as they love their sleepy little town. So they decide to make their own archeological site.

The mayor claims they have found great archeological discoveries 10 feet underground beneath the old bus station. It appears to be a 600-year-old Spanish mission. It has old bricks and old crucifixes and old friar’s shoes. Word gets around and tourists start coming. The locals create the dig site in a really professional way, with little dug-up and pre-dug-up areas, and little brushes for gently brushing dirt off bricks and pieces of masonry; and everyone wears big pocket khaki Gap shorts and eyeglasses and baseball caps bearing the names of movie studios and media outfits. When the buses arrive they are there, doing their work quietly and diligently, except when one of them exclaims, “But this could be pre-Columbian!” Another calls over the government site control official and says, “It is barely legible, but look—I think the lettering says C-O-R . . .”

And someone else says, wisely, “This is too exciting, do you understand what this might be?” There is silence. And then the oldest man there, soft white hair and a face baked for a century in the sun, says softly, “Cortez.”

Every day heavy launches full of tourists are met at the dock by local people with donkeys and old carriages. They charge a small amount to take the rich Americans and Germans and Asians to the site. They are well tipped. At the site the tourists ooh and aah, and watch as priceless old treasures are unearthed. A man playing the part of the local wiseguy takes one of the tourists aside. “There is loads of this stuff. No one will miss anything. We haven’t even catalogued it. You want to buy an old crucifix? I have one. Here, $50.” The tourist pays.

Everyone goes home, the tourists happily to the ship, the locals back to the little house where they make the old crucifixes, beating them with hammers and putting them on the stove for burn marks. They hammer out some new Cortez signs on old tin.

The town is saved, the tourists are happy, and one woman from Wiesbaden, holding her little burnt-up cross, experiences a religious conversion and attributes it ever after to the Crucifix of Cortez. I like this story.

*   *   *

Actually there has been one bit of local news, and I know of it because the people here who witnessed it haven’t stopped talking about it. It is what happened with the moon. Two nights before Christmas, people were outside walking along when suddenly they looked up and saw the moon and saw an amazing thing. There was a perfect brilliant white ring around it. As one who was there told me, if you imagine the moon as a one-inch-round ball of whiteness, about four inches from its circumference and making a perfect circle was a perfect white ring. “It was like a ring you would put on your finger,” a young man who saw it told me. His mother added: “It had that sort of shine to it.” And a doctor who has lived here for a decade told me, with a look of real wonder, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

They all discussed it as a meteorological oddity, but I of course immediately apprehended what it was: a celestial gift. A nod from God. For three days earlier, in Rome, Pope John Paul II had approved the canonization of Juan Diego.

Juan Diego of Mexico, the loving and humble Indian peasant who five centuries ago saw the Blessed Mother, talked to the beautiful lady and, through a series of amazing occurrences, convinced the local bishop and even ultimately the Vatican that the Lady was real and the Lady wanted a great church built. Her appearance to Juan Diego sparked what has been called the greatest religious conversion in all of Western history; it is the point at which Mexico became wedded to Catholicism.

In 1990 Juan Diego was beatified. And soon he will be recognized a saint.

And on that night, around the moon, a wedding ring to mark a marriage that for all its ups and downs endures, and was that evening acknowledged in a spectacular manner.

This is a wonderful time to be alive. I just thought I’d add that.

We wind up the year. It has been full of drama. We now prepare for fun. Christmas is coming, very soon, and whatever religious holiday you celebrate, you’ve probably got some cheer and downtime coming. And this is good.

Shall we have some fun? One thing we could do, together, is sit down for a minute, read this, and take part in a bit of constructive mischief.

*   *   *

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was created in 1945 by Harry Truman to recognize high and heroic civilian contributions in time of war. President Kennedy reinstituted it shortly before he died in 1963; he continued it as the highest civilian award in the country but wanted it given to those who give great service to their country in time of peace.

Many great artists, scientists, civic leaders, entertainers, novelists, union leaders and political figures of all stripes have received the award, which happens to be very pretty: a red-white-and-blue enameled star on a round gold filigreed medal, with a navy-blue ribbon trimmed in white. About a dozen Americans receive them every year or so, usually in a colorful ceremony in which the president personally hands it to you in the White House, lauds your great work and thanks you on behalf of a grateful nation.

I saw Mother Teresa win it; they waived the requirement that you be an American citizen for her, in part because so many of her convents did so much work in America’s cities. She was given the award in a special Rose Garden ceremony, and afterwards, pressed by a reporter on what she thought of Ronald Reagan, she uttered a few words that carried a real definitional wallop. “In him greatness and simplicity are one,” she said. Then she and a bevy of nuns hurried away, but not before pressing into my hand a pamphlet with a drawing of Christ and inside a poem she had written about him. She looked at me and said two words: Luff Gott. Love God. Then she walked softly and quickly into a black White House car and was gone.

*   *   *

I love the Presidential Medal of Freedom. To me it’s like a Medal of Honor for civilians, only without the physical derring-do. The ceremony itself is always full of high feeling, marked by the delight that comes with seeing excellence recognized, celebrated and applauded. (It should be broadcast in its entirety on television, so children can be inspired.) And it’s an open and egalitarian award: you just have to be a citizen who has done great things that have been a great benefit.

In 1984 or ‘85, as a speechwriter to President Reagan, I wrote a series of memos putting forth the name of those I thought deserved it, and made what I felt was a strong case for Steven Sondheim and, my special hope, the novelist Walker Percy, whose “The Moviegoer” was in my view the great novel of the second half of the 20th century. (In it, greatness and simplicity are one.) My nominees were not chosen; I think that was the year Frank Sinatra won. He too had been in his career a great contributor to the pleasure of the people, so what the heck. But Percy was alive then, and I think it might have meant something.

*   *   *

It happens that our busy president is coming up on his first anniversary as chief executive. It happens that he has not yet awarded any Medals of Freedom. He and his staff are preoccupied with a hot war and a cold recession and are busy. There’s no rush; the medals don’t have to be given every year. But right about now the White House should have in it someone who is . . . thinking about it. I have not been able to find that person.

I think we should help. I think we should make our own list, don’t you?

It seems to me obvious that George Bush’s first Medals of Freedom should be given to the men and women who one way or another pulled us through September 11, 2001.

I have my list. Take a look at it, and add a name or two if you want. (We don’t have to be limited to the events of 9/11, I just think we should.) The hardy and incredibly devoted James Taranto and Brendan Miniter, editors of OpinionJournal, will post here as many of your ideas as they can. Then we will forward the whole bundle to the White House in an e-mail whose subject line is: The people have spoken.

I feel certain that the White House will listen to us, as we are the millions of men and women who read OpinionJournal, and we are not to be ignored.

*   *   *

All right, my list, not in order of importance or even love, just as they come to me.

1. The New York City Fire Department. On their medals: “The hero comes when he is needed. When our belief gets pale and weak there comes a man out of that need who is bright and shining, and everyone around him reflects some of that glow, and stores some up against the day when he is gone.”

2. The men and women, the airline staff and passengers, on the planes that went into the towers and the Pentagon. We’ll never know the exact dimensions of the heroism on those planes, but we know it was there. See quote above.

3. The New York City Police Department and Emergency Medical Services personnel. Not as celebrated as the FDNY, but full of people who put it all on the line that day.

4. The men and women of the Pentagon, who lived and led through what happened there. This includes Donald Rumsfeld, who ran not from the scene but to the scene and helped the wounded. I don’t know if that’s a good thing in a defense secretary the day a war starts, but it’s hard to think of a better symbol of the goodness and egalitarianism that people displayed that terrible day.

5. Rudy. It was said of the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa that his work was marked by this dynamic: “The villains have arrived while the hero is evolving.” Rudy had a lot of time to evolve over his two terms, and he did. By the time the bad guys came, he was ready; he had become the man he was intended to be. He used all his gifts. He led with perfect integration of head and heart.

6. The Flag Raisers. The three firemen in New York who lifted the colors, and whose Iwo Jima-like moment was immortalized on the front page of the New York Post, among other papers, with the headline PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE. Ditto the men at Ground Zero who unfurled a huge flag from a broken building. Ditto the man at the Pentagon who, the night of the attack, put up a huge flag and trained a spotlight on it so everyone going by would see the proof through the night.

7. Paul McCartney. While Rock Hollywood went somewhat Goth and dark in its all-network fund-raiser and tribute to heroes, it was the fireman’s son from Liverpool who, a few weeks later, really got it right. He came into New York, got the room, put on the show, electrified hundreds of thousands of tired and sad New Yorkers, and reminded them they could rock again. The former Beatle is already Sir Paul McCartney. America can do the Brits one better. After giving him the Medal of Freedom we can, by act of Congress, give him honorary citizenship of the United States of America. Paul McCartney, American. That just sounds right.

8. Michael Moran. I know it was vulgar; I know it wasn’t dignified; I suspect it wasn’t sober. But don’t you think Mr. Moran, a fireman, got it right when he informed Osama bin Laden that he, Mr. Moran, was from Rockaway, and OBL could kiss his royal Irish ass? It was so old-fashioned ethnic, so old-fashioned Brooklyn and Queens. It was the authentic voice of the old New York, which was newly back in style. It captured what so many of us feel, whether of the Hibernian persuasion or not. And it’s always nice to give a nod to royalty.

9. The cheerers. The men and women and kids who lined up on the West Side Highway in Manhattan for a month to cheer on the workers going into Ground Zero and the workers coming out after a 12-hour shift. I will never forget the middle-aged Hispanic woman I saw with her two little grandchildren, one in a stroller. They were standing in the dark by themselves just off the highway. The child in the stroller held a little American flag. The mother held a hand-lettered sign torn from a cardboard box. It said, “America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You!” When people under stress see things like that, it means everything.

10. Oprah. I don’t know how many shows she did helping people get through the horror of 9/11—and I mean everyone, from those who lost loved ones to young people who can’t work in skyscrapers anymore, and people who started to descend into all sorts of emotional dark places. Oprah would not give up on 9/11; she stuck with it as the only subject matter of our day, she got people on her show who could help people. It was a stupendous public service, done with no eye to the ratings and against the common wisdom that we have to move on. Her show didn’t move on until it moved people on. Also she came to New York and did, with Bette Midler, a fabulous stadium show. So:

11. Bette Midler too.

12. The men and women of the media. They drive us so crazy with their lockstep view of the world; they consciously and unconsciously skew the news; they see the world through the very same lens and ask the very same questions and rarely and only for entertainment or under cultural duress allow other points of view on their air. These are people who badly need real diversity-training sessions. And for all that, they did the work of heroes on Sept. 11. They were cool and tough and unstoppable; they hit the sites and got the news and risked their lives. And the brightest of them understood for at least the first 24 hours of this war that they might be hit live, on the air, kaboom! The great symbols of American commerce and military might had already been hit; only the media remained. They did their jobs and held their ground. Well done crazy-making and courageous journos.

*   *   *

That’s my list of the people who made all the difference that day, who got covered in grit and ran to the trouble. They’re my dirty dozen. Add some of your own. We’ll send it to the White House, to help them. And yes, we are talking about a heck of a lot of medals. But then a heck of a lot of people earned them.

Some presidents have come from families of property and high renown—or notoriety. Think only of the Roosevelts and Kennedys. And other presidents come from humble circumstances, sometimes very humble.

Ronald Reagan belongs to the second group. His family moved from one rented apartment to another as his alcoholic, shoe-salesman father struggled to hold a job. Young “Dutch,” as he was known, took many lessons from his experiences growing up, including the importance of hard work and self-reliance. He worked his way through college, found jobs in radio during the Depression and went on to become a Hollywood star, governor of California and, finally, president.

In “When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan,” Peggy Noonan examines the sources—and consequences—of Mr. Reagan’s idealism, honesty, religious faith and patriotism. From his days as an anticommunist leader of the Screen Actors Guild to his legendary words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall, the book investigates the way Mr. Reagan’s convictions and character affected his life, his presidency and history. A few excerpts:

Early lessons: “[Mr. Reagan’s father] felt he had been discriminated against in the old ‘No Dogs or Irish Need Apply’ days and ways, and it made him despise prejudice with a committed and consistent passion. He established the idea of equality as part of the family’s conversation, part of the way the family understood itself. They were people who stood for tolerance.”

Artistic ambitions: “Ronald Reagan did not so much have the natural talents and cast of mind of a businessman or economist or political figure, he had the natural talents and cast of mind of an artist. It is what he thought he would become, his first arguably serious ambition. As an adolescent he had thought he might become a cartoonist. And indeed he went through all his life drawing faces, caricatures and cartoons, designing leather crafts and memorizing poetry.”

Opposing communist fronts in Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s: “Reagan loved argument, loved freedom and thought everyone should join the fray—anarchists, Wobblies, monarchists, whatever. But if a political group refused to come forward publicly and put forth its programs in the democratic daylight; if it chose to pursue power secretly, by guile and deception, silently taking over institutions and moving for power through force—well, that was what the Nazis did in Germany. That’s what Fascists and the supporters of dictators do. That wasn’t the American style at all.”

Mr. Reagan’s simple tastes, as displayed at his California ranch: “You can imagine the expectations of Gorbachev as he was driven up this road. He knew about capitalism and how capitalists and powerful men live in America. And the expectations of the queen of England, who knew something of how the famous in America lived. And they saw: a shack. And they thought: This is how staff lives! This was nothing like his dacha, her castle. It is a little one story house with stucco and adobe walls. They are painted white. There’s a red tile roof.”

Unpredictable interests: “It is not true, as has often been said, that Reagan wasn’t curious. He just wasn’t curious about what you’d expect a man like him to be curious about. If he was talking to a doorman at the Mayflower Hotel about how they park and retrieve the cars on a busy night, he’d be learning something and be truly interested. If you were a professor back from China or the Sudan and had real-world observations, anecdotes and history, he’d eagerly take it all in.”

His famous “Evil Empire” speech: “He felt that previous American leadership had not taken on the principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy because we had feared to offend. But Reagan was not inhibited in that way. He thought: We can scarcely make the Soviets worse, and the truth might make things better. Or at least establish the only platform on which things can become better.”

His habit of telling jokes: “I think he thought everyone was too serious. I think he realized today’s dreadfully somber problem is next week’s joke about the hell we went through last week, and he figured he’d just speed up the process. I think he was also fun all the time because the constant tragedies and injustices of life while painful were also by definition passing—everything changes, today is setback, tomorrow bounty.”

Taking criticism: “The reason he took criticism so well is that he had been trained in receiving it in Hollywood. Not as an actor in the reviews, though there was some of that, but when he went up against Communists and Communist sympathizers and the anti-anti-Communists of Hollywood. They had threatened his life and livelihood. What was being called an evil idiot compared to that?”

Positive reflections: “I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him. When I talk to or read the works of people in politics, entertainment or journalism who didn’t admire or agree with him, they will, if they get going, tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy. I think his character is the least criticized of any great political leader of the century.”

My friends, this is the kind of column I used to do now and then before the world changed. I tell you what I’ve been doing and thinking and if you’re interested you get a cup of coffee and sit down and read along, and if you’re not you can go back to OpinionJournal’s main page, or Drudge, or Salon, or Free Republic.

*   *   *

It is Christmas in New York. The weather as you know has been soft, nice and not freezing but often overcast. A friend who comes into New York each week from Chicago told me yesterday that on Michigan Ave. it’s hustle and bustle and the world hasn’t changed at all, it’s Christmas, but on Madison Ave. it’s dead. It happens that I often walk along Madison Ave. and hadn’t noticed that, but there’s some truth in what he said. Our great high-end commercial avenue doesn’t have quite the cheery bustle of years past. But there’s more love on it, more flags and more friendliness in the shops, and at a big expensive hand-made furniture place in the 80’s they still have the pictures of every fireman who died on Sept. 11, each face highlighted in the middle of a paper star, all the stars filling the store’s main window. (In New York there has been a slight below-the-radar anti-fireman reaction to this kind of thing. Some people are tired of hearing the firemen praised, and they have a brother-in-law who’s a fireman who’s a worthless oaf who can’t even pick up his shorts. The other day an Internet executive told me this. I said: “Believe me, as soon as 343 Internet executives rush into a burning building and die so that strangers can live, I’m gonna drop the firemen like a rock and celebrate executives.”)

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I have had a Christmas party week, a very social week. I am not an especially social person but it’s been a time for big gatherings, and I am grateful for it. In Brooklyn in my new neighborhood a house party in a grand brownstone mansion, thrown for the neighbors by a gentleman who in the ‘80s and ‘90s became rich. When I walked in I had the oddest sense of having been in this great home, or having been in a place very much like it long ago. The huge rounded doorways, the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms and placement of the windows.

I was born in Brooklyn half a century ago and not far from here, but in those days Brooklyn wasn’t rich. It was still full of the families Betty Smith wrote about in “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” only two generations older than Francie, the schoolgirl in the book, and not impoverished but working class. We lived in an Irish and Italian ghetto that was turning African American and Puerto Rican. Living with our family were old aunts who’d been maids and cooks in Manhattan, and an uncle who was a carpenter. My grandmother was the coat attendant at a dance hall in Brooklyn called The Lenruth Room when I was a little girl. And I remember being there with her when I was a child, and seeing people dance and touching the coats.

My grandparents lived in an apartment on Myrtle Ave., in a walkup on the fourth or fifth floor, and their bedroom faced the Myrtle Ave. el, which was about 10 feet outside their window. The whole apartment shook, literally shook, when the elevated trains came by. When I was with my grandparents I would put my arms on the window sill like the old ladies of the neighborhood and watch the trains go by.

I’ll tell you who else did this, a generation or two before. The actor Tony Curtis, who a few years ago wrote a wonderful memoir of his years as New York street urchin and Hollywood hellion. He told this story. As a boy he would sit each morning at the window of his parents’ apartment and watch the elevated trains. Every morning he’d see a man on the 8 a.m. train sitting in the same seat, wearing a brown hat and reading the Herald Tribune. The train would stop, young Tony would glance at the man and the man would glance at Tony. Then he’d go back to reading the paper and the train would roar off. One morning the train stops and the man isn’t in his seat. Next day he’s not there, next week. Then 10 days later he’s back in his same seat with the paper and the brown hat. And he glances over at Tony and Tony glances at him. And for once they maintain their gaze. And the man lowers the paper and mouths, “I’ve been sick!” And the train roars off.

I love that story. It’s a metaphor for how we know each other and don’t know each other, how we have relationships we don’t even remark upon and barely notice until they leave.

Did I have a relationship with the house of the rich man whose home I was in this week? I didn’t see how I could, but I mentioned to the man’s friend, standing in his great hallway, that I had the oddest feeling of knowing this place even though there had been no mansions in our lives when I was a kid. The man said, “Oh, this wasn’t a mansion when you were a kid. He restored it to the way it was when it was first built. When you were a kid it was all broken up into 10 apartments. Regular people lived here.”

So I could have been there before. And now I am here as an adult, as a person who writes of presidents, and the house is a mansion. Brooklyn is, has been, will ever be a place of miracles.

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At a party in Manhattan, I spoke to a close aide to Rudy Giuliani, our king. He told me Rudy doesn’t want to leave until the fire’s out. Mr. Giuliani, of course, leaves as mayor in January, but his aid told me he is obsessed with putting out, as his final act, the infernal fires of Ground Zero, which still burn. Rudy wants the fires out by his last day as mayor. The city, the aid tells me, has been using satellite heat-finding imagery to pinpoint exactly where in the dead zone the fires are. “We find out where, we force foam in from one direction and the fire goes in another. We force foam in from the other direction and the fire goes up or down.”

I asked him what, after three months, is still burning.

“Computers,” he said.

“Computers?,” I said.

He said the wires of computers, the innards and machinery of computers—they keep burning. “There isn’t a piece of glass in the ruins, not a single piece,” he said. The glass was melted and pulverized, turned to ash. There isn’t a desk or chair in the ruins either, he said—from two towers full of desks and chairs. Again, they were burned and pulverized by heat and force.

He mentioned another odd thing I’d noticed, we’d all noticed: paper survived. Paper from the offices of the trade center—merger agreements, divorce decrees, memos that Sandra in Accounting had a baby boy, custody petitions—the paper of the towers shot into the air. When the towers tumbled it created a reverse vacuum and papers were sucked up into the gathering cloud and dispersed all over downtown, the rivers, Brooklyn and Queens. But the binders the papers were in—the legal binders, the metal rings inside them—they didn’t survive.

What he told me made me think of a telephone repairman who wrote his memories of Sept. 11 and sent them to me after last week’s column. He had been working on a telephone pole in Queens. He heard the explosions, the lines went down, and soon paper was raining down on him and everyone else. One fluttered down and he caught it. It was a business card. A few days later he called the number on the card and asked for the name. A young woman answered. Yes, she said, she was alive, she had made it out of the building. No, she didn’t know her business cards had made it to Queens. (Hollywood: Use this. In your version they fall in love.)

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I went to a book party in downtown Manhattan, in the spacious condo of a man and woman who had been walking their children to the first day of school when the Towers were hit. They have three gorgeous kids, one of whom, aged about four, asked to stay up to see the guests this evening and then, overwhelmed by the smiles, crinkles, wrinkles, earrings and perfume of adults bending down to kiss, and frightened perhaps by the gooney look old people sometimes get when they look at childhood beauty, hid in her mother’s skirt and then her father’s arms. The guest of honor, a wonderful man of depth and charm, arrived late, from a television appearance. I hugged him, congratulated him, asked how he was. “My whole life is work,” he said, softly. Then he sucked in his abs, turned, shook hands with friends and worked the room.

We all feel that way so often: “My whole life is work.” We all work so hard. But it is, as they say, a choice. We wouldn’t have to work so hard if we would take everything we have and rent a $600 a month apartment just outside a suburb of Tulsa, and join a local church and get a job in a hardware store and be peaceful and kind and take the elderly neighbor to the hospital every other week for chemo.

But it is not the American dream to want to live outside a suburb of Tulsa in a $600 a month apartment. It is the American dream to, among other things, be at the book party celebrating your friend’s bestseller surrounded by brilliant, accomplished and interesting Americans who take part in the world, who are immersed in it and try to turn it this way and that.

We work so hard to find happiness. But more and more I think of what a friend told me on the phone 10 years ago after I had written an essay on the subject. He called and said: “This is a famous quote from someone, I forget who, and this is what you mean. ‘Happiness is a cat. Chase it and it will elude you, it will hide. But sit and peacefully do your work, live your life and show your love and it will silently come to you and curl itself upon your feet.’ ”

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After the book party, I went to a dinner party in upper Manhattan, at the home of a writer and thinker and his smart, bubbly wife. It was the three month anniversary of Sept. 11, and naturally the talk was: 9/11. Normally these conversations end in something like resolve and laughter, with someone saying something upbeat. But not this night, and I was glad of it. I spoke to a man, a dynamic businessman and a good person who was, to my surprise, utterly changed. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year. I found out that until recently he had been at Ground Zero every day since Sept. 11. He had lost his office, scores of friends and co-workers, had rushed to the site and worked there for months as a helper and organizer.

Now he is a changed man. He used to carry success on his shoulders like a well padded suit, and now in his eyes there is grief, grief, a deep well of grief. “I had to go to a doctor because I couldn’t stop smelling the smell,” he tells me. It is the olfactory disorder of Ground Zero: Work there long enough and you can’t lose the acrid burning smell, your nose absorbs it as if it were a memory, and won’t let go. You wake up 30 miles away at home in your bed and it’s 4 a.m. and you smell it and you think you’re going mad.

He told me how Sept. 11 had changed his life. “I am more religious,” he said. He looked like he wasn’t sure what that meant and was surprised to find it happening to him, didn’t fully understand it but knew it was true: He’s more religious. And, he said, what he wants to do now is not make money but help people, serve the public, do good.

And he meant it. It wasn’t post-traumatic virtue disorder, it was: A life in change.

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I find myself drawn to and heartened by people who can’t get over Sept. 11. Because I can’t either, and I never will. But then I talk to them and realize: They’re here, and I’m here, and we’re at the party, so we’ll get over it.

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On the way home and for no particular reason I remembered something I was told a few weeks ago by a friend who had in another time and for other reasons become a changed person.

I have known him for years but had not known the story he told me. He had been a roaring alcoholic, a man who’d lived to drink and gamble. But something was changing in him, and one night he was at home drinking by himself when he saw something on TV—something someone said, something that moved him deeply. And suddenly he knew his life must change. He picked up the phone and called the 24 hour hotline at a local rehab hospital. And he said, slurring, “I want to spick to a dahkter, I think I’m an alcaholic.”

“Is that you Billy?,” sad the woman who answered the phone.

He was shocked. Someone must have reported him! They must keep the numbers of known local alcoholics!

“How did you know my name?” he demanded.

“Because you call every night at 2 a.m. How’s your daughter?”

For two weeks he’d been getting drunk every night and calling the rehab line and having long conversations with whoever answered. And it was news to him. The next day he entered rehab, and for many years he has been a changed man.

People change. It’s not true that they don’t. It is true that it is more unusual than it is usual.

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At the dinner party a friend told me of his son, a Marine at Camp Lejeune. My friend and his wife may or may not see their boy for Christmas, it depends on his orders. The mother, a beautiful lady, frankly admitted her fear for her son. The father was proud and wistful. I mentioned an acquaintance of ours who has a handsome young son in ROTC, and who will join the armed forces when he graduates in June. I bumped into her and she told me that this is where parenthood makes hypocrites of us all—you know our country needs men like this, you know we must fight, but not my boy, not my son.

The father and mother I was talking to smiled and nodded. It’s the same for them. “Let me tell you what my son said to me when I told him how worried I was about him,” the father said. “Dad, I am fully capable, fully trained and armed to defend myself, and I am not the target. You are not armed and trained and you are the target. Worry about you.”

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I worry about all of us, and so no doubt do you. But Wednesday I had a wonderful, heartening experience online that I will share with you because it may help you too. I like to go to Christian Web sites such as www.redeemer.com, where you can find the Rev. Tim Keller’s inspiring and informative sermons. I go to Catholic Web sites too, and Wednesday I marked a great feast day of the church at one.

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It was the feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a celebration of the event 500 years ago in which the Mother of Christ appeared before an earnest and loving Mexican peasant named Juan Diego. The appearance and the miracles that followed sparked what was probably the biggest mass religious conversion in the history of the Americas. And indeed Our Lady of Guadeloupe is considered by Catholics to be our country’s patroness.

As America becomes more Latin and Hispanic the feast has become bigger, grander. It was marked in Washington with a mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and there were masses and festivities in Albuquerque, N.M., Houston and Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz. But according to an article in Crisis magazine on a Catholic Web site the biggest celebration in the U.S. took place in Los Angeles. “Following a procession through the city’s streets, Cardinal Roger Mahony celebrated a mass for nearly 20,000 who gathered on the football field in the Cal State Los Angeles Stadium.” Twenty thousand.

And, most delightfully to me of all, yesterday in Rome, at the end of a general audience, Pope John Paul II for the first time ever activated a Web page. They brought him a laptop and he hit a key with his Parkinson-pained finger and suddenly www.virgendegaudalupe.org.mx was born.

At another site I found that people were writing prayers of gratitude and petition to mark the feast, and I read them. They were so moving and beautiful.

There is so much going on in America, in churches and on Internet sites, that no one in normal media, elite media or any media really seems to touch. But I continually discover and rediscover that there is a whole world of people who exist apart from the New York Times, the Washington Post and our beloved Wall Street Journal, who exist as part of a real and strong and authentic American community, and indeed a world community.

At the site I visited the prayers and petitions to Our Lady were in English, Spanish and French.

They asked for consolation for those who died or lost loved ones in the Trade Center attacks, they asked for protection for our country and peace for the world. “I pray for the people and kids in Afghanistan,” said one.

Most were in one way or another personal: “Dear Blessed Lady, intercede for me and pray for me that with your help I can get the money to save my home. Ask your divine son to show his infinite mercy.”

“Dear Lady, please . . . pray for dj’s, entertainers, artists, performers and media and writers.”

“Mama Mary . . . please pray for . . . all the teachers, everyone serving in the armed forces, President Bush, all the leaders especially of the Philippines, all the terrorists, bin Laden, all the priests and religious and our Holy Father.”

“Dear Lady of Guadeloupe, please let all my friends forgive me for all that I have done.”

“Pour les enfants abandonnes.”

“Senora, en tu dia te recuerdo y te amo. Gracias madre por todos tus bienes.”

“Je t’aime et mercies der ester avec moi et ma petite famille jet t’aime tres fort dis bonjourr a padre pio pour moi.”

“Happy Feast Day, my Lady Mother. You seem so close today, telling me to let the desire of my heart be that of your Son’s, and to let his desire be mine . . . bring me back to my monastic community, my Lady, though I have failed and fallen so many times.”

“Jesus, Son of Mary, our Mother—forgive me and help me to know and love her more. I desire to be just like her . . . Mama Mary, help me to let go of covetousness, vanity, lust for the flesh and food . . . and all the vices and weaknesses that separate me from your son . . . (help) all my students, especially John.”

“Blessed Mother on this, your feast day, please free [my loved one] from the bondage of drug addiction.”

“I beg for my estranged husband and for the purity and sanctity of my children . . . Please, my Mama, obtain a miracle for my family.”

“Dearest Lady Thank you for all the trials I have received these past few years for in them I have found a new love of God.”

There were men praying to be better husbands, wives to be better wives, prayers to be freed of alcoholism and healed after infidelity, for runaway children and broken families.

All were marked by humility and gratitude, many by pain and anxiety. They prayed so hard for our country, and there was a sense that they knew that they were praying at a time of heightened alert, and during Ramadan and in a time of extraordinary need.

I found it all so moving. So now I go there and pray along with them, and feel enlivened by their community. It’s as good as, better than, a wonderful dinner party.

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I will leave you with a happy thought. The other day into my imagination popped a scene that I dearly hope will happen. I imagined that I was walking along Fulton Street in Brooklyn. It was a pretty afternoon, just pre-dusk, and the street was full of shoppers. And suddenly a woman came running from The Wiz, and she shouted to no one, to everyone, “They found Osama! They caught bin Laden!” And the street stopped stock still and then someone cheered and then we all cheered, and we went into The Wiz and watched the reporters telling the story on all the big TV monitors, row after row of them. And strangers talked to strangers and people who hadn’t wept since Sept. 11 found themselves with tears in their eyes, and it was an unforgettable moment in American history.

Actually I shared this scene with my table at the dinner party earlier in the week.

“Dead or alive?” someone asked. I shook my head. “The way you imagined it, is Osama dead or alive?”

I said I didn’t know and didn’t care. A man said I should care, it’s bad if he’s alive, that means crazy hostage things and suicide bomber nuts. Someone else said, “I feel sure that when they get him if they get him it will be an unknown CIA agent who gets him, and we’ll never know his name.” He will be invited to the White House and shake the president’s hand and be assigned somewhere far away, and it will be one of the great secrets of all time. He will be The Man Who Got Osama. And we won’t even know his name.

I thought, “Oh no, we must know his name and dedicate things to him like mountains and libraries.” I said we have to know and she said no, if he is known he will be in danger, and so will his family: “the Jihad never forgets.”

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

We’ll see how it ends.

For me today more prayer sites, and a visit to the pained and peaceful people of faith. And then on to Fulton Street, where there’s a big Macy’s and a Wiz and television and appliance stores. On to the great street bustle of Brooklyn in 2001, where miracles still happen, and have.