Peggy Noonan

It is interesting how American and British political realities have mirrored each other the past few decades, with Britain lagging slightly behind—though only slightly, and not at the beginning.

In the beginning, in 1979, came the revolutionary Margaret Thatcher, there to change all the assumptions of longtime left-wing Britain. She was conservative, tough, antitax, antielite, for small business, a doughty daughter of middle-class live-above-the-shop folk.

A year later her friend Ronald Reagan (who was born over a bank) took power in America and showed himself to be her sort. He had met her in the early ‘70s and told English friends she would be a good prime minister. (“A woman?” a Tory fathead had snorted. Yes, said Mr. Reagan, like Queen Victoria.) To make things even more interesting, the current pope, who came in in 1978, broke all the rules from the start simply by being Polish, and shared Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan’s views on totalitarianism, Soviet communism and religious freedom.

Mr. Reagan left in 1989, replaced by the softer George Bush. Mrs. Thatcher was forced out in 1990, replaced by the more ameliorative John Major. In 1992, after a dozen years of conservative-to-relatively-conservative federal governance, the people of America voted for change.

Enter Bill Clinton, a man of the left who was a reformer of the left and who, having seized the Democratic presidential nomination, moved to seize the restless and prosperous middle of America. To an extent he had a clear philosophy—expressed not by him, but by the intelligent and accomplished Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager in 1988, who told me in 1992 that she was tired of losing elections over the death penalty. She would now support those who were for it, such as Mr. Clinton, who made his point by sending a brain-damaged Arkansas man to his death during the campaign. (His name was Rickey Ray Rector, and he famously told his guards minutes before he was taken to the death chamber that he wouldn’t eat his dessert right now, he’d save it for later.)

In 1997 John Major and his Conservatives were upended by Tony Blair, a Third Way man who, like Mr. Clinton, always seemed to be devoting more of his impressive intellectual energy to hiding his views than communicating them. In politics you can walk like a cloud or pierce like a sword; Messrs. Blair and Clinton walk like a cloud, indistinct perhaps but large, and there, and recognizable.

In 1996, at the first chance, the conservative party of America, the Republican Party, fielded an old party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Clinton, astride a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

In 2001, at the first chance, the conservative party of Britain, the Conservative Party, fielded a young party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Blair, on top of a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

It took another try for the Republicans of America to scrape into the presidency, barely, six months ago. Maybe William Hague’s party will succeed after another try, and maybe it’ll just scrape in too.

*   *   *

That the political experiences of America and England have pretty much mirrored each other the past few decades doesn’t mean the British are playing follow-the-leader. They are playing follow-the-trends. All the Western industrial democracies are experiencing variations of the same ones: changing demographics, changing populations, changing cultures, prosperity and its mixed blessings, a lessening of religious feeling.

(A great French novelist of the 19th century once said, feelingly but also as a simple observation, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It has been a century since anyone could say that, but somehow it always comes as a surprise that Italy, say, is no longer a Catholic country in habit or culture. It somehow shocked me, though there is no reason it should have, that my first time in Paris, at Christmastime 1993, you could walk miles through streets and neighborhoods and not see a single sign or indication that a great Christian holiday was here. In France, the country of the Curé d’Ars and Bernadette or Lourdes and Joan of Arc.)

And a great challenge for conservatives in all the Western countries is how to show that conservatism is relevant, applicable to the times, reflective of the true nature of the people of the West—and to do so without violating what conservatism is. It is, of course and by its own nature, a way of saying “Stop!” to the aggression and bullying of government, to the encroachment upon the rights of the individual.

But it is fair to say and politically demonstrable that saying “Stop!” is not enough to rouse a populace.

I find that my mind goes back, and has for more than a decade now, to one word: immigration. We live, as we all know, in the great age of immigration, which is transforming America as it is changing Europe. (A small Catholic note: It is ironic and maybe cause for sadness that the church ended the standard Latin mass just as all the Catholics started moving around. The Latin mass might have helped them hold together. Then again, the church made the reform to help people understand what was happening in the mass by telling them in their language. I wonder if any immigrants to America would say that the mass said in English helped them learn the language.)

At any rate, immigrants as we all know have a general personality profile that could be called conservative, and that I would call conservative. That is: They put themselves in charge of their lives, made a big change that took guts, took a chance that showed faith in the future, work hard, are committed to education as a way to rise, care about their community, feel like outsiders, and have often been abused by their own governments, which is part of the reason they left home. They’re often church-, mosque- or synagogue-goers. Unlike affluent natives, they know they need God.

It’s hard to believe the conservatives of Western Europe can’t make something of that, can’t forge bonds that not only broaden their own base but even change the immigrant experience by including them, quickly, in the political life of the nation they’ve joined.

*   *   *

A note about England. Margaret Thatcher, whom I know very slightly and admire greatly, once told me a wonderful thing. She told that the way she saw it, part of England’s purpose, part of its historic mission, had been to stop the bad ideas of Europe from jumping quickly and completely across the Atlantic. The little island to the west of the Continent was the last stopping point for Europe’s unfortunate affection for communism, for full-fledged socialism, and England had slowed them, helped stop them, before they jumped across the Atlantic like a great sneeze and made America and the rest of the West sick.

“It stopped Europe’s bad ideas!” she said.

Mrs. Thatcher is a Tory, and it is clear from her recent speeches that she thinks the modern Labour Party and the cunning and cheery-looking Mr. Blair are in fact aiming to outlaw England: to slowly, subtly take from it its Englishness. You start with the House of Lords, say, or fox hunting, and soon enough you’re on to abolishing the pound and relinquishing autonomous nationhood as you rush to join Europe.

Why would any leader, any great political party, aggressively follow a course that would ultimately lessen its own power? Because it won’t. It will lessen England, but it will raise up those like Mr. Blair and his followers who will go on to lead the new Europe. This is the rise of the Third Way boomers, the liberal intellectual and media establishment. It’s probably the kind of world the folks at AOL Time Warner would like, as they’d have only one big power to make deals with and not a dozen dinky little ones with strange rules and languages. And anyway, the point is: AOL Time Warner folk are culturally and in their politics like Mr. Blair, like Mr. Clinton, like the men and women who would rule the new Europe. They’ll be right at home.

One of the results of a new and fully confederated Europe would be a more homogenized Europe, one in which France is not so French and Germany not so German (yes, this would not be all bad), Greece so Greek, Ireland so Irish. A big Blairite blur of a continent, with the strings of power held in Brussels by bureaucrats whose loyalty is not to a nation or a national idea but to each other. To liberal bureaucratism. To being 50 years old and in power and shaping the new world as it ought to be shaped, which is along the lines you like—modern lines, leftist lines. Big state, big power, big pleasure.

I wonder how the immigrants of Western Europe will feel about finding out that even though they left this country and journeyed to that one they’re still in the old country, only now it’s run in Brussels. I wonder if they’ll like that idea.

I also wonder if, as each separate European country became more homogenized and more like the others, they will start to have very successful local theme parks where you can take the kids to visit your country as it once was. The one in Dublin would have people with big families and dad and mom drinking Guinness and fiery political arguments and pictures of the pope on the wall. I pick Dublin because I was there most recently, and also because I’m Irish-American and I can. The people online waiting to get in will be pleasant daddies with cell phones in their ears and Blackberries clipped to their pockets as they surf around monitoring what’s up with the euro today. (Actually, that’s what it looked like waiting to get into Dublin Castle last summer.) In the Rome Theme Park they’ll have a little Coliseum and a woman who looks like Anna Magnani chasing cats.

*   *   *

I suppose another reason the Blair Labour Party will continue to push to join Europe is that it will be a rejection of the leadership of the United States, a decoupling of Europe’s fate with ours. That’s why they want to start a European army. The never-affectionate-toward America leaders of the coming European confederacy will rule a rich and united force of nations, one that has more power than ever, makes more impact on history than ever. And if the cost of all that is liberty, well, that’s a price they’d pay.

A loss of independence in the judiciary of individual sovereign states, a loss of power for an English government to call the shots in its own economy . . . It seems so counterintuitive. But sometimes history is.

Now that the Democrats dominate the U.S. Senate, the junior senator from New York is poised to achieve a new and rather sudden prominence. Hillary Clinton is not only her party’s acknowledged expert on health care legislation, she has taken to referring to her tenure as first lady in a way that suggests she feels those years should be added to her seniority in the Senate. When recently asked about Jim Jeffords’s jump across the aisle, she said “I’ve known him and worked with him for more than eight years,” before adding she felt his decision was “a matter of conscience.”

The quotes are from a remarkable interview published Wednesday in the Poughkeepsie Journal. It was remarkably long at nearly 9,000 words, and remarkably revealing. It deserves more attention because it provides what seems a window on Mrs. Clinton’s recent style, attitude and approach to her job.

*   *   *

In her remarks Mrs. Clinton reverts to a level of partisan invective that she has not shown since entering the Senate five months ago. She says the Bush education bill is a fraud, that the Republicans only want to spend money on defense, where “the sky’s the limit”—the Bush team supports “a total blank check on defense spending.” Why would the Bush administration attempt to mislead voters? Because of their “hypocrisy” and “cynicism,” which she finds “shameless.” The Bush economic policy is “a total sham” in which “the bulk of [the tax cut] goes to the people who are already the richest taxpayers in America.”

Mr. Bush, as president, is radical. “I think many of us were surprised at how far right many of the moves were and how captured by the very large special interests the administration seems to be.” She suggests his environmental decisions were belligerent: “It’s almost like, ‘We are going to do it because we can do it and make you like it.’ ” The Bush administration must be watched: “You have to look really carefully at what these people do.” Of one Republican she says, “You had Frank Murkowski running the Energy Committee in the Senate. Bless his heart, all he wants to do is drill ANWAR.”

Those who support a voucher system or a way for public school students to opt out of failing schools just want to “dump” on needy children, using them as “whipping boys and girls” for selfish reasons. “A lot of them don’t want us to have a public school system.” “They are privatizers,” she warns darkly. She suggests one problem with getting children out of failing schools is that there is little or no room for them in successful schools.

Why did Al Gore lose? “It wasn’t an effective campaign. Unfortunately.” This slap is followed by a standard denunciation of Mr. Bush: He wasn’t elected, he was elevated by “the interference by election officials in Florida, and the United States Supreme Court.” And, of course, Mr. Bush has “no mandate.”

Throughout the interview Mrs. Clinton is sharply personal. Republicans aren’t wrong, they’re bad. Democrats are thoughtful and trying to help. This kind of thing is unusual even for New York in a non-election year. This is not the nuanced and directly dignified sound of Mrs. Clinton’s predecessor, Pat Moynihan, in a fury. Nor is it the sound of her colleague, the more easygoing Chuck Schumer, on a bad day.

This is the sound of Hillary Clinton moving forward at a seemingly dramatic time and attempting to make a vivid impression.

She claims it was not the Republican Party’s idea to cut taxes and provide a tax refund. “The refund, which was a Democratic idea, we were the ones who said give back a refund, do it this year, provide a stimulus.”

She seems preoccupied with how to sell things, how to “market” them. The Democratic Party isn’t doing “a very good job communicating to you or anybody else.” A small upstate airport can become important “if we can figure how to market it and sell it.”

Asked what can be done to help upstate New York’s economy, she seems to suggest that a greater sophistication on the part of the locals would be nice. “Look at Niagara Falls: I mean, when I was a little girl, we went to Niagara Falls, we stayed on the American side. Now everybody goes to the Canadian side. Why? The Canadian government said, ‘Hey, We’ve got this great natural resource, let’s invest some money in it.’ I mean, it’s not complicated. I was just down at Roosevelt’s Top Cottage. And they’re going to open it on June 16th. This part of America should be a tourist corridor, second to none. We have everything from pre-Revolutionary War history, and Revolutionary War history, to the Roosevelts.” We could bring in “zillions of tourists.” She has been trying to explain that to the upstate folk. “I was talking to some of the local people there. They’re just beginning to think maybe they should go out and hire somebody who knows how to market tourism.”

*   *   *

How to help Poughkeepsie? She suggests “the cooperative technology extension service that I’ve advocated.” Poughkeepsie makes good products but “can’t really get them into the global marketplace.” The answer: “I think we should do a technology cooperative extension service, so that businesses would have access to that kind of know-how. . . . They can’t possibly afford it at this point.” Upstate New York, she says, is not well connected to the Internet. “There’s no doubt in my mind that if you could connect up upstate New York from one end to the other, it would be one of the most attractive places for people to do business. You could attract businesses out of California that don’t have electricity or water now and would be very interested in coming here. I have a program for grants and loans and tax credits that would be a public/private partnership to try to get the infrastructure that we need.”

This is viewing upstate as the Clintons viewed Arkansas: as a third world country in need of their knowing assistance. But it is also indicative of a mindset that does not know and perhaps cannot know the real story of upstate New York, which is a story of clobberingly high taxes that have continued off and on, mostly on, for the past half century, all of it accompanied by deteriorating public schools. Less convinced, or perhaps reflexive, ideological enthusiasts than Mrs. Clinton might wonder not if the government has the answers, but if the government caused the problems.

*   *   *

In the interview, Mrs. Clinton was less cutting and colorful in her language when asked, finally, and in the gentlest terms about her “difficult” transition, in the words of a reporter, to the Senate amid charges that her husband granted pardons “that . . . were somehow connected to the campaign.” Does she think she “will have to address this issue at another point, or do you think it has been addressed?”

This was remarkably soft even for a softball and it inspired Mrs. Clinton’s shortest answer: “We’ll just let it run its course. There was no quid pro quo. There wasn’t any connection what so ever. That’s what is going to be determined and it will all fade away, as these things usually do. And we are just going to wait for that to happen.”

Read that paragraph again. That’s how lawyers talk when they aren’t sure what the prosecutor has. (We will find out when U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White of New York concludes her investigation of charges that Mrs. Clinton played a role in the granting of certain pardons in return for political support in her senate run.)

*   *   *

In the earliest days of her Senate job the sharpest criticism of Mrs. Clinton had to do, not with what she said, but how she looked. Freed of the campaign obligation to be attractive and friendly looking on the rope line she showed up for Senate duty with flat hair and no makeup. She was criticized for this. It made her campaign efforts to be attractive look phony, and left her looking like a rough tough hard-line boomer feminist babe, ready to lecture you on gender equity as she orders you to put out that cigarette.

Burned by the criticism, she started doing her makeup again, or having someone do it, and doing her hair or having someone do it, and tying a soft-pastel cashmere sweater around her shoulders and throat, as she did during the campaign. The sweater does for her what 20 years ago a sweater vest did for Dan Rather: warmed the image.

*   *   *

Mrs. Clinton spoke at Yale this commencement season, and joked that she had one bit of advice: Pay attention to your hair, everyone else will. Her frustration was understandable. She is right that the media take an unusual interest in how she looks, but I don’t think the reason is that they are shallow and she is not. I think the reason is this: How she looks is what she shows, as opposed to how she thinks, which she has historically hidden. Paul Wellstone and Diane Feinstein tell you how they think, so no one obsesses about how they look.

Perhaps another reason for the media obsession is this. When caught off guard—not posing, not noticing the cameras, but daydreaming perhaps or thinking about something she has to do later, her face settles into a hardness, a pale blank thin-lipped ovoid that looks very, very angry.

Remember the videotape of Bill Clinton leaving Ron Brown’s funeral in Washington four years ago, and not knowing a camera was on him? He was chuckling and chatting as he walked out of the church. Then he saw the camera, put on a pained and stoic face, and wiped a nonexistent tear from his eye.

For some of us, that captured his essence.

That’s what Mrs. Clinton without makeup, with the hard un-posed unconscious look, does. The media think so too, which is one reason they’re always taking her picture.

But perhaps after this week’s Poughkeepsie Journal interview they’ll listen to her more, and learn as much. For the interview really reveals a level of aggression that had previously remained hidden, and there are reasons for the aggression. The first is that she feels it: This is her, this is her anger. The second is that she really does see those who disagree with her politically not as intellectually opposed, but as stubbornly obstructionist for personal reasons. They are flawed, thus their policies are flawed.

And the third reason she talks like this now is that she is moving forward, gaining ground by gaining attention, and starting to lead. She is breaking past the clutter to make an impression. Only two years ago when someone said that Mrs. Clinton will run for president, people scoffed. Now almost everyone on the American political scene wonders if she will move in 2004 or 2008.

*   *   *

Her party is not star-heavy. It does not have a deep bench. She is very famous, and appeals to the Democratic base. It is a mistake to think Mrs. Clinton has achieved her ambitions, just as it is a mistake to think Mr. Clinton has. He wants to be the first First Spouse. It will be part of his legacy. And it’s a lot better than what he has now, which is speeches in tacky venues and hanging out at the diner.

Mrs. Clinton, by the way, said in the Poughkeepsie Journal interview that her husband does a lot of reading, and travels, and is “pursuing some of his philanthropic activities.” He does “great interviews” with schoolchildren in the neighborhood, and when the Girl Scouts come selling cookies “he buys 20 boxes.”

Will he be back in politics? “I think he’s had a good time and he hasn’t been wanting to be in the political mix because that’s not appropriate for him to do at this point.”

Note the last three little words.

We had a wonderful weekend, hiking, barbecuing, visiting friends, snapping a friendly salute to the flag as it went by on TV or the street so our children would see and absorb the information that we honor the flag in our family, we note the parade that remembers the men and women who have fought for our country in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Or at least that was the plan. We did some of these things when we weren’t watching TV talk shows about the Democratic Party’s winning of control of the Senate.

We have eased into the new reality. This evening there will be news stories about Jim Jeffords’s first day as an independent. In this clip, he will be cheered by tourists and pose for pictures with a gaggle of them in the Capitol; here he’ll shake hands with a new caucus colleague, who’ll laugh and pat his arm; there he’ll shake his head over the criticism, which he’ll call understandable and surprisingly mild.

We have been through the Jeffords story this way, that way, inside out and upside down. We have absorbed it in the modern way: sitting in front of an electric box that gives us more pictures and factoids than we need. We have separated the wheat-news from the chaff-news and concluded: This is a story that changes everything and nothing. It’s just another few bars in “The Ballad of Blue and Red,” or, less gently, another chapter in “The Battle of Blue and Red.” We are a divided country; it is a divided Congress; it is a divided Senate, which just tilted.

*   *   *

History is biography. Mr. Jeffords had things he wanted or needed and Mr. Jeffords got them. Others in his position might have experienced themselves as stuck in a frustrating reality. He is a member of the 10% of Republicans in the Senate—10%!—who are liberals. They are sometimes treated like they’re a mere 10%. Sometimes they’re treated as if they’re key, because sometimes they are. But mostly they’re just 10%. To make it worse, the Senate 10% reflects the Republican reality on the ground: Only about 10% of the base is liberal, too.

What a losing position to be in. But Mr. Jeffords didn’t see the muck of reality, he saw rich opportunity. A way to move from obscurity to prominence, from powerlessness to power, from membership of a minority to majority of one, from one voice in a hundred to shaper of destiny, from representative of a silly state to king of a personal power base whose creation puffs up both his state and his standing.

Now was the time to move, before the fate of a Thurmond or Torricelli is settled, and the Senate rearranged by the powers on high. Mr. Jeffords moved, served his own interests, put himself in the history books, and did it all in such a way that those who want to, and there are many, can claim he took the high road of political conviction and not the low road of personal calculation. What a move! His public persona has, in a matter of days, morphed from boring, bland, singing senator who harmonizes with goofy Southerners to that of Lincolnesque leader, the sharp planes of whose face reflect a gritty tradition of New England moral dissent.

What a 10 strike. For Jim Jeffords. Who is in politics by the way. So no one should have been surprised. Everyone should have been calculating that he would do this.

Still, there’s something refreshing when one man grabs history and shakes it up, bends it. It reminds us all of our power, our personal power to change the facts as we walk into the world each day.

*   *   *

But what a skievy choice. Rather than announce his desire to change parties, resign and run for the Senate again (as few, but some, have done), leaving it up to the voters to accept him or reject him under new colors, he wins office as a Republican six months ago, walks out on his base and party leadership in his state and in Washington, and announces that he had to on principle.

But what principle? His principles survived Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Couldn’t they survive a George W. Bush whom Mr. Jeffords campaigned for and who has turned out to be a president who has proceeded on exactly the issues he campaigned on? If it was principle, why did Mr. Jeffords reportedly tell Mr. Bush that he is a one-termer? That sounds more like politics, an honorable profession but not a principle itself.

*   *   *

It changes everything and nothing. It keeps the voting lines and patterns of the Senate the same; Mr. Jeffords voted like a liberal Democrat and will continue to. (Actually it would be in his interests to confound expectations, demonstrate independence and show it’s not personal against Mr. Bush by supporting the president vigorously in the first vote he can. And let’s assume he’ll do what is in his interests!) But it will still take 60 votes to control the Senate and neither side will have them.

So nothing changes. But everything changes. Democrats rule the upper house for the first time in six years; they win back all committee chairmanships and the right to slow, speed and kill legislation.

And they elevate both their stalwarts and their stars to new roles. Ted Kennedy will chair the Labor Committee. And the new Democratic honcho in charge of health-care legislation will be Hillary Clinton. This makes her an activist again. No more the quiet backbencher, saying that “I’m just here to learn.” Now she will be given authority. Now she returns to a position of real power.

You lock the door and she comes in the window, you lock the window and she comes up the floor boards. This is like “Alien”—she lives in Tom Daschle’s stomach. Just as the music gets soft and the scene winds down you hear the wild “Eeek! Eeek!” and she bursts out of Tom and darts through the room.

Mrs. Clinton signaled her new aggression within hours of Mr. Jeffords’s announcement. When the Senate, on Thursday, overwhelmingly confirmed Viet Dinh and Michael Chertoff as assistant attorneys general, Mrs. Clinton cast the only vote against either man. Were her reasons serious, or spiteful? You decide. Both men were lawyers with the Senate Whitewater Committee.

All this is a threat to the Republic. But in a narrow sense it is also a gift to the GOP base, to the party’s hackocracy, to those Republicans on the street who’ve never really been comfortable sitting back and just hoping Mr. Bush will do well. They can now jolt awake with the super charge of adrenaline that only Hillary—Eeek! Eeek!—can give them.

Well, Hillary and Ted.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, no longer has to fashion legislation acceptable to a liberal Republican who in the months before he bolted kept telling reporters that it’s just a short walk across the aisle from one side to the other. Mr. Bush has other liberal Republicans to consider and persuade, but one suspects they’ll be less likely to bolt now that Mr. Jeffords has reaped bolting’s main rewards.

And Mr. Bush has something to fight now—the Democratic Senate. He won’t have to spend the 2002 congressional campaign explaining to a not-always-attentive electorate why a president whose party controls Congress is unable to bring dramatic change. Now he can happily rail against “the do-nothing 107th.”

And he’ll have a worthy foe in the endlessly calculating Mr. Daschle, who was as nimble as Mrs. Clinton in taking advantage of the new circumstances, but not with what seemed to be spite. He did his hair up and got made up and went outside among the people and made a speech marking the beginning of his majority leadership. It had the semi-moving anecdotes—“ ‘Give them hope,’ my friend told me before he died”—and semi-graceful grace notes we’ve all become so used to. It almost had a hero in the balcony. Except it wasn’t really like a State of the Union, it was more like the first draft of an inaugural address.

I am about to take a month’s leave to work on a book and thought I’d say goodbye with a few of the things I’ve been thinking about, and experiencing.

I’ve been in California. I love California and feel that somewhere in my heart I am a forty-niner; I come here and want to live in the hills, panning for gold. I wonder, why would anyone not live here? The crashing coast, the beautiful light—artists should live here and paint in this light, as they once sought out the brightness of Paris—the deep vivid color of the flowers, the yellows, reds and purples. The East has greener greenery—the leaves on trees in New York and Massachusetts and Virginia are a deeper green and seem crisper and more sparkling after it rains—but the variety of the foliage here, the gnarly oaks, the winding bending sycamores, the elegant palms, is spectacular.

I’m staying in the most elegant hotel I’ve ever stayed in and surely one of the most elegant in the world, the Bel Air, which is located near some of the people I’m here to talk to. Every night a nice young man comes and starts a fire in the fireplace; and everyone is courteous, competent and quiet. The place hums. But the best thing is that the hotel is in a deeply wooded enclave and feels lushly natural and far from the city. You don’t hear traffic, you hear birds. There’s a plump white swan in a stream that runs through the property, and after dinner I saw a man who I think was Tom Hayden lead his little boy down to the swan so they could get a good look.

My first morning here I went out before 8 a.m. It was the weekend and everyone was still asleep except for the soft-walking staff. It was cool, really crisp for April, maybe 55 degrees, but the sun was strong and yellow and came through the leaves and branches and I could hear the stream, and there were big white flowers in full bloom, calla lilies and other kinds, and someone was burning wood, and I walked into the cool, moist air and thought: This is like the beginning of the world.

Then I went to the gym, which is small but has what you need. There was a woman doing calisthenics on a mat, and two men working out near a rack of weights. One was a trainer, the other was working the weights. I took a treadmill and got up to 4.0 and was rocking along and saw, by the mirrored walls, that one of the men was Tom Cruise. I just loved the sight of him. He is beautiful.

I was careful, as grownups are, not to stare and push past his privacy, and soon another fellow came in and we all softly grunted and sweated as the machines whirred, and after a while Tom Cruise went to leave. But first he put other people’s stray equipment back in place, and then made eye contact with each of us and smiled goodbye as he walked through the door toward the garden. When he’d been gone about 30 seconds, the woman on the mats looked at me and said, “Was . . . that . . . him?” With comic precision, like Lucille Ball when she sees Charles Boyer in the next booth at Chasen’s. We laughed and agreed he is very polite. It must be wonderful to be a movie star and make people happy just by being there. Anyway, he struck me as a beautiful palomino with alert eyes and a conscious intelligence.

*   *   *

I went to the Reagan Library, in the rusty colored hills of the Simi Valley, where I read Ronald Reagan’s high school and college short stories. There’s a great fluidity and smoothness, almost a roundness, to Ronald Reagan’s writing that never changed from when he was a boy to when he was president. He wrote stories about lifeguards—he was a lifeguard—and handsome young men at college—he was a handsome young man at college—and heroes—he wanted to be a hero, and in time he was.

You feel tender and protective about young Ron when you go through his papers, in part maybe because you feel tender about his young, not fully formed handwriting, and protective about the frailty of the soft old papers you’re holding. But also it reminded me that all of us who worked with him, or rather most of us, certainly those of us in speechwriting, felt protective about him when he was in the White House. Which in a way is odd because he was a big successful president and we were little shmigoogies.

But something in him made you want to shield him, help him. The most literal case I know of this is that of one of his Secret Service agents who over the years had become his friend. He often guarded the president, but on the day Mr. Reagan was shot, he was assigned, at the last minute, to the first lady’s detail. To this day when he thinks of the shooting he thinks: “If only I’d been there maybe I could have taken his bullet.” And he means it. He would have.

*   *   *

I saw Ed Meese, at a speech on Saturday night. He said: The thing people forget about Mr. Reagan is that he was born to be a leader. He was high school president, college president, the leader of a college strike, the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. When he joined the reserves in the U.S. Cavalry—he joined up in the 1930s because he wanted to ride horses—they made him an officer. There was something in him that people saw, an ability to walk in front, a capacity to point in a direction and urge people to follow him.

A.C. Lyles, a producer at Paramount who met Mr. Reagan in 1936 or ’37 and has stayed his friend all these years, told me no one who knew Mr. Reagan was surprised when he went into politics; they knew he’d lead and they knew he’d rise. Mr. Lyles told me that when he got to know him, he thought Ronald Reagan was the smartest man he ever met. “Everyone else here talked about the movies, which is understandable, it’s our business, but he talked about what was happening in the world.” Mr. Lyles said James Cagney, who was a political conservative and who took an active interest in the people and players of Hollywood, thought Mr. Reagan might be president some day, and urged him to go into politics. Back in the ‘50s, Mr. Lyles typed up a prophecy and had it notarized. It said Ronald Reagan would someday be president of the United States. He sent it to his friends so they could one day attest to his prescience.

I had dinner with Mrs. William French Smith, Jean Smith, whose husband, Mr. Reagan’s first attorney general, died a few years ago. She met Mr. Reagan in the ‘50s, “when he was an actor.” She saw him give a speech to the Junior League, of which she was a local leader. A few years later she met Bill Smith, and they married. Her husband started to talk to her about his friend Ronnie Reagan, whom he and a few others were trying to talk into running for governor. Mrs. Smith said she’d seen Mr. Reagan speak years before and that she’d thought he was going to be a very important man someday. In fact, she said, he could be president. “I was the first one to say it,” she told me.

They all think they were the first one to say it, or think it, and in a way they’re all right. Mrs. Smith told me the night Ronald Reagan won the 1966 California’s governor’s race a young man in the crowd at the victory celebration walked around wordlessly holding a big banner in his hand: “Reagan for President.” He was the first one to say it, too.

I spent a day at the Reagan ranch, way up in the mountains north of Santa Barbara. They’ve kept it as it was when he was last there, and what strikes you most is its modesty. The property is fantastic, almost 700 acres more than 2,000 feet above sea level. You can look this way and see unfolding ranges and then the sea, and that way and see more ranges, and towns. Former National Security Advisor Bill Clark told me Mr. Reagan called it his “cathedral in the sky.” You should see the fences he built, and the tack house with his old saddles and blankets.

But the house itself is so modest. A little porch, a sitting room, a small dining area, a small kitchen with GE appliances, a small master bedroom and a small second bedroom. Mikhail Gorbachev visited in 1986 and later said it was not good enough for a great leader. I imagined what it was like for him, snaking his way in a motorcade up the winding hills with the California live oaks and the streams and knowing what was ahead; he knew of movie stars and capitalism, he knew he was about to see the great mansion of a rich man, a many-roomed abode unfurling itself on a hill. And instead he found a one-story white stucco house, something ma and pa might own after a lifetime of a losing struggle against the malefactors of great wealth.

Mr. Reagan didn’t care about the house; he cared about the trails and the horses and the land and the fences. “He liked to get dirty,” a man who used to ride with him told me. “He liked to do it all himself, the care of the horses and the land.”

While I was enjoying California and just breathing it in, just loving it, just roaming around the Paramount lot and seeing old sets and imagining Irving Thalberg leaning in the shade and smoking a cigarette, while I was having all this California fun, the news about the state was not good. A report came out this week saying the Golden State’s business prospects are not bright, and everyone is worried about the electricity crisis. And there’s the still-looming writers’ strike, which could hurt the movie business and throw people out of work.

The people who live there are feeling understandably anxious; as the visitor, I kept thinking: This place is fabulous, at its worst it’s heaven. Enjoy it—it’s ungrateful not to! I asked a man I know if after 15 years here he can still see the beauty, and he said with what I thought was relief, “Oh yes. I really notice it every day.”

And of course there’s this. In my hotel room, in the blond-wood bureau, in the third drawer, in which they keep an extra blanket and a local phone book, there was what looked like a black nylon shaving kit. I pulled it out. On top it said “Hotel Bel-Air Earthquake Kit. Please do not remove/For Emergency Use Only.” It weighed about five pounds. Inside were bandages, tissues, a silver Mylar emergency blanket wrapped up tight, a silver whistle, two Cyalume Lightstick Safety Lights, eight four-ounce packs of emergency drinking water, and a 4-by-6-inch brick of “Emergency Ration Food Provisions” whose label says, because this is California, “Contains 100 percent of most Daily Recommended Vitamins & Minerals—Absolutely NO cholesterol.”

It was quite . . . wonderful. Like doing duck-and-cover drills when I was a kid, as if they would help. It reminded me, of course, that California, our great unanchored beauty, is heaven on a fault line. Beautiful but not fully grounded, like a young actress making her way down the red carpet at the awards ceremony and tottering on stiletto heels.

This was going to be about the first 100 days of the Bush administration, which will be marked a week from Monday. But I did that column a few weeks ago and haven’t changed my mind.

I said then it seems President Bush is doing well, very well. He still is. There are all sorts of ways to defend this assertion—he’s enjoyed legislative victories, has avoided missteps that are embarrassing or disastrous, has established himself as president, is speaking forcefully if not fluidly, has good ratings, and his opponents continue in a kind of slow-motion disarray.

I do not think the China episode was the triumph it has been painted as by other Bush supporters, and by distinguished columnists such as Charles Krauthammer. But I agree with Michael Kelly that the truly heartening moment was Mr. Bush’s decision not to attend the welcome-back ceremonies for the crew, not to go for a lot of cheap, teary camera time.

He has dignity. This was once a baseline expectation for American presidents. Now, after the past eight years, it comes as a shock. It’s as if the neighborhood egomaniac has left the barbecue and normal conversation and relationships can once again proceed.

*   *   *

But the biggest reason I think Mr. Bush is doing well is that everything I’ve mentioned is part of the day-to-day of history. It is history but not big history, the little news clumps on which we chew each evening. Big history is the thing you remember, it’s what history bothers to notice. It’s the headline over the paragraphs that contain the data.

What history will remember about Mr. Bush is that his presidency began successfully because he moved forward with sureness and confidence on the two big things he most consistently campaigned on and stood for, an across-the-board tax cut and the inclusion of faith-based initiatives in government efforts to help those who need it. Mr. Bush showed history that he will do what he said he’d do. And in doing what he said he’d do, and boldly, he turned 50% of the vote into 100% of a real presidency. He became the president. He became a leader.

It is my sense that people are starting to recognize him as a person they might want to march behind. It would be very interesting if, in a few months, if a broadly cast poll asked: What percentage of the vote did George W. Bush get in November? Or: Did you vote for George W. Bush? I suspect a surprising number of people will say he won with more than 50%, and I suspect about 58% will claim they voted for him. That’s what people do when they start thinking of a president as someone they want to be associated with, which is to say as a winner.

What a happy relief all this is. One of Mr. Bush’s challenges, it seemed to me, was filling up the big empty space left by Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton filled up the room. You might say that he filled it up with pathology and a teary soullessness, that he was a big walking negative. But he filled up a lot of space, and when he departed I wondered if a normal man, one who lacked a drama queen’s hungers and howls, could fully fill it up.

But Mr. Bush has done it. In his compact, tidy, unsick way he filled the space, and not with his own brand of darkness but so far with an unshowy competence and command.

*   *   *

People keep wondering aloud if Mr. Bush can become a great president. They did this when Mr. Clinton came in, too. I don’t know the answer but my sense is that he can, if history cooperates in giving him the kind of piercing challenges that make apparent greatness or its lack. What it appears he would bring to such moments is what he seems to bring into the office each day. He is commonsensical, well-balanced; he enjoys idealism in himself and others and knows how to operate. He knows whom to talk to for advice and ideas and insights, but he knows that he ultimately calls the shots and will bear the credit or blame.

Someone told me recently of a conversation he had with a longtime friend of Mr. Bush. The friend said there are two misconceptions about the president, one being that he is stupid and the other being that he is sweet. When I heard this I laughed out loud with delight because I knew I was hearing the truth. Mr. Bush is shrewd, smart and not at all brilliant, which is good as brilliant men have a way of being dicey presidents. All that intellectual action gets in the way of common sense and serenity. But one senses also with Mr. Bush that he’s got this tough little cold streak. I would call it mean, but I don’t think he takes delight in it. I think he takes only cool satisfaction.

I was thinking the other day about JFK, who was a tough talker in private and who would announce that so-and-so was “screwing” him and he was going to “tuck it to him good” and “break it off at the handle.” I was thinking of this because I was wondering how Mr. Bush might be thinking of how to handle someone like Sen. Jim Jeffords, the liberal Republican from Vermont who has taken to announcing that he can always cross the aisle and join the Democrats in the 50-50 Senate. I was thinking that Mr. Bush will be really nice to him until he doesn’t have to anymore, and then he’ll tuck it to him good and break it off at the handle. I don’t think he’ll laugh or clap his hands when he does it, I think he’ll just throw a little smile to Karl Rove and say, “And now on to other things.”

Mr. Bush’s staff strikes me as something new and unusual, maybe the best White House staff since . . . well, I’m not sure. Bill Clinton’s staff ultimately reflected his nature: young, immature, not serious. The elder Bush’s staff was made up of tennis players from the soft courts of Houston country clubs; they had no idea why they were there. Ronald Reagan’s staff was tumultuous and riven, but the intellectual caliber was high, especially at the middle levels. Jimmy Carter’s staffers were talented and unlucky both in terms of what history handed them and in their boss’s ultimate temperamental unsuitability to the presidency. Gerald Ford’s staff wasn’t around long enough to make an impression, Richard Nixon’s staff was jailed. LBJ’s was talent-heavy, sophisticated and serious, but its White House was another victim of history.

The younger Bush’s staff is something new in that its members are not at war with each other. They have a way of operating that speaks of a high comfort level and clearly defined rules. They are knowing, not at all naive, not necessarily nice, hardworking, and they know who’s boss. They are loyal to him, and they are loyal to each other.

One reason: They are working for the only president since JFK who knows how to read the New York Times and the Washington Post, Newsweek and Time. He knows how to decode them. He knows how to figure out who the source of the blind quote is. For eight years, W. watched Mr. Reagan’s staffers kill each other in the press and harm Mr. Reagan’s presidency. He watched his father’s staffers kill each other with leaks and the airing of policy and personal grievances. He watched his father’s staff go to Bob Woodward to give him their own self-protective versions of the real lowdown on the elder Bush’s economic policies and political collapse.

W. knew the men around Mr. Reagan and his father had their own relationships with reporters, and traded information and background information for favorable treatment. And W. learned from these shrewd men and women, was literally taught by Robert Teeter and Lee Atwater and Dick Darman, how to read the papers, how to deconstruct the story, how to plant a story, how to hurt a foe.

W.’s staffers know not to do it, because they know he’d find them out and fire them.

His staff seems to have learned how to get along, how to thrash things through and hash things out and leave it in the room. Mr. Bush wants their insights, ideas, advice and guidance; he wants them to be candid and he wants the right to be candid in return. They’ve learned how to trust each other. It’s interesting to see, and interesting to wonder if it will continue, just as it’s interesting to wonder if some day we’ll find out that Karen seethed with hatred for Karl and Karl couldn’t tolerate Josh and Josh made fun of Dick behind his back. It’s really great not to know those things right now.

But the biggest reason for the staff cohesion is this: The new Bush administration is the first in many years to not be ideologically divided. There was a constant tug of war for the soul of the old Bush and Reagan White Houses, of the LBJ White House, torn to pieces by Vietnam. There were ideological and political tongs too in the Carter White House, and even in the Clinton White House, which didn’t really have a soul to speak of but which had Dick Morris pragmatists here and Stephanopoulos/Carville leftists there.

But W.’s White House is not riven or deeply divided. It is not a White House at war with itself. The staffers don’t have to fight for Mr. Bush’s soul because he takes care of his soul. He’s the captain, they’re the crew; he points and they row. He pointed in a certain direction in the campaign, and continues in that direction in his presidency. It’s impressive. One hopes this seriousness—and literal soulfulness—will continue. If it does it could yield greatness. So far it has yielded a good beginning.

They were eyeball to eyeball and both blinked. China will send the American crew members back, and the U.S. is sorry a Chinese pilot died and that our plane landed on Chinese soil without permission.

Of all the commentary and chatter that followed the president’s announcement, perhaps the best summation came from a father of one of the crew members, who, when asked about the wording of the U.S. apology-not-an-apology, told MSNBC, “[China] can believe what they want to believe and we can believe what we can believe.”

Just so. And we can know what we know, too.

*   *   *

It is not unusual for a new president to be faced with an international crisis early on. LBJ had the rolling crisis of Vietnam from day one, as did Richard Nixon. Gerry Ford got Mayaguez, John F. Kennedy the Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy, like George W. Bush, faced his first hard time three months into his presidency. On April 16, 1961, 40 years ago this Monday, U.S.-trained Cuban anti-Castro troops attempted to invade Cuba and overthrow the regime.

Like President Bush, like any new leader but perhaps more than most, Kennedy was preoccupied with showing that he was a man of strength and resolve. He was new in the job, had won the votes of only half the country, and feared being called fearful. And so he went ahead with the invasion, allowing 1,500 men to go up against Castro’s army of more than 100,000, landing the forces far from dense population centers thought to be home to the thousands who would rise up in support of freedom, allowing little air cover, and no direct U.S. military participation.

It was, of course, a disaster, and was over in five hours. The invasion troops were outnumbered and outgunned, hit hard by Soviet MiGs flown by Czech pilots; and Castro, who knew the invasion was coming, had already arrested any Cubans who would have joined an uprising against him. More than a hundred men died and the rest surrendered.

“He chose a minimum of political risk” in planning the invasion, said his biographer, Richard Reeves, “which meant a maximum of military risk.” Kennedy was urged to send in American troops when there was still a chance, but told Nixon in a telephone call that “There is a good chance that if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin.” A few days later when Kennedy met with Dwight Eisenhower at Camp David, Ike stood by him in public but castigated him in private, saying his thinking was exactly wrong. According to Reeves, Ike said: “The Soviets follow their own plans, and if they see us show any weakness that is when they press the hardest.”

Kennedy accepted responsibility, Castro triumphed, the crisis went away. But of course it never fully went away, because all such disasters have implications. A calculating world was watching, and taking Kennedy’s measure. Eisenhower was right: Three months later, in the dead of night, Khrushchev, emboldened by Kennedy’s failure, put up the Berlin Wall. He gambled that Kennedy would do nothing. He was right.

*   *   *

That’s the thing about crises; sometimes their biggest impact is on the future. The world watches, takes a leader’s measure and moves, based on its calculations. Kennedy lived in interesting times, and faced many crises. Mr. Bush’s first crisis was not as weighted with high stakes.

In the China crisis, if that is not too big a word for it, Mr. Bush kept his cool and did not turn to bellicosity as the unsure sometimes do. He canvassed the deep Republican foreign-policy bench, sent some confused signals, settled down, announced he would not give in to Chinese demands for an apology, announced a stalemate, and soon thereafter announced an agreement in which the U.S. said it was sorry about the death of the pilot and sorry for landing without permission.

He got the job done. The crew will come home. And so the crisis ends. Mr. Bush’s handling of the crisis was—in a word the Bushes hate, the one that was used to spoof his father—prudent. But one wonders what the world will conclude from his prudence. Some may conclude that he is patient and cool-tempered. Some may conclude he can be rolled. In this sense his crisis was the opposite of Ronald Reagan’s response to his first crisis, a domestic one with international implications. A federal workers’ union said it would break the law and strike for higher wages. Mr. Reagan said: If you do, I will fire you. They struck. He fired them. When the world saw what Mr. Reagan had done with the flight controllers’ union, it began to conclude that the cowboy was not a creampuff.

*   *   *

Nobody wanted war with China, nobody desired harsh talk and threats. Few desire a deep disruption of relations. A conclusion that ends with no loss of life beyond one pilot doesn’t invite gainsaying. But a conclusion that seems to come with apologies that you said you wouldn’t make—that will be gainsaid aplenty.

The story is played out, of course, against a backdrop that is one big question that the administration will some day have to answer, either through actions or words or both. And this is whether China should be treated as our adversary, or our potential adversary, or a major competitor, or even a potential friend.

But that question is dwarfed by ones that only China can answer: Are their ultimate intentions hostile? Do they see us as the enemy? Why are they engaged in a big military buildup? Do they mean to move on Taiwan? What are their intentions in Asia—are they hegemonic?

There are many reasons to believe the Chinese are a potential threat, and certainly the way they comported themselves in this crisis—from the forcing down of the American plane to its boarding, and the imprisonment and interrogation of U.S. military personnel, straight through to its propagandistic media reports and its attempts to whip up anti-U.S. feeling—underscores a growing Western assumption that their intentions are not benign.

And so one question is what the Chinese will conclude from Mr. Bush’s actions, whether he is an impressive leader or an unsteady hand.

But another legitimate question, brought to you by the Chinese government, is what kind of friendly competitor, what kind of potential friend, what kind of respectful adversary takes the actions they have taken.

*   *   *

Some good has perhaps come of the crisis. Perhaps I am wrong and misreading things, but my sense is that the American people did not become passionately and sentimentally engaged in the stories of the crew members. We didn’t break out in yellow ribbon madness. We didn’t have a big national wallow, and that is good. The problem with such sentimentality has always been that it put undue pressure not on the ayatollahs of the world but on the Carters, on the leaders of democracies.

And there is also this. The Chinese and the Americans plan to meet on April 19, and perhaps a new candor, after what they have been through together, will come forth.

*   *   *

For now it doesn’t feel triumphant but it does feel over. It was a first test for Mr. Bush. He didn’t fail, but it will probably become clear down the road if he succeeded in showing anything that it would be helpful to show. The Chinese certainly seem to have revealed something too. And if it was unsettling, it was at least clarifying in terms of who they think they are—and who they think we are. This would tend to strengthen the hand of those in the U.S. who have long argued that China has chosen to be our adversary, and we had better know it.

Dan Rather is 69 years old, the anchor of “CBS Evening News” for the past 20 years, probably one of the most famous men in America and a political liberal. He is in trouble this week after a front-page story in the Washington Post reported that he recently appeared at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Texas. This is considered scandalous because . . .

Wait. Why is it scandalous? Because America didn’t know he’s liberal? But we know that; we’ve almost always known it. Because America never guessed that he was a Democrat? We knew that too. When he reports the news, he practically wears a straw hat and sings “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Why is it scandalous that he went to a Democratic Party fund-raiser? For only one reason. Because it formally and officially gives away the game. The game is pretending that he and most of the rest of the American broadcast-journalism establishment do not have strikingly uniform political views.

But it’s about time that game was given away. Dan Rather at a Democratic fund-raiser is not a scandal but a public service. I say give that man a Peabody.

*   *   *

Mr. Rather has formally apologized for what he called his mistake, and this disappoints me. I called twice yesterday to talk about it, but his assistant, a person with an English accent who was veddy veddy busy, far too busy to be polite, told me that he will not be commenting on the story beyond the apology he released Wednesday. I asked if he could make an exception for me, as we are old friends. But he didn’t.

Too bad. All I wanted to say to him is, “Dan my man, you went as the main attraction to a Democratic fundraiser! That is terrific, why did you apologize? Why not just be what you are? Come on, break through the old ways and inaugurate a new era of candor and honesty in broadcasting!”

I guess at that point he would feel forced to insist he’s not a Democrat and not a liberal, and then we both would have started to laugh. Maybe that’s why he didn’t call. It makes you feel silly when you try to spin people who know you and know better.

*   *   *

I worked for Dan Rather from 1980 until 1984, and I thought, and still think. he is a great guy. But most people don’t change as they grow older, they just grow more so. Dan has grown more so. He was a political liberal. Now he’s even more liberal.

I never thought his biases sprang from a naturally political nature. I thought and think he adopted a particular political point of view as a matter of protective coloration.

Back in the ‘60s he made his name covering hurricanes, a bright, young, handsome guy who’d stand waist-deep in floating rats to get the story. He came to the attention of CBS News, which brought him to New York and offered him a job. He took it, but at first he wasn’t comfortable in the CBS culture. He felt like a hick from Texas, untutored and un-Eastern; he had an accent and a funny haircut.

He was patronized by the snooty CBS of William S. Paley and his erudite executives. One of Mr. Paley’s men turned to me one day in 1980 and told me he’d known Dan since they covered Vietnam together for the network.

“Oh,” I said, “what was he like in those days?” I figured he’d tell me stories of late nights and derring-do.

“He wore yellow socks with his suits,” the exec sniffed.

I don’t think Dan started out caring too much about politics. I think he cared about reporting and stardom, appropriate interests for a young broadcast journalist in the 60s. I think he adopted a political philosophy to fit in, to rise. He wanted Mr. Paley’s men to think he was sophisticated. He wanted to be like his hero, Edward R. Murrow, Mr. Paley’s old friend. So Dan cloaked himself in liberalism, and it worked just fine. (In fairness: He also covered the civil rights movement in the ‘60s and would have had natural sympathy for the good guys working for equal rights, and they were liberals too.)

And as happens often in life, when you pretend long enough to be something, and the pretending is not onerous, you can become what you pretend to be. In time he wasn’t wearing liberalism; he was liberalism. When he got in a little trouble for being an administration tormentor during the Nixon years it made him very famous—and very attractive to half the country, including his bosses at CBS, who were themselves hostile to Nixon and energetically supportive of his demise.

They won. They were gracious. They told their on-air personnel not to gloat. They made Dan heir apparent to the great Walter Cronkite, who had established his extraordinary importance in American journalism by becoming a major force against the Vietnam War. “If I’ve lost Cronkite we’ve lost America,” LBJ is supposed to have said, and if he didn’t say it was true anyway.

So Dan is a longtime liberal. And as Murrow’s greatness rested on certain iconic moments—rallying support for beleaguered England during the blitz with radio reports that are still journalistic classics, first-person reporting on revelations of the Nazi concentration camps, battling Joe McCarthy—Dan went in search of iconic moments too. That is how greatness descends; one pulls it down from the air of history and puts it on one’s head like a hat.

Nixon provided one iconic moment for Mr. Rather. “No sir, are you?” he famously shot back when Nixon asked him if he was running for something. Nixon, in a news conference, was making fun of the applause that greeted Dan’s taking the microphone. “No sir, are you?” was not, strictly speaking, a witty thing to say, but it had the tone and quickness of wit, and was misunderstood as such. Anyway, it made him a star.

George Bush—the first one—was going to occasion an iconic moment, too. When he ran for president in 1988, Mr. Rather and his producers tried to ambush the vice president in a live evening-news interview. They were going to fry him, as you remember, on the griddle of their deep and fearless probing on Iran-contra. But Dan pressed too hard, and was rude, and Mr. Bush decked him by asking if he’d like his entire career to be judged by the time he walked off the set in a huff because his broadcast was momentarily delayed.

I will never forget Dan Rather’s face at that moment. He looked like he’d just taken a hard right to the face. He seemed to flinch, and angrily went to commercial. It was an iconic moment all right, but not the sort Dan was looking for.

*   *   *

When I worked with Dan Rather in the early ‘80s, I wrote his daily CBS Radio commentaries. He was politically on his side, and I was growing more conservative. I went to him one day and told him it was starting to be a problem for me to write his point of view well. He was terrific; he said that on every issue we would give a full airing of the views of both sides, but then at the end we’d call it the way he saw it because it was his show. That was fine with me, and we put together a broadcast that I still think was distinguished in that more often than not it was balanced. Each side got its say.

Conservatives seemed to appreciate the approach, to judge by our mail. They didn’t mind that Dan’s views were often liberal, because they were so glad that he aired their views. (That’s all conservatives ever really wanted out of the media. They never expected broadcasters to be conservative. They just wanted them to report conservative arguments honestly and without a slant. They thought broadcasters almost never presented their views with fairness and without bias. And they were right.)

Dan wasn’t always political. He has a lovely patriotic sense, a natural respect and affection for the fighting men who put themselves on the line for America. We wrote about heroism, too. Once we did a piece on the USS Intrepid, the old Unlucky I, which had barely made it out of the Leyte Gulf during World War II. I think the story got the most mail he ever received. Dan was moved by the subject of family, and the perennial attempt at all holidays to be closer to loved ones.

So I always thought he was a great guy and I still do. He wore his heart on his sleeve and he was no intellectual, but he had a nice instinctive skepticism toward government pronouncements and official stands. At CBS we treated him like a god. He was one of the big three anchors, and the one who was No. 1. He got used to being treated like a god. He could be imperious, strange. I would go to his office each morning to confer on that day’s commentary and I would ask his bright assistant, Terry Belli, “And how is King Baby today?” And she would laugh, and give me a report. Dan was what all network anchors were, and to a lesser degree still are: He was a 20th-century prince, more powerful than a senator, more lasting than a president, and as glamorous as a movie star.

*   *   *

But—have I made this clear?—he was and he is politically of the left. If you didn’t notice that over the past 25 years there is no way you would not have noticed it during the last presidential election, which I think he tried to make into his last iconic moment.

Last night on Fox News (idiotic disclaimer: I am a contributor there) Brit Hume, breaking as he so often does with the pack, reported the Rather fund-raising story at some length and then played a video compilation of Dan Rather’s comments on Nov. 26, the night Katherine Harris certified Mr. Bush the winner of the presidency. Mr. Rather’s comments make his anti-Republican agenda clear:

“Florida’s Republican Secretary of State is about to announce the winner—as she sees it and she decrees it—of the state’s politically decisive 25 electoral votes.”

“The believed certification—as the Republican Secretary of State sees it.”

“She will certify—as she sees it—who gets Florida’s 25 electoral votes.”

“The certification—as she sees it—as the Florida Secretary of States sees it and decrees it—is being signed.”

The Media Research Center notes that on Dec. 13, reporting the Supreme Court’s decision on the vote counts in Florida, Mr. Rather actually began the evening news by suggesting an “ideologically motivated” court had “in effect handed the presidency to Bush.”

Yet this Wednesday, even with the storm over his appearance at the Democratic fund-raiser, he devoted all of 23 seconds to the Miami Herald/USA Today re-re-recount that showed if the hand counts had continued Mr. Bush’s margin would have grown. Needless to say, he didn’t correct his November comments.

*   *   *

Dan Rather’s politics inform and give shape to his reporting—to his choice of a lead, his use of words, his allocation of the time a story deserves.

And this is not new. And it is not peculiar to him.

Now he’s in the middle of a storm over the embarrassment of a major American journalist speaking at a party fund-raiser. Not a journalist who declares up front his philosophy and biases—a columnist or essayist like Bill Buckley or Anthony Lewis or George Will or Tom Friedman (or me)—but a journalist who is supposed to be a reporter—a dispassionate teller of what is new, of what has happened and what it may mean.

And so of course he was wrong to help the Democratic Party raise money. But in a way he was right, too. He was honest. He acted on his instincts. What scandalizes his fellow journalists, after all, is not that people can now fairly infer that he is of the left and not the right. It is that by doing what he did, he gives the game away.

His peers will no doubt criticize him. They will go into great high harrumph about how reporters just don’t do such things. But their real, unvoiced complaint will be that he screwed up by illustrating the real problem with broadcast journalism, which is that it’s slanted. They all, almost all, slant it, and they do it deliberately. Because they have views they wish to promote and advance.

Last summer at the political conventions, a person long respected on Capitol Hill, a former Democratic operative, told me that conservatives all complain about liberal bias in the networks, but we don’t know the half of it. He told me that I couldn’t imagine how closely the Democrats work with the media. “I’m a socialist, I don’t give a damn,” he said. (He didn’t actually say “damn,” but this is a family newspaper’s Web site.) But he was amazed that conservatives complain so much and know so little.

*   *   *

Charging the news media with liberal bias is like charging the rain with being wet. It is of their essence, it is what they are. And pretending this is not so is a dull and stupid game. It’s also over. It is a fiction that has been overtaken by events.

The “CBS Evening News” was once a behemoth, the premier news show in a three-network world. Now Mr. Rather’s show competes with more and newer networks, with cable news, with hundreds of channels. The hegemony of the old elite networks has ended, as we all know.

In the new, more competitive era, with scores of stations competing for viewers, with everyone looking not for a broad base but a solid niche, it’s foolish to force highly opinionated reporters to act as if they don’t have opinions. After all, it’s not as if they are fooling the audience. It would be more practical, and probably better and less infuriating for everyone, if all the TV news shows and networks would admit the truth, declare one’s bias.

The British newspapers do that. The Guardian is the authentic voice of bland Blairism, the Telegraph the grunter of conservative critiques. It doesn’t make them less honest; it makes them more candid, less able to or willing to fool. This is refreshing. In a niche universe why not declare that your news show is informed by liberal values or conservative ones? Why continue the charade? It’s not as if anyone believes it.

That’s why I was so happy when Dan Rather went to the fund-raiser and it was reported. It was an honest thing to do, a declaration of a stand that would surprise no one. And that’s why I’m sad he apologized. He should have bragged about it. It was one of the most honest actions of his career.

It was a real iconic moment.

May there be more.

I have been thinking the past few weeks, as I’ve watched the Democrats attack President Bush’s tax-cut plan as deeply flawed because it benefits the rich and was developed in fact only to benefit the rich, more specifically to benefit rich Republicans and their big-business friends, that this is an odd and an old tic the Democrats display when discussing tax policy. They’ve been doing it all my life, since I first started noticing politics 30 years ago, and they did it well before then, and it’s interesting that they do not stop.

I am referring to this: Somehow the Democrats always want you to show your loyalty to the poor by hating the rich. It is as if they think resentment of the haves is prima facie proof of sympathy for and identification with the have-nots. And it is odd that they still do this, for a number of reasons including that so many Democrats are rich, or at least “rich.” (I can remember when the Democrats did not seem the rich man’s party, but by the 1970s at least anyone could see that wealthy city people were likely to be liberal Democrats and modest-living small-towners, suburbanites and blue-collar workers were more likely to be conservative and Republican.)

The Democrats have never gotten over class warfare as a political strategy and tactic. And as I say this is odd, in part because in America class warfare doesn’t really work. It makes the Democratic base happy to some degree, but it is not inclusive; it is by its nature exclusive. It seems driven by envy and resentment, which are negative emotions. And the envy and resentment seem inauthentic, cynical.

There is a good argument that class warfare doesn’t work, period, except in one way: It makes some Republicans defensive, and it makes some Republican leaders nervous and unsure.

*   *   *

I know a little about this because I used to love making Republicans defensive. I loved looking down on the rich. Now I consider it creepy, knee-jerky and narrow to label people by how much they have or inherited, but once to my young mind it made sense.

I grew up in a working-class Democratic family, with a father who’d been a Brooklyn street urchin with no father himself and a mother who couldn’t take care of him, and he told me last summer, literally on his deathbed, that one of his fondest memories of boyhood was going down to the local government office and getting a Social Security card. He was 15 but big and lied about his age, and the card made him feel like he belonged to something, that he was a workingman in America, and here was his name and his number.

He always loved FDR and Eleanor and saw the Democratic Party as the party of the common man, and he thought Republicans were rich, snobby bums. His views filled the household air and were happily absorbed and shared by me and others in our family. By the sixties I was reading the great work of the newspaper poets of New York, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, and the writers of the Village Voice and the then-liberal New York Post, and they all hated the rich too.

When I was a teenager, I heard somehow of country clubs, and I gathered they were where rich Republicans went to be insensitive together. I thought of them as gray people—gray-haired, pallid, in gray jackets and slacks. My father once put down George Romney (a very gray man) as a guy who looked like a country-clubber.

A dozen or so years later I was in the Reagan White House, and I mentioned to Ben Elliott, my boss and the man who ran speechwriting, that I liked Reagan Democrats, blue-collar voters who’d left the party over busing and Vietnam and taxes, but I still couldn’t manage to like country-club Republicans. He asked what I meant and I told him, and we agreed it was the country-clubbers in the Reagan administration who never quite . . . understood things and always got in the way of good policy.

Ben later used the phrase “country-club Republicans” in a conversation with Bob Novak, who began to use it, and soon the phrase entered the lexicon. I think it came from my old man, and I think he would be pleased to know a whole class of people were now routinely insulted with his words. I hope Bob Novak reads this and can remember if the phrase might have bubbled up from his conversation with Ben.

But I digress.

The only rich people the antirich newspaper poets and neighborhood pundits back then liked were the Kennedys, whose wealth was considered glamorous because they glamorously helped the poor.

But they and others like them, it started to seem to me, and tens of millions of others, were “helping the poor” by creating government programs that were so big and costly (and ungainly, and ultimately unhelpful, and finally destructive) that the middle and lower-middle classes were being taxed to death to pay for them. And that didn’t seem to me compassionate. Or to the tens of millions of others who later voted for Ronald Reagan and then both Bushes.

*   *   *

As the elegantly insightful pundit and historian Michael Barone has pointed out, politics in America doesn’t really split along economic lines. Slightly more than half of the wealthiest Americans voted for Bush; slightly more than half of the poorest Americans voted for Gore. But on cultural issues the splits can be huge. Jews vote for Democrats routinely in the 80% to 90% range, conservative Christians vote for Republicans at nearly as high a proportion.

I called Mr. Barone yesterday, and he noted that the closest America has come to successful class warfare was in the first half of the last century, when unions vs. business had some traction. But he notes that even in 1936, the first presidential election after FDR started Social Security and boosted progressive taxation, FDR carried the groups and areas that he had won over in 1934, before his programs had passed. They liked him, approved of his efforts and the vigorous orderliness he seemed to be bringing to a country in crisis. But for the most part, Mr. Barone observed, class warfare has not been effective.

Why then do the Democrats cling to it still? “Because some of them think it’s right, and some of them think it works,” Mr. Barone says. Class warfare was the theme of last year’s Democratic presidential campaign. “Gore was doing it—’The people vs. the powerful.’ Well, the people in Montana gave him 30% of their votes, the coal miners of West Virginia didn’t back him, the beneficiaries of federal dams” in the Northwest didn’t either.

Class warfare, says Mr. Barone, is at odds with Americans’ hopeful nature. “We don’t identify ourselves as permanently downtrodden; it is not the American experience that you’re kept down and can’t move up.” In America you can not only move up, but do so quickly. The divorced single mother of this year gets a job or remarries and suddenly she and her children are not the bottom line on anybody’s statistical readout anymore.

It is the fantastic fluidity and hopefulness of Americans, their enduring sense that in only one generation they can go from nothing to everything and nowhere to anywhere, that contributes to some surprising statistics on the death tax. Only 2% of Americans pay the levy, but in the polls 70% are consistently against it. Maybe this is because, as Steve Forbes used to say, they think it unfair that anyone should have to deal with the undertaker and the taxman in the same week. But it’s also probably a good bet that this majority opposes the death tax because they believe that some day they’ll have money, or their kids will, and they won’t want to pay it.

We all think we can make it. We all think we can work hard and succeed, or win the lottery, or our cousin’s new restaurant will be a big success and he’ll hire us as greeter or maitre d’. We all dream. The inheritance tax seems antidreamer because it seems anti-American dream. A lot of Americans think that when you bash the rich you’re bashing their future ZIP code.

The only ones class warfare really seems to work with is some Republican members of Congress. A number of them go into a defensive crouch whenever Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle and the networks do their thing.

It’s odd. They must be country-club Republicans, those guys.

Sixty-two days into his presidency, and 40 days before everyone talks about and writes about his First Hundred Days, some thoughts on George W. Bush and how he’s doing.

The great question from those who had not supported him, which is to say from half the country, was: Is he up to the job? The headline on his tenure so far: Yes, and maybe more than you know. Maybe more than he knows, too.

He has shown a certain mastery in his dealings with Congress, approaching them with an attitude of easygoing insistence. He’s demonstrated that he will stick with the issues he campaigned on, and put them forward as legislation. He’s shown an ability to communicate with audiences. He’s shown toughness in terms of some issues he wouldn’t dodge. In international affairs he’s been sharp with Iraq, candid with Korea and strikingly blunt with Russia—throwing out 51 Russian spies in an apparent message-sender after the revelations of Robert Hanssen’s damaging espionage. In the words of the New York Post’s Deborah Orin, “Clinton wanted to be liked around the world—Bush wants to be respected.”

We are getting used to him. At first when he was president, when the television stations would say the president was about to make a statement, Mr. Bush would show up on the screen and you’d be surprised: Oh, Clinton’s not there, Bush is. Now you expect him and have an image of him in your head before he appears. This, obviously, is because as time passes you get used to the new guy. But it’s also true that the new guy is putting his imprint, his mark on things. He has been semiubiquitous, not as all over the place and always in your face as Bill Clinton, but there every day in a speech or at a meeting, pushing for what he wants. And what he wants is clear.

The first to notice that Mr. Bush is making his mark were the Democrats, who watched warily for a few weeks and then concluded the president was, unfortunately, not a fool or a phony. They seem a little lost and a little angry, leaderless and unsure who should lead them. Robert Reich writes an essay saying the Democratic Party is dead, and it’s hot but not controversial; that is, Washington seems either to agree or to not know exactly how to disagree.

What the Democrats need now I think is for someone, some known or unknown leader, to come forward with a stirring and thoughtful and data-filled and nonmanipulative speech that draws a vivid line in the sand by declaring what the modern Democratic Party is, and stands for, and means to be, and exists to achieve. What the vision of a Democratic future is. This has not been done by a Democrat in a very long time. Mr. Clinton never did it, nor did Al Gore. It’s time. You can rev the troops and reinspire weary leaders by reminding yourself what you’re fighting for.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush’s most telling moments:

William Safire once wrote that he knew Richard Nixon had finally gotten psychologically used to being president about a year into his first term, when he stopped putting a little towel on the hassock before he put his feet up in his Executive Office Building office. Mr. Bush had his moment earlier. You know the story, and I repeat it because it said something important quickly and economically. He arrives at Blair House the day before he is to be inaugurated. The reportedly snooty caretaker asks what he’d like. He says a cheeseburger. She more or less says this is Blair House, we don’t do plebian fare. He looks at her: “Bush. Texas. Cheeseburger.” She gives him what he asks for, and no doubt runs out to stock up on ground chuck. The word spreads: He wants what he wants, and don’t high-hat him.

Second telling moment: Strong inaugural address, good day.

Third: He quickly withdraws U.S. aid for groups that perform or advocate abortion overseas. This is not broadly understood to be a popular thing to do, and is therefore not a good symbol for a new administration. Various opinion-givers say it will be like Mr. Clinton and homosexuals in the military, a window on Mr. Bush’s incompetence. But the abortion decision is not unpopular; the media bang away on it but the people don’t respond with anger or dismay. Which tells you something about what the real feelings are about abortion in America—layered, complicated, not necessarily knee-jerk and not necessarily a point of primary passion. Which Mr. Bush and his people appear to understand fully.

Fourth: He moves forward with his tax cut right away, saying he campaigned on it and he wasn’t going to abandon it as soon as he gets to Washington.

Fifth, he has a solid nationally televised address, telling both houses of Congress that some say his tax cut is too big—applause—and some too small—applause—but he thinks it’s just right—jolly laughter and applause.

The charm offensive took the edge off his critics’ hatred. The nicknames are amusing and seem interesting, and if his habit is only a tic, it’s a colorful one. Mr. Bush maintains good relations with conservatives and the conservative establishment in Washington. He is friendly to the press. He shows himself to be good natured and demanding; it’s a good bet no more cell phones will be ringing during meetings and photo-ops now that he castigated a staffer this week for failing to prevent it.

Good-natured and demanding is a good combination in a president.

*   *   *

It will be interesting to watch the psychological tensions over who he is play out within him. For Mr. Bush is proving himself every day and quite consciously to be this: not his father. Not someone who can get rolled by the Democrats, not someone who will abandon a primary campaign pledge, not someone who feels a certain ambivalence about the rightness of his beliefs and the meaning of leadership. Mr. Bush is succeeding in proving he is not his father, and has begun to be praised for not being his father.

He knows this is good politics, but it must be complicated for him personally. You can imagine that coming from a family in which competition was part of the air that he would feel some satisfaction at “beating” his father. Young men compete with their fathers even when they love them very much, sometimes especially when they love them very much. George W. Bush and his father couldn’t fish together without bantering about who did better. But it could not be an unalloyed pleasure to vanquish his father, whom he adores. And to make it more complicated, the better George W. Bush does, the more he is compared to Ronald Reagan. Soon that will be one of the clichés about him, that he is really Reagan II or Reagan Jr.—exactly what his father was supposed to be and wasn’t.

George W. loves and admires his father and does not, one suspects, love Mr. Reagan, who was a relatively distant if wholly affable and admirable presence in the life of the Bushes, including W. The new president showed up and gave a good speech at the christening of the aircraft carrier the USS Reagan two weeks ago, and spoke of Mr. Reagan with warm respect. He also used the boat to make a point: The traditional Republican commitment to enhancing U.S. military strength continues.

But I thought as I watched from the audience: I bet he won’t be doing a lot more of this in the future. Once his success is firmly established he will stop the honoring of Reagan, and start having his dad around, and letting people know how much he has learned from him. There are big Reagan anniversaries coming up: the 20th anniversary of the shooting, a week from today; the first tax cut; Normandy. Mr. Bush can mark them, using Mr. Reagan’s memory to make current points, or not. It will be interesting to see what he does. It was interesting to see a few weeks ago that the Bush administration decided not to rush the memorial to President Reagan some are eager to build on the mall.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush has improved as a communicator. He had to, of course, and that he has is a relief. His genuineness and earnestness come through when he’s on the stump, and are underscored by his lack of fluidity and smoothness. I’m always interested to hear what he’ll say, not because I think it will be brilliant or lyrical but because he means it. That’s what makes it interesting, as opposed to entertaining. He’s not nervous anymore, or doesn’t seem to be.

Yesterday, he spoke to the North American Newspaper Association, and he had the kind of focus and lack of self consciousness that speaks of engagement in the thought; he wasn’t distracted by wondering what impression he was making. He pushed his tax plan and it was good. “I trust them more than I trust Washington,” he said of the American people. “There’s a fundamental philosophical divide in Washington” about who should be in charge of the peoples’ purse, the people or the politicians. When the speech was over I thought: Those editors and publishers were impressed.

Later he spoke at Catholic University in Washington and lauded the leadership of Pope John Paul II. He congratulated Washington’s new cardinal, Theodore E. McCarrick, noting that while they’re both new to their jobs, Mr. Bush is the one who is term-limited. In a prepared text, he spoke of the day John Paul was elected pope and quoted a journalist who heard his first blessing in St. Peter’s Square. He wired back to his editors, “This is not a pope from Poland, this is a pope from Galilee.” Mr. Bush spoke of “the pope’s first visit to Poland in 1979, when faith turned into resistance and began the swift collapse of imperial communism. The gentle, young priest, once ordered into forced labor by Nazis, became the foe of tyranny and a witness to hope.” He noted “The last leader of the Soviet Union would call him ‘the highest moral authority on earth.’ ”

It was great stuff, and it belies the cliché that Mr. Bush is a clumsy speaker. It is interesting to me that the online magazine Slate’s “Bushism of the Day” series seems tired and thin, more the expression of reflexive hostility than an attempt to have real fun with a buffoon. Comedy Central is about to launch a weekly spoof called “That’s My Bush,” and from the commercials it looks like they’ll portray him as sweet-natured, well meaning and confused, like a WASP Desi Arnaz. This isn’t the worst way you could look on a comedy show, and to me it suggests a certain affection, or at least a diminution of dislike in certain circles. Mr. Clinton was always portrayed on TV as a sly trimmer with an eating disorder and other compulsions. It was not wholly affectionate.

It’s getting easier in New York to say you like Mr. Bush. People up here don’t seem to hate and deride him as they did before he was president.

*   *   *

The biggest chance the Bush administration has taken so far seems to be with the tax cuts. I speak not of the decision to go forward with them, which wins praise on pretty much all sides, but with their size—that is, whether they are too small to make an impact on the economy. It is possible that when the cuts pass they will have a positive effect by at least seeming to be the right symbolism—a way of signaling to markets that more money in the economy and less for government is a governing intention from here straight through to the end of the Bush administration.

But there’s an interesting and very timely argument from the economist Alan Reynolds in which he says the current market downturn should spur Mr. Bush to move forward more boldly and insist that his cuts be phased in more quickly and deeply.

Mr. Bush could throw the ball over the heads of the media and straight to the American people by announcing that current circumstances demand more dramatic action. If he has the audacity and the will, he could use the events on Wall Street and the depressed mood to his great benefit, and the country’s. My friend Ben Elliott, former head of the Reagan speechwriting department and now on Wall Street, has noted that “with markets being linked ever more closely, and the reverberations spreading ever faster and further, the new challenge to be nimble and flexible but also right applies not only to business leaders but to political leaders.”

This could be another defining moment for Mr. Bush, a time when he seized the new terrain instead of letting it be filled by Tom Daschle, Olympia Snowe and rest of the timorous Senate.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush and his people are making a million mistakes, and in time we’ll know of some of them. All new crews in the White House make a million mistakes. But these people seem not to be making big ones, not yet. It continues to look as if the adults are in charge, and Mr. Bush is looking like a young man who’s up to it and maybe more than up to it. I continue to wait for him to do something stupid or cynical so I can loudly disapprove of him and prove my ability to be objective within a context of obvious political sympathies and beliefs. But nine weeks in, I’m still waiting.

After I left my speechwriting job in Ronald Reagan’s White House 15 years ago, I stayed home, had a baby and wrote. Sometimes I’d run into Washington people I didn’t see anymore and they’d ask, “What are you doing now?” I’d say, with hopeful pride, “I’m writing a book.” They would nod and get the blank look people get when they’re trying not to show a reaction to unfortunate news. Then they’d ask, “What else are you doing?” As if writing a book wasn’t a real job. As if only a loser would write a book, as opposed to being out there running the world.

Later I mentioned this to a friend and asked him why in Washington they think writing a book is synonymous with doing nothing. “That’s because you were talking to Republicans,” he said. “Republicans care about money. Democrats care about books.”

And I thought yes, that’s exactly it. In 1964, when Arthur Schlesinger told his friends he was writing about JFK, they thought he was saying he was doing something huge.

But now I think that it has completely changed. Republicans—well, not Republicans but conservatives—care passionately about the world of ideas, and about history. They write books. And Democrats seem to care about money, and they don’t write books, not serious ones.

It’s a big switch, and has big implications about how history will view both parties in the long term.

*   *   *

Democrats in government used to write books. They did this because they had respect for the life of the mind, respect for ideas, respect for history. They wanted to add to the sum total of its data; they wanted to give history what it needs most, first person testimony: I was there, I saw it, and this is what it was like. This is what didn’t work and this is what did. This is what I learned. Hear me.

What came of that tradition, that attitude, were a series of classics, from Sam Rosenman’s “Working With Roosevelt” to Robert Sherwood’s “Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History,” whose subject, Harry Hopkins, was chief architect of the New Deal. Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department” was a magisterial recounting of the creation of U.S. foreign policy in the quarter century after World War II. There were Mr. Schlesinger’s stupendous, “A Thousand Days,” his history memoir of JFK’s short tenure, and Theodore Sorenson’s stately “Kennedy.”

William Safire’s “Before the Fall” came out just after the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom he served as a speechwriter. Because of the timing—everyone was tired of Nixon and his traumas and wanted to move on—Mr. Safire’s history didn’t get the appreciation it deserved, but it was good work, and a contribution to history.

It was Mr. Safire who told me, when I entered the White House, to keep notes on what I was seeing and hearing each day. When it is over, he said, you’ll have a book. I told him I couldn’t keep a diary; I was far too busy. He said no one is too busy to write one sentence a day; he told me to write a few words and park it in the computer.

Well, I thought, I can certainly do that. So I tried to write a sentence every day or so and, as Mr. Safire no doubt knew I would, I found it impossible to write only one sentence. I wrote three, and then three paragraphs, and so on. I didn’t do it every day, but I did it when moved, because of Mr. Safire’s advice. Because Mr. Safire was looking out for history.

In time I made my own attempt at a contribution to history; I gave my first-person testimony in “What I Saw at the Revolution.” It was very ambitious in that I was trying to write a book no one had ever written before: a book about what it was like to be there, in the White House, what it sounds like and looks like and how people treat you when you’re there, and when you’re not. I wanted to capture what it was like to be part of something big, of big history that was unfolding every day as the old clock down the hall did its tired ticking and the vacuum cleaner from downstairs in the Executive Office Building droned as you stayed late to write the speech for the president whose meaning you understood and whose aims you fully supported.

Ronald Reagan’s was, as we all know, a fractious, painful administration, marked by great fights and struggles. But now when we see each other we throw ourselves in each other’s arms, like veterans who had shared the same foxhole. Fifteen years later it didn’t matter that we argued; it mattered that we ducked the same incoming together, and went over the top together. I never expected to feel this undifferentiated affection and respect for the old Reagan hands, but I do, and a lot of them do too.

I can’t tell you how moving it was to go to the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan and at the big reception see my old nemesis, former chief of staff Don Regan. “Peggy,” he said, “I’m an artist! I paint now. I have work in two museums. They didn’t teach me to be an artist in the marines, or at Merrill Lynch, or the White House!” He still looked like George Raft, and we hugged and laughed. Just like old times, except that’s not how the old times were. But I digress.

*   *   *

George Shultz wrote a great book, “Turmoil and Triumph,” a heavily detailed volume on the challenges of foreign affairs, a theater of great drama in the Reagan years. History will be able to thumb through its pages for years, as it will Caspar Weinberger’s history and memoir from the vantage point of the Defense Department. Colin Powell’s book was more a memoir about his life and the personalities of those around him, but it’s excellent in its more limited way. And there is Martin Anderson’s triumphant recounting of the early days of Reaganism, “Revolution,” which has been and is indispensable to scholars of political history.

The first President Bush’s presidency didn’t produce much in books. There was John Podhoretz’s bright and lively “Hell of a Ride” and a few serious and scholarly tomes that came along in the early ‘90s. But George Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, didn’t love ideas, and didn’t surround himself with those who loved ideas. He surrounded himself with people he liked and admired. So the books about his era were generally thin.

And this began the current thinning out and dumbing down of White House history writing and memoir writing. Bill Clinton’s presidency lasted eight years and was rich in drama, and yet almost no literature or history has come of it. Dick Morris did a memoir of working with Mr. Clinton that shed some light on the ex-president’s personality; George Stephanopoulos, who was truly at the heart of the administration for four years, wrote a personal memoir that seemed more carefully calibrated to protect the writer’s future, and his advance, than to speak to history with candor and courage. Michael Waldman wrote an adequate if undistinguished memoir of his years speechwriting for Clinton. It did not seem deeply felt or experienced, and a memoir, to succeed, must be both.

Most important, perhaps, the Waldman and Stephanopoulos books seemed not shaped but misshaped by scandal. The unspoken defensive assertion of Mr. Waldman’s book seemed to be: “Not everything was corrupt!” Mr. Stephanopoulos, who worked with what he called a “writing coach,” published his book after the Monica scandal blew up, and only acknowledged the obvious by elaborating on what was already known: Mr. Clinton has a temper, turns red with rage, is married to an intense woman, is often the target of investigations.

*   *   *

Why the recent deterioration in quality of White House books? It is not because the Clinton people lacked talent or intelligence, and if none seemed especially literary, certainly many seemed bright and observant. One senses they simply did not feel free to be truthful, or have the wild courage to be truthful. I say wild because it seems that in the Clinton administration that something painful was at work. If you were candid, honest, unblinking and uncritical, you aroused the fierce enmity of the president and first lady’s loyalists, flunkies and operatives—of people who could affect your professional life for the rest of your life. People who could—and would—smear you. The code of omertà ran strong and was obviously enforced.

When I was working on a book on Hillary Clinton, people who worked with her seemed terribly afraid of saying the wrong thing, sharing the wrong observation, holding the wrong view. It was pulling teeth to get them to talk, even not for attribution. A friend would say of a young woman who worked for Hillary, “She’s worked for her for years and doesn’t like her. But she’ll probably never talk to you. She’s afraid.” The exact nature of the fear was never explained but I talked to her and sensed it and was disturbed by it.

And so, in the few books of the Clinton era, truth suffered. Without truth, though, a memoir or history has no point. And you cannot fake it. Truth in a memoir or history is something that is experienced by the reader as a thing almost palpable; you can feel it when you’re getting an honest recounting, when you’re reading the undiluted or unavoided perception that is painful to write but true, and therefore worthy of being written.

I am sure that some day we will learn more about the Clinton administration from those who were there, but what I imagine coming down the pike is a work by a handful of retired Secret Service agents. They saw everything, and years from now they will speak. There is a classic of the era of the Roman emperors called “Secret History” by Procopius, a Roman general who wanted to preserve for history the ugly facts of the rule of the Emperor Justinian and his wicked and fascinating wife, Theodora. It was a classic of the literature of corruption, and is still in print. I can well imagine a secret history of the Clinton era being written too.

But one hopes for more. One hopes for a serious book from a former State Department or Pentagon appointee or staffer about the making of policy in the Clinton administration, about the forces that collided and yielded this decision or that, this governing philosophy or that lack of one. It would be good if it were marked by candor and unmarked by defensiveness. History deserves it.

As for the Bush people now newly installed in their White House offices, the good news is that so many of them are serious people, and several of them are writers, more than capable of creating classics that are a contribution to understanding our times. The even better news is that Mr. Bush fils, like Mr. Reagan, has respect for the power of ideas and has surrounded himself with people with ideas. This is promising: People with ideas write books with ideas.

The bad news of course is that any notes they take at any time day or night during their White House careers are not “private.” They are subject to subpoena by special prosecutors and investigators. It has been this way for a long time. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney mentioned it nine years ago, with a sad shake of his head.

*   *   *

A friend who works for Mr. Bush and is a gifted writer mentioned the problem to me some time back, and we agreed that it was serious. To take honest notes for history and thereby put yourself and your family and your livelihood in jeopardy, to state your views and leave them open to misinterpretation and misuse—and look what happened to that Clinton appointee in the Treasury Department, whose private notes were subpoenaed in one of the scandals, and who was reduced to telling Congress that he lied to his diary.

But here’s a thought. History, the facts and meaning of what unfolds each day as man marches forward in his sidelong way, is more important than you and me. My friend is in the middle of it, and I don’t want him to let reality slide by each day so that at the end it slithers away as you try to grab it with your memory. You want to hold on to the facts as they unfold and appear, and take notes, and be so interesting, make it so well observed, so starkly candid, of such high literary and intellectual quality, that if perchance an investigator ever reads it he’ll say to his fellow Ivy League gumshoes: “This is wonderful.”

Washington is a sieve that leaks from the top. They’ll talk about your fascinating diary over drinks and someone from the press will hear and then it will get in the papers and a publisher will call and you’ll get a great advance and produce a great classic.

And though conservatives by and large don’t seem to care very much about the first anymore, they still care about the latter.