Peggy Noonan

“I’m feeling like a president.” George W. Bush was standing greeting New Yorkers before a speech 12 days ago in Manhattan. He was tanned, smiling, looked like he’d been getting his jogging in. A sinus infection that had left him gobbling Advil from New Hampshire through South Carolina was finally gone. He was feeling good.

I leaned toward him, not hearing in the hubbub, and he repeated what he’d said. (Actually: “Uhm feeln lahk PRESSdint.”) I had written once of how his father had started to feel like the president after Election Day 1988, that suddenly he was standing straight and filling out his suit. I looked at his son, who said, “That’s what the primaries are for, in part. What the long season is for.” To give you time to become what you mean to be. And he wanted it known he was becoming it.

*   *   *

I thought of that yesterday when Gov. Bush took the podium in Austin, relaxed and in something like command. These days he’s Bush in bloom, expansive and settled, and the selection of Dick Cheney reflects his new confidence. Some bad luck (a Concorde down, a Mideast peace process gone bust) and some leaking (never let your father call the doctor and expect the neighbors not to hear) dulled the impact of the announcement, but it was still the story of the day, not only on its own terms but because of what it revealed about Mr. Bush. He didn’t choose someone who’ll help him win, he chose a man who’ll help him govern. He is certain he is going to win. He is thinking of the future.

Thus the choice. If you were president, Dick Cheney is precisely the kind of man you’d want working down the hall. He was chief of staff to President Ford a quarter century ago at age 34, was Wyoming’s only congressman for six terms, was President Bush’s successful secretary of defense for four tumultuous years encompassing a major war in the Persian Gulf. Talk about been there, done that.

But he was not an obvious choice. He is the darling of no part of the party, does not bring a big state, brings nothing to the Electoral College, is not a political pugilist and will not go after the other team hammer and tong. No one has ever called him a great campaigner, and he looks like one of those public servants who find shaking hands on the stump mildly embarrassing, if not germy. He brings nothing to the ticket but seriousness, experience, integrity, maturity, wisdom and a thoughtful conservatism.

Mr. Cheney is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton is dramatic, full of sparks; he loves to pose reaching for hands and being engulfed in the love of the people. Dick Cheney does not appear to want or need public adoration. Those who know him say he will prove to be a gifted debater, but I see no sign of that. He keeps his own counsel and ponders, does not thrust and parry, does not love the cha-cha of politics, the dance. That’s why he wound up in public service—not what the Clintons and Kennedys call public service, by which they mean politics, but real public service, i.e., serving the public.

A small anecdote about a large facet of his personality. Once, in the summer of 1992, I was invited to a dinner upstairs in the White House. I’d never been there before, and wondered what I’d see. I saw a handful of people talking politics, commenting on the upcoming election, and sat near Dick Cheney, whom I did not know and who was sitting quietly on a sofa listening to everyone. He looked grave and friendly. President Bush’s sister turned to him and said she hoped he would someday write a book, and hoped he was keeping a diary. He sort of winced, and looked down. No, he said, “unfortunately you can’t keep diaries in a position like mine anymore.” He explained that anything he wrote could be subpoenaed or become evidence in some potential legal action. “So you can’t keep and recount your thoughts anymore.” We talked about what a loss this is for history. It concerned him. It was serious; so is he. Then everyone started talking politics again.

*   *   *

There would be problems with any GOP vice presidential choice because the media, which got one of the great stories of the 1980s with “Dan Quayle is a numbskull,” is looking for another good story, and who’s to blame them. It’s summer, we need a good story. The best shot with Mr. Cheney was touched on by a weatherman on Fox News Tuesday morning who jokingly pointed to a weather map full of clouds and rain and said, “Cheney fever is sweeping the nation!”

He looks like a boring, white, middle-aged male Republican. And though he’s famous to some, he’s wholly unknown to many and has been out of the public eye through most of the 1990s. If you are older than 45 or so, you might think Dick Cheney is a gifted public servant with a long history of dazzling achievement. If you are in your 20s or 30s, he’s a round guy with a bad ticker. Mr. Cheney will have to be introduced to a significant portion of the electorate.

And because he was famous long ago, and because even in his mid-30s he had premature gravitas and seemed 50, a lot of people think he’s old. It is amazing to think he is only five years older than George W. Bush. He seems five years older than Gov. Bush’s father. His cardiac problems will have to be addressed clearly and honestly again and again. Doctors say he’s fine after his triple bypass, but a heart problem can be a political problem. It didn’t help Bill Bradley. It didn’t hurt Lyndon Johnson, however: He had a massive heart attack three years before JFK chose him as vice president. He got out of the hospital, stopped smoking, lost weight, and a year into his own active presidency people had forgotten he’d ever been sick.

*   *   *

The not-so-secret weapon, and the growing story will be Mr. Cheney’s wife, Lynne Vincent Cheney, who is something new as a vice presidential spouse. She will probably be somewhat controversial, not in the usual tabloidy way of vice president’s wives—“Betty Ford’s Addiction,” “Tipper’s Secret Agony”—but because she is an authentic intellectual, a scholar engaged in the culture wars, a brilliant writer and thinker with a doctorate in British literature (her dissertation was on Matthew Arnold).

She has operated the past 20 years not through the power derived from a successful husband but through her own independent efforts. She was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and wrote “Telling the Truth,” about the tendency of modern academia to allow politically correct thinking to shroud and obscure the truth. As the second lady, she will be news. Mrs. Cheney is currently at work on a book about problems in public education, including fuzzy math, creative spelling and the abandonment of phonics. Maybe later we will finally get a White House memoir written by a principal that is not only informative, but literature.

Looks like she’s the un-Clinton, too.

The choice of Dick Cheney seems so grounded, mature and constructive that, as a citizen, I am astonished. An adult has been picked for an adult job. We appear to be entering a new era. Perhaps it will be called the restoration.

From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.

And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea — which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman.

[Header] Holiest Time

It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in shock, “They are atheists. They don’t believe in God.” Well, they certainly don’t believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.

Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It’s almost honest.

All weekend you could hear the calls to radio stations, to television, from commentators, from the 40% who are wounded, grieving and alive to the implications of what this act tells us about what is allowed in our country now. “This couldn’t happen in America,” they say, and “This isn’t the America we know.”

This is the America of Bill Clinton’s cynicism and cowardice, and Janet Reno’s desperate confusion about right and wrong, as she continues in her great schmaltzy dither to prove how sensitive she is, how concerned for the best interests of the child, as she sends in armed troops who point guns at the child sobbing in the closet. So removed from reality is she that she claims the famous picture of the agent pointing the gun at the fisherman and the child did not in fact show that.

The great unanswered question of course is: What was driving Mr. Clinton? What made him do such a thing? What accounts for his commitment in this case? Concern for the father? But such concern is wholly out of character for this president; he showed no such concern for parents at Waco or when he freed the Puerto Rican terrorists. Concern for his vision of the rule of law? But Mr. Clinton views the law as a thing to suit his purposes or a thing to get around.

Why did he do this thing? He will no doubt never say, a pliant press will never push him on it, and in any case if they did who would expect him to speak with candor and honesty? Absent the knowledge of what happened in this great public policy question, the mind inevitably wonders.

Was it fear of Fidel Castro — fear that the dictator will unleash another flood of refugees, like the Mariel boatlift of 1980? Mr. Clinton would take that seriously, because he lost his gubernatorial election that year after he agreed to house some of the Cubans. In Bill Clinton’s universe anything that ever hurt Bill Clinton is bad, and must not be repeated. But such a threat, if it was made, is not a child custody matter but a national security matter, and should be dealt with in national security terms.

Was it another threat from Havana? Was it normalization with Cuba — Mr. Clinton’s lust for a legacy, and Mr. Castro’s insistence that the gift come at a price? If the price was a child, well, that’s a price Mr. Clinton would likely pay. What is a mere child compared with this president’s need to be considered important by history?

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.

For now we’re left with the famous photo, the picture of the agent pointing his gun at the sobbing child and fisherman, the one that is already as famous as the picture taken 30 Easters ago, during another tragedy, as a student cried over the prone body of a dead fellow student at Kent State. It is an inconvenient photo for the administration. One wonders if it will be reproduced, or forced down the memory hole.

We are left with Elian’s courageous cousin, Marisleysis, who Easter morning told truth to power, an American citizen speaking to the nation about the actions of the American government. We are left with the hoarse-voiced fisherman, who continues trying to save the child. We are left wondering if there was a single federal law-enforcement official who, ordered to go in and put guns at the heads of children, said no. Was there a single agent or policeman who said, “I can’t be part of this”? Are they all just following orders?

We are left wondering if Mr. Clinton will, once again, get what he seems to want. Having failed to become FDR over health care, or anything else for that matter, he will now “be” JFK, finishing the business of 1961 and the missile crisis. Maybe he will make a speech in Havana. One can imagine Strobe Talbot taking Walter Isaacson aside, and Time magazine reporting the words of a high State Department source: “In an odd way Elian helped us — the intensity of the experience, the talks and negotiations, were the most intense byplay our two countries have had since JFK. The trauma brought us together.”

[Header] What Reagan Would Do

And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr. Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would not harm our country. Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history.

He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”

But then he was a man.

It is, of course, all that Republicans are talking about: So what do you think of John McCain? What do you think of what’s happened? A lot of them seem not only surprised but delighted. Unexpected history is happening, and politics is fun again.

It is tempting to see in the political contest between George W. Bush and John McCain the clash of two mythic American archetypes, the Flyboy and the Boss’s Son. The Flyboy at the moment is making a strong impression. The Boss’s Son at the moment seems lost. Republican primary voters are the girl who will choose between them.

Mr. McCain of course is the Flyboy. He flew in on a wing and a prayer, dashing, sardonic and slightly hung over, like Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” You met, he took you dancing, you marveled at the medals on the damp and smoky wool of his uniform. Later he fell asleep on your mother’s couch, where he had flashbacks: “Jump, Kowalski, jump!”

“Capt. McCain, Capt. McCain, you’re having a nightmare!”

[Header] Authentic and Adorable

You laughed together at the hypocrisies of the local burghers—he’s an outsider, and deep down you’ve always felt like an outsider too. There’s a downside—they say he has a temper; there was a scandal with a banker; he hangs out with those boys on the bus, whom you’ve never liked. Sometimes the things he says are self-contradictory, or don’t quite hold together. But he’s different—authentic, and brave, and adorable.

He has captured your imagination. This may get serious. He seems such a relief from—from that other man in your life, George W., the Boss’s Son. He’s not from a war movie, he’s—he’s Rodney in “Peyton Place”! No, he’s Cliff Robertson in “Picnic”—the factory owner’s boy, affable, competent, clean and good, with soft brown hair and a boyish smile. He’s destined to run the family business and be a town leader, surrounded by dependable family retainers and advisers. He’ll be a good provider, and a good father, too. But you perceive within him a diffidence, and maybe an ambivalence. Does he even want to take over dad’s job and settle down?

You’ve been dating him for a year, and everyone thought marriage was in the cards, but now—now there’s Flyboy. And suddenly you realize one of the biggest reasons you couldn’t get serious about the Boss’s Son is that your parents wanted you to! Mom and pop—let’s call them “the Republican establishment”—kept telling you he’s a catch. They kept pushing you, for your own good. Well, heck—let them marry him!

*   *   *

The McCain phenomenon seems to me less a crusade than a crush, and this is all so un-Republican it is breathtaking. Republicans have tended to vote on issues. They agreed with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84; it wasn’t his charm. They agreed with George Bush père in ’88. In ’92 they were mad at him—because of what he’d done on the issues! Nineteen ninety-six was just one long mess but now, in 2000, won’t Republicans return to their usual ways?

Maybe not. Gov. Bush talks more about the issues Republicans care about, and takes the kind of stands they support. Sen. McCain doesn’t talk about the issues they care most about, and when he does, when he talks about something like defense, his position is hard to understand. He wants to improve military readiness, fill out the hollowed-out armed forces—and by the way, spending should stay at Clinton levels.

It is all so surprising and fascinating. And God bless him, only Bill Clinton could have brought us to this pass. It is yet another example of Clinton-shock. The effect of Mr. Clinton on Republicans, as much as it has been talked about, is still not fully appreciated. But the sheer concussive affect of having a president who Republicans think is a bad man, not a patriot, a truly harmful presence in American life—the effect of Bill Clinton on on-the-ground Republicans has been so utterly jarring, that it has left them abandoning the logic that has long guided them, and supporting in droves a man they don’t especially agree with, for the simple reason that they feel sure he is not Bill Clinton.

Mr. McCain seems in fact the opposite of Mr. Clinton. Bill Clinton dodged the draft and watched the war on TV, John McCain lived it in the Hanoi Hilton; Mr. Clinton is big and glib, Mr. McCain is bantam-like and peppery; Mr. Clinton is smooth, Mr. McCain sputters; Mr. Clinton transparently lives by the polls, Mr. McCain relishes telling Portsmouth, N.H., they may have to close the base; Mr. Clinton is famous for lying, Mr. McCain rides a bus called the Straight Talk Express.

They seem different. But one of the reasons for the anger of the Republican establishment—the mom and dad of this piece—is that they think in their hearts that Mr. McCain is another Clinton. He looks different and sounds different and has a different history, but he’s a similar kind of man—a strange and self-promoting egotist, one who is unpredictable, inconsistent and vain. They’ve worked with him for years, know him, and think the anti-Clinton is really Clinton II. And what some thoughtful Republicans are trying to puzzle out is whether the Washington establishment dislikes Mr. McCain because he is so much his own man, or because he is so much a flawed man.

For a lot of other Republicans, Mr. McCain right now has three big advantages. First, “mom and pop” don’t like him, and he and the voters are relishing the rebellion. Second, the Flyboy wants it. And when you want it, you don’t mess yourself up with things that keep you from getting it. Does the boss’s son want it? If he wants it he can probably have it, but if he really is at heart ambivalent . . . well, ambivalent men don’t win the presidency. They usually don’t get the girl, either.

[Header] Message: Himself

Third, Mr. McCain already has his message: himself. The antiestablishment hero who’ll come in and clean up the mess in Washington, who can see through its hypocrisies and do something about them. Mr. Bush’s job is harder: to retool a message for the changing, and concussed, conservative base.

What a year, what a surprising struggle, and as to how it will turn out, Hollywood offers mixed signals. In “The Best Years of Our Lives,” the girl goes with Flyboy, and everything works out right. In “Picnic,” she rejects the Boss’s Son, and you can tell it’s not going to end happily.

New York’s Central Park, 6:43 a.m. on a Thursday in late September, a morning dark, cool and rich with something latent. I walked along head down, lost in thought, trying to understand how a brilliant man could write, would write, such a base botch of a book. If only I were with him and could ask. Suddenly I stepped upon an acorn, and an electric shock tore through me. Suddenly, in an almost occult sense, I was there! In his office, in the townhouse on Capitol Hill. The rows of shelves groaning and gleaming with books, the long gray filing cabinet below and, within it, the famous yards of cards, the ones he showed so proudly on “60 Minutes,” each marked in careful, spidery script with a Mont Blanc pen whose use signifies a commitment to calligraphy, a writer’s love of sparkly things, or nothing much.

“Edmund,” I said, “I’m writing like a nut because I’m imitating you! I agreed to review your book because I was sure you’d been unjustly criticized. I expected something of breadth, depth and sweep—something serious. Not this—this high-dive belly-flop into the pools of Narcissus.”

He looked at me—wire-rimmed glasses, soft bangs and beard. Why, he looks like Lytton Strachey! (Later, from my notes: “His unconscious homage to wiggy but groundbreaking Bloomsburian biographer?”) At first he was dismissive—the criticism is the sort of thing that “always greets any kind of original idea.” Then he was pleading. Fourteen years of expectation, 14 years of the elusive Reagan, and all the while as each year passed he got closer to … the battlefield. When his book on Teddy Roosevelt came out in 1979 Teddy was long dead, the historical case long settled. But Ronald Reagan is alive, the argument rages, there is still no settled opinion! The editors, reviewers and social figures with whom Mr. Morris dines—Mr. Reagan is, still, their full moon; they see him, they bay. And sometimes bite.

“Do you know how all this pressure left me?” he asked.

“Don’t say barking mad.”

“No—unnerved, in time enraged, at last quite desperate. So I got someone else to write the damn thing, a made-up character with a made-up life who has made-up interactions. I called him ‘Edmund Morris.’ If you don’t like the book you can bloody well blame him.”

*   *   *

I will.

But where to start.

Edmund Morris’s “Dutch” (Random House, 874 pages, $35) is a shocking book, not a work of sustained scholarship but a mere entertainment, and not an entertaining one. It is at turns bilious and cold, corny and cynical, manic and flat. It is also almost heartbreaking in that it marks such a waste—of history’s time, the Reagans’ faith, the writer’s talent.

The famous central literary device, as I think we all know, does not work; it confuses, frustrates, obscures what it was meant to illumine. The reader never quite understands who is talking and whether he is being given a fact, a joke, a serious opinion, a bit of speculation or a guess. The fictitious “Edmund Morris” is a bore, tedious and windy, and a distraction from the more compelling story, fitfully told, of Ronald Reagan.

From beginning to end a badly written meanness permeates. Mr. Reagan goes to “a hayseed school” where the girls have “ugly names” and wear “cheap perfume.” His first radio broadcasts appeal to “Dust Bowl brats like little Hughie Sidey.” His early California supporters are patriotic and honest but, tragically, lack “irony.” They are “aesthetically blind, culturally retarded … they view all threats to the Constitution—their Constitution—with the utmost seriousness.” Silly them. At White House dinners Mr. Morris puts up with more tacky people, a boring female theologian and a Palm Beach socialite “stiff with jewels.”

When he is not mean he is English, not necessarily the same thing. He has no feel for the Midwest, and when he gives his characters dialogue—“There was more ‘nuff roasted chicken and corn as evening came on” and “Jay Russell got him a new Buick”—they sound like extras in “Show Boat.”

His portrait of America in the ‘60s seems written by someone who wasn’t there; cliches are not avoided but seized upon and held high. The free-speech battles at Berkeley get deservedly long attention, but the central characters are not Mr. Reagan and university president Clark Kerr but Mr. Morris and his fictitious son, “Gavin,” who calls the Black Panthers “bad cats I dig in Oakland.” You will, literally, wince.

[Header] Cheap and Corny

The political perceptions and assertions are almost uniformly common wisdom. For all his references to dusty archives and the pains of research (one wonders why he makes so many) much of what Mr. Morris says about Mr. Reagan’s presidency reads like clippings from Time magazine. A troika rules the White House, Edwin Meese has a messy briefcase, pragmatists and hardliners disagree, David Stockman is tense, supply-side economics silly. SDI, the missile defense system Mr. Reagan fought to research and deploy, is presented, cheaply and cornily, as an idee fixe whose appeal to Mr. Reagan is its similarity to sci-fi novels and B-movies. Mr. Morris does, however, allow others to make the case that holding to SDI at Reykjavik changed everything in the U.S.-Soviet relationship and was a key element in the Soviet collapse.

The book’s judgments on Mr. Reagan are mixed but not balanced, and the language deployed seems an attempt to cloak the author’s indecisiveness. The result is a striking inconsistency. Mr. Reagan is an apparent airhead. Mr. Reagan has a clean, orderly, serious mind. Mr. Reagan tells pointless stories. Mr. Reagan’s stories have a serious allegorical purpose. Mr. Reagan is a yahoo, Mr. Reagan is a reader with a high enjoyment of style and a writer of crystalline clarity. Mr. Reagan lacks compassion and heart, Mr. Reagan’s emotions well over when he speaks of that which he deeply cares. Perhaps strangest of all, “Reagan was America, and he wasn’t much else.” What a sentence. You have to be very strange to think that isn’t quite enough. The flaws of the book were reflected (and perhaps rehearsed) in Mr. Morris’s “60 Minutes” interview last Sunday, in which he dismissed Mr. Reagan’s character and gifts and then posed, weeping, as he read the president’s last letter to the country.

“Dutch” has some moments. The reporting of the John Hinckley assassination attempt has the simple force and power of that old popular classic, Jim Bishop’s “The Day Lincoln Was Shot.” Mr. Morris’s rendering of the blacklist era, almost thwarted by the insertion of fictional movie scripts and song-and-dance patter, is tugged along by the sheer force of Mr. Reagan’s actions, which are presented as courageous and idealistic. The sections on the Reagan-Gorbachev summits are strong. All of the author’s interruptions, conceits and bizarre devices cannot derail these few but solid narratives. Mr. Reagan’s function in this book made me think of what was said of FDR: He is like the Staten Island ferry, big, unstoppable and bringing all the garbage along in its wake.
[Header] What Really Happened?

I am not sure what to make of the quality of the reporting and suspect we will be hearing more about it. It is simply not believable, as Mr. Morris contends, that Mr. Reagan “secretly despised” George Bush. He secretly despised no one, and you didn’t have to know him well to know that. Mr. Morris’s attribution of an “upstairs downstairs” social resentment between the Reagans and the Bushes seems similarly bizarre, and one can’t help believe President Bush when he says it isn’t true. A small anecdote in which I figure, expressing concern about Mr. Reagan before a speech, is weirdly hyped up but happened. I’m not sure other things did. The story that young Ronald Reagan wanted to join the communist party but was turned away because he wasn’t bright enough (yes, Hollywood communists were famous for turning away rising stars who weren’t bright) comes from the gossip of an aging left-wing Reagan foe and is confirmed by no one. Colin Powell is reported boasting to Mr. Morris, on the last morning of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, that Mr. Reagan’s filmed office goodbye was great: Once again he, Mr. Powell, and the senior staff “directed [Reagan] and scripted him and made him up and gave him his cues.” It is hard to believe that Mr. Powell would talk like that, but if he did he is a conceited and ungrateful man, and quite stupid, too.

One senses this scene is in the book—that many stories are in it—not in an attempt to shed light, or make us understand, or explain Mr. Reagan, but merely to generate Bob Woodward-type headlines. This is unworthy of the author of “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.”

There is one other scene, at the end of the book, that is striking. The author sees Nancy Reagan leave the North Portico for the last time as first lady. “I blew her a kiss, feeling absolutely no emotion,” he writes. This actually is revealing, and for once you know exactly which Edmund that is.

A final note. I think this book’s great purpose may be to demonstrate decisively, and perhaps finally, contemporary biography’s obsession with the small. It is as if modern biographers cannot handle greatness and feel compelled to reduce it to petty and irrelevant things. This is puzzling and pointless. It is also tired, and, because it so often seems driven only by rage and inadequacy, tiresome. You’d think it would fall out of style, if only for the reason that, as is demonstrated here, it does damage not to the subject, but to the historian.

Hand it to her. Hillary Clinton had a spectacular day yesterday as she stood on the edge of a rolling field on Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s upstate farm and announced that she may announce. It was as deft and clever a political presentation as I’ve seen, a marvel of spin and more. She was poised, articulate, both cool and warm and—a first for her—modest.

She was in fact a natural.

I watched all morning rapt as CNN and MSNBC went live, and I think I saw some of what the future will hold.

[Header] ‘Listening Tour’

The media presence was huge, a reported 200 journalists, and most if not all seemed transported. “The listening tour” they breathed as they filled time. “Hillary Clinton’s listening tour is about to begin.” It is of course not a listening tour but a talking tour aimed at defusing bombs and getting good press, but the reporters called it the magical listening tour because—well, because her people told them that’s what it is. And if there’s one thing her people know it’s them people.

It wasn’t only a lack of skepticism from the elite press but a presence of enthusiasm. CNN’s Bruce Morton said of the day: “It’s really the voters’ show. . . . The point is to hear what they have to say.” But that was not the point, as he surely knew. MSNBC’s Chris Jansing made a sad-clown face and said of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, “It all began in the depths of her depression.” Ms. Jansing asked reporter Chip Reid how Hillary was feeling now—excited, nervous? Mr. Reid, reporting from the White House, said he thought the first lady was excited. “She’s running on Clinton time,” a now-happy Ms. Jansing said of Mrs. Clinton’s lateness.

Martin Kettle of London’s Guardian newspaper lightened things up just by answering questions. “Why are you here?” he was asked. “Hillary Clinton’s a world figyah!” he replied. Does she have star power? “Well she’s been well received in Britain—she has a huge stah following!”

Now we saw Mrs. Clinton walking, live, down a lane as she chatted with Sen. Moynihan in full, lanky gentleman-farmer-by-way-of-Harvard button-down shirt and khakis. He introduced her to the press—“Hi, Gabe!”—saying: “I hope she will go all the way. . . . I think she is going to win. . . . I think it will be wonderful for New York.”

Then Mrs. Clinton stepped forward—no notes, no text, standing behind a bare standup mike, looking exposed and undefended, a brave woman entering the arena, which is how her people wanted her to look. Surrounded by the huddling press she explained her candidacy.

“The last few months have been quite extraordinary for me,” she said. “I’m humbled and surprised to be standing here today.” She suggested she had in fact been drafted—hundreds of New Yorkers had come to her, and she listened to their excitement, and soon she too was excited by what she could do with them and for them. They e-mailed and sent notes and phoned. It would not have been gracious to ignore them. And so she will “spend the next few weeks and months listening.”

“I care deeply”, she said. “I am concerned that we work together to face the challenges that face New York and the people of New York.” She’ll be “listening hard, trying to figure out how to serve the people of New York.”

She said she wants to help improve education and health care, and specifically to help “the crown jewels, the teaching hospitals” of New York. Her husband has cut their federal funding. She has announced she opposes his move. Just watch, the Republican political consultant Jay Severin said yesterday: Mr. Clinton will announce a plan, she will oppose on the grounds it hurts New York, he will change his mind based on the eloquence of her arguments, and she will call news conferences announcing her triumph.

“I’ve been a tireless advocate all my life,” she said in a note of self-congratulation that was her one mistake of the day. Hearing how she’s worked so hard to help us reminded me of how the Clintons are always saying that they’ve devoted their lives to public service. When politicians say, “I’m in politics,” it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, “I’m in public service,” you know you should flee.

The press threw softballs, and she neatly hit them deep into left and right, but the carpetbagger issue she hit out of the park. “It’s a fair question,” she said, conceding the obvious with grace. “I have some work to do to demonstrate that what I’m for is more important than where I’m from.” They must have worked for weeks on that one. (Mrs. Clinton did prep sessions in the White House this past weekend, and a Clinton supporter said she was excellent from the beginning.)

She said she takes seriously New Yorkers’ legitimate questions about what skills she’d bring to the state and to the Senate. She said in effect that she brings not a lack of ambition but a gift for advocacy.

She was disciplined. A question about Monica got the mantra response: I’m looking forward to meeting with New Yorkers. A question that might have been tough was rendered soft in the phrasing: How will she respond to charges regarding the $100,000 profit in cattle futures? She’s looking forward to creating a new future with New Yorkers.

The press was impressed.

Mrs. Clinton right now is doing two important things. First, she is nailing down her base. This means building excitement in the left wing of her party by convincing them that she is one of them and worth fighting for. Thus her blunt attack on vouchers the other day before the National Education Association. A year from now, when it matters, she will speak not as a “progressive” but as a moderate; her base, knowing the game, will not take offense. Yesterday’s speech was a departure, but Mrs. Clinton will be talking to the left for the next few months. This will garner renewed criticism, some of it fierce, from those who are not of the left. But that doesn’t matter, because of the second thing she is doing.

[Header] Rope-a-Dope

That is absorbing attacks, every day. For the next nine months or so she’ll be playing rope-a-dope, exhausting her foes by taking every blow they can throw. She’s doing this now because right now it doesn’t matter what is said of her. A year from now, when it matters, if New York’s pundits—the Dunleavies and Dowds, the Brookhisers and Breslins—are still attacking her, they will look obsessed and winded. She will look long suffering and glistening. The criticisms of ‘99 will be but a memory. Reporters will be reduced to covering her latest proposals. She knows this. Her people know this. It’s why, right now, they don’t mind attacks.

Yesterday was a very good day for Mrs. Clinton because it gave her wall-to-wall great coverage. But that may turn out to be good news for Republicans, in the same way that an alarm clock going off at the right time is good news. It rings, you hear it, you wake up and get dressed and stop dreaming and go to work.