Looking Forward

Since the country is facing a national election, which is, among other things, a coast-to-coast argument, I have been thinking about the peaceful image of a joining of hands, a private coming together-a wedding. Which is, of course, not an entirely private act, as it takes place in public with witnesses, and is a cause for local celebration: A new family has been created. This is good.

To love weddings you have to view them with the same attitude you bring to a play or movie, which is a complete and willing suspension of disbelief. This is sometimes hard. But I like weddings because they’re a show: I like to see everyone get dressed up and pose for the cameras. I like to notice the way the mothers of the bride and groom circle each other. I like to see Grandma and Grandpa dance. I like the toasts: the funny ones, the affectionate ones, the drunken ones.

The big change I’ve noticed lately at weddings is someone will say, “She’s taking his name.” And the older people will murmur and say, “Oh,” and nod. They don’t express approval outright, for that would be impolite to women who do not take their husbands’ names. But you get a sense they approve.

It turns out this is happening on a broader scale. A recent Bride’s magazine reader survey revealed that in 1992; 71 percent of first-time brides in their 20s said they planned to take their husbands’ names. In 1996, the number was up to 87 percent. You can even see the new style in the decisions of some young celebrities. When Pamela Anderson of Baywatch married rock star Tommy Lee, she became Pamela Lee. Model Jill Goodacre married singer Harry Connick, Jr., and became Jill Connick.

This could reflect a return to traditionalism in the Age of Martha Stewart. It could suggest a return to simplicity: It’s cumbersome to be Ms. Smith married to Mr. Jones and call your children the Smith-Joneses. It also happens to have a counterpart in the business world. When Chase Manhattan and Chemical Bank merged recently, they picked one name: Chase Manhattan, because it was more well-known. And that was despite the fact that Chemical was the bigger bank. Lesson: In any merger, taking a name is just the first of many compromises.

Or maybe taking the husband’s name marks a return to clarity. The New York Times has what one of its reporters calls “the Ferraro rule.” When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, she used her professional name, which was her maiden name: Ferraro. But the Times didn’t want to call her Miss Ferraro because she was a Mrs., married to John Zaccaro. Except, she didn’t go by Zaccaro. So the Times invented a new formula: A married woman who uses her maiden name gets a Mrs. to go with it. Thereafter, Geraldine Ferraro was referred to as Mrs. Ferraro.

This rule was explained to me ten years ago when the Times referred to me as Mrs. Noonan. I was married; then, to Mr. Rahn but used my maiden name professionally, so at home I was Mrs. Rahn and at work, Ms. Noonan. So the Times, in the name of politeness and political correctness, had chosen to call me the one thing I wasn’t. It was odd, and amusing, and I got to tell my mother she was in the papers.

People have a right to go by what they want to go by. If you would rather retain the name your daddy gave you than assume the name your husband has, go for it.

But when I see young brides change their names and take their husbands’, I think it suggests a kind of bravery. And I suspect at least some of them are saying something through their courage.

A bride in her 20s grew up in the Age of Divorce.

As likely as not, her wedding party consists of her mom and her mom’s second husband, and her dad and his third wife. This bride and her husband know firsthand what the end of a marriage means. And they may have fewer misconceptions than their parents about how important freedom and self-actualization are. They may think other things are more important, like constancy and commitment and loyalty.

Maybe, for these brides, taking their husbands’ names is a declaration not only of intention, but of faith. Maybe they are suspending disbelief. Marriage itself is a marvelously faithful act. It shows that you have faith in yourself and your spouse, and also in life, in the ability of things to stay and grow and endure.

Which is why I suppose I find myself at weddings lately just as fascinated and entertained as ever, but also moved. And, when I hear someone say, “She’s taking his name,” I find myself nodding like the old people, and quietly thinking, Good.

The Captain Of His Soul

On the stump those last days, Bob Dole’s campaign was more local than national—the taped Sousa marches, the town bigwig at the mike vamping in front of an audience in elephant hats. Then Dole would come out from behind the stage, parting the polyester-blue curtain, and enact the body language of victory—thumb up, quick-flash smile, the arm that doesn’t hold the pen punching the air in a go-get-’em arc. The crowd would always stand and applaud. “We love you, Bob!” someone would yell, and the unmuffled sound would echo too well, because the hall was always half empty.

He didn’t look bitter or lost that last week, didn’t look—concussed, as big losers of past history have. He just looked like a man who was enacting a campaign rather than waging it. And I stood in the back of the hall and thought, He’s losing with grace because losing is something he knows how to do. I thought of the old poem Invictus:

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I think that’s how he saw himself at the end. Invictus, one of F.D.R.’s favorite poems, was popular in the storm-tossed 1940s and would have been known to a lieutenant named Dole. It is a poem about fierce human will, a poem you might call proud or braying, depending on your taste. And you could say the Dole campaign at the end was a similar kind of poem.

He drew the party faithful. A Dole campaign stop was not Reaganesque (20,000 adoring college students) or Bushian (mom and pop and the kids in the city square). Dole’s crowds were 400 and 600, often at small, third-tier colleges, and they were Republican believers. One night, on the Wednesday before the voting, at the Pontchartrain Center outside New Orleans, about 700 people showed up, a big crowd. It was dinnertime, after work, and they could have been home relaxing, watching TV, helping with homework, but instead they got in the van and drove on the highway to stand and cheer for a man who they knew would give a bad speech and who in a week would be an asterisk in a boring book.

The faithful lived up to their name. At Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, there was the young mother in jeans, hair frosted blonde, a baby in her arms and a toddler in a stroller. She came late to the speech, flustered, and she was excited to be there to see a man who was running for President. When Dole was moving along the side of the gym talking and shaking hands, she saw the top of his head, his tanned brow and his combed, sprayed hair, and she said to someone, “That’s him—oh, I’ll never get there with the kids …” I turned and motioned to the stroller. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch him.” She looked at me as her brain rolled out the possibilities—the young mother said she last saw her son at a Dole rally when a member of the press offered to stay with him—and she jerked the stroller softly and barreled toward Dole, who was turning now and disappearing in a small sea of suits. “Oh,” she said as he left, “oooooooh!”

Those twilight days Dole took to talking about Dwight Eisenhower. He would tell crowds, I want you to be proud of your vote, just as I was proud years ago when I voted for General Eisenhower. Hearing him refer to his fellow Kansan, I realized Eisenhower was to Dole what F.D.R. was to Reagan—the prototype, the vivid President of his youth, the one who set the standard and the style. Do you remember Ike’s philosophy from the ‘52 campaign? Neither does anyone else. He didn’t have a philosophy; he barely had a discernible point of view. What he had was himself: I’m Ike. I ran the war, and I can run the White House, because I am me. The buttons said it all: I LIKE IKE.

Dole ran the same kind of campaign: I’m Bob Dole, and you know me: I ran the Senate; I’ve been here for 30 years; I’m solid and competent, the Big Bobster. But that won’t do anymore. The candidate must be himself, and more than himself: he must be the carrier of a point of view, the expression of certain assumptions. He must have a philosophy. You may say, but Clinton didn’t have a philosophy! And the answer is, sure he did—he had plenty of them.

Dole ran like Ike but without Ike’s air of inevitability, and without his sunny good fortune. But then Dole never saw himself as a fortunate son, and if you know his history, you know why. The story of his devastating war wound and recovery is so moving because trauma was at the heart of Dole, not only of the physical kind but in so much of his life that would follow. For he would enter the Republican Party just as the great wave of modern liberalism was washing across the American continent. He would rise to head the Republican National Committee just in time to see victory washed away with Watergate. He rose to lead his party in the Senate—only to find his time going not to securing victory but to limiting loss. He would run for President twice and lose and keep running.

It was a political life of great triumph—he did, after all, go for the very top job—but his victories obscured its persistent theme. And now here, in the last days of his last campaign, at the end of another long losing haul, he stood alone, with the faithful, the master of his fate, as the old poem says, the captain of his soul.

Welcome to Hard Truths

Bob Dole’s acceptance speech was big—stern, daring, even at moments Churchillian—but it was marked most by a kind of interrupted eloquence. The speech betrayed the weight of a few too many hands. Even in its strongest, most poetic passages there seemed to be something missing. When Dole stirringly pointed to the exits in the convention hall and declared the Republicans the party of Lincoln, he invited any bigoted delegates to leave, “as I stand here and hold this ground.” But the way the section was constructed, it seemed as if he were telling the party it was bigoted and no longer welcome at his convention.

The speech didn’t quite hang together. Yet it was a brave speech and deserves credit for its ambitions. It was brave first in that it ignored many of the time-honored conventions of political oratory, and did so in a way that asked a lot of the audience—especially the people in the hall. Half the delegates had been to dinner, had had a few drinks and were ready to rock. But Dole gave them little to play with. He didn’t offer much humor, didn’t inspire a chant, didn’t ask them to hoot ‘n’ holler.

What he asked them to do was stand there and think. And that is a lot to ask of a delegate surrounded by guys in elephant hats. But the most interesting part of the speech’s bravery was its high moral seriousness; it attempted to address what really ails America. And it did so while rejecting the florid optimism of political speeches and asserting instead that America is in trouble because of the way modern Americans have been living their lives. He scored the small corruptions of our lives, of ambition and unthinking selfishness that damage first individuals, then a whole society.

“Permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed,” Dole said, “honor and liberty must be restored.” How? Through personal “right conduct, every day at every level.” What stops us from rising above ourselves? The answer was beautifully put—if not utterly convincing: “It is because for too long we have had a leadership that has been unwilling to risk the truth…An Administration in its very existence communicates this day by day until it flows down like rain. And the rain becomes a river, and the river becomes a flood.”

But what worked on page didn’t always work onstage. Dole never seemed to “own” the speech, didn’t have it absorbed so deep it was bubbles in his blood. My guess is he never really liked it, but stuck with it because his previous collaboration with his speechwriter, the novelist Mark Helprin, was such a hit. Aaargh, eggheads all liked the resignation speech, do it again. There was a lovely spareness to certain small sections, and if it had been sustained, it would have resulted in elegance. Helprin had given Dole a first draft of the speech on April 22, then met with him roughly a dozen times to work on it. But in San Diego things unraveled when Dole asked for new writers. Soon sections of eloquence were followed by blocks of boilerplate. After more than a dozen drafts, Helprin turned in his beeper and went home to upstate New York. There he issued a statement. It said in part, “Early on I was happy to volunteer to Senator Dole a first draft of an acceptance speech, and he then made it his own…In the end the legitimate and understandable requirements of political speechwriting did not mesh with the principles of my profession, which I can in no circumstances abandon. So I stood down, without rancor.”

That is pretty strong rhetoric. Perhaps some of the best at the convention.

A Memo to Bob Dole

    FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
    TO: BOB DOLE
    DATE: JUNE 10, 1996

This week you leave the Senate, with a goodbye speech on the floor that is sure to be moving. Whatever happens in November, you’ve closed a great chapter of your life.

Now what? The standard thing to do is what all modern presidential candidates do: get on a plane and hop like a mighty flea from one end of the continent to the other. Your advance team will get the schedule late and throw events together haphazardly. They’ll put you in the wrong room with the wrong crowd, with the TelePrompTer shading part of your face and with a bunch of nine-year-olds standing behind you at the lectern with faces that say, “Mama, whatever I did to get put here, I won’t do it again!” That is, it’ll all be like your Macomb County event last week.

What should you do? Let’s start with your problems and work from there. You’re out of money and will be until roughly the time of the G.O.P. convention, when you get an infusion of federal funds. Your campaign is also, at the moment, without a kind of physical context. When people think of Bill Clinton they think of a big white house with pillars on Pennsylvania Avenue. When people think of Dole they used to think of the Senate floor, the wrong place but a place nonetheless. Now you are—where? On a tarmac without a tie.

You’re rootless, moneyless, groping toward a message. Is there a way to make a virtue of these disadvantages? Yes. It’s an idea that’s just begun bubbling up from the Republican ranks. (Ted Stevens and Slade Gorton are talking about it in the Senate.) It is simple, cheap, so old it’s new, so hokey that it has a startling cleanness about it.

It’s this: go home to Russell, Kansas. Go back to the house you and your brother and sisters grew up in, the house in which you waged your lonely battle to recover from the wounds of war. Wage the last great front-porch campaign of the 20th century. Now and until the convention, make that house and that porch the locus of your last great battle. Let the word go forth that you’ll meet with any American or group of Americans that has the wherewithal to get there and the patience to stand in line. Get them all in—farmers, fishermen, enviros, ranchers, housewives, fire fighters—and listen to them. Ask them what they most need from the next President, listen to them, learn from them.

This will be the first real front-porch campaign since 1920, when Warren Harding oozed to effortless victory. But before him the great front-porch campaign, the one that caused the phrase to be coined, was in 1896, by William McKinley, who sat on his porch in Canton, Ohio, and met with whoever came by. As William Safire once noted, McKinley “had good reason to stay at home . . . he was not the stem-winding orator his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, was.” He played to his strength, a strong personal presence. “I rang and walked in,” wrote an English journalist. “Mr. McKinley was sitting on a rocking chair not 10 feet from the door . . . he is gifted with a kindly courtesy that is plainly genuine and completely winning.”

Like you. You shrink in crowds and expand in private. Play to your strength. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and have them come to you, as they should. Here are the reasons to do it:

It will give you place and context. Your campaign will reside in a place called Kansas, a square state in the middle of America. This is a good place to be.

It will give you a symbol—the old American porch, the kind people rocked on before the days of drive-by shootings. The symbol underscores a message: I stand for the heartland.

It will make you a better candidate. You’ll learn things you didn’t know. No matter how sensitive or astute, no man spends 36 years in Washington and doesn’t lose a sense of the texture of his country.

It will force the media to tell your story for you. Every major news outlet in America will send a crew and reporters. They’ll be forced to get to know Kansas towns and Kansas people. They’ll be forced to do feature stories on your life—this is where he played football, this is where they passed the cigar box to pay his hospital bills.

Every comedian in America will spoof it. Dennis Miller will rant, Al Franken will say Kansans are big fat idiots, Letterman will have a Top 10 Reasons I’m Really Sitting on This Porch. Fine. The more famous they make it, the more famous it becomes, the more present in the minds of people.

You’ve just begun thinking about this, as has your wife, but you haven’t really focused on it. But do.

By the way, McKinley and Harding won handily.

Memo to Bob Dole

    MEMO FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
    TO: BOB DOLE
    DATE: MAY 27, 1996

Your Senate leave taking provided that most satisfying of political moments, when the words are as big as the event. Forget the June departure date, leave now and for good. You made a dramatic exit. To go back in the next three weeks and haggle is to blur the picture and confuse the public. Don’t step on your own applause line: it’s over, the tie is off, go West ol’ man.

Now you go to the people. What they need from you is a clear new picture. Like Bush in 1988, you’re famous but unknown; people know your face and name but aren’t sure what you believe in. This is not a disadvantage but an opportunity. Now you get to reintroduce yourself, and on your terms.

Start with what people know. They know you’re experienced, they know you’re an adult, they can see the flintiness. But they don’t know if you have the presidential temperament, that you’re a big, good-natured, stable, tough-minded optimist. You also need to show that you’re genuinely thoughtful, that you have been watching and thinking about America for a half-century and have come to conclusions that are now convictions about how to preserve and protect her.

All year your aides and friends have been telling you to show your passion. But after three years of sentiments and feelings from the White House, the whole country hungers for logic. (And in any case, every time your staff tried to make you show passion, you wound up pounding the lectern—”Have you no shame, Hollywood?” “Liberal judges!”—and looking not serious but fierce, dark, censorious.) You can demonstrate the quality of your thinking and temperament by spending the next six months speaking clearly to the American people—by trusting them with your thoughts. Which is not something you’re used to.

Talk about the things that have happened in America since 1961, when you entered Congress, and what your thoughts are about what worked, what didn’t and what you’ve learned in a party split on issues and a country going to extremes. In the past 27 years you’ve straddled, which may have been the only way for a Republican Senate leader to survive. You’ve had your paleoconservative moments—”Democrat wars!”—and an old-style, Midwestern aversion to deficits. You’ve also pushed through tax increases, and if you think you were wrong about some of your votes and views from 10 and 20 years ago, then explain where you were and where you are. If you think you were right then, say that too, and amplify. People respect it when politicians try hard to speak truth.

To do all this, you will have to overcome a lifetime habit of thinking words are the enemy. Up until now they have seemed that way. Words muck up deals, create divisions, draw battle lines, are misunderstood. When you are a legislator, silence is your friend. The unspoken word never has to be taken back. (And dust-bowl Kansas wasn’t exactly a place for airy chat; you grew up in the last age of yup and nope. “Lost the farm.” “Bad.” “Still tryin’.” “Good.”) Now it’s all different. When you run for President, words are your friend, your only friend. You must “martial them to fight for you,’’ in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase. This will be a psychic shift, and it won’t happen overnight. But it’s your job now; if you win the presidency, it will be your job then.

Don’t let your advisers tell you that the right loves cheap, nasty issues, and you have to be cheap and nasty to please them. This is a common misconception of moderate conservatives. Reagan spoke to the right as if they were equals; he never had to throw them raw meat because he never thought they were animals. And don’t let the liberals in the party fuzz up the message. The conservatives are still small town and small pocket; the liberals are the moneybags of Team 100 who used to be entrepreneurs and lately are lobbyists. They’re proabortion and disdain the icky Christians. (This kind of snobbery is as old as America itself.) Take their money and thank them, but do not let them dictate policy.

You have a gender-gap problem. The way to ease it is to bring up the real women’s issue of this campaign: the fact that more and more women are entrepreneurs—dry-cleaner’s owners, real estate-agency owners—and taxes and regulation are killing them. Show women who are breaking their backs pursuing economic freedom that you’re on their side.

Your wit is natural to you, almost compulsive, deeply mordant. They’re telling you to squelch the one-liners. Don’t. It’s you, and it’s a relief. The pious conniver in the White House lacks the cool tragic sense that produces irony. So go with it, knowing wit is not a substitute for thought but an adornment of it.

So go out there, speak, be famous and known.

Heroic Jackie, Tacky Jackie

What does the Jackie Onassis auction tell us? some things that we already knew, and some that we didn’t. We knew that there were always two Jackies, really. One was moving and heroic and cultivated, the possessor of a detached dignity that kept us fascinated. The other was a girl who was just a little too interested in money, which was not moving or heroic at all, and certainly not cultivated.

The first Jackie has, and deserves, a place in the history of American heroism. For on a dark, cold weekend of a November long ago, when everyone felt stunned and saddened, she redeemed a tragedy, gave it a kind of meaning, by the sheer force of her presence and the size of her will. And she did it at age 34, after her husband’s head had been exploded on her lap.

But the other Jackie, Tacky Jackie, was not so inspiring. I remember reading one of the early “Jackie, Oh!”-type biographies and being struck by the story of First Lady Jackie receiving, as a gift from a head of state, a ceremonial gold sword. She held it in her hands as it gleamed in the lights of the East Room—and noticed that embedded in the surface were a host of beautiful jewels. First Lady Jackie became Tacky Jackie, and tried to find out how to get the jewels out, to make herself some earrings.

As soon as I read it, I believed it. By the 1970s we knew that for all her splendor she was a woman who would buy 10 pairs of the same Pappagallo flats, all in different colors. You have to really like things to shop like that. You have to want goods in stores to give you pleasures you’re not getting in real life to be like that. You have to be a little sad. Or a total greedhead. I think she was a little sad.

Tacky Jackie is not a noble picture, and it is not how we choose to remember her. And we are right.

So she wasn’t perfect. And now we know her taste wasn’t either. In fact, some of the items sold last week reflect an amazing and heartening level of vulgarity. The big Onassis diamond that went for $2,587,500 is a truly gross piece of work, and I am not saying that only because I can’t have it.

Jackie had a brilliant marketing sense if she was involved with the idea of an estate sale, and I suspect she had a few thoughts on it before she died. It was brilliant to set the prices so low on everything. That way, everybody felt he or she could afford something. No one could accuse the Kennedy kids of greed, as it seemed rather generous of them to offer Dad’s humidor for only a couple of thousand dollars. Then when it went for $574,500, it was like an enormous compliment to the Kennedy family: “We like you! We really like you!” And the kids could shyly say, “Thanks, we’re so surprised. We never dreamed people would pay $1.5 million dollars for a set of coasters Gore Vidal once threw at Bobby Kennedy at Merrywood . . .”

Yes, brilliant. And it gave us the last Jackie we will ever have: Canny Jackie, the girl who really knew her public.

Looking Forward

You’ve left the house, walked just a few steps, and notice something: Your shoulders aren’t hunched defensively against the cold. Your pores, which for months had been sealed tight, unclench and breathe. There’s no scarf half asphyxiating you, no mildly embarrassing hunk of wool on your head.

It must be spring.

Heaven. That’s what it’s supposed to be, and what it is for a lot of people. And that’s how I’ll soon experience it too. But, sometimes, at the outset, all that beauty and softness, all those rich and succulent smells, all that blooming and renewal gives me a solid week of the blues.

It’s hard to be happy on cue. Our inner mood clocks often don’t keep time with the occasion or season we’re expected to celebrate. Moments of true joy more often come unbidden and unplanned.

Anyway, here is my paradox. Spring is about birth, new life, and beginnings and, for me, brings melancholy. Autumn may be about death and endings, but for me and many others, it’s happy. How could this be?

Probably some of it is that no matter how old we are, a lot of us still move to the rhythms of the school year. September is about fresh starts—the clean smell of new leather shoes, new plans, and new fantasies. I’m gonna study really hard this year—I’m gonna be really nice and really popular—I’m gonna lose weight, make the team, run for class rep.

We remember all that, carry it through our lives, and with the change of seasons, resummon those old memories.

But that’s only part of it. Spring makes demands: Be upbeat, grateful, enjoy. Autumn, when trees turn dry and dark and the world turns muted, makes no demands. But since a certain melancholy is appropriate we, contrary humans that we are, can’t help but consider the good points. The landscape isn’t bleak, but interesting. I think I’ll pick up some cider. Let’s go look at the leaves.

A recent illustration of this phenomenon came a few months ago during the blizzard that swept the eastern part of the country. Everyone was “in crisis” and “enduring an onslaught”—cars buried in snow, schools and stores closed, no mail. Naturally, normally semisurly New Yorkers were made sweet and good-natured by the crisis, and the empty streets became winter playgrounds, with kids and parents out sledding, skiing, and having snowball fights. They were told to endure. Instead they had a party.

So often the most festive events Christmas, New Year’s, even the birth of a baby—trigger a letdown rather than a lift. I blame some of this on the Happiness Cult. It replaced the Seriousness Cult, which ended about the year 1900. If you don’t know what the Seriousness Cult was, go look at a picture of Queen Victoria. She was its poster girl. Her face says it all: Life is earnest; we weren’t put here to have a good time.

The Happiness Cult is driven by affluence and advertising and insists that everyone has to have a feeling of lighthearted satisfaction, especially at events, celebrations, and holidays. But during the days of the Seriousness Cult, happiness wasn’t the purpose of holidays. Christmas was actually considered a religious observance calling for worship and meditation. New Year’s was an occasion not for revelry but a cold night to stay in with warm cider. Autumn was harvesttime, a time to reap. And spring meant work: planting and digging and bending down in the sun. You didn’t have to be happy, you just had to get the job done.

This is what I do with holidays, seasons, and events that in our current era demand happiness: I remember that Christmas is, if not somber, at least serious, that New Year’s, birthdays, and the transition to spring are times for reflection and reappraisal. Any happiness that surrounds them comes as an unexpected gift.

Of course, the gift does come. Because it’s hard to be serious and somber when you’re supposed to be. You wind up feeling like the old English farmer who said, “I meant to be a philosopher, but happiness kept breaking through.” I try to be earnest—and wind up seeing the sweetness around me, and feeling the warmth. Happiness breaks through, if not on cue, at least always in time. And I enjoy and am grateful.

Looking Forward

I am walking along a busy sidewalk and a man barrels by, close enough to jostle me and another woman. “Skyewz me,” he barks, not looking at us or anyone else.

I am on line at the grocery. The man in front of me, who is holding a baby, has forgotten something. So he turns, walks toward the space I happen to occupy, says “Skyewz me!” and plows on. I step aside to keep from being knocked over.

When I go home, I ponder.

Both men looked normal—that is, not like criminals, firefighters rushing to a blaze, or politicians. Both were rude, and both were average in their use of the words “excuse me.” By which I mean, like a lot of people, they have turned the phrase into a command, when it used to be a request.

Neither acted like a gentleman, but then I don’t think many of us expect men on the street to be gentlemen anymore. For years now we’ve been telling men not to treat women as if they were weak and frail, not to patronize them as if they were inferior. And men, who are occasionally—in Princess Diana’s phrase—“thick as a plank,” took this to mean they were being told to be rude. Well, they’ve certainly come through!

Of course, women, too, are bad with “excuse me.”

The phrase used to hold within it an unspoken sentence: “Will you excuse me, please?” It was a soft-toned question followed by gentle-toned gratitude: “Thank you.” Sometimes the phrase was even accompanied by a smile that said, “Aren’t you the nicest person to let me bump into you and not get mad?”

It seems to me that we have turned “excuse me” into a snarly command, SKYEWZ me, that carries within it an unspoken sentence: “Get out of my way,” or “Move it, buster.”

I am of the school that manners are morals, that you pour coffee for the other person first because you have made a moral decision to honor others, show interest in them and concern for them. This is part of what football great Gale Sayers was referring to when he called his memoir I Am Third. His philosophy of life was that God is first in importance, you are second, I am third.

This is a profoundly modest and self-denying attitude with which to approach life. It says, “I am not a big deal, I’m just another child of God, how can I help you?” And it is profoundly at odds with modern thinking about Who We Are and What We Deserve.

I lately get the impression that people now understand that when they are courteous—when they let the pushy person cut ahead of them in line, when they react with forbearance to the boisterous teenagers or the snapped demand of the clerk—they are perceived not as polite and kind, but as weak.

And this may be because the social movements of the past quarter century have, though not deliberately, suggested that patience and kindness are the refuge of the spineless. Feminism taught us to instruct men on their failings, the civil rights movement taught us to point out one another’s dishonesty, 12-step programs told us how to find and point the finger at enablers. All these movements had considerable goodness at their core. But in their insistence on one’s rights as preeminent, they also inadvertently encouraged us to be less sensitive, rougher.

We are told: Be strong. If you have adequate self-esteem, understand your rights, have no hesitation about asserting yourself—you will insistently point out that you were ahead of that guy on line, correct the harried clerk, embarrass the rowdy teenagers.
Well, we certainly are strong. We know our rights. We sure do assert them. “Skyewz me,” we say as we barrel past each other, our eyes on the horizon, our concentration unbroken.

We all love justice, but I can’t help thinking it would be an easier country if we all loved mercy.

I wish we would remember that rudeness isn’t a strength, but evidence of an inability or unwillingness to think of others—which is a weakness. Rudeness isn’t authentic, it’s egocentric make way for me, I’m more important than you.

I wish that more of us would think, I Am Third. And turn “excuse me” back into a request, a humble one, with thanks when it is granted.

If I have offended you with my arguments, please excuse me. I mean it.

Why We Already Miss the Gipper

When Steve Forbes announced for president last week, he said Republicans have an “empty feeling” about the ’96 race, and it’s true. They’re poised for victory, it’s a Republican year, they’ve already won the Congress, and yet . . . they’re frustrated.

There is an absence, a lack, this presidential year. Will Newt run? Will Colin Powell? Some say the general’s qualities are Reaganesque, but more and more of us see him as our favorite moderate Democrat. There is one Republican out there who unites the party; who has the respect and affection of both its elders and collegiate Dittoheads; and who, in a party riven somewhat by class, is happily claimed as One of Us by Greenwich millionaires, Chillicothe Christians and Little Rock auto mechanics; who soothes the chafing tensions between pro- and anti-gun, pro- and anti-abortion. And he even comes from California.

He is, of course, Ronald Reagan, more than ever the party’s undiminished hero. Seven years out of office, no one has quite taken his place. That’s what the empty feeling is — his big absence.

The feeling is not confined to his party. He is old now and ill, and for the nation, he is a poignant presence. He is in a kind of twilight; we cannot mourn him, but we can miss him, and we do.

Which is not to say his critics have ever stopped trying to tear down his record. But it doesn’t seem to have worked. Almost two years ago, I wrote to him and asked how he felt about it. “I’m not the sort to lose sleep over what a few revisionists say,” the president wrote back. “Let history decide; it usually does.”

Other presidents have loomed large. Nixon loomed, but like a shadow. Reagan looms like a sun, lighting the stage on which the year’s contenders stand. But his light is so bright they squint in the glare and seem paler, washed out.

Part of this is inevitable. We appreciate presidents more than we appreciate candidates. When a man becomes president, we suddenly discover virtues of which we — and they — had been unaware. If he is elected, Dole’s wit will be called not mean but trenchant and deep, a gallant mask for pain; Gramm’s stark and prickly conservatism will become a no-frills tribute to authenticity.

And it’s good to remember we didn’t always love Reagan. In 1980 he was called an aging nuclear cowboy who’d throw Grandma into the snow, a washed-up grade-B former-actor former-governor who’d run twice and lost and whose hands were clasped in victory over a pompadour people said was dyed.

The media and academe saw him not as a statesman but as a joke. And there were failures: he never really cut the size and scope of government, and the deficit grew. There were irritating excesses (glitz, glamour), insensitivities and derelictions.

But for all that, he is missed and admired, still the man you see when you hear the phrase The American President. Why? Because of a combination of qualities in the man and in his presidency.

He set out to make big change. Only a few times a century do you find a president who really changed things. Most presidents, one way or another, have no serious grievance with the status quo. Ford, Carter, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Bush — they made progress or mischief at the margins. But Reagan changed things as much as Franklin Roosevelt — only in the opposite direction. He changed the way we look at the role of government in America. In the 50 years preceding his presideney it was generally agreed (though not generally stated) that the government created wealth and should supervise its distribution. But Reagan said no — it does not create wealth, it is an impediment to prosperity, and it should not be distributing your money, you should. Like it or not, that was change.

He knew what he thought and why he thought it. He had thought it through, was a conservative for serious philosophical reasons, had read his Hayek and his Friedman, knew exactly why “that government governs best that governs least.” And he became a conservative at some cost, in the early ‘60s, when the country was beginning to turn left and the community in which he lived and earned his living, Hollywood, was turning lefter still.

He didn’t hold views to be popular, he held them because he thought they were right. The men around him sometimes used polls to divine which issues to hit hard. That’s not how he used polls. He used them to see if what he was saying was what people were hearing, and to cheer himself up when he was blue. He liked it when the pollsters could tell him 82 percent of the people thought he was doing a good job. He’d breathe the numbers in, stick out his chest and wade back into the fray. But his positions were not poll driven, and the people could tell. So even when they disagreed with him, they still respected him.

He meant it. His beliefs were sincerely held. And because he was sincere, the people cut him some slack where they wouldn’t cut it for others. geagan raised taxes in ‘82 and won by a landslide in ‘84. When George Bush raised taxes, they sent him to Elba.

He was right. He said the Soviet Union was evil and an empire, and it was; he said history would consign it to the ash heap, and it did. Thirty-one years ago in The Speech, the one he gave a week before the ‘64 election and which put him on the political map, he said: high taxes are bad, heavy regulation is bad, bureaucracies cause more ills than they cure and government is not necessarily your friend. It could have been given by half the congressional candidates of 1994-and was.

He had the presidential style. He knew how to act the part. In this he was like FDR and JFK, who also understood the role. He intuited that a certain detachment produces mystery, and mystery enhances power. He was not on television every night. It would have lowered his currency, made him common. He wasn’t Ron-is-the-caller-there-Reagan, and wouldn’t have understood a president who is. He thought it boorish to be in the nation’s face all the time.

He would not have talked about his underwear on TV — they would never have asked him — and he not only wouldn’t feel your pain, he barely agreed to feel his pain. He had dignity. Clinton has the baby boomer’s discomfort with dignity: they equate it with formality and formality with phoniness, and what could be worse than that?

He loved America. He really loved it. His eyes went misty when he spoke of her. It was personal, emotional, protective and trusting. He was an American exceptionalist — we weren’t like other countries, God put us in a special place with a special job, to lead the forces of good, to be the city on a hill John Winthrop saw and hoped for. Clinton grows misty-eyed, too, but over abstractions: justice, harmony. Clinton loves America at her best. But Reagan loved America, period.

It worked. If, when he ran for president in 1980, a little angel had whispered in your ear, “If Reagan wins, by the time he leaves Soviet communism will be dead, the Dow will have passed 2000, taxes will be cut and we’ll all have a more spirited sense of the historical possibilities,” would you have voted for him? Of course you would have.

He won by 10 points that year, but if we’d known what was coming he would have won by 30. The fact is he was a big man who did big things, and that is why we already miss him.

America’s First Lady

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy OnassisShe was a last link to a certain kind of past, and that is part, but only part, of why we mourn so. Jackie Kennedy symbolized—she was a connection to a time, to an old America that was more dignified, more private, an America in which standards were higher and clearer and elegance meant something, a time when elegance was a kind of statement, a way of dressing up the world, and so a generous act. She had manners, the kind that remind us that manners spring from a certain moral view—that you do tribute to the world and the people in it by being kind and showing respect, by sending the note and the flowers, by being loyal, and cheering a friend. She was a living reminder in the age of Oprah that personal dignity is always, still, an option, a choice that is open to you. She was, really, the last aristocrat. Few people get to symbolize a world, but she did, and that world is receding, and we know it and mourn that too.

Those who knew her or watched her from afar groped for the words that could explain their feeling of loss. A friend of hers said, with a soft, sad voice, that what we’re losing is what we long for: the old idea of being cultivated. “She had this complex, colorful mind, she loved a turn of phrase. She didn’t grow up in front of the TV set, but reading the classics and thinking about them and having thoughts about history. Oh,” he said, “we’re losing her kind.”

I echoed the sentiment to another of her friends, who cut me off. “She wasn’t a kind, she was sui generis.” And so she was.

America continues in its generational shift; the great ones of the ‘50s and ‘60s, big people of a big era, are going, and too often these days we’re saying goodbye. But Jackie Kennedy’s death is different. No ambivalence clouds her departure, and that leaves us feeling lonely. America this week is a lonelier place.

SHE WAS TOO YOUNG, DESERVED MORE TIME, AND THE FACT THAT SHE DIDN’T GET IT seems like a new level of unfairness. She never saw her husband grow old, and now she won’t see her grandchildren grow up.

But just writing those words makes me want to break out of sadness and reach back in time and speak ‘60s-speak, or at least how the ‘60s spoke before they turned dark. So I guess I mean I want to speak Kennedyese. I want to say, Aw listen, kid, don’t be glum. What a life she had.

She herself said something like this to a friend, in a conversation just months ago, when she first knew she was sick. She told him she was optimistic and hoped to live 20 more years. “But even if I have only five years, so what, I’ve had a great run.”

They said it was a life of glamour, but it was really a life of splendor. I want to say, Listen, kid, buck up, don’t be blue—the thing about this woman and her life is that she was a patriot, who all by herself one terrible weekend lifted and braced the heart of a nation.

That weekend in November ’63, the weekend of the muffled drums, was the worst time for America in the last half of this century. We forget now the shame we felt as a nation at what had happened in Dallas. A President had been murdered, quite savagely, quite brutally, and the whole appalled world was looking and judging. And she redeemed it. She took away the shame by how she acted. She was young, only 34, and only a few days before she’d been covered in her husband’s blood—but she came home to Washington and walked down those broad avenues dressed in black, her pale face cleansed and washed clean by trauma. She walked head up, back straight and proud, in a flowing black veil. There was the moment in the Capitol Rotunda, when she knelt with her daughter Caroline. It was the last moment of public farewell, and to say it she bent and kissed the flag that draped the coffin that contained her husband—and a whole nation, a whole world, was made silent at the sight of patriotism made tender. Her Irish husband had admired class. That weekend she showed it in abundance. What a parting gift.

A nation watched, and would never forget. The world watched, and found its final judgment summed up by a young woman, a British journalist who had come to witness the funeral, and filed home: “Jacqueline Kennedy has today given her country the one thing it has always lacked, and that is majesty.”

To have done that for her country—to have lived through that weekend and done what she did from that Friday to that Monday—to have shown the world that the killing of the President was not America, the loving dignity of our saying goodbye was America—to have done that was an act of supreme patriotism.

And a lot of us thought that anything good or bad she did for the rest of her life, from that day on, didn’t matter, for she’d earned her way, she deserved a free pass, she’d earned our thanks forever.

IN A REMARKABLE INTERVIEW SHE GAVE THEODORE WHITE THE FOLLOWING DECEMBER, she revealed what a tough little romantic she was. “Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way—if it made him see the heroes—maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, this idealistic view.” And she spoke of Camelot and gave the world an image of her husband that is still, for all the revelations of the past three decades, alive. She provided an image of herself too, perhaps more than she knew. The day before she died, a young schoolteacher in New York City who hadn’t even been born when she spoke to Teddy White, told me of his shock that she was leaving us. “I thought she would be like Guinevere,” he said. “I thought she would ride off on a horse, in her beautiful silence, and never die.”

HER FRIENDS SAW A GREAT POIGNANCE IN HER, AND A GREAT YEARNING. BEHIND HER shyness there was an enormous receptivity to the sweetness of life and its grace. A few years ago, friends, a couple, gave a small dinner party for two friends who had just married, and Mrs. Onassis was among the guests. It was an elegant New York gathering, a handful of the renowned of show business and media and society, all gathered to dine on the top floor of a skyscraper. The evening was full of laughter and warm toasts, and the next day her hosts received from Mrs. Onassis a handwritten, hand-delivered letter. “How could there be an evening more magical than last night? Everyone is enhanced and touched by being with two people just discovering how much they love each other. I have known and adored ((him)) for so long, always wishing he would find happiness…Seeing him with ((her)) and getting to know her, I see he has at last—and she so exceptional, whom you describe so movingly, has too. I am so full of joy for both—I just kept thinking about it all day today. What wonderful soothing hosts you are—what a dazzling gathering of their friends—in that beautiful tower, with New York glittering below…”

With New York glittering below. The world, I am told, is full of those notes, always handwritten and lucid and spontaneous—and always correct. “The notes were the way she was intimate” with outsiders, said a friend. The only insiders, really, were her family.

THERE WAS ALWAYS IN HER A SENSE OF HISTORY AND THE SENSE THAT CHILDREN ARE watching—children are watching and history will judge us, and the things that define our times are the great actions we take, all against the odds and with a private valor of which the world will little note nor long remember. But that’s the big thing—the personal struggle, and the sense that our history day by day is forged from it. That was her intuition, and that intuition was a gift to us, for it helped produce the walk down the broad avenues of Washington that day when her heart was broken.

She was one sweet and austere tune. Her family arranged a private funeral, and that of course is what she’d want and that is what is fitting. But I know how I wish she would be buried.

I wish we could take her, in the city she loved or the capital she graced, and put a flag on her coffin and the coffin on a catafalque, and march it down a great avenue, with an honor guard and a horse that kicks, as Black Jack did, and muffled drums. I wish we could go and honor her, those of us who were children when she was in the White House, and our parents who wept that weekend long ago, and our children who have only a child’s sense of who and what she was. I wish we could stand on the sidewalk as the caisson passes, and take off our hat, and explain to our sons and daughters and say, “That is a patriot passing by.” I wish I could see someone’slittle boy, in a knee-length coat, lift his arm and salute.