Peggy Noonan

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.

NEW YORK—“To think of all they’ve put us through—and now they won’t even go away. Who are these people? And why do they think they are necessary to us?” So said a nice liberal Democrat from Manhattan, colorfully indignant recently at Hillary Clinton’s intention to become a senator from the state of New York. Most of the women I know feel the same way. One, a writer and reporter who votes Democratic, told me, “This is how I feel: Lady, keep your hands off my state.” These people are Mrs. Clinton’s base.

Their resistance is understandable. For Mrs. Clinton to launch this candidacy because (as a conservative would see it) she wants to fill the vacuum in her life with our money and our freedom, to launch it (as a liberal might put it) because she’s working out some revenge psychodrama and thinks New York should pay for the therapy;

To say to a state that you have no connection to, no history with, no previously demonstrated interest in—to say to a state whose greatest city you have treated for seven years as your own personal cash machine, a city where your greatest impact has been the traffic nightmares you cause as you motorcade north from Wall Street to Park and 96th in your relentless search for campaign money—

To say to this great state full of gifted people that you deserve to be its senator is an act of such mad boomer selfishness and narcissism that even from the Clintons—the Gimme and Getme of American politics—it is an act of utter and breathtaking gall.
And of course she may well win.

Modern people have a way of absorbing the brazen, factoring it in, in time discounting it. For some New Yorkers, gall isn’t a flaw but a lifestyle choice, one of the seven habits of highly effective people. Mrs. Clinton is a star, and New York likes stars. She will have the support of unions, and New York has unions. She is slippery and pragmatic and won’t play the part of the liberal. She has a human shield in the Secret Service, and won’t be as exposed as other candidates. She’ll raise a lot of money with ease, and she’ll have top-flight media.

She is already running a shrewdly calculated campaign. Take the not so slowly accelerating number of trips to New York that began three months ago—Hillary with children, Hillary at a school, Hillary meeting with local mayors, etc. She knows that this early in a campaign everything is a blur on a TV screen; the blur-impression she is creating is that Mrs. Clinton is here a lot. In another three months it will be Hillary kind of lives here . . . she must have an apartment here . . . she sure cares about us. On Election Day a year and a half from now, some New Yorkers will think she is already our senator, running for re-election. Take the almost accidental slipping into “we New Yorkers” and “our state.” When she first did this two months ago, she knew it would be the lead on the 11 o’clock news: Was it a slip or a declaration? Hillary Clinton says we New Yorkers lead the nation in apple production. The next time she said it, smaller headline. Now she says it with no headline, just the steady drumbeat—we, our, us.

All of this is an attempt to create an impression that will fool the distracted. And if there’s one thing the Clintons have learned in 25 years in politics, it’s that a lot of voters are distracted. This is the word they use when they’re being polite.

What comes next? How will she run? As we think about this, we should keep in mind Nora Ephron’s comment of some years back: “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.”

When Mrs. Clinton announces, she will make a virtue of necessity and request, with a straight face, that she be treated like any other candidate in New York. (Upcoming headline from the New York Press: “Welcome Ms. Putzhead!”) But many people, as she knows, will find it hard to oblige. They can’t help treating a first lady with particular respect.

There will be a war room—there is always a war room with the Clintons—staffed by spinners. They will tell her to act out humility. “Be modest on the stump—admit you don’t know everything. That’s how to put it, ‘everything.’ Say, ‘I love New York and I want to be its advocate, to speak for this state in a national platform and uphold its interests in Washington. But I’m not gonna pretend I know everything. So I want to hear your concerns, so we can begin our dialogue.’”

*   *   *

There will be a speech in which she talks about the first time she came to New York, and saw the glittering towers, and fell in love with the vitality and energy on the streets, and hoped one day to return.

The carpetbagger issue will be cleverly spun. George Will asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Sunday if the Founders didn’t intend a senator from a state actually to be from and of that state. Mr. Schumer said the Founders in their wisdom left it to the states to formulate their own residency requirements. Then he delivered a little homily that was marvelous in its audacity. New York, he said, is full of immigrants who came here to follow their dream. And Hillary too comes here as an immigrant, eager to work and contribute. Mr. Schumer seemed to be road-testing a line. She will use it. Drawing a parallel between herself and new Americans will align her with a growing and significant part of the electorate. Look for speeches in which she speaks of “We newcomers to New York . . .”

Her vinegary, experienced aides will fight like tigers. Harold Ickes, abused in the past by the Clintons, has what appears to be battered-wife syndrome—I can’t leave, he needs me!- -but is a serious ideologue who makes serious use of derived power. James Carville will be even worse than usual. Mr. Carville is on a roll, having just helped to elect Ehud Barak in Israel. He’ll be in charge of spinning her support for a Palestinian state and privately reassuring Jewish supporters. Watch for statements from Mr. Barak a year from now that Israel doesn’t feel at all threatened by Mrs. Clinton’s position.

Because Mrs. Clinton is loyal not to place but to position, she will easily make the leap from patronizing Hot Springs to patronizing Staten Island. She will hide her condescension well and speak to the locals with warmth and humor. The old good-natured crowing about how Arkansas has the biggest watermelons in the country will become new good-natured crowing about the best cannoli in the world.

It will be hard for Republicans to blast her positions in advance, because her pollsters haven’t told her what they are yet. But she will campaign as a moderate. She will stand with police union members on the steps of medium-sized city halls and deliver speeches in which she supports community policing, the death penalty and a ban on “cop killer” bullets. She will stand with nurses’ union members under banners that say “Better Health Care for All” and say we have to fight “so that the hard working people of New York aren’t bankrupted by hospitals and ignored by HMOs.” There will be no specifics.

She will spend a lot of the campaign in grade schools, reading to children and speaking with indignation about how “the forces of cynicism and shortsightedness” want to “take money from our public schools to finance their experiments”—vouchers, charter schools—”and leave our new citizens, our immigrants and those who have been left behind in a brutally broken system.”

She will tirelessly front for the teacher’s unions and oppose the school-liberation movement that she knows would probably help the children she claims to stand for. But she will hew to the party line, gambling that no one will nail her on it.

Which brings us to the media. While they are not in the tank for Mrs. Clinton, they will practice a rampant, subtle, unspoken self censorship. No one in the elite media, the networks and big stations, the national magazines or big newspapers will go after her. They don’t like her, but they associate themselves with her politics, and they will not press her on her previous statements, on the financial scandals, the hidden billing records, the private eyes, the Republican FBI files illegally gotten by the former barroom bouncer she hired. They will congratulate themselves on avoiding sleaze and innuendo. In return they’ll get exclusive interviews.

Intrepid reporters who break from the pack will be reduced to yelling “What about Juanita Broaddrick?” as Mrs. Clinton hurries by the rope line. They’ll be called hecklers and harassers; NBC, CBS and ABC will do pieces on “Hillary Faces the Gauntlet,” taking a wry look at the famously irreverent New York press. Cut to the guy yelling “How did you make that hundred grand?” and then a close-up of Hillary being interviewed by a sympathetic anchor. She’ll says she understands how passionate people get about politics, but that our political process has gotten uglier, which is sad. She will be noble. She may bite her lip.

The entire campaign will be animated by the central insight she has derived in the years since 1991: Voters can be fooled, and mesmerized by repetition. A word here on the strange way they learned. Twenty years ago Ronald Reagan used words and events to communicate truths: America is good; democracy is the best form of government; the government should be our servant and not our master; the Cold War can be won.

Hillary’s generation of liberal political operatives watched, learned and added a variation: They would use words and images not to reveal but to obscure, not to clarify but to confuse. They would mislead their way to power. They felt they were justified: They didn’t think anything Mr. Reagan said was true, and yet the people supported him. Ergo they were manipulated. Ergo we will manipulate too.

Hillary’s New York campaign will show whether they’ve run this way of campaigning into the ground, or turned it into yet another victory.

“I know it’s an amendment. I know it’s in the Constitution. But you know what? Enough is enough.”
—Rosie O’Donnell

Enough is. The audience at Ms. O’Donnell’s show applauded yesterday, and I would have too if I’d been there, not for her call to ban all guns but because Rosie O’Donnell was as genuinely moved by the Colorado shootings as the rest of us, and was at least trying to come up with an answer. The political sentiment expressed was radical but was also the expression of a fact: People have had it. Something is different about this story. We’ve been through it before but the reaction this time suggests some critical mass has been reached.

You could see it even in the unnerving sameness, the jarring predictability of what we saw on television as this very specific tragedy unfolded. We all know the Kabuki now, we know it by heart. First the aerial shots of kids fleeing the shooting, then the shot of the girl sobbing in the arms of her friends; after that the Associated Press photo of the boy with his baseball hat turned backwards, gesturing over a body; then the memorial at the local church with kids sobbing and a stricken pastor speaking; then the yearbook pictures of the perpetrators—”He was kind of quiet, kind of a weird guy”—then the neighbor’s testimony about video games and Marilyn Manson; then the debate: “It’s the gun culture.” “It’s the community.”

We all know how to do this now. We have been here before, and too often. The children, in the midst of the horror, all know how to speak to the cameras and give the reporters what they need.

[Header] Groping for Answers

We all know our part. We all know what’s next. The difference this time, so far, is that the finger pointing seems wan, halfhearted. People seem to be groping for that elusive thing, a satisfying answer—or partial answer—or a piece of the puzzle.

Here’s mine. The kids who did this are responsible. They did it. They killed. But they came from a place and a time, and were yielded forth by a culture.

What walked into Columbine High School Tuesday was the culture of death. This time it wore black trench coats. Last time it was children’s hunting gear. Next time it will be some other costume, but it will still be the culture of death. That is the Pope’s phrase; it is how he describes the world we live in.

The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam.

Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:

. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . said that he turned and said, “You better put some ice on that” . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . . which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiancé . . .

This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.

It is corny to lay it out like this because we all know this. What I’m writing is not news. It is part of the reason that Hollywood people, when discussing these matters, no longer say, “If you don’t like it, change the channel.” They now realize something they didn’t realize 10 years ago: There is no channel to change to. You could sooner remove an ocean than find such a channel.

Who counters the culture of death? The good parents and good families of our children. They are kind enough, sensitive enough to give them religious belief, the knowledge of a God, a sense that life has coherence and purpose. They are generous enough, and loyal enough to the future, to show through their actions that doing your best to show love is good, doing your work is good, contributing is good. “This is what we do,” they do not say but show. “This is how to live.”

But there aren’t enough to go around. Most of the children who get into terrible trouble and wind up with guns in their hands don’t have anyone to counter the culture. There are a number of reasons, but lately I think a great one is this: So many parents themselves are bound down by the culture, by the sickness of it, which they bear as a weight on their shoulders.

And there’s more. We forget, those of us who are middle-aged, that we grew up in a time of saner, less sick-making images and sounds.

For instance, the culture of crime only began to explode in the 1960s. We have lived in it for 30 years, and most of us turned out OK. So we think our children will be OK too. But they never had a normal culture against which to balance the newer, sicker one. They have no reference points to the old, boring normality. We assume they know what we know: “This is not right.” But why would they know that? The water in which they swim is the only water they’ve known.

The television executive Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News Channel, is a modern man, a smart man who lives in the world. A few years ago I was on his TV show to sell a book. He asked me why I am concerned about violence in the media. After all, he said, television and movies are full of comedy and the country isn’t breaking out in laughter. I laughed and said that was true, but here’s the difference: Violence is an inspiration to the unstable. People who are frailer, less stable, are more subject to the dark images they see. Teenagers, who are by nature in greater thrall to sweeps of emotion and sadness, are most vulnerable. If Holden Caulfield with all his angst had lived in modern America—well, that would be a book.

A man called into Christian radio this morning and said a true thing. He said, and I am paraphrasing: Those kids were sick and sad, and if a teacher had talked to one of them and said, “Listen, there’s a way out, there really is love out there that will never stop loving you, there’s a real God and I want to be able to talk to you about him”—if that teacher had intervened that way, he would have been hauled into court.

[Header] Things in Common

Yes, he would have. It occurs to me at the moment that a gun and a Bible have a few things in common. Both are small, black, have an immediate heft and are dangerous—the first to life, the second to the culture of death.

One more thing: I think every intelligent person I know has been having thoughts like this for years, and they don’t want to, and they’re right not to want to, because it just may be true that this is one problem our resourceful and brilliant country cannot solve. The dark genie is out of the bottle, and swims in the seas.

I’ll tell you who could make some progress though, maybe. Hillary Clinton. All the big media people, the owners and anchors, the studio heads and producers, the creators and disseminators, they all admire her. They support her. She could talk to them, She could ignite a “national conversation.” She could get tough. She could take names. It might cost her—they give her money. But she’s an important member of the community. And you know, it takes a village.

We are at the end of a great drama. It does not end entirely happily, but then some of the most important stories don’t.

Much has been said about the effect of the Clinton scandal on our children, and it is true that thanks to him fifth-graders now know that oral sex is not, as the few parents questioned on this before 1998 perhaps said, talking about sex. But the scandal has also highlighted a fact that we know and yet I think have not fully absorbed: There is really no escaping the American culture anymore, no escaping the big story, the current debate, the thing that’s happening. Once, you could live on a farm and raise your children with your own truths and information. Once not so long ago, in our lifetime, you could live in a big-city suburb and do pretty much the same. But now it’s all Phil Spector’s wall of sound.

There was no escaping Bill and Monica the past 13 months; they came at every parent and child who passed the racks at the candy store, they came from every newspaper headline and magazine cover, from every radio show in the car and TV show in the house, from every comic’s monologue and internet chat site. And from there to every school yard, and every kitchen table. Right into the heart of your family.

And so this scandal, which asked whether a president’s character has anything to do with his country, is the scandal that proved that a president’s character has everything to do with his country. Bill Clinton wanted to change America. “I am an agent of change,” he said in 1992. He was righter than he knew.

*   *   *

But life is funny, and often bad things get turned to good. A big storm comes, and after it’s over, neighbors find they’ve become friends, a young mother finds out she is brave. In this storm our children learned something. They saw that a big man did bad things, and then they saw that even though he was very powerful, a king more famous than Caesar, the laws of the common people were still applied to him. The crimes he committed were unearthed and investigated. He was impeached in the House, and his crimes were asserted and debated in the Senate, a great deliberative body. It could not find the will to convict him, but those senators who both were honest and had a heart for what had happened in the country stood up and called the big man’s actions what they were, low and cruel and wrong.

He was brought to the bar of justice, which is the way it’s supposed to be in a place where everyone is equal and nobody is better than anybody else. And even though the president kept his job, there was a thing that happened that we couldn’t see but a lot of people sensed: He was like an army officer stripped of his stripes and insignia in front of the troops. He did in some way get the slap of the glove he deserved. And our children know this, they know he was punished, they know that though he is still there, he also was brought down. This is not a bad lesson for children, especially children in an aging democracy, to learn.

*   *   *

Much has been made of the House managers’ valor, and much will be made, at least among conservatives, of the Senate’s failure to convict. Senators, by and large, did not seem to approach their work in a way that betrayed moral engagement. They simply managed a problem. “Does it matter that that is our constitutional role?” one asked me. Yes, the Founders intended members of the Senate to be men of property who would hold themselves aloof from passing passions. But modern senators are also princes of the city who love their high place; they understood the polls were not with this enterprise, did their best not to offend their base and kept walking.

A senator, an intelligent and thoughtful man, told me the great tragedy is that the American people have, through their support of the president, acquiesced in his abuse of the law. “This may well haunt us down the road,” he said.

But one might also, having witnessed much of the House and Senate debate, feel haunted by a sense that something is wrong with many of the people who are in politics in America now. You don’t get a sense with a lot of them that they actually put their country first; you don’t sense that they spend a lot of time asking themselves questions like, “Is this the right decision, or is it only the convenient one?”

It struck me as I watched these past few months that many of them seem, to some lesser degree, like the man whose actions they were discussing. They just—and this is almost too cornily cynical to be true, but it is—they just seem to want to be famous and powerful and successful and well thought of. They reminded me of what the political strategist David Garth said when I asked him if most of the politicians he knew and had known were driven by belief. “They start with a little philosophy and end with a little philosophy,” he said. “All the rest is hunger.” I am sure that in some ways it was ever thus, and yet I’m also sure that we can’t afford this modern political personality anymore.

*   *   *

Once a few years ago I talked to a man who was going to run for president. I asked, knowing that he had been facing some difficult questions on big issues, how he was doing. “Great,” he said, “we raised $250,000 last week.” True story. Some time back I traveled to talk to another person with national ambitions. He told me he was about to make an important statement about his thinking on a specific issue. I asked him what he was going to say, and he turned to his pollster and shrugged. The shrug said: What am I going to say? And the pollster told him.

A few months ago I watched the big ticker-tape parade that was held for the New York Yankees after they won the World Series. I was surprised to see New York’s then-lieutenant governor in the cavalcade, waving at the crowds from the back of an open car. The next day the papers had a story: She had arrived at the staging site, commandeered a car and told an aide to drive. “I am the second-highest elected official in the state,” she explained as they hit the gas.

More and more, politicians seem like weak egomaniacs, people so weak they let polls push them around and so egomaniacal they have to jump into the parade.

*   *   *

Last Thursday I went to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Presidents are always invited, and presidents always show, and I was curious about what Mr. Clinton would say to 4,000 Evangelicals, as the Senate at that moment considered the charges against him.

He looked gallant and attractive as he entered with Mrs. Clinton. He looks like a good man with that big open face and the small mouth and the big jaw, an imperfect and unclever face, in the sense that the elegant and refined features of a George Sands or a Ralph Fiennes are clever looking. He listened to the speakers with a flamboyant attentiveness, as if he’s sure he’s in every reaction shot. He nodded a lot of encouragement and threw back his head in laughter.

I was struck again that he has none of the diffidence of his hero John F. Kennedy, none of the occasional ironic shyness. Kennedy showed a detached amusement when he saw the nuns jump up and down as the motorcade went by. Mr. Clinton would think they had good taste.

When he rose to speak, it was with his usual confidence and casual intimacy. He said he had worked to “deepen the peace in Bosnia” and “guarantee religious freedom for those who disagree with us.” He told stories of peacekeeping in the Mideast and Northern Ireland. The text was peace but the subtext, revealed in anecdotes in which he played the part of the person who got the warring parties together, was: I am the indispensable man.

Other presidents have asked for prayers at this breakfast, and others have taken part in them, but Mr. Clinton decided to lead them. “I ask you to pray,” he said, nine times, to the Evangelicals. Then things got interesting as he asked them to pray “for yourselves,” that we all be “purged of the temptation to pretend that our willfulness is somehow equal to God’s will.” He told them to listen well to all that had been said this day.

I thought: He’s talking to us as if he is a moral leader and we are the nice people being led. He’s providing moral instruction to a room full of ministers.

Then I thought: And he’s Bill Clinton!

People say he’s shameless, and maybe he is. Certainly he fascinated the crowd, which stood for his words at the end but, after mild applause, silently. But lately when I see him—and lately when I watched the House and Senate debates—I found myself thinking of JFK’s words after he watched Richard Nixon’s sweaty self regard during the famous last press conference in 1962. “No class,” said Kennedy. “No class.”

In politics you show your class by not indulging yourself, by not being an egomaniac, by putting good philosophy and good people first. We will of course survive Bill Clinton and his many dramas, but one wonders if we will easily survive, in the coming decade, all the little Clintons who these days are drawn to politics, who are like him but less so, and some of whom, in the U.S. Senate, now decide his fate.

In the fiery years of Watergate, Jimmy Breslin wrote a book called “How the Good Guys Finally Won.” It was a spirited recounting of how people better than Richard Nixon brought him down. It would strike some of us as odd to remember those days as happy, but that’s how Mr. Breslin saw it, and for a lot of people they were. I know a couple who courted throughout the scandal, who fell in love as they shared inside dope about what Chuck Colson did today and what Martha Mitchell told her hairdresser.

Part of what they felt was the joy of the hunt, the excitement of being a little person able to stand on principle and overpower your big, powerful enemy. This no doubt is what Ben Bradlee was referring to when, during Iran-contra, he was quoted as saying, “I haven’t had as much fun since Watergate!”

There was no such joy in Mudville when Mighty Clinton struck out. There were the tears of Tom DeLay, and the sadness of Chris Shays, and, for those watching at home, this: the picture of the murmuring, milling floor of the House as the first article of impeachment got 218 votes and passed. You couldn’t tell anything had happened from what you saw; no one seemed to notice. I cleared my throat and said to my son, “They impeached the president,” and that was the only sound.

*   *   *

Now it’s Monday morning, we’ve all had time to digest and absorb the astounding Allan Drury novel that unfolded this weekend, and one should say it: The good guys finally won.

And it was moving, because they did it against the odds, and they stood on principle, and they didn’t let the polls rule them, and they acted in a way that may have put them in both short-term and long-term political jeopardy. But they did what they thought was right. And down the road Republicans may see these nerve-jangling days as the time when their party, long buffeted by doubt and confusion, began to find its soul again.

It was Henry Hyde, stupendous and tremendous Henry Hyde, who explained better than anyone, I thought, what was at issue. “The question before this House,” he said, “is quite simple. It is not a question of sex. Sexual misconduct and adultery are private acts and none of Congress’s business. It is not a question of lying about sex. The matter before the House is a question of lying under oath. This is a public act. This is called perjury. The matter before the House is a question of the willful, premeditated, deliberate, shameless corruption of the nation’s system of justice. Perjury and obstruction of justice cannot be reconciled with the office of the president of the United States. That, and nothing other than that, is the issue before us.”

He was followed by a series of Republicans who spoke soberly, factually. The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial.

It was strange and Druryesque that the most electric moment of the Clinton impeachment was the resignation of Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston, when he said of the president, “You, sir, may resign your post,” and the Democrats hissed, “You resign!” and he held up his hand, and looked at them, and told them he would. That breathtaking moment, the hooting and the hand and the announcement, seemed to me revealing of different styles, of almost characterological differences between Democrats and Republicans these days. The Democrats in Congress now are like the young Chuck Colson, partisan, ruthless and tough. The Republicans seemed like the young William Cohen, thoughtful and stricken.

*   *   *

Sunday morning, James Carville went on “Meet the Press” and did what his wife calls his nuclear winter routine, threatening the president’s foes and promising to punish them. You’d expect the president’s friends to be thinking, pondering, ratcheting down the rhetoric. Their man just became the first elected American president to be impeached. It ought to concentrate the mind. It would be more understandable if they were thinking, “If only . . . if only he had reacted differently.”

Their friend was the defendant in a sexual-harassment case. He got blindsided by an embarrassing question while under oath. He did a wrong but human thing, he panicked and lied. Then he went home. He had time to think. If only that day—or one day in the months afterward—he had said, “I was asked under oath if I’d done something wrong. I was surprised and ashamed and I lied. But I want you to know it is true, I had a relationship for two years that was wrong, I ended it, I was and am ashamed of it, and now you have this information and must do with it what you will. I’ll pay whatever fine and face whatever censure. But I can’t drag America through the mud any more over this.”

What would have happened if Mr. Clinton had done this? It would have been a five-day story, with jokes from Jay Leno and a busy buzz in the media and new attacks on his character from his opponents. And then: nothing. It all would have gone away. We could have gotten it behind us. And he would be a successful president today, the luckiest two-termer in all U.S. history, a victor shining in the lights.

Instead Mr. Clinton turned a private transgression into a public trauma. He burrowed in and continued to lie, with fervor and shamelessness, sometimes under oath and sometimes to the country.

That is why he was impeached on Saturday, because he didn’t put his country first, which still comes as a shock because it is the job of the president to put the country first; that’s what he was hired to do. It is strange that his people don’t seem to learn, that they still respond with threats and ugliness, that instead of hanging their heads they hold pep rallies at the White House, as if celebrating another jolly triumph.

It is hard to feel the full human sympathy for Mr. Clinton that one would normally feel for one who has paid a high price for his actions. Throughout the yearlong trauma he forced the country through, he smirked and maneuvered and muscled people. He acted as if he were still in Little Rock, still up against legislators in plaid suits who own the Chevy dealership. When Bill Clinton was governor and it was the Yalie vs. the yokels, the yokels folded when you leaned on them. But Washington is not Little Rock. This is why David Broder told Sally Quinn, “He trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place to trash.” And Lindsey Graham and Chris Cox and Bill McCollum are not yokels.

*   *   *

Richard Nixon was a strange man, gifted and dogged, self-pitying and morose, but even he at the end aroused sadness and sympathy. You could see that he was, as one of his close friends told me, “phony tough.” He wasn’t really a hard man, it just made him feel better to talk like he was. But Bill Clinton really is hard. That’s why it’s so difficult to feel sympathy for him, because when you look at him you see not the tears inside but the coldness.

Nixon’s people got their hearts broken by history. Pat Buchanan once told me they were close in that White House because they felt so under siege. Mr. Clinton’s people have never seemed under siege. They are attackers, aggressors. For a solid year they’ve been all over the tube, every day, 24-7, and they reflected the style of their boss: finger pointing, accusing.

I don’t recall anyone who works for him ever granting any decency or right spirit to the other side. I can’t recall one of them saying, “I understand the serious issues involved, I understand there are decent people on the other side who feel that important principles must be upheld here, I respect their views, but mine are different.” Instead it was all the smirking snarl, the snarling smirk, all “You’re partisan!,” “You’re far-right haters” leading a “right-wing putsch.”

Nixon’s people were phony tough, like him, and had hearts that could be broken. But Mr. Clinton’s people really are hard, and are proud of it. That’s why they called it the War Room.

But they hurt him with their toughness. They couldn’t help him speak to the country like a fully formed man with a fully formed heart, because Mr. Clinton surrounded himself with men like himself. They couldn’t give him what he needed, because they didn’t have it either. And that too is one of the reasons he was impeached.

But the final reason comes from Sam Ervin, the great old senator of Watergate fame. “God is not mocked,” he said. Mr. Clinton lied under oath after promising to tell the truth, so help him God. And God is not mocked.

*   *   *

A final image, one that I suspect will stay with me when I think of these days. One of the networks kept showing serial views of the White House as the debate proceeded, and you could see the Washington Monument in the background, that tall, dull monument that yet seems to mean something to people, to say something to them about the permanence and inviolability of our democracy. It’s still covered with girding top to bottom, being cleaned after years of getting dirtied by pollution.

It seemed to me the perfect metaphor for what had happened in the House this weekend. They were trying to take a grand old institution and make it clean again, make it shine like new. It was the right thing to be doing. It’s how the good guys finally won.

Newt Gingrich’s singular place in politics could be seen over the weekend in this: He got hundreds of sincere tributes from people who were sincerely delighted he was leaving.

He was right to go, right to take the election’s blame on his back and bear it away. His leadership had failed, his party had lost focus, and, as happens in politics, his friends had come and gone while his enemies had accumulated. His revolution had faltered, and by own standards. In 1995, near the end of the first hundred days of the 104th Congress, I asked him at what point he would know if this was an interesting moment in history, or the true beginning of something. “I’ll know two years, four years, six years from now,” he said. Meaning: when the Republican majority in the House and Senate either grows and settles in or doesn’t and dwindles.

But before he goes we should give him his due, and not only because he deserves it. In giving it we can see how far Republicans have come the past 20 years. We can probably see some lessons for the future too.

[Header] ‘Frisky Puppy’

Mr. Gingrich moved history. He both was shaped by his times and shaped them, and with genuine vision. “He knows where he wants to go,” Margaret Thatcher said of him in the summer of 1995. “And he has tons of guts.” Then she paused. “Bit of a frisky puppy, though.”

To say the least. Tons of guts is part of what got him to the speakership, along with an almost deranged optimism and imagination.

Maybe the last he needed most. Mr. Gingrich walked into Congress for the first time in 1978, in almost the exact middle of the 40-year reign of the Democratic majority. He looked around, saw their complete domination of the agenda, their complete control of the committees, their refusal to let minority views on taxes and spending and foreign affairs be debated or even heard. He saw their wild frustration of the Republicans, saw their leaders’ attempts to be players by “living with reality” and “accepting the hand you’re dealt,” saw that they had become low-budget liberals who’d grown comfortable with the status quo. He watched the only poll that matters in Congress, the one that comes every two years when the voters vote, and saw that even though they always told exit pollsters they didn’t like or respect Congress, 90% of the time they re-elected their own congressmen.

He saw the disrespect he got in the press when his ideas got any attention at all, saw the unreturned phone calls pile up, saw it all and said with the sunny optimism of the idiot or the visionary: We can change this.

We can change it. For 16 years that was his chant. I first him heard say it in 1984, when he dropped by to visit some of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters. We were known as optimists and we were on his side, but I didn’t think he could do it. I told him that in 1995, and he was surprised. He said, “Ten years ago I assumed I’d be here. I assumed I’d be helping to reshape the country.”

Why? I asked.

“Robert the Bruce. Robert the Bruce and the spider.” In the old story the great Scottish warrior, exhausted after a series of lost battles, sits on a rock in the forest and weeps. And he sees a little spider trying over and over to weave a strand to carry him upward. And a strand breaks and he falls and a strand breaks and he falls. And finally a strand holds, and he climbs, and builds.

“If you think about the spider, why wouldn’t you assume I’d eventually make it?”

This makes him sound charming. Would that he had been.

At the beginning of the hundred days I saw—anyone could see—what his problem with the public might become. He was speaking to members of the Republican National Committee in a Washington hotel. His famous book deal had just become public and he was under heavy criticism. He was furious at the attacks. Haley Barbour, then the Republican national chairman, spoke to him before he went on. Don’t talk about the book contract, he said; talk about the Contract With America.

Mr. Gingrich got up and quoted Mr. Barbour. Then he tore into his critics, saying their hatred of him was personal but not only personal. “I am a genuine revolutionary,” he said, “and they are genuine reactionaries.” He said they would do everything they could to stop him, but he would not be stopped.

The audience was rapt, almost frightened by the ferocity of his words and his delivery, which was one long blast of anger.

I thought at the time: It is good to see a political figure so uncontrolled by spin and its doctors, good to see one explain what he thinks is driving the political situation in which he is embroiled. But doesn’t his fury detract from the revolution? He makes the story himself, and not the merits of legislation.

His great virtue was his great vice: For 20 years he fought what seemed a losing fight with courage and aggression. Now he was where he wanted to be. And his spectacular aggression, which had lifted him up, also brought him down, and made the country turn away.

Mr. Gingrich in those days compared himself often to Eisenhower and Grant. But it was another general he put you in mind of. Patton couldn’t stop punching forward; thus was Sicily liberated. Then he slapped a soldier.

Mr. Gingrich was like Bill Clinton in that he didn’t really understand why you might not want him in your face all the time, on the tube, in the news conference, at the speech. He didn’t see why people in 1995 who’d experienced two years of Clintonmania might not see Newtomania as a relief.

He did not sense that an unshared thought can have power, that the face you have when you have an observation that you’re too circumspect to share is an interesting face, and an interesting face has a certain mystery—What’s he thinking?—and mystery has certain power.

His friends said it wasn’t Newt, it was the media. The media in Sam Rayburn’s day was Scotty Reston with a notebook. Now it’s 50 TV shows and 500 radio shows, a huge sucking maw that demands statements and sound, a thousand technicians with boom mike chasing him as if they were Ahab and he was the whale.

He should have dived deep, disappeared and now and then sent up a riveting, powerful spray. Instead he held news conferences every day, bickering with a hostile press. It was like the daily acting out of a bad marriage in which neither party likes or understands the other and both see no way out.

He rose of course not as a conciliator but as an aggressor. He wouldn’t dodge an argument, he’d start one; he wouldn’t shade a truth, he’d assert it, colorfully and memorably, often to the empty House, on C-Span. He felt he was reaching the American political class, the activists, the sophisticated couch potatoes surfing in the night.

He thought he was doing what the left said to do: Speak truth to power. And what he did in those days was part of the reason the Democrats hated him, and would hate him forever. And part of why the Republican establishment didn’t know what to do with him.

And they didn’t.

Lord Darby, born to royalty, once tried to explain to Queen Victoria the problem with her new prime minister. “Mr. Disraeli has had to make his position, and men who make their position will say and do things which are not necessary to be said and done by those for whom positions are provided.”

Many members of Mr. Gingrich’s party—the Danforths, the Heinzes, the Bakers—had come from comfort and were calmer.

Mr. Gingrich was an outsider, from the Army-brat middle class, his family was always moving, and he was always the new kid .He was an outsider as a college professor who was a conservative, as a House member who was a right-wing back-bencher. At the Reagan White House they saw him as a big mouth with no class. The Bush White House hated him for breaking with the president over taxes. He was the kind of outsider whose vision of himself was so shaped by his differentness, his outsiderness, that he couldn’t get it through his head that he was now an insider. He couldn’t feel comfortable about it because for at least 30 years, in the geography of his mind, insiders occupied a territory called Corruption, or Sold Out. Outsiders lived in a land called Decency. To be an insider was to move to a neighborhood with better houses and worse people.

But the leaders of his own party looked down on him in the 1970s and ‘80s, and it wasn’t lost on him. Talking about it once, he said, “Do I know that despite my best efforts to help Ronald Reagan, do I know that Jim Baker and Dick Darman thought I was a jerk? Sure.”

He looked at me challengingly. And continued: “Did I know that all during the Bush years, while I was trying to save Bush, that Darman was trying to destroy me? Sure. But that only tells me who I think I am. I’m a historic figure. What I was 11 or 12 years old a friend gave me an old clipping of Lincoln’s defeats. I carried it around for years. Lincoln lost five times between being a congressmen and winning the presidency. Five straight losses, all in the 1850s.

“So my attitude is, a lot of people who will go down in history as dumb, or interesting secondary figures like Baker, undervalued me when I was doing what I had to do to be me. It didn’t offend me. I didn’t really like it but it was not—it would have cost too much . . . to have noticed it.”

Michael Barone wrote an essay on Mr. Gingrich, saying, “Like Charles DeGaulle, he has believed from childhood that he has a great destiny, that he will reshape the nation. Like DeGaulle he has overcome setbacks, mistakes, ridicule and opposition, and has persevered in his stands until his confidence no longer seemed ridiculous. Like DeGaulle he believes that his nation has a special mission. And like DeGaulle he has heaped scorn on his opponents and cold bloodedly ended the careers of those who have stood in his way. Gingrich cannot be unaware of the parallels — in one of his [college] lectures he talks about DeGaulle and himself in the same breath.”

But as DeGaulle himself once said: The graveyards are full of indispensable men. And you cannot lose as badly as Mr. Gingrich did in the past few years and survive.

The lessons? Some obvious ones, I suppose. It would be good for Republican leaders to take a deep breath and remember how far we’ve come since the day Newt Gingrich walked into Congress. Good to remember that fierceness doesn’t always work, that the media is a steamroller that shatters and crushes big sharp rocks but leaves sturdy pebbles undisturbed. Good to remember to calm down, lead, act not as if you’re a minority member giddily thrust to the top but a majority member soberly leading. Stick to first principles, don’t distract with personal drama, be serious and not clever.

And probably good to see this: We’re at the end of a 20-year arc and the beginning of a new era.

In 1978, when Mr. Gingrich entered the House, the tax-cutting Proposition 13 swept California and Ronald Reagan lay in wait. The modern conservative movement, reflecting the will and wants of the people on taxes and spending and cultural issues and foreign affairs, began to fully emerge. The movement became a coalition, which yielded a realignment, and Mr. Reagan was twice swept into the White House. And, in 1994, Republicans won Congress for the first time in 40 years.

And now we’re in another time. Newt’s uncalm visage, the failed government shutdown, Oklahoma City and the releasing of the president’s grand jury testimony left the men and women who had long stood for middle America looking extreme, radical, strange.

And middle America itself has changed in 20 years, inevitably, perhaps profoundly. And we are all of us still catching up with the changes, which have been cultural, attitudinal, and can be seen most dramatically in the fact that a president whose behavior would a generation ago have resulted in immediate dismissal is today secure, unremoved and popular.

[Header] New Terrain

The new era brings its own new terrain. The former Bush domestic policy adviser Jim Pinkerton says the lesson to start with is this: “There’s the realm of politics and there’s the realm of morality, and sometimes they intersect and sometimes they don’t. Clinton will get whatever he deserves in the hereafter, but in the here and now he’s won. And those who wish to contend with him in 1998 must take that into account.”

And here’s another idea. It is the guidance and inspiration to be found in looking again at the life of Abraham Lincoln, a great moral and political leader who spent the years before he took the presidency being against slavery and speaking against slavery and inching the country along to see it his way. He sometimes frustrated his friends and delighted his foes, but he inched each day closer to the prize, through calm leadership and with a human, humorous, appealing face. Great personal qualities deployed politically: He made it hard to hate him.

That’s what Republicans must do. That’s what Newt Gingrich didn’t do, couldn’t do.