Peggy Noonan

Democrats, when they’re feeling alarmed or mischievous, will often say that Ronald Reagan would not recognize the current Republican Party. I usually respond that John F. Kennedy would not recognize the current Democratic Party, and would never succeed in it.

Both men represented different political eras but it’s forgotten that they were contemporaries, of the same generation, Reagan born in 1911 and JFK in 1917. They grew up in the same America in different circumstances, one rich, one poor, but with a shared national culture. By the 1950s, when JFK was established in the political system and Reagan readying to enter it, bodacious America had settled into its own dignity. It had a role in the world and needed to act the part. Both men valued certain public behaviors and the maintenance of a public face. It involved composure, coolness, a certain elegance and self-mastery. They felt they had to show competence and professionalism. They knew they were passing through history at an elevated level, and part of their job was to hold high its ways and traditions.

Their way is gone, maybe forever. Democrats blame this on Donald Trump, and in the area of historical consciousness he is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.

Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.

Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious. The lack of professionalism, the incompetence is the kind of thing that not only shocks a party but shadows it. They can’t run a tiny caucus in a tiny state but they want us to believe they can reinvent American health care? Monday night when the returns were supposed to be coming in, it was like the debut of ObamaCare when the website went down.

Iowa, which for almost half a century has had a special mystique, has lost it. It will never be first-in-the-nation again. The candidates, who worked so hard for so long, were denied their victory moment. Did the movers, operatives and networkers who were behind the app and the technology have any consciousness of what they were changing, of the history they were changing, if they failed? The professionals were detached from their own voters, and not invested enough to give them a functioning primary.

You know what Iowa really tells us? Anything can happen now—anything. Because rigor in politics is waning, the old disciplines are not holding, old responsibilities are being thrown off. It was a failure of competence by people who were just passing through and burnishing their personal brands.

What a disaster.

And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.

“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.

She introduced him rudely, without the usual encomiums. Oh, snap.

The classy lady was not classy. She forgot she has a higher responsibility than to her base, but—yes, how corny—to her country, the institution, the young who are watching and just getting a sense of how to behave in the world.

If she was compelled to show symbolic fealty to the “resistance” she should have taken it outside the chamber. That place is where Daniel Webster debated; she occupies the chair of Henry Clay and “Mr. Sam.”

And she set a template: Now in the future all House Speakers who face presidents from the opposing party at the State of the Union will have to be rude fools.

Remember those videos that used to be all over the internet, with members of the Korean congress punching each other in the face on the floor of the legislature? Man, we used to laugh. Now in the future that can be us.

This is how a great lady becomes just another hack.

Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” Those who came slouched angrily in their seats, looking down, refusing to rise for all the heroes in the balcony. Why do they think that is a good look?

Those who didn’t come were unprofessional, but it was also a practical failure. They abandoned the field and let the Congress of the United States look like one big, cheering, unified bastion of boisterous Republicans, with a few grim women dressed in white in the corner. That’s what you want America to see?

The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute. There were the usual boasts: “The unemployment rate is the lowest in half a century”— but they had force in the aggregate. The policy that was emphasized (opportunity zones, expanded vocational education, neonatal research combined with a call to ban late-term abortions, expanded child credits) combined with the heroes in the balcony (a Border Patrol agent, a kid trying to get into a charter school, the brother of a victim of crime) was powerful and rich in inference.

More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.

This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.

Yes it was bread and circuses, and yes it was like a reality TV show. There should be a word for “I know I’m being manipulated but I am moved anyway.” We need that word because it is the essence of our entire media/entertainment/political culture. But if you weren’t moved by the mother of the baby born prematurely and the 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman there’s something wrong with you, and in your attempts to maintain a fair minded detachment you’ve become distanced from your fellow humans.

Republicans in the Reagan era used to say, and think, that we were the Main Street party, not the Wall Street one. In the three decades since, small-town America has fallen apart and Main Street disappeared into broken up, lonely, ex-urban places. Mr. Trump is saying he’s for the people who live there, in Main Street’s diaspora.

Whatever happens with him, that is the party’s future. Whatever happens with the Democrats they cannot afford another week like this.

Here is something small but big that happened this week and speaks of a generation gap within journalism. I write from the perspective of having worked the overnight shift at CBS News when I started out, choosing stories off the wires to lead hourly newscasts. I was young, and I sometimes got it wrong in terms of news judgment.

Last Sunday, when Kobe Bryant died, when word was just spreading, a political reporter for the Washington Post tweeted a link to a Daily Beast report from 2016 detailing a charge of sexual assault against Bryant. The 2003 case was settled out of court; it looked ugly and seemed believable in the broad outlines. The Post reporter apparently wanted people to remember that Bryant’s was not a blameless life and that the abuse of women is real.

The internet erupted and the reporter said she received death threats. The editor of the paper (hello boomer) emailed her that she was damaging the Post and should take her tweet down. She was put on paid suspension. Hundreds of Post staffers signed a letter protesting her punishment for merely tweeting out a news story. She was reinstated.

All this received big coverage in the press. Here is an aspect I haven’t seen mentioned. It has to do with moral imagination and respect, with empathy and the essence of tragedy. These are things it can take time to know.

Bryant had just died. The wreckage was literally still smoking. People were just learning what had happened. It was a national shock—a helicopter falls out of the sky and this 41-year-old sports hero and his beautiful 13-year-old child and seven of their friends and colleagues were suddenly taken from life, snatched away. Fans in Los Angeles, with nothing to do with their grief, spontaneously gathered at the Staples Center, where they wept. In the news reports you could see people grappling with that very modern question: Why am I sobbing at the death of someone I never met? What was it that he meant to me, how did a stranger reach into me so?

Part of the grief was surely about how life can turn on a dime: nothing is guaranteed, “You know not the hour.”

But the point: The wreckage was still smoking. People were absorbing. And, as Americans used to say, “There is a time and a place.” That is not the moment to send out on social media, from an account that includes the great name of your journalistic institution, your reminder of perhaps the worst thing Kobe Bryant did in his life.

In newsrooms they were preparing his obituary, working hard to get all the facts right, to capture his athletic greatness, to get at his hold on the public imagination, and to make it all hang together in a way that has force and sensitivity.

In the obit of a public figure you must absolutely include information on the subject’s major scandals or embarrassments. This is a journalistic and even historical necessity. There is no “speak no ill of the dead” in journalism. Often you must. Sometimes it’s the lead. Sometimes it’s the entire story.

But usually it’s not. Here is how the tweet struck me. It was like you go to a wake for a neighborhood man who suddenly died, and everyone’s grieving, and some guy walks up to the family and says, “Sorry about your loss. But let’s face it, he did embezzle funds from the bank.”

The reporter apparently has a cause, and it’s #MeToo (hello millennial), and she has written of her own memories of abuse, and she appears to be quite the warrior. (It was probably better for journalism when reporters hid their causes, but that’s another piece.)

It is good to have respect for your own trauma, and your causes, but of course what happened Sunday wasn’t about her but about the dead, and the grief that was washing over millions.

All this is connected to something larger, a more difficult question we have trouble getting right in the age of causes. It is that you can’t judge somebody’s life by the worst thing he ever did. The worst thing he ever did is part of the story but it’s not “the story.” It’s too strict a standard, it’s not realistic, and though it pretends to be unblinking, it is really unknowing. A life, even a small one, is a big, dense, effortful thing, a real drama that can’t always be easily resolved.

Those who threatened and crudely insulted the reporter were idiots, and in a nation of 330 million you’ll have a lot of them.

But for those who were offended, it’s not that they’re stupid and blind. It’s not, “They’re men and don’t want to hear the truth of what men do.” It’s that they take it as assaultive when you smack them while they’re weeping. And they rightly resent it when they sense you are opportunistically using a painful national event to score points for your cause.

It would strike them as cold.

*   *   *

We end with what is ending, the impeachment trial.

We’ve written of the need for Senate witnesses, especially John Bolton and Joe Biden. The question may be settled before this column goes to print. If, as expected, the Republicans refuse more witnesses, the French saying will be true: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.”

They will pay a high reputational price, and the president’s position will be further clouded: “Sure he got off—in a rigged trial.”

The impeachment rested on a charge against the president. The Democrats insisted he did it. The Republicans had said he didn’t. Now a Republican insider has apparently come forward with an unpublished book that says, “He did it.”

It would be wrong not to subpoena him and get him under oath. This is a trial. Mr. Bolton has key evidence. It cannot be justly ignored.

It is that simple, and history will condense it down to that.

The rationales for refusal don’t hold. “It would take too long.” It doesn’t have to if the president, the Republican majority and the chief justice agreed it should happen. If the president were wise he would waive executive privilege, make a great show of welcoming more testimony, take the blows, and emerge—as he knows he will in any case—acquitted.

And if it took longer, so what?

“We want to get this thing done, make it go away.” It won’t go away, the president’s impeachment is in the history books.

“The House should have done it.” That’s a process argument, not a justice argument. You’re supposed to be the steadier, more mature chamber.

“It will only help the Democrats.” But you never know what is going to happen in testimony. Mr. Bolton would hurt the president, surely. Would Mr. Biden? His presence would get Republicans showily and for the first time where Trump supporters want to go: to families cashing in on proximity to power, to swamped-up Washington and its nefarious ways.

That wouldn’t hurt Republicans—it is their subject matter.

“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” It will be a cloud over those who made it.

We must take our satisfactions where we can. It is not terrible for the young that they witness a certain gravity emanating from Congress. There’s a lot to be learned and reminded of when we speak of the genius of the Founders and quote Hamilton, Madison and the others as they created the political arrangements by which we live. These were not shallow men. It’s good to be reminded that for all our flaws as a nation and a people, we came from something magnificent and are the heirs of that magnificence. It is good for the young to see our representatives enact, sometimes actually model, personal dignity. Impeachment manager Rep. Zoe Lofgren, we’re looking at you. It’s good to see those hallowed halls actually seem hallowed.

Scott Fitzgerald, near the end of his life and bruised at thinking his work was forgotten, wrote to his daughter that when he considered, objectively, his gifts and the price he paid to realize them, he thought he saw in his career “some sort of epic grandeur.” That is what we too can see, objectively, when we bother to look at our career as a nation, and a people.

I see all this as an unanticipated side benefit of the impeachment proceedings this week. And it seems to me there’s something new to be gained.

I believe the president is guilty of shaking down the government of Ukraine for personal political gain, that he has rightly been embarrassed for this, and that the fit final punishment with an election coming was censure, not impeachment. But we are where we are, and the proceedings can be enriched if both parties unclench and let this thing broaden out.

The key to deepening things, capturing the essence of the argument and satisfying the majority of the people is three words: Witnesses, witnesses, witnesses. History deserves them; the public wants them, according to polls, and will not be fully served without them.

On this, the parties are at loggerheads, in stalemate. Senate Democrats would like certain witnesses but not others. They think they’ve made their case—why open it to unexpected hazards? You never know what will be said in testimony. Republicans don’t want new witnesses. The House had plenty of them, questioned them, drew up the articles based on their testimony. The Senate is here to weigh them, not develop new evidence. Also there are aspects of executive privilege.

Both parties are thinking of their own needs, which is what parties do. But when you open the door to impeachment, there’s a third party in the room, History. It too has its needs, and they are less selfish than those of the political parties. History wants information. It wants data and testimony. It wants as near as possible to know and understand the story.

It will be surprising if the president doesn’t come around to backing more witnesses. As the Democrats make their case against him, he will begin to seethe: I want more people defending me! I want my guys! He’ll have a conversation with Mitch McConnell, and we’ll be off to the races.

And why not? Take the time. Throw everything against the wall, let historians sort it out.

How many witnesses? Four major ones in four days would not be unreasonable.

John Bolton and Joe Biden? Yes.

Mr. Bolton was Donald Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. He was in the thick of it but apparently apart from it. He spoke of the Ukraine scheme disparagingly, is said to have called it a drug deal. He called Rudy Giuliani, the apparent instigator, “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” according to the testimony of Fiona Hill, the president’s adviser on Russia and Europe.

Mr. Bolton is a central fact witness. The story is incomplete without him, and his testimony could prove crucial. He is respected among conservatives, who know him from Fox News; he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If you want to break through to Trump supporters who think this whole case is a big, ginned-up hoax, get him. He has already said he will testify if called.

As for Mr. Biden, it is fair to ask: What does he have to do with this? He’s not a fact witness. He wasn’t a participant in the scheme; he was its intended victim. Donald Trump apparently thought he was the likely Democratic 2020 nominee. So he muscled Ukraine to embarrass Mr. Biden by publicly announcing an investigating of his son Hunter. Mr. Trump apparently thought then-Vice President Biden had pressed for the firing of a Ukraine prosecutor who he thought was moving against Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian company.

Mr. Trump’s great defense is that he was simply pressing the new government of Ukraine to be harder on corruption in general than it had been in the past. Is it unfair to ask Mr. Biden to testify on his approach to and actions on Ukrainian corruption when he was vice president? Is it unfair to ask how he viewed his son’s job with the company of a nation on which the senior Mr. Biden held portfolio? No. And it would satisfy half the country: “Good, we’re finally talking about the swamp and its corruptions.”

Mr. Biden was a U.S. senator for 36 years. He knows that chamber, his friends are there. He’s a public figure of long standing. It would not be unduly burdensome or overwhelming for him to be invited into that arena to expand the public record.

It would be high-risk, high-reward. If Mr. Biden bobbles it when he’s questioned about Ukraine, its country’s corruption and his son, it could ruin his presidential candidacy. On the other hand if he brings it to Mr. Trump, if he makes the case he has been the object of calumnies and speaks in defense of the career public servants the president abused, such as Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who lost her job in the Ukraine scheme—well, that could make Joe Biden president.

This would be pretty exciting. Hunter Biden shouldn’t be hauled in. He has never sought public office and is portrayed in the press as in perpetual personal crisis. Compelling him to testify would be not thoroughness but sadism.

The Democrats should want—History would want—the testimony of Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, also in the center of things during the Ukraine scheme. He isn’t known to have attempted to thwart the president’s actions. Did he? If not, why not?

In return for Mr. Mulvaney, Republicans should want Rudy Giuliani. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters hope for a colorful, even intemperate defense of the president. Rudy’s their man. If Ukraine was a drug deal, it looks as if he ran the cartel. Get him in and under oath. First question: What were you doing?

Then end this. The 67 votes needed to convict won’t materialize. Scrub this saga as thoroughly as possible and then leave it to history, which will find in it valuable material as to the ways and mores of early 21st-century American politics.

Impeachment is moving forward and going nowhere. There is new information but it doesn’t really tell those who’ve paid attention anything they didn’t know. Putative administration operative Lev Parnas said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday that the president knew everything about efforts to lean on Ukraine. But this was clear in testimony throughout the impeachment hearings. His own ambassador to the European Union said it! The ambassador to Ukraine knew she was being schemed against, lost her job because of it, and spelled it out under oath.

It’s icing on a cake that’s already sagging. The president will be acquitted for a host of reasons, from partisanship to a prudential judgment that his actions don’t warrant removal with a presidential election 10 months away.

What did Speaker Nancy Pelosi gain by playing her monthlong game of peekaboo, waiting to send the charges to the Senate? She withheld from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell papers he didn’t wish to receive and she saw that as leverage? It appears she was playing for time as investigators tried to develop more evidence. But again, for what? The president couldn’t look more guilty.

Meantime impeachment as a dramatic and distinct event lost all momentum. In the month after the House vote the story lost lift, then got lost in the Iran drama. This second stage feels not like the continuation of the first but a brand new second impeachment, which a lot of people will experience as overkill.

On the creepiness of the signing ceremony for the impeachment articles: Modern presidents have always held such ceremonies and signed big, happy legislation with many pens. Lyndon B. Johnson liked clutching bunches of them in his thick, meaty fist and handing them out personally. But the impeachment of a president is a grave and unhappy event. It’s not celebratory. Enacting triumphalism was shallow and looked like a tell. Why pens, why not a scalp?

Serious people understand the implications of things. Impeachment has now been normalized. It won’t be a once-in-a-generation act but an every-administration act. Democrats will regret it when Republicans are handing out the pens.

To the Democratic debate Tuesday night in Des Moines.

It contained my favorite panel-candidate moment of this cycle.

Bright young woman journalist: “Sen. Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the election?”

Sanders: “That is correct.”

BYWJ: “Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”

Warren: “I disagreed.”

It was like Judge Judy on drugs:

“Ernie, did you hit Peggy on the head?”

“No, of course not.”

“Peggy, how did you feel when Ernie hit you on the head?”

The moment went uncorrected. This is why people hate the press.

I found myself watching Elizabeth Warren. She has proved she can take a punch and throw one (“Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections.”) Of the candidates in their 70s she’s the highest-energy and most indefatigable. Actually she’d have high energy for a 50-year-old. All candidates now have to be actors but she’s a good one, telling her stories over and over, her voice growing husky at the moving parts.

Her challenge is not that she’s a woman, it is her policies, and maybe something else. I watched the debate with a man who’s sophisticated observer with no dog in the fight. Ms. Warren was doing her magical thinking about how universal Medicare won’t cost people a thing, it’s all savings with a few small tax increases on people we don’t like. I asked aloud, “Does she believe what she says or does she know it’s make-believe?”

He considered: “She did.” he said. That sounds right, that she started with belief but at this point sees the holes in what she’s saying. She’s caught, because she’s said it too often and now can only repeat it.

Bernie Sanders has the same magical thinking about the cost of things, who’ll pay, and what effect that will have on the nation’s life. But he gets away with it because he’s a declared socialist. His supporters don’t want realism and his foes don’t expect it. Ms. Warren says she’s a capitalist with a critique, so she faces a different burden.

There was also in the debate a kind of detachment from real life. A voter asked: “How will you prioritize accessing quality affordable child care?” The candidates were indignant that women can be held from the workforce by the high cost of child care. Pete Buttigieg vowed to get “federal dollars” involved, and spoke of stunted careers. Ms. Warren said, “My plan is universal child care for everyone.” She told of how she was almost forced “off track” by child care problems. Mr. Sanders said, “Every psychologist in the world knows 0 through 4 are the most important years of human life, intellectually and emotionally.”

No one spoke with compassion for parents, for mothers who forgo the earnings and status (“I have a job”) and relationships (“I’m not lonely all day”) of having a job to stay home with kids under 4. No one said that actually a lot of parents think the most important thing is to stay home and raise the kids, that many struggle to do it, and we might want to help them. No one noted we don’t give any particular honor to those who stay home, even though our culture depends on them.

What seemed to guide all the answers was a technocratic assumption that it’s best for little children to be raised by well-compensated strangers as mom is absorbed into the workforce, where she’ll finally achieve full self-actualization.

It was all so . . . cold. And detached from real life as many live it.

Meanwhile in full-employment America, Donald Trump is taking out terrorists with drones and announcing trade deals with China and seemingly weathering every storm. In the China ceremony Tuesday, in the East Room, after a booming “Hail to the Chief,” with a palpable sense of triumph filling the room, with the golden frames of the great portraits shining, Mr. Trump rolled off the names of the CEOs in the audience. There were a lot! It was in a way a fabulous celebration of the riches produced by capitalism. But it also seemed an almost sinister declaration of the intimate ties between great U.S. corporations and the federal government. The CEO of Boeing is here, the chief of eBay. “How’s General Electric doing, Nels?” “Ryan Lance, ConocoPhillips, you’re doing fantastically well!” “I made a lot of bankers look very good, but you’re doing a great job.” “Ken Griffin, Citadel, what a guy he is.”

It was reminiscent of the scene in “The Godfather: Part II” where Fulgencio Batista hands around the solid gold telephone. “I’d like to thank this distinguished group of American industrialists for continuing to work with Cuba for the greatest period of prosperity in her entire history. Mr. William Shaw, representing the General Fruit Company . . . Messrs. Corngold and Dant of the United Telephone and Telegraph Company . . . and of course our friend Mr. Robert Allen of South American Sugar.”

We all think our breathless recitations of the latest revelations matter but I don’t know, it keeps feeling like 2016. Only this time with full employment.

So far our recent encounter with Iran looks as if it ended pretty well, or as well as it could have. At the moment it looks like we’re more or less where we were before Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was killed, only he’s gone and that’s good. There is no particular reason to believe Iran has been chastened, but it might have been tempered, reminded that there are limits. For the first time in 40 years, since the hostages were taken in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the Iranian government took a hard jab from America right in the face. This appears to have left them surprised, rocked back on their heels.

It’s not terrible that that government be put on the back of its heels.

How will Americans see it? I don’t care what instant polls suggest, they’ll say, “A monster was killed and nothing bad happened? OK, good.”

Now we’ll see where it all goes. Iran will likely continue what it always does, mayhem through cutouts, machinations and subterfuge. Maybe it will increase its efforts at mayhem sharply. Maybe, unlikely but who knows, its rulers will decide a readjustment in their general approach is in order, what with a plummeting economy and America led by the Great Mental Case.

I didn’t experience President Trump’s speech Wednesday as others seem to have. Observers were appropriately relieved he didn’t announce an escalating response to the Iranian missile strike. They called it conciliatory. But it wasn’t, it was stark. He repeatedly referred to Iran’s rulers as a “regime,” not a government, and he slammed their “destructive and destabilizing behavior.” He said Soleimani’s hands “were drenched in both American and Iranian blood” and he “should have been terminated long ago.” Mr. Trump damned the rulers as scoundrels who abuse and murder their own countrymen, including, recently, 1,500 antigovernment protestors. The people of Iran, on the other, hand are great and have “enormous untapped potential.” “Iran can be a great country.”

I think I discerned an attitude shift. Washington’s previous longtime common wisdom has held that Iran is split and divided; the young, moderate and liberal, hate their government and its repressions and despise the mullahs. So we should let this internal resistance spread, rise and deepen as economic sanctions make life harder and the government’s position less secure. Do nothing to get in the way, to ruffle things or encourage Iranians’ love of country to transfer to loyalty to government. Play it cool.

From what I heard, Mr. Trump thinks: No, don’t be cool. Heighten the tension between the people and their government. Make them decide. Force the crisis.

You have to wonder how this will play out, considering that the Iranian resistance just saw the mullahs embarrassed and exposed in a new way.

All this had me thinking about the poignant pictures that flood the internet whenever Iran is in crisis. They are of men and women on the streets of Tehran before the shah fell and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. They all look so modern, it’s all Western dress—men in sharp suits, women in bouffants driving cars. No one looks feudal or shrouded. They could have been in America. Iran has never figured out how to be both modern and moral—well, no one has—and chose a particularly reactionary and clenched form of nonmodernism. Iranians are a brilliant people from a dazzling culture saddled by the cultural stylings of medieval clerics.

Writers knocking about in New York and Washington over a few decades meet or bump into the diplomats of the world, and though they are individuals you get a general sense of their country’s attitudes through them. The Chinese are courtly and careful; they radiate a sense of “We are a great and sober people who mean business.” The Russians have lost respect for America but maintain form and are businesslike. They’re also more fun than they once were. Their old defensiveness about America is gone because they don’t think we’re great anymore, which has relaxed them. The Brits are professionals who sometimes do hale and hearty but often treat an acquaintance like a ferociously probing BBC interviewer; they suck out whatever view or data occupies your brain because they’re so desperate to fill their weekly diplomatic dispatch and show Whitehall they’re in the mix and in the know. The French never seem desperate and preserve the old well-tailored élan. The Germans have European self-deprecating modesty down.

The Iranians are altogether different. They don’t bother to arrange their face into a friendly look and don’t care what you think of them. They do not mind if you notice their contempt for us. They kind of like it! They enjoy a stony-faced recital of our sins.

For 40 years they’ve been riding high. They’ve enjoyed scaring everybody. They just got pushback they didn’t expect. We’ll find out with time if the decision was wise or helpful. But it’s hard to feel bad about it. Actually I feel as I did about the Pakistanis after the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It took place on their soil. They weren’t alerted. They were embarrassed. But they’d allowed him to live there for years without telling us. So too bad. You had it coming.

*   *   *

Under the heading, “Men more frequently need to be reminded than informed”:

If the past few decades have taught us anything it’s that you should never accuse those who question a U.S. military action of lacking patriotism. Sometimes the greatest patriotism is to stand against the crowd to protect your country from ill-thought-out actions. That is one of the harder forms of patriotism. Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, charged Monday ”leading Democrats” were “mourning” the loss of Soleimani. No one mourned his loss, everyone knows he’s a bum, and that was cheap. They questioned the decision and the reasons behind it.

No administration should tell the people’s representatives to refrain from questioning or criticizing a decision because it might signal dissension in the American ranks. It is true the world is always watching. It’s also true they expect the Americans to disagree among themselves. It’s part of our fabulousness. Our friends in the world become anxious only when the disagreement doesn’t fully occur, or is repressed, as in the run-up to the Iraq war.

We all know that top positions in the government are still not fully staffed, and some key positions are staffed by those without deep experience. The past week would have gone better if the administration were sufficiently alarmed by and attentive to its personnel problems. Lines of communication would have been clearer and the sense of alarm lessened by more reliable information. It is fair to say they made a good decision to take out Soleimani, and fair to say that for much beyond that they were lucky duckies.

Administrations that get lucky in one drama tend to get cocky and begin new dramas. How would this administration look if it were feeling cocky? The way it looks every day. What would be good to see now is modesty—the modesty of serious people who know they got lucky.

I bumped into a great artist on the morning of New Year’s Eve and he smiled and asked: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the coming year?” We were on the street in a little town and it wasn’t too cold and he and his wife looked beautiful in their wool hats. His question surprised me because I’d forgotten to think in terms of optimism and pessimism, and then realized I don’t when the year turns. I told him that, and then said that tonight at the party I will simply think I am here / I am here / I am lucky / I’m alive.

Someday you won’t be. So live life, enjoy it, roll with what comes. Make things better within your ken, however large or small that ken is. Do your best, not your lazy rote “I did my best” but your actual honest best. Keep your spirits up, don’t get down, it’s not all on you. “God is in charge of history.”

Every year at this time I think of two things. One is what the musician Warren Zevon said on the “Late Show With David Letterman.” I watched it, live, in 2002. Zevon was dying of mesothelioma, and Mr. Letterman asked how his illness had changed him. Zevon’s answers suggested he’d come to feel awe for the barely noticed gifts we’re given each day. “From your perspective now,” Mr. Letterman asked, “Do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?” Mr. Zevon answered: “I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

That is a gift, to know how good the sandwich is.

The other is a quote I read 40 years ago, from the writer Laurens van der Post in 1961: “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are all making history together, we are part of an era, and we are responsible to each other and to this great project.

These are the attitudes with which your columnist approaches 2020. Now, my sense of where we are.

On the impeachment of the American president, the story’s already been written, hasn’t it? It didn’t quite work, did nothing to help and little to hinder his position. The question whether to have witnesses in the Senate trial is a side issue. He can’t be proved more guilty. Even his supporters know he leaned on Ukraine for political gain. They judged this deserving of embarrassment but not removal. It will be the impeachment that didn’t move the needle, that history barely remembers.

On to the real action, the presidential election 10 months away.

The Democratic primary field is still flailing and doesn’t see it’s flailing. At the moment their theory of the country is wrong, and it’s wrong because it’s a theory, not a cold-eyed look at circumstances and facts on the ground. That is what good generals look at first. If there is a grinding war or an economic downturn people will want change and the out party has a good shot. If the economic downturn is severe they will consider deep structural change, even radical change such as socialism. It isn’t true that America will never go socialist. Maybe it will, but not under current conditions—full employment, rising wages.

Maybe all this will be settled at an open convention. But they ought to know by now they went too far left too quickly. And sometimes you have to stand up to the base.

President Trump is no doubt happy. He thinks he’s beating his domestic enemies. The great threats are North Korea and Iran. On the latter he will experience two conflicting impulses. On the one hand he sees himself as Mr. No More Benghazis—I’m the tough guy, I’m not afraid to take action. On the other, he sees himself as the unconventional president who doesn’t have wars, who thinks the Mideast is a loser’s game, who wants out.

Underlying his eventual decisions will be an unspoken theme of his re-election campaign: I’ve been president three years and the world didn’t blow up. My critics said it would because I’m crazy. I’m crazy like a fox! I kept things cool. That theme is about to be put to a test.

In the 2020s, the American position on China will harden—not the government’s but the country’s. Whatever happens with the administration and China, Mr. Trump will think it’s about him and lose interest when it appears not to be. But among the people, especially the business class, the perception will deepen that China is not our friend. Channeling this into the creation of an actual coherent China policy will be the big work of the next administration. This one doesn’t do coherent.

The belief that big tech needs to be corralled—to be broken up or declared public utilities—will grow on the left and right. The big companies are too powerful and have too insinuating an effect on our lives. This won’t be Mr. Trump’s issue—again he thinks it’s about him, and whether their algorithms are unjust to him and to conservatives. He wants big tech to bow to him, and they will. They’ll come for dinner, be his pals and work out deals. They think he can be had. He can. But the issue isn’t going away, and wise lefties and creative conservatives may fully seize it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made herself look ridiculous this year when she backed lowering the voting age to 16. This is an idiotic and destructive idea, an epic and hackish pander, and is offensive to the baseline reality that the adults of a great nation have the right to govern its affairs. It will go nowhere, but the coming decade may see some pushback against the 18-year-old vote, passed in 1971. A lot has changed since then. We know the brains of 18-year-olds are not fully developed and haven’t fully knitted. Young people are educated more poorly, and the screens that surround them and through which they learn encourage sensation, not thought. Their experience of the world is limited; most are financially and emotionally supported by others. All this as the questions we face grow more complex. We should raise the voting age, not lower it.

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They never have a second move. Bow to them, as most do, and they’ll accuse you even more of newly imagined sins. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually they’re not. They’re mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.

Everyone with an honest mind hates them. Someone will finally move effectively against them. Who? How? That will be a story of the ’20s, and a good one.

When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take its shape and fully become itself, but it’s already doing that.

The 20th century was shaped by the events of 1914-19, the Great War and Versailles. The past two decades have been shaping the 21st.

If we limit ourselves to domestic politics it’s been a time of big change with big implications.

Both parties have been overthrowing the elites and establishments that reigned for at least half a century. In doing so, both parties are changing their essential natures. In both cases the rebellion is driven largely by a bottom-line bitterness: You didn’t care about us, and now you will be gone.

Among Democrats it is the rising left, the progressives, kicking away from the old Clintonian moderates, from old party ways and identifications. They hate Clintonism almost more than they hate conservatism. And they are hated back. In a recent conversation with a politician who was a high official in the Clinton administration, I asked: When you go talk to progressives about your differences, how does that conversation go? “I don’t speak to them,” he shot back. The new New Left—we have to find a better name—is closer to socialism or proudly socialistic. What they feel for the old party establishment: “Thanks for standing up for the little guy while your trade deals made you and your friends rich.” “Thanks for creating a tax system in which you guys become billionaires while everyone else sank.”

The left-wing millennials will rise because the young always do. It’s tempting to compare the rise of the left in the party now with the 1970s and the rise of the old New Left. Boomer leftists then were mad at America over the war, and some of them had read Marx for the first time. But they loved America, and they went on to show that love as the workhorses they were—the first to put the lights on in the office or the institution in the morning, the last to put them off at night.

The rising millennial left seems to love high abstractions—economic justice, global movements for change. But they weren’t raised in a patriotic age, they weren’t taught what in America is admirable, even noble. Do they love America? Do they love this thing we have and are part of in the same, moist-eyed way Americans have in the past? It’s unclear. But if they don’t, when they triumph we’re in trouble.

On the Republican side the rise of Donald Trump revealed the new party to itself. It is a big-government, antiwar, populist party that is conservative-leaning in its social policy. Any card-carrying Trump supporter will immediately say, after lauding the economy, that he has delivered on the courts and has aligned his administration, for all his personal New Yorkiness and indifference to social issues, with those who think conservatively.

Republicans in 2016 were to the right of party leaders, elders and professionals on essential issues—immigration, political correctness, the LGBTQ regime and the arguments it spurred in the town council about bathroom policies, and in schools over such questions as, “Are we still allowed in sports to have a girls team composed of biological girls and a boy’s team composed of biological boys? Will we be sued?”

They knew that on these questions and others the party’s establishments didn’t really care about their views or share them.

When Republicans rebel against the status quo, it’s a powerful thing. They produced in their 2016 rebellion something new: They changed the nature of the presidency itself. The pushing back against elites entailed a pushing against standards. It’s always possible a coming presidential election will look like a snap-back to the old days, a senator versus a governor, one experienced political professional against another. But we will never really go back to the old days. Anyone can become president now, anyone big and colorful and in line with prevailing public sentiment.

We have entered the age of the postheroic presidency. Certain low ways are forgiven, certain rough ways now established. Americans once asked a lot of their presidents. They had to be people not only of high competence and solid, sober backgrounds, but high character. In modern presidencies you can trace a line from, say, Harry S. Truman, who had it in abundance, to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, who also did.

But the heroic conception of the presidency is over. Bill Clinton and his embarrassments damaged it. Two unwon wars and the great recession killed it. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” buried it. When you deliberately lie like that, you are declaring you have no respect for the people. And the people noticed.

They would like to have someone admirable in the job, someone whose virtues move them, but they’ve decided it’s not necessary. They think: Just keep the economy growing, don’t start any new wars, and push back against the social-issues maximalists if you can.

In the last cycle we spoke of shy Trump voters—those who didn’t want to get in an argument over supporting him. I suspect this cycle we’ll call them closeted Trump voters—those who don’t want to be associated with the postheroic moment, who disapprove of it, but see no realistic alternative.

In time we’ll see you lose something when you go postheroic. Colorful characters will make things more divided, not less. They’ll entertain but not ennoble. And the world will think less of us—America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders—which will have an impact on our ability to influence events.

*   *   *

I close with another entity of American life that should be worried about seeming like it doesn’t care about its own country. It is what used to be called big business.

America has always been in love with the idea of success. It’s rewarded the creation of wealth, made household saints of the richest men in the world. We were proud they lived here.

But big business, especially big tech executives and bankers, should be thinking: In this century they’re coming at you left and right.

The left used to say, “You didn’t build that,” while the right said, “You did.” But now there’s a convergence, with both sides starting to think: This country made you. It made the roads you traveled; it made the expensive peace in which your imagination flourished; it created the whole world of arrangements that let you become rich.

You owe us something for that. You owe us your loyalty. And if you allow us to discern—and in this century you have been busy allowing us!—that you do not really care about America, that your first loyalty isn’t to us but to “the world” or “global markets,” then we will come down on you hard.

It isn’t only parties that can be broken up in this century, the one that isn’t coming but is here.

The Democrats think they’ve just had a big triumph. The president’s been impeached. But Republicans see themselves as gaining the upper hand.

The House couldn’t lift the event into an air of historical gravity. They dressed in dark clothes and never smiled, as at a wake, but the deceased was making kicking sounds from the casket and appeared to be tweeting, so it was incongruous.

There was no “debate” and no one tried to persuade anybody. The revealing moment was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the first article had passed and some Democrats apparently began to clap. She threw them her mother-of-five look: Don’t make me come up there. They were surely members of the Progressive Caucus. They wanted to applaud because they were happy, and they were happy because they are shallow.

What felt like news came the day after, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who throughout the crisis had been relatively quiet and oblique, and who is never interesting by accident, suddenly became fiery. “The Senate exists for moments like this,” he said, rather menacingly. “Transient passion and violent factionalism” have swept the House. “The moment the framers feared has arrived. A political faction in the lower chamber have succumbed to partisan rage.” They have produced a “failed inquiry,” a “slapdash case” which is “constitutionally incoherent.” So “the Senate must put this right.”

This was, among other things, the leader of the Senate declaring war on at least the actions of the House and its speaker. Again, this is not some House blowhard but a serious man, and a careful one.

Why such charged language? Why isn’t he being boring and letting this dribble out over the holidays, letting the mood change, cooling the embers?

Maybe because for the first time since this drama began, Republicans are starting to think their position is gaining. Their thinking would have to do with the immediate picture and the broader national one.

The immediate picture: A Quinnipiac poll this week shows support for President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office has gone down since October, to 45%.

Why? Some guesses.

For one, in the past 10 days the latest jobs numbers came out, and America has functional full employment. A Quinnipiac poll released Dec. 10 showed that since February 2018, the share of the population who believe the Republicans handle the economy better than the Democrats has gone up seven points, from 42% to 49%. The share who say they are better off financially since 2016 is 57%.

That is a powerful number. When people have peace and prosperity they don’t like to make a change at the top. That’s what saved Bill Clinton when he was impeached. They knew he’d done what he was accused of, but they let it go.

In months of hearings the American people witnessed serious and credible testimony from officials of obvious stature who said, essentially: The president abused his power. None of this did the president any good. But there was no dramatic insider testimony from someone such as John Bolton, a Trump appointee who might have been astringent in his portrait of how the White House operates, and believed by the president’s supporters. The idea that America’s national security was endangered by the president’s actions with Ukraine did not take.

And the debate never moved beyond party lines.

My guess is that after the testimony, voters thought the president guilty but did not see this story as equal to the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee or the cultural catastrophe of the Clinton scandals.

They figured: We have a presidential election less than a year away. Settle it there.

They also probably think he didn’t get away with it—because he didn’t. The president has been punished in the court of public opinion, punished every day in the hearings, and punished in the impeachment vote, which will now be in the first paragraph of all his obituaries. If he committed knuckle-dragging malfeasance, he paid the price.

But the broader reality helping the president, fortifying his position and that of his party, is one of the insufficiently noted stories of 2019. In terms of politics it is the story of 2019, bigger than impeachment. It is that, poised to defeat an unpopular president, the Democratic Party picked itself up—and placed itself outside the mainstream of American politics.

In almost every national public presentation this year, especially in their presidential debates, they branded themselves not as what they had to be—a sophisticated party with a working-class heart—but what they couldn’t be—extreme left-wing progressives.

It was a historic misjudgment.

From their first debates in June, their major candidates announced themselves to be for sharply higher taxes, banning private health insurance, the Green New Deal, free college, complete student loan forgiveness, free health insurance for illegal aliens, and functionally open borders. They would ban fossil fuels and fracking. At least one candidate said America’s religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage. They are extreme on abortion—no limits, ever—and in their support of identity politics, which sees not a country but a thousand warring tribes endlessly rewarded for being at each other’s throats.

Very much a part of all this, and sworn in just under a year ago, were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad,” enthusiastically held up by the Democrats’ friends and operatives in the press as the future of the party. If they are, the future is grim, with their Leninist insistence that you’ll do it their way or be flattened. It is not only policies that count but spirit. Theirs is one of accusation and division. Where they should be ardent they are only arrogant. Their approach speaks of a desire not to make progress but to unsettle and undo.

But the point is most of the most famous public faces in the party spent 2019 essentially supporting a reordering of arrangements that have lasted two centuries and allowed us, for all our mess and chaos, to be great.

Here is how the party’s lurch left has improved the president’s position.

It makes the 2020 race not “Trump vs. the Democrat,” a race he can lose, but “Trump vs. Lefty Madness,” which he can win.

The left is turning Donald Trump into a savior. He was not a savior before AOC. He was not a savior before Elizabeth and Bernie said they’d ban your health insurance.

But the past year has allowed the president’s supporters, and independents, to see him that way. It has given them something new to fight for, something better. They don’t have to say, “I’m for Trump because I love him,” or think, “I’m for Trump because I have sacrificed all standards for power.” They can say, “I’m going to defend the free-market system and our liberties by voting for Trump.”

The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to see or understand any of this. But 2020 is already printing its bumper stickers. “I’ll take the somewhat demented over the wholly destructive.” “The imperfect over the obnoxious.” “Vote for the barbarian, it’s important.”

After so disastrously branding their party throughout 2019, is it possible for Democrats to turn it around in 2020?

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs.

A surprise is there’s little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it’s true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment from a voter in a forum. The candidates seem bored with the subject and don’t bother to fake passion if you ask. Impeachment is a reality show going on in Washington, and everyone knows the outcome, so it’s not even interesting. On my way to Waterloo I realized: We’re about to have the third impeachment of a president in American history, and the day it happens it’s not going to be Topic A in America. It will barely be mentioned at the dinner table. It is a coastal elite story, not a mainland story.

The Democratic race is as fluid as it looks. No one, even bright party professionals speaking off the record, knows what to expect. Biden was inevitable, then maybe Elizabeth, maybe Pete’s inevitable, but Bernie may be inevitable, and don’t write off Joe.

But “Beat Trump” is back. When 2019 began Democrats were thinking that was priority No. 1. Then other things became more important—Medicare for All, climate change, policy. But it feels like Democrats here are circling back to their original desire. “Who can beat Trump?” is again the most important question. They don’t know the answer. They’re trying to figure it out.

You can hear this in what the candidates say.

At a Teamsters forum in Cedar Rapids Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders was burly in his aggression. “This is a president who is a fraud,” “a pathological liar,” “a homophobe,” “a bigot.” Mr. Sanders said his campaign is about “telling the billionaire class that their greed is unacceptable.” He got a standing ovation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar the day before, in Grinnell, spoke to about 150 people at the Iowa Farmer’s Union: “We’re not gonna let this Gilded Age roll right over us.” Donald Trump made promises he didn’t keep. After his tax cut passed, “he went to Mar-a-Lago and told his rich friends, ‘I just made you all a lot richer.’ And I can tell you none of them were farmer’s union members.”

“He thinks the Midwest is flyover country.”

Leaders are making decisions for seven generations, she said: “He can’t keep his decision seven minutes from now.”

Pete Buttigieg, at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, told a crowd of more than 1,000—lots of students but others too, many of them prosperous and middle-aged: Don’t just watch “the Trump show—help me pick up the remote and change the channel.”

Before he spoke, a handsome, gray-haired psychotherapist from Iowa City told me why she supports him: “I think he has empathy. His orientation, what he’s been through. Yet also the military and a Rhodes scholar.” She liked his liberal Christianity: “He hasn’t let anyone else co-opt his spiritual life.”

Mr. Buttigieg used to say his name was pronounced “Buddha judge.” When he went national he changed it to what his crowds now chant: “boot edge edge.” I suspect he did this because America wears boots and likes edginess, but no one wants to be judged by the Buddha. I mention this because Mr. Buttigieg has the air of someone who thinks through even the smallest questions of presentation.

In person he seems like the smart young communications director for a Democratic presidential candidate, not the candidate himself. Yet he gets a particular respect because people think whatever happens this year, he’s going to be president some day. The local congressman who introduced him said as much: “No matter who comes out of this . . . Pete Buttigieg is the future of the party.”

He is personable in an old-fashioned sense; he reminds me of Michael Kinsley’s description of Al Gore when he was 38: “an old person’s idea of a young person.”

Mr. Buttigieg is often painted as a moderate. After he spoke I asked about something I’m interested in, how people develop their political views, where they get them. Do most inherit them, swallow them whole? His father was a Marxist-oriented academic at Notre Dame; he himself, I said, is a man of the left. Had he ever kicked away from family assumptions? Did he ever feel drawn to conservatism, to Burke or Kirk? He had not, though “I will say this: I came to respect the ways in which, right around the time of Russell Kirk, conservatives came to be very much in touch with the relationship between their ideas and their politics and politicians. I think it was born out of a period when the left had universities already, and the right needed to construct a structure of think tanks and so forth.”

When he was an intern on Capitol Hill, every young Republican staffer had a copy of Hayek on his desk. “On our side, the academic left, particularly in the humanities, had gotten into really abstruse things around postmodernism and poststructuralism. There was, ironically, contrary to our self-image, I think less of a clear relationship between ideas and politicians on the left. We had our policy intellectuals, but there was less of a connection between our politicians and our political theorists.”

He came to respect “the organizing efforts of conservatives.” I asked if this was around the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Of a sudden the Republican Party is the party of ideas.” He smiled and shrugged: “Just a hair before my time.”

Ms. Klobuchar’s polls have been going up, from 1% in the Emerson College poll in October to 10% now. Her audiences are bigger. It has broken through that she’s a moderate, a senator, a Midwesterner: “I’m from Minnesota and I can see Iowa from my porch!” She has wit. She knows she has to prove that she’s tough, that she can go toe to toe with Donald Trump.

She’s had strong debates. In the last one, social media went crazy because her hair shook. Not her face or voice, her hair. She later joked on Twitter: “I’ll plaster my runaway bangs down for the next NBC debate.”

What happened? She told me the debate hall had been reconfigured, overly air-conditioned, and unknown to her, a nearby air vent was blasting at the top of her head. She didn’t know there was a problem until the break, when a tech came by and said he was sorry.

“Now I guess hair spray,” she laughed as she told the story.

How difficult will it be to beat Mr. Trump? While I was in Iowa the new jobs numbers came out. America has functional full employment. It is a marvelous thing. We’re not in any new wars. With peace and prosperity, how can the incumbent lose?

The counterargument is that his approval is stuck in the low 40s with peace and prosperity, which tells you everything—he is vulnerable, more than half the country rejects him in what are for him ideal circumstances. This in turn brings back the familiar 2016 theme of shy Trump voters, people who don’t tell pollsters they’re going to vote for him, or even tell themselves.

Maybe the real story is that it’s all fluid.

During presidential scandals, members of the media often speak of the Iran-Contra affair. I’m not sure they really understand it

In retrospect that scandal was distinguished by two central, shaping characteristics. First, it was different from other scandals in that its genesis wasn’t low or brutish. It wasn’t about money, or partisan advantage, or sex; it was about trying to free American hostages in the Mideast, and attempting to pursue a possible, if unlikely, foreign-policy advance. It had to do with serious things. Second, when the story blew it eventually yielded a model of how to handle a scandal, though it didn’t look that way at the time.

In July 1985 President Reagan was in Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from colon-cancer surgery when his national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, told him of a potential opening in efforts to free the seven American hostages the Iranian-dominated terrorist group Hezbollah had taken in Beirut. Among them were the Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson; Father Lawrence Jenco, the head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon; and William Buckley, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Beirut station chief. Buckley, who’d seen action in the U.S. Army in Korea and Vietnam and been much decorated, had been held since March 1984 and endured more than a year of torture. Reagan knew this, and he’d met with the families of other hostages.

Mr. McFarlane said Israeli contacts had told him that a group of moderate, politically connected Iranians wanted to establish a channel to the U.S. With the Iran-Iraq war raging and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his 80s, Iran’s political leadership might soon be in play. The moderates would show their sincerity by persuading Hezbollah to give up the hostages. Mr. McFarlane wanted to talk. Reagan approved.

Thus commenced an initiative that its participants thought farsighted, its critics called almost criminally naive, and Secretary of State George Shultz later called “crazy.”

The moderates wanted the U.S. to permit Israel to sell them some TOW antitank missiles. They would pay, and the U.S. would replenish the Israeli stock. This would enhance their position in Iran by proving they had connections to high officials in Washington.

Reagan should have shut everything down at the mention of weapons. He didn’t. He later wrote, “The truth is, once we had information from Israel that we could trust the people in Iran, I didn’t have to think thirty seconds about saying yes.” It was only a one-shipment deal, he reasoned, and the moderates had agreed to his insistence that they get the hostages out. A shipment was made, and hostage Benjamin Weir was released.

In October 1985 the terrorist group Islamic Jihad announced it had killed William Buckley. (The White House National Security Council concluded he’d probably already died of a heart attack.) Reagan stayed hopeful, although when word got around of what was happening, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Mr. Shultz opposed it. Mr. Shultz told Reagan that while it might not technically be an arms-for-hostages deal, it would certainly look like one—and it would blow sky-high as soon as it leaked, as it would leak.

By winter it was clear some of the Iranian go-betweens were dubious. No more hostages were being released. Mr. McFarlane resigned. His successor, John Poindexter, pressed for another shipment of missiles, to be followed by talks with Iranian moderates. CIA Director William Casey agreed it was worth the risk if there’s a chance they could deliver. Mr. Shultz and Weinberger pushed back. Reagan later said, “I just put my foot down.” In the spring, Mr. McFarlane returned for a secret trip to Iran, which he’d been told would free the last of the hostages. He went home without them.

That July, Jenco was released. Casey and the NSC asked for another missile shipment. Reagan approved.

Then a new terrorist group took three more American hostages in Lebanon.

A channel had been opened to a group that included a nephew of the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who requested various gifts including a Bible inscribed by the president. Amazingly, he got them. Later, it was reported the Americans even brought a cake shaped like a key.

In November 1986, a Lebanese news outlet broke a story saying America was trading arms for hostages.

It was explosive. Reagan looked like a hypocrite—his administration had long pressed others not to sell arms to the Iranians. His people looked like fools gulled by gangsters.

Mr. Shultz later summed it all up this way: “The U.S. government had violated its own policies on antiterrorism and against arms sales to Iran, was buying our own citizens’ freedom in a manner that could only encourage the taking of others, was working through disreputable international go-betweens . . . and was misleading the American people—all in the guise of furthering some purported regional political transformation, or to obtain in actuality a hostage release.” Mr. McFarlane, Mr. Poindexter and Casey “had sold it to a president all too ready to accept it, given his humanitarian urge to free American hostages.”

Reagan was embarrassed, but once he saw the dimensions of the problem—he believed his motivations were right and the American people would understand once he explained—he took a series of constructive decisions. He kept Mr. Schultz, who’d been public in his criticism, in the administration.

When Reagan’s friend and confidante, Attorney General Ed Meese, announced he’d found evidence that Lt. Col Oliver North of the NSC had diverted part of the money the Iranians paid for the weapons to the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan was originally sympathetic, less so when he was told Col. North was shredding documents. In the end he fired him. Mr. Poindexter resigned.

Reagan appointed a commission to investigate everything that had been done. The three members were sensitively balanced: chairman John Tower, a Republican senator; Edmund Muskie, a Democratic former senator and vice-presidential nominee; and Brent Scowcroft, the coolheaded former and future White House national security adviser. There were 50 witnesses, including the president. A joint congressional committee held public hearings. Reagan waived executive privilege. He accepted an independent counsel.

The Tower Commission’s 200-page report was delivered in February 1987, three months after the story broke. It was sharply critical of the president but found he did not know of the Contra angle.

Democrats in Congress and the media had exploited the mess for all it was worth, but on another level some Democrats quietly pitched in. A former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Robert Strauss, met with the Reagans and helped steady the ship.

Throughout the drama the president fell into a funk. The public turned on him; his poll numbers plummeted.

But he wasn’t over. There were great triumphs ahead—the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 and ratified in 1988; “Tear down this wall” in 1987, and its fall in 1989, less than 10 months after Reagan left the presidency.

Our allies were offended by the scandal but impressed by its aftermath. Mikhail Gorbachev noticed too: The old lion didn’t die.

Iran-Contra was a big mistake, a real mess. But its deeper lessons have to do with how to admit and repair mistakes, how to work with the other side, and how to forge through and survive to the betterment of the country.