I was a day shy of my eighth birthday when the reassuring words of President Reagan crackled over my family’s radio. Like all Americans, we were traumatized by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which carried, among her passengers, 38-year-old social studies teacher Christy McAuliffe. We had followed her story in the newspapers and were proud of the opportunity afforded this civilian hero, chosen from among 11,000 applicants to a special “Teacher in Space” program.
The president’s words—delivered at a time when presidents still knew how to deliver reassuring words in crisis—were poignant and powerful:
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
This was my introduction to the creative pen of Peggy Noonan, working then as a speechwriter for the 40th president. And I’ve been reading Noonan ever since, from the apt prose she crafted for Reagan to the eyewitness account of her time in the White House, What We Saw at the Revolution. Noonan’s tribute to Reagan, When Character Was King, was a key text in my political journey, while her how-to book on the delicate craft of communication, On Speaking Well, is a guide I recommend and often require as I teach future writers.
For the last quarter century, Peggy Noonan has been a weekly fixture at the Wall Street Journal, where her column, “Declarations,” is a must-read. Like an unofficial political poet laureate, she has put words to the feelings Americans have experienced in this tumultuous century. Consider this column, written the Thanksgiving after 9/11:
We . . . learned we are stronger than we knew. A nation that had spent the past few decades trying to decide what kind of cashmere slippers to buy found out it was, still, tough as old boots. We found some things that had been lost. Our love of country, for instance. Not everyone found it because not everyone had lost it but some had. They hadn’t thought in a long time about why America is worthy of their love and protectiveness.
Or her reflection on the trauma of 9/11, just one year later: “And then the buildings fell. That was the thing, they heaved up and groaned to the ground and brought a world with them. We could have taken it if the buildings didn’t fall.” In 2015, Noonan published an anthology of her Journal columns published to that point, The Time of Our Lives. And now she’s back with a collection of her works in the decade since, entitled A Certain Idea of America.
Noonan’s pen has been sharp at times. In a section entitled “I Don’t Mind Being Stern,” she does not hold back in criticisms of public officials or troubling trends. She doesn’t, for instance, much like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s hoodies and shorts. She’s angered by the events of January 6. Though conservative, she calls balls and strikes, critiquing Republicans and Democrats for their public sins. Most of all, she has an innate ability to tell us what it all means, where the country is going, what she’d recommend leaders do and say. They don’t always listen, as is clear from an entire section, “It Appears He Didn’t Take My Advice,” with columns on Presidents Trump and Biden.
Conservatives will especially appreciate that she was prescient in channeling the rising angst against the “woke” policies that became a fulcrum for the 2024 election. As early as 2019, Noonan was railing against the pronoun police, comparing this new, strange norm to the French Revolution. “An odd thing,” she writes of the new Robespierres, “is that they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large spirited. They’re more like messianic school-masters.” She mocked the struggle sessions of social justice warriors, for whom “the air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress,” comparing this phenomenon to China’s Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone will agree with Noonan’s observations about our political moment—she’d be upset if you blindly accepted her opinions as gospel. But it will be hard to match her rhetorical power in key moments. In a column after the landmark reversal of Roe, she correctly predicted the coming conflicts over abortion. And yet she didn’t hesitate to state her own beliefs, worth quoting in full:
I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting— that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for fifty years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.
If only Republican leaders could use their bully pulpits to persuade like this.
Readers also can’t miss the moral indignation Noonan expresses after the horror of October 7. “This is what happens,” she writes, “when savages hold the day: they imperil the very idea of civilization.” Or her disgust, felt by all Americans, at the slow response of the Uvalde officers, who failed in 2022 to charge the Robb Elementary school, where 22 children and two teachers were murdered. “We can’t let it settle in that the police can’t be relied on to be physically braver than other people.”
But Noonan’s columns aren’t all news and politics. She especially enjoys profiling great Americans, and in this volume we are treated to profiles of Billy Graham, Tom Wolfe, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, George H.W. Bush, and others. Of Graham, she writes, “We talk about the friend of presidents, who moved among the powerful, but he was a man who wanted to help you save your soul, whoever you were, in whatever circumstance. And there would have been millions.” Of Dylan: “We can forget: there are geniuses among us. They’re doing their work and bringing their light.” Of Wolfe: “This was a great man.” Of Queen Elizabeth II: “When she entered the room, Britain entered the room.”
To write like that, with such verve, eludes most of us. She wishes, as you can see in her many admonitions to her fellow Republicans, that conservatives could summon the kind of rhetoric that is both clear and uplifting. You can sense in her columns a kind of nostalgia for the old Reagan. And it’s hard not to share that aspiration, with so many jeremiads today that sound persuasive only to those who happen to agree with the particular Jeremiah.
Yet what is refreshing about Noonan is that her ability to adapt, to stay perceptive and relevant in an era when so many have either formed their identities as reflexively anti- or pro- Trump, without appreciating the political currents that have shaped us. She rightly calls Trump’s 2024 win “the biggest political comeback in American history.”
Noonan’s steadiness, I think, is owed to her deep love for America, which bleeds on every page. She is conservative but not myopic. She holds fast to her beliefs, but zooms out from the partisan squabbles and observes America as a whole. An entire section of A Certain Idea of America is devoted to patriotism, a sentiment Noonan has not yielded to the cynics. In one column, “A Continuing Miracle,” she waxes poetic:
Which gets me closer to my feelings on patriotism. We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, that where you start doesn’t dictate where you wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence, and in spite of the heart-break. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution. And in the forging through and the holding high, we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.
America, she writes, “is where the miracle is.” Miracles being something Noonan, a Catholic and admirer of Pope John Paul II, believes in. “I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, “ the Pulitzer Prize winner admits, “who get up and go forward without it. How do you do that? … I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That it is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby—it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing.”
The publication of A Certain Idea of America is a reminder that Americans, of all persuasions and political stripes, should read Peggy Noonan. For even when you disagree—and you will—you’ll come away smarter, more patriotic, and with gratitude for her unusual gift of words. Having witnessed a revolution, a great American writer has unleashed her own.
