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5/8/02

Noonan touts Reagan’s courage, leadership abilities

By Jeff Minick
When Character Was King by Peggy Noonan.
Viking, 2001. $24.95 — 224 pp.

Peggy Noonan is the writer living in New York City who more than any other columnist captured the varying moods and emotions of both New York and the nation at large after the 911 terror attacks. Someday I expect to see the columns she wrote in the wake of the bombing collected into a book, and it will be a book that you will want to possess so that you can read it again and again.

Peggy Noonan also served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986, helped write speeches for Reagan and several others, and then wrote a best-selling book about her experiences in the White House titled What I Saw At The Revolution.

Noonan’s latest book is also about Reagan. When Character Was King is an analysis less of what Reagan actually did in the White House, though these accomplishments are necessarily a part of her story, and more an examination of Ronald Reagan’s moral fiber and leadership qualities.

What Noonan has given us here is a portrait of a man who was somehow bigger than most of the other men around him. Reagan wasn’t the brightest president we’ve ever had, but we can all think of bright presidents who have fallen flat on their faces. He wasn’t the most knowledgeable president we’ve ever had, though knowledge may lead a president to micromanage a situation rather than delegate authortity and power to others to deal with that situation. Reagan wasn’t always the best judge of character in others, though unlike some of our chief executives he often understood more about those around him than he revealed.

Where Reagan was great in terms of character was in his courage, his persistence in following what he regarded as the right path, and his heart for people. In When Character Was King, Noonan gives example after example of Reagan doing what he believed was right, even when it cost him. In regard to the Soviet Union, for example, that now defunct government which Reagan called an evil empire, Reagan took tough stands, walking away from failed arms negotiations and calling on the Soviets to “tear down the Wall” in Berlin. His toughness paid off handsomely; the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

Reagan’s persistence and loyalty, too, was one of his chief virtues. When he believed in an idea or a person, he stuck with them. Noonan recounts how whenever Reagan would hear someone call out “Dutch!” at a political rally, he would turn eagerly toward the caller, hoping that it was someone who knew him from his youth. In a funny and interesting actecdote too long to quote in this review, Dan Rostenkowski, a Democrat and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committe, disagrees with Noonan regarding Reagans greatness — “he was a good president,” Rostenkowski contends, but not a great one. Yet Rostenkowski also states that Reagan’s “admirable quality was if he gave you his word you could sleep very well that night.”

One of my favorite stories in this book of good stories involves a lady named Frances Green, who lived in Daly City, Calif., and an invitation to come to the White House to meet the president. Frances Green was living near poverty, but had over the years contributed regularly a dollar a year to the Republican National Committe. Mrs. Green took every penny she had, bought a four-day train ticket across the country and went to see Reagan. What she had failed to notice was the RSVP on the invitation.

When she arrived at the White House, she happened to be standing in the entry hall with an executive from Ford. When it seemed that the invitation might not be honored by security, the Ford executive found one of the president’s secretaries, who found the president’s personal secretary, who helped arrange a tour of the White House. When she arrived outside the Oval Office, still accompanied by the Ford executive, Frances Green peeked inside. Noonan then writes:


“This,” I said in a speech about Reagan’s character, “is why Reagan is Reagan. He knows Mrs. Green is a little old lady all by herself in the world, she’s no one, with nothing to give him, and Reagan is behind his desk and he rises and calls out, ‘Frances!’ He says, ‘Those darn computers, they fouled up again! If I’d known you were coming, I would have come out there to get you myself.

“He asked her to sit down and they talked about California and he gave her a lot of time, and if you say on a day like that it was time wasted, there are a lot of people who’d say, Oh no it wasn’t. No it wasn’t.

“He had a big heart, a kind of liquid heart that flowed out to others.”


(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)