Act III of Peggy Noonan’s life began in 2000 with her online column for the Wall Street Journal. Peggy’s latest book, The Time of Our Lives, captures her best from this period and beyond, containing pieces this avid Peggy reader has never seen. And her editorial notes that go along with the articles? Delicious.
“Have you read Peggy this week?” This question and the familiarity with the writer are quite common. No last name is necessary. Peggy is sui generis, and her fans stretch all ages. Peggy has a friend, Mickie, who is now close to 90. When Peggy started her Internet column in 2000, Internet-less Mickie would have the column faxed to her each week. She had to have Peggy’s take. A few months back, a friend, a former opinion columnist, was chatting with a family, and the talk turned to writing and writers. The youngest child, a hitherto quiet ninth-grader, came to life. Did my friend know Peggy Noonan? What did he think of her writing, her political views? How was her work regarded? The young woman wanted to know, because she made a point of reading her every Saturday in the Wall Street Journal.
It’s difficult to overestimate the influence of Peggy in this time of our lives. One is struck by how Peggy has written much about women and has a great appeal to women. She doesn’t write on “women’s issues” (an awful term). She doesn’t throw down the gender card as a “woman columnist.” In fact, she’s more likely than not to eviscerate female subjects who do. But she is a woman who brings a woman’s intuition and feeling to her insights, and she writes with style, grace, and brave and vulnerable honesty. No columnist, male or female, does quite what she does today. All this makes Peggy Noonan long overdue for a Pulitzer in commentary, and this collection of her work such a treasure.
Noonan doesn’t belong to what H. L. Mencken called the ‘However’ school of opinion writers. You know where she stands.
Peggy writes about our public life in a way that recognizes that politics is, as she says, “a full-body exercise,” not a simple agglomeration of positions, poses, or sound bites. That’s what distinguishes her from so many other columnists. She is fundamentally a patriot and believes this means being completely honest with her readers even when they resent it. “I can’t do my job — I could never do my job! — unless I say what I really see and think,” she notes in one of the reflections in the book. She doesn’t belong to what H. L. Mencken called the “However” school of opinion writers. You know where she stands. She puts it out there. It’s personal — sometimes painfully so.
And Peggy has paid a price for this — perhaps more of a price, she writes, because she’s a woman and therefore more vulnerable. What’s interesting here is that she is not writing this to claim victim status. She is writing it simply because she thinks it’s true. You see the critical difference between the self-avowed victimization and a stoic recognition of reality in her writings on Margaret Thatcher, who was “eloquent” and “stirring,” with tons of guts:
And of course she was a woman, the first British prime minister to be so. She made no special pleading in that area and did not claim to represent what we embarrassingly call “women’s issues.”
As opposed to Hillary Clinton’s pity party:
It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say, ‘Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they break each other’s bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it’s like that for the boys and for the girls.
Thatcher’s is an ennobling, empowering, authentic feminism. Hillary’s is manipulative, degrading, phony.
#share#There are other themes that run through The Time of Our Lives. Some are astonishingly sharp and prophetic. All are a joy to read for the first time or reread after all these years. As early as 1992, she was writing about voters’ fear for America’s future and the failure of our political class. In November 1998, she was writing about the possibility of a terrorist attack (“a big terrible thing to New York or Washington” happening in the next year and a half). I think her writing in the aftermath of 9/11 will make its way into history books, though the column “Welcome Back, Duke” and the post-9/11 return of manliness it describes now seem more aspirational, given the cultural beachhead that the feminized male has established over the last decade or so.
Then there’s Peggy’s amazing writing. Oh, the writing, the rhythm, the phrasing. Baby Boomers acting “as if they thought history were a waiter in a crisp white jacket.” Firemen on 9/11 who “brought love into a story of hate” and “the rough repositories of grace.” The Twin Towers’ cleanup crews of “men who hadn’t been applauded since the day they danced to their song with their bride at the wedding.”
Peggy Noonan travels in rarefied circles. That’s clear from the columns. But it’s also clear that she has never forgotten where she came from. She loves America and is unsparing in her criticism of our “unknowing and empty-headed elites.” (“Our cynicism is also earned. Our establishment has failed us.”) This might keep her from ever receiving a Pulitzer, since the elites inevitably award this kind of prize. It shouldn’t, but it might. If The Time of Our Lives is any guide, Peggy will doubtless meet either outcome with serenity. “You write as you and sound like you,” she writes in the introduction, “because you are: you.”
— Ann Corkery is a partner at the law firm of Stein Mitchell and a former U.S. public delegate to U.N. General Assembly and U.S. delegate to U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.