Peggy Noonan, of course, needs no introduction. She’s a former Reagan speechwriter and the author of a much-talked-about Wall Street Journal column, as well as a new book, called Patriotic Grace. Her openness to — rather than outright opposition to — Barack Obama has not sat well with many on the Right. About the book, the openness, and this “beautiful election,” as Noonan referred to this presidential race, she recently took questions from National Review Online. — KJL


Kathryn Jean Lopez: What is this Patriotic Grace you write about?

Peggy Noonan: It is knowing what time it is and acting accordingly. In my book I tell the story of a dramatic terror alert at the U.S. Capitol during the events surrounding the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I was in a ceremonial room in the Senate, part of a delegation asked to receive back the president’s body from California, where he had died, for the lying in state. A plane had entered Capitol air space, was headed toward the Capitol, was presumed to be weaponized. All were told, literally, to run for their lives — “Incoming aircraft, one minute out!” Quite a scene. As I walked I saw a great lady, a close friend of the Reagans, and before them of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, a great bipartisan figure of the old Washington — the easier, slower, more humanly textured, even to some degree more affectionate Washington that in our time has been replaced by “The Senator will be in the gym from 4 to 5, has a 5:16 hit on Hardball, then three fundraisers from 6 to 8:45, and contributor calls from 9 to 10” — be carried down the Capitol steps in her wheelchair, as all around her fled. She held her cane in her hand, like the brave little prow of a ship. And as I turned and saw her a thought came with the force of an intuition, though it was not that, just a thought: Before this is over we’ll all be helping each other down the stairs. Before the age we live in is over we will all live through a great crisis, a 9/11 times ten, or more, and we must know this, and act accordingly. We must become more serious in the way we practice our politics, more equal to the moment. We need to take the long view; in the age of chatter we need forbearance, maturity, and grace.


Lopez: Where does it come from?

Noonan: Your brain, your heart, your guts, your soul.


Lopez: Who has it?

Noonan: That’s a bit like asking “Who has courage?” Everyone does at some moments, and some do at many moments. We are in a brute political clash, a national one, right now, and few people are experiencing their best moments, or rather few activists and politically passionate people are having their best moments. One of the things I say in the book is keep your eyes on the horizon: we are going to wind up fighting for our country, and we’re going to have to do it all of us together.


Lopez: Sarah Palin is a mom with spunk and executive experience. Does she not demonstrate some patriotic grace?

Noonan: Well Kathryn, we have disagreed on the meaning and implications of Mr. McCain’s choice of Mrs. Palin. Here are some cool words from a cool head, George Will, who saw early on what a number of us came to see, and who said better what I would try to say later. “The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience. Any cook can run the state, said Lenin, who was wrong about that, too. America's gentle populists and other sentimental egalitarians postulate that wisdom is easily acquired and hence broadly diffused; therefore anyone with a good heart can deliver good government, which is whatever the public desires. . . . John McCain’s opponent is by far the least experienced person to receive a presidential nomination in the 75 years since the federal government became a comprehensively intrusive regulatory state and modern weaponry annihilated the protection the nation derived from time and distance. Which is why McCain's case for his candidacy could, until last Friday, be distilled into two words: Experience matters.” Kathryn, Will wrote those words shortly after the choice was announced. In retrospect his judgment seems to me not only correct, but somewhat prescient.


Lopez: Do you have any guilt/worry that you might be playing a not-so-minor role in the election of Barack Obama with some of your columns, and this book?

Noonan: My first thought is that any columnist who thought he was playing a major or minor role in people’s political decisions would be mildly delusional. Columnists tend not to have that power, nor deserve it. But my second is of course I try to think about the implications, if any, of what I write. But where I come down is this: I am a columnist, and my job is to try, within the limits of my abilities, to tell my readers what I think is happening, and what it means. I have to say what I believe to be true or I don’t deserve to write for the Wall Street Journal. I also try to look ahead. No election is the end of the world. That will come later.


Lopez: I know you've had a deep respect for John McCain in the past. Is that a thing of the past?



Noonan: How could anyone not respect John McCain? He did in Vietnam what few can say with complete confidence they would have done. He suffered for his country, and to uphold the idea of personal honor. But we are not talking about respect for his past achievements as we discuss the campaign, we’re talking about what's happening now, what he's doing now. There will be many post-mortems — there have been many pre-mortems — and you know how I feel about the inadequacies not only of the campaign but of some of McCain’s judgments. I know conservatives and Republicans who will vote for Bob Barr, for Obama, and one who believes he will not vote in the presidential, though I think he will. I damn none of them, and dislike all the damning of the past five or so years. But at the end of the day the old-fashioned idea of prudence comes into play. I see three arguments for a McCain vote, the first being the runaway train — bigger Democratic majorities in Congress plus a popular new Democratic president, plus a Democratic base thirsting for innovation, may well produce something wild, and who will put on the brakes? The other is the life issues, in which Obama’s disposition is apparently to the left of Bill Clinton. Our last Democratic president yielded some good things — balanced budgets for instance — due to a Republican Congress. Divided government has its virtues. In any case these three arguments are, for me, decisive.


Lopez: Most conservatives no longer view George W. Bush as a conservative. Some never did. A lot had hopes. All that considered, do you understand the protective instinct — to want to defend him when defense is legitimately due? Can you understand why some conservatives might think that when you turned on him you did so too dramatically? That there could have been more patriotic grace demonstrated?

Noonan: You ask many questions here, and some are addressed further down. Columnists can, on the web, get very boring, and insistent, with “as I said here, and here” but please allow me to post my original critique of Bush, and my subsequent elaboration on it. I would ask your readers to take a look when they have the time, and see if my reservations and criticisms seem to them, in retrospect, too dramatic, or unrealistic, or unthinking. In a larger sense, Kathryn, allow me to say here that I have been dismayed to see something new happen, in the past few years, in conservatism. I speak of it at greater length in Patriotic Grace, but some is worth saying here. When I was first struggling through as a young conservative, when Bill Buckley was heading NR and Ronald Reagan and then Bush I were in the White House, conservatism was marked — truly, distinguished as a political movement — in part by an air of profound latitude in terms of what could be said. We had brawls. I remember when Reagan raised taxes in 1982 — conservatives tore him apart. Bill’s general attitude as I saw it was that he didn’t really care a fig for Richard Nixon, for Dwight Eisenhower, for George Romney or Bill Scranton, he cared for conservatism, for the country, for America. He cared about our future in Vietnam, and American policy toward China. He was not party-oriented, but philosophy-oriented, principle-oriented. And of course he sometimes supported those such as Al Lowenstein in New York — an exotic choice, but in keeping with the freewheelingness of the day. As for Reagan, my goodness — we debated publicly his flaws and mistakes and misjudgments while he was president, and those of us who worked for him felt free to criticize him. In What I Saw at the Revolution I spoofed him, teased him, and spoke of his pluses and minuses as I tried to understand him, and to help the reader understand him. Now there is, in the conservative movement, a greater air of fearfulness, of repression. And this is all so very un-conservative. “Which side are you on?”, “You better not buck the team,” “Declare your loyalties, comrade.” Literally: comrade. This is not the way of conservatism, this is the way, the manner and tone, of the old leftism. I don’t think it’s defensible morally, and I know it’s indefensible practically. Movements must grow, must include, expand, gather in; politics is a game of addition.


Lopez: There is no Bill Buckley or Ronald Reagan conservative running for president. But doesn’t McCain-Palin come closest?

Noonan: This question seems to me wrongheaded, or perhaps I mean not so realistic, in this sense. I said in a speech to Republicans down south about a year ago that if it were 1885, and Republicans were sitting around saying, ‘When will another Lincoln come?’ and ‘Is this candidate Lincolnesque?’ you would sit in the back of the hall and think: These people are sad. Life moves, new leaders must rise, and adapt to and operate within new realities. And I think some conservatives, or Republicans, still have to wake up on this. About five years ago I told the editor of the New York Times that when Jack Kennedy ran for president, Democrats didn’t run around asking, “Is he the new FDR?” Democrats just wanted JFK to be the new JFK — and so did Kennedy. At any rate I do not judge McCain as more or less like Reagan. You must judge him as McCain. And you must understand 2008 to be 2008, and not, say, 1986. And at the end of the day you must judge the parties the candidates bring with them, and the philosophies that to whatever degree infuse those parties.


Lopez: What is a conservative?



Noonan: Thank you for asking. I think this is something we should talk about more, and something I would urge NR to address with a greater force or breadth. Bill Buckley and his hardy band — James Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, etc. — brought to their task a certain missionary zeal. They thought they had to explain this thing, conservatism, to an American public that had just come through 25 years of the New Deal and had not heard or seen conservatism announced, put forward, or explained in a coherent way in more than a generation. (Russell Kirk of course was very much a part of this project, in perhaps a broader way.) Let me tell you, everyone wants to talk about politics, and the kind of ad McCain should cut, but what about the philosophies that animate our politics? But briefly, my views. You can debate whether conservatism is a philosophy, a program of settled ideas, a school of thought, a way of seeing the world. I tend to see it, to experience it, as a way of being, a way of understanding the world and responding to it. I cannot help but think that knowing there is a God is the start of all conservatism. (Apologies to agnostic friends who are various kinds and flavors of conservative.) Once you know that you know something big. From there you go on to knowing man. “If men were angels . . . ” They are not, so you don’t want to give them too much governmental power. I’ll throw forward some words and phrases meant to be shorthand for a lot. Prudence. A sense of reality. Understanding limits. Respect for tradition — it didn’t happen by accident. The long view. Respect for the individual and his rights. A knowledge that life is worth living, we’re lucky to be here. I would add or emphasize, for me, a Catholic sense of mystery — we don’t know all, can’t know all, must do our best. I think of ideology as some abstract thing dreamed up by intellectuals and squished down on the heads of human beings — “You will conform your actions to my ideological assumptions and expectations!” I see philosophy as something that rises up from human beings who observe and live with human beings. Conservatism is not an ideology. That’s the last thing it is.


Lopez: I tend to think there will be a serious revisiting of our founding principles — both 1776 and 1955 (the year National Review was founded) — after this election, whatever happens. Agree or disagree?

Noonan: You may remember we first spoke of this last spring, in Rome? The first wave will be . . . well, it will be as ugly as the past month. Uglier, as those with some responsibility for the past seven years turn their finger not on themselves but on others. (I happen to think careerism has become an unseen force in much of the fighting. Conservatism didn’t used to be a career, it was a sailing against the wind, a pushing back against the age that is pushing you, and it was often lonely, individual, painful. It has been for me.) The second wave will be more important, a real surveying and rethinking. A going back to the texts, Burke to Kirk, but also a deeper attempt to apply conservative principles and insights to reality as it is on the ground. For it must be applied to the reality as it is on the ground, to the facts, or it will not be conservative. Burke respected reality so much his enemies said he worshiped a thing just because it was. So yes, there will be seminars and symposia, and activists will have epiphanies on the Amtrak Acela while delayed at Wilmington. But here’s the most important wave. What I have been reminding people in speeches lately is America is not made in Washington. America is made in America. So this is step three, and will happen concurrently and for a long time with step two: look to the states and the counties. Briefly: I don’t believe in political saviors — I don’t think life is as a rule that dramatic, clear cut, resolved, or necessarily heroic. But what is happening in the states, and who is leading in and rising in the states, is going to yield up the leaders of the future. The great story of the next few years, and maybe longer than a few, will be what is happening there, and what is happening in the American culture. The McCain-Palin moment will pass; America will continue. Conservatives have to stop looking to Washington, it cannot solve our lives. And it’s not a very conservative impulse, to always be looking at and to the federal establishment.


Lopez: When people have been reading you for years, they sometimes think they know you too well. And feel betrayed when you don’t say what they might. And think they can read your unspoken motives. Just to clear the air here, when you sit down at your computer to write a column, what are you thinking? What is your goal? Who are you seeking to please?

Noonan: I feel I’m responsible to what I think is the truth, and to my readers, and I don’t think I can seek to please anyone. At the same time it grieves me — I mean real grief — when I disappoint readers. When I began what I did not know would become, but became, my break with Bush, in 2005, I came under great professional pressure, and prolonged criticism. But I don’t only disappoint Republicans. I disappoint the Right of course but also the middle, and the Left. On the latter, I guess the column that received the most heated response very recently was when I scored Obama for saying thoughts as to when life begins are above his pay grade. I said everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins. This got a lot of colorful e-mail. Among Republicans, my goodness — my criticism of the Republican leadership in Washington, that band of lobbyists who didn’t find it all so convenient to be separated from power sources — that wasn’t greeted so well. But I’ll tell you the larger attitude I bring to work. I don’t write to people whom I assume agree with me. I don’t write with the assumption my readers are nodding their heads. The Journal has such vast readership, especially on the Internet, with a stretch from conservative to liberal to the middle to the curious but unformed. Connected to that, I think perhaps you know something of my background? I am from a working-class family that knew all the problems the working class knows — a general lack of stability, etc. It was a hard place. My family were Democrats, as those who are not secure in this world often were and often are. As I became politically conservative, I became used to holding a minority viewpoint, not only in my family but in the places I worked. I came to separate personal relationships from political ones — one of the old friends I love most is probably, or at least on alternate Tuesdays, a Communist. But the larger point is, in all my experience, from young womanhood through now, personal and professional, I have always lived somewhat against the grain, and never in an intellectual ghetto where we all agree and see the world the same. So I just never assume agreement. Writing for Reagan underscored all this. He didn’t talk to “the base” when running for president, or while serving, he talked to the whole country, and was well aware of the terrain — the facts, the variety of thought and experience. That is my habit or inclination: talk to everybody, not a sliver or piece of the population, do your best. And I’m always thinking that I’m talking to people who one way or another struggled, and I don’t mean solely economic struggles, I mean life is full of struggle, for everyone. This is never far from my mind. As to method, I write about 5,000 words a week in order to cut from it what I think I’m seeing and what I think is worth saying.


Lopez: At what moment in the campaign season did you feel a need for “Patriotic Grace”?

Noonan: I’m feeling it right now.


Lopez: What do you hope to contribute with Patriotic Grace?

Noonan: The encouraging of taking the long view, to say what I think: We are going to wind up saving our country in the next ten or twenty years, and we must concentrate on it now, and on such actions as we can take to make that great struggle more likely to succeed. To remind us we’ll all have to get through it together. To discourage a political teamism that becomes gangism. To encourage people to love their country, to love your foe even as you criticize him, to understand a movement even as you stand against it. And to remind people not to be governed by their e-mail inbox. This is in a way a challenging time to be a citizen, with so many people feeling robbed of their peace. But it’s a wonderful time to be a writer. So these are your answers, my beloved Kathryn, and after heartsickness and even some leading questions, may we once again after the election once again go to Mass together, and have fun.