Overview

1. 'The irony is that the original hero of the neocon movement, Ronald Reagan, understood these lessons,' Mondale writes in his memoir, 'The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics,' published on Tuesday.
2. 'This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President-yet written with complete interpretive freedom-is as revolutionary in method as it is formidable in scholarship.
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4. 'I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,' Ronald Reagan said in 1984.

Former special advisor and press secretary to President Ronald Reagan shares an intimate, behind-the-scenes look inside the Reagan presidency—told through the movies they watched together every week at Camp David.

For 2 1/2 years Peggy Noonan worked in the White House as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, and for 2 1/2 years she took notes on everything she saw, heard, thought, felt and imagined.

- Ronald Reagan: 'The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.'

- Nancy Reagan: 'She was a Galanosist,' who 'disliked the contras because they were unattractive and dirty.'

- The White House: 'A beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there is nothing inside.'

Of the many, many books to come out of the Reagan White House-the autobiographies of Maureen, Patti, Michael and Nancy; the memoirs of Don Regan, Larry Speakes, Michael Deaver-Noonan`s 'What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era' (Random House, $19.95) might be the most devastating.

Peggy Noonan came to Pennsylvania Avenue so wide-eyed that when Reagan wrote 'very good' on a draft of one of her speeches, she cut it out, taped it to her blouse, and wore it around the White House all day. But when she left, she was so disillusioned she thought of him as a balloon in the Macy`s Thanksgiving Day parade, 'right up there between Superman and Big Bird.'

Noonan, 39, came to the Republican White House from an unlikely background. Her family were Kennedy-loving Irish-Catholics. She named her goldfish Jack and Jackie. But she never felt comfortable with 'the contemptuous elite' she found running the antiwar movement in the `70s, and she decided to use her McGovern button as a roach clip.

She took a hard turn right and never turned back. Working at CBS Radio, including three years of writing for Dan Rather, didn`t change her mind. She decided she was a partisan and lobbied for a job with the Reagan

administration. The 'woman speechwriter' slot was open and she took it. When she arrived at the White House in 1984, she was 33.

Noonan never fit in, never tried to. Because she come from CBS, her colleagues just assumed she was leaking to the media. She got so much publicity they resented her for promoting herself. Speechwriters, after all, were supposed to be heard, not seen. Yet she had an eight-page profile in Esquire, complete with a full-length picture. The title was 'Who Puts the Words in the President`s Mouth?' although Noonan was only one of six speechwriters and not even the most important. In his memoir, 'Speaking Out,' former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes says Ken Khachigian was given the most important speeches.

'She insisted on taking credit in public for many of the speeches she had written,' Speakes wrote. 'She was always saying, `I wrote this` and `I wrote that.'`

'That`s a lie,' said Noonan, who was in Chicago recently on her book tour. 'A light bulb went off for me one day when I realized why I had this reputation (for self-promotion). One of my friends was (CBS White House correpsondent) Lesley Stahl. We`d go to lunch and she`d walk me back to my office and I watched people watch us. They projected, `Gosh, if I went to lunch with Lesley Stahl, I`d be advancing the old career!` That`s not what we were doing. We were talking about boys.'

Noonan didn`t look like the other White House women. They wore suits and shirts and pretend ties, short hair. She wore jeans and boots and long, flowing hair. She got such a withering look from Nancy Reagan one day that she hid behind a pillar the next time she saw her. She made some powerful enemies, including Chief of Staff Don Regan. Even her personal habits set her apart. She was told that her wine-drinking and cigarette-smoking in the White House mess 'wasn`t considered average.'

But then, few things about life in the White House were. She found it to be a place of 'intrigue and betrayal,' where people were either 'leaking stories' or 'undermining colleagues.' No one went out after work for a drink. Noonan imagined her colleagues all going straight home at night, coming directly in the next day, and saying brightly: 'Good morning! What can we do to advance traditional values today?' She herself worked from 10 to 10, then went home to boil two Lean Cuisines.

Never say `gay`

Speech writing in the Reagan White House was like something out of

'Alice in Wonderland.' There were all these strange rules. The president doesn`t say, 'I`ll never forget'; he says, 'I`ll always remember.' He never says, 'I will be frank,' because he is always frank. He never says,

'I am worried,' because, like Alfred E. Neuman, he never worries.

(Sometimes, however, he`s concerned.) And he never, ever says 'gay.' To be on the safe side, he doesn`t even say 'gaiety.'

Noonan once used the G-word in a speech congratulating the U.S. Olympic team. An advance man said it sounded like the president was calling the team gay.

She responded: 'Listen, I want to tell you something from deep in my heart. No it doesn`t. No one will think, no one would ever think, that the President of the United States would hail our Olympic heroes by accusing them of being homosexual. I promise you this.'

But why take a chance? The G-word was deleted.

Things got stranger and stranger after Reagan`s pollster, Dick Wirthlin, met with the speechwriting team. Tests with focus groups showed that certain words and phrases were good, others were bad. 'Reach for the stars'-good.

'Let`s not cut the family budget, let`s cut the federal budget'-very good. 'Free anything'-very, very good. Except 'freedom fighters.' They were bad, bad, bad, whether they hailed from Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia or Nicaragua.

'This isn`t writing,' Noonan responded. 'This is one small step for focus groups, one giant step for the Where`s-the-beef-izaton of mankind.'

Although Noonan had progressed from writing a Rose Garden speech honoring the teacher of the year to working on some of the president`s key speeches-on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, the address to the nation after the Challenger exploded-she was outspoken and difficult. Don Regan kept her from becoming the chief speechwriter when the job opened up and denied her a 'goodbye moment' with the president when she quit in 1986, saying, 'It`s not fun anymore.'

'I was a little hurt when I left the White House,' Noonan said. 'I wanted the president to notice I was gone. But all I got was a goodbye note from the autograph pen.' Noonan admits Reagan probably wouldn`t know her if he saw her. 'I never registered with him.'

Noonan returned briefly to work for George Bush during his 1988 presidential campaign. She coined the phrases 'a kinder, gentler nation' and 'a thousand points of light' for his nomination acceptance speech. But the rules hadn`t relaxed much. 'Read my lips,' one of the more colorful, if hardly original, phrases she wrote into the speech, almost didn`t make it because there was no history of presidents referring to their organs in their speechs.

A frightening coldness

When Noonan arrived at the White House, she was nearly besotted with Reagan. 'I approached him with total awe, you know?' she said. 'I figured he was a great president, probably the greatest of my lifetime.' Her first glimpse of him was of his foot. 'It was a beautiful foot,' she writes. 'I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it.' (One reporter has suggested that Noonan might not be so much a conservative, as a foot fetishist.)

Indeed, Noonan found much good in Reagan. She calls him 'the sunny president . . . probably the sweetest, most innocent man ever to serve in the Oval Office.' He would keep the family snapshots that people sent him, and they`d accumulate in his pockets and desk drawers. She says he had no personal enemies. Yet when people close to him were knifed, 'he managed not to notice.'

Ronald Reagan Memory Issues

There was a coldness to him that was disturbing at first, and finally frightening. James Baker said of him, 'He is the kindest and most impersonal man I ever knew.' A friend said, 'Behind those warm eyes is a lack of curiosity that is somehow disorienting.'

Certainly Noonan never saw Reagan engaged by the affairs of state. She watched him closely and was 'mildly shocked' at one Cabinet meeting to see how he 'strained to show interest.' At another, while a shouting match was in progress between Secretary of State George Shultz and Budget Director David Stockman, the president 'dreamily, delicately began to pick out his favorite colors' from a bowl of jelly beans. The most animation he ever showed was when he spotted a rat scurrying through the Rose Garden.

Columnist Ellen Goodman has written that this book should have been called 'Desperately Seeking Reagan.' Noonan calls the chapter on Reagan

'Who Was That Masked Man?' She looked hard, but she never found out, not even after spending extensive time with him preparing his farewell-to-the-nation speech. She and two other aides met with him five times. They had prepared a list of questions to draw him out.

'(W)hat was the most difficult day you ever had in this office?'

He had no response.

'(T)he day the Marines died in the barracks in Lebanon?'

'Oh, yes.'

'And the shuttle explosion?'

'Oh, yes.'

'And Grenada?'

'Yes.'

When he was asked how it felt to call the families of American boys killed in action, he had no answer.

'Don`t fall in love with politicans,' writes Noonan. 'They`re all a disppoinment. They can`t help it, they just are.'

`The truth is fun`

There`s an old saying: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, it`s a duck. Well, this book looks, quacks and waddles like a kiss-and-tell book, although Noonan strongly denies it.

'They`re so undignified,' Noonan said. 'This is history-I don`t mean to be high falutin`-but when you write history, you owe it to yourself and your readers to be as fair as you can be, but also as clear-sighted and honest. I could have done a halo-polishing job-'Ronald Reagan: Angel or Saint?'-but why? The truth is fun, you know?'

The book has received rave reviews from the so-called liberal press. The New York Times printed a long excerpt under the title: 'Confessions of a White House Speechwriter.' But the National Review panned it. This is the journal that Noonan said 'sang' to her when she was a young conservative, that 'assuaged a kind of loneliness' she felt, that was 'the first conservative friend' of half the Reagan administration. They ran a blistering review under the headline: 'Peggy Noonan Grosses Out.'

Ronald Reagan Autobiography

They point out that although Noonan writes that she read Franklin Roosevelt`s speeches and decided, 'This is how Reagan should sound,' in fact, 'Reagan sounded like Reagan before Peggy Noonan was born.'

They question the arrogance of a line like, 'Speechwriting was where the Administration got invented every day.'

'By Peggy Noonan?' questions the National Review. 'Did tax cuts, indexing, SDI and the Pershing missle occur to her while she was sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park? And when did she dream up Grenada?'

The review criticizes her 'sneering attitude' toward her colleagues. The review offers the following advice to Bush and future presidents: 'When you hire a speechwriter of this moral character, lock up the silverware and keep your hand on your wallet.'

Next, a novel

They probably don`t have to worry. Noonan is through writing for other people. She said she told Bush, 'If you`re ever in a jam . . .,' but he never took her up on it after his inaugural address, and that`s OK with her. She enjoys writing in her own voice and is at work on a novel based in New York, where she lives with her son, Will. She`s separated from her husband, economist Richard Rahn.

Ronald Reagan Memorabilia

Noonan is pleased to take credit for 'a kinder, gentler nation' and 'a thousand points of light,' although she has forgotten that the phrase was ridiculed at first. But she doesn`t mention that she was the one who had Reagan call the contras 'the moral equals of our Founding Fathers.' But then, this is her book.