A Certain Idea of America: Selected Writings

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Copyright © 2024 by Peggy Noonan

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All columns first published in The Wall Street Journal and have been edited slightly for clarity.

Cover design: Brian Lemus

Cover photograph: Erin Patrice O’Brien

Book design by Alissa Rose Theodor, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Noonan, Peggy, 1950– author.

Title: A certain idea of America : selected columns / Peggy Noonan.

Description: [New York] : Portfolio ; Penguin, 2024.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024037311 (print) | LCCN 2024037312 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593854778 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593854785 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government. | United States—Civilization.

Classification: LCC E183 .N66 2024 (print) | LCC E183 (ebook) | DDC 973—dc23/eng/20240926

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024037311

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024037312

Ebook ISBN 9780593854785

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Foreword

1 | LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

Billy Graham, the Ecumenical Evangelist

The Wisdom of Oscar Hammerstein

The Mystery and Grace of Paul Simon

Hats Off to Tom Wolfe

Thoughts on Theodore Roosevelt and John Hay after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

These Generals Were the Closest of Enemies

History Gives George H. W. Bush His Due

On Margaret Chase Smith

Richard Nixon’s Example of Sanity in Washington

On the Death of a Queen

A Great Man Got Arrested as President

Bob Dylan, a Genius Among Us

2 | I DON’T MIND BEING STERN

The Senator’s Shorts and America’s Decline

Life Isn’t Merde

Get Ready for the Struggle Session

The Left Is Overplaying Its Hand

America Needs More Gentlemen

Reflections on Impeachment, Twenty Years Later

The Uvalde Police Scandal

America Has Lost the Thread

The Half-Madness of Prince Harry

The Sexual-Harassment Racket Is Over

Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots

What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns?

Scenes from the Class Struggle in Lockdown

Bring ’Em to Justice

Psychos in the C-Suite

America’s Universities Are Self-Destructing

Democracy Is Not Your Plaything

The Media Can’t Keep Their Heads

Where Did the Adults Go?

3 | TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS

My Summer with Leo Tolstoy

The Lonely Office Is Bad for America

A Genius for Friendship

America’s Most Tumultuous Holy Week

Think Like an Artist

Out of the Ashes of Notre Dame

On Uvalde: Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb

Coronavirus Will Change Everything

Our New Coronavirus Reality

What Comes After the Coronavirus Storm?

Give Thanks for Taylor Swift

4 | ON AMERICA

What’s Become of the American Dream?

A Continuing Miracle

On Keeping Our Composure

Wisdom of a Non-Idiot Billionaire

Which Way to Pointe du Hoc?

An American Song, an American Crisis

A Week in the Life of a Worried Land

Home Again, and Home Again, America for Me

Spirits in the Skies of Summer

The Pilgrims Take Manhattan

We Need a Farsighted Conservatism

Against the Tear-It-Down Movement

Joe Biden Can’t Resist the River of Power

A Tabloid Legend on Jeffrey Epstein’s Death

Why the Titanic Keeps Drawing Us In

The Protected Versus the Unprotected

5 | IT APPEARS HE DIDN’T TAKE MY ADVICE

If Biden Runs, They’ll Tear Him Up

Imagine a Sane Donald Trump

6 | WATCH OUT

What I Wish Oppenheimer Had Said

The Ukraine Crisis: Handle with Care

It’s the Unthinkable. We Must Think About It.

The October Horror Is Something New

The Rape of the Israeli Women

AI Is the Y2K Crisis, Only This Time It’s Real

We’re Putting Humanity’s Future into Silicon Valley’s Hands

Artificial Intelligence in the Garden of Eden

What Might Have Been at Tora Bora

7 | WE CAN HANDLE IT

Roe v. Wade Distorted Our Politics and Roiled Our Culture

What Pro-Lifers Should Learn from Kansas

John Paul II’s Prescient 1995 Letter to Women

Mrs. Smith’s Tips for New Lawmakers

Mind Your Manners, Says Edith Wharton

The San Francisco Rebellion

The Kids Are Not All Right

Save Capitalism!

The President Has a Presentation Problem

What Comes After Acheson’s Creation?

American Institutions Are Frailer Than We Know

The Century of the Postheroic Presidency

Acknowledgments

About the Author

_149815575_

For Will and Alice in an auspicious year

FOREWORD

This is not a book about the day to day of our national political life. It is simply about loving America and enjoying thinking aloud about it.

The columns gathered here are varied in terms of subject matter. They are about the things that endure, and things that deserve to be encouraged. A number of them are about spectacular human beings. As my editor and I read through the past few years of Wall Street Journal columns, if I said, I really enjoyed writing that, or she said, I loved this, or I said, This was important to me, it was in. If not, out. We chose about eighty from more than four hundred. We found ourselves most attracted to themes of history and its pleasures.

The book is divided into seven parts.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is mostly about great figures and artists of the twentieth century, from Billy Graham to Oscar Hammerstein, from Queen Elizabeth II to Senator Margaret Chase Smith of the state of Maine, and from Tom Wolfe to Bob Dylan, with some side trips to the nineteenth century and the generals of the American Civil War. Looking back on a career of now fifty years, I see that from the beginning what I have loved most, what has most moved me, is writing honest praise.

I Don’t Mind Being Stern, on the other hand, is about having fun, as a public writer, taking as big a stick as you can to people and things you are certain deserve it. The U.S. Senate changing its dress code to accommodate a senator who enjoys dressing like a child? Get the stick. Vengeful Prince Harry? Ditto. We were certain a recent Broadway production of Cabaret deserved our stern attention, in a piece whose last line is its summation: "Life Isn’t Merde. We castigate men who aren’t gentlemen, and admonish parents who, as their personal vanity product, wind kids up to become mindless status robots. Also receiving fire are woke academics who speak garbage thoughts with garbage words. (I am sorry to use the word woke," which is boring and sounds merely sarcastic, but the thing is that when you say it, everyone pretty much knows what you mean.) I believe we were the first to compare contemporary social justice warriors with the practitioners of the struggle sessions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We enjoyed pointing out that the leaders of the French Revolution were, largely, sociopaths. There’s a piece written in the hours after January 6, 2021.

In Try a Little Tenderness we turn to love, which we posit as a very good thing. We call for artists to enter politics. We meditate, after the fire that swept the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, on the enduring presence and power of religious faith. We unabashedly love, we swoon over and wish to marry, Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. We mourn for Uvalde, Texas. We talk about the endless drama of men and women, and instruct America that more happens every day in the office than business. Also we declare Taylor Swift an American phenomenon, and if you don’t like it you can just shake it off.

It Appears He Didn’t Take My Advice is two columns long. The first, on Joe Biden, was so spectacularly wrong in its central prediction that it made us laugh. Yet looking back five years, it seemed to me in its reasoning to be still oddly pertinent. The second, on Donald Trump, on the eve of the 2016 election, seems to me to have some prescience as to his central problems as a historical figure. Also in the writing of it I remember a feeling of poignance.

On America is about the foibles, troubles, and triumphs of our country. It includes the story of my great-aunt Jane Jane, and how, as an Irish immigrant, she came to love her new country. I’d say the general theme of this section is about keeping your poise under pressure. It includes recent college graduates, the Normandy invasion, and the spirited, against-the-grain testimony of an old-fashioned capitalist. Also included, a portrait of the dynamics that produced a political sea change: The Protected Versus the Unprotected.

Watch Out contains columns about the worries that preoccupy my mind: the dark potentials of AI, skepticism as to the character and motives of its inventors; the possible use of nuclear weapons, and the ongoing dramas in Ukraine and the Mideast.

We Can Handle It is about working our way, as a nation, through things that roil us, from the #MeToo movement to the abortion wars, from the creation of a sane foreign policy, to the low state of the American presidency.

—

This collection draws its title from the famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs, most happily translated as All my life I have had a certain idea of France. It struck me when I read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America, and from the beginning it shaped my thinking and drove my work.

What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance—how did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right (different but complementary) gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: Providence. That is where my mind settles, too.

De Gaulle said his thoughts on France were driven as much by emotion as reason, and the same for me. A piece in here dated July 3, 2019, speaks of both:

I’m not really big on purple mountain majesties. I’d love America if it were a hole in the ground, though yes, it’s beautiful. I don’t love it only because it’s an idea, as we all say now. That strikes me as a little bloodless. Baseball didn’t come from an idea, it came from us—a long cool game punctuated by moments of high excellence and utter heartbreak, a team sport in which each player operates on his own. The great movie about America’s pastime isn’t called Field of Ideas, it’s called Field of Dreams. And the scene that makes every grown-up weep is when the dark-haired young catcher steps out of the cornfield and walks toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes, That’s my father.

He asks if they can play catch, and they do, into the night.

The great question comes from the father: Is this Heaven? The great answer: It’s Iowa.

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, and that where you start doesn’t dictate where you’ll 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 heartbreak. 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 holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.

We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first Fourth of July and in spite of all the changes that have swept the world.

It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.

I would say of the above, welcome to my deepest heart.

You’ll see some of the U.S. Civil War here. It has been a lifelong preoccupation and followed my interest in Abraham Lincoln, whose life has gripped me since childhood. He is the only American president who was both a political and literary genius—literally, genius—and about him clung an air of the mystical. He was completely human (homely ways, off-color jokes, depressions, a writer of angry letters) and yet there was something almost supernatural in his ability to be fair, to be just, to be merciful toward his tormentors (the angry letters were thrown in a drawer). What a figure. Tolstoy thought him the greatest man in history.

Religious faith is a constant subtext here because it’s my constant subtext.

Anyway, America. With all her harrowing flaws (we have always been a violent country, for instance) she deserves from us a feeling of profound protectiveness. Our great job as citizens is to shine it up a little, make it better, and hand it on, safely, to the generation that follows, and ask them to shine it up and hand it on. I think that is often what I was trying to do. When you see this I will have been a weekly columnist in The Wall Street Journal for just shy of a quarter century. I am grateful I haven’t run out of opinions.

—

All of these columns have appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The titles of some have been changed though not the dates, and some words and references have been added or replaced to enhance clarity but not alter meaning.

CHAPTER 1

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

On great figures and artists, most, but not all, of the twentieth century.

BILLY GRAHAM, THE ECUMENICAL EVANGELIST

February 22, 2018

You know the miraculous life of Louis Zamperini, whose story was told in Laura Hillenbrand’s epic, lovely book, Unbroken. Louis was the delinquent, knockabout son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, who went on to run for America in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, then joined the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor. He crashed in the Pacific, drifted in a raft on open sea for forty-seven days, came near death—shark attacks, storms, strafing by Japanese bombers—and survived, only to be captured by enemy troops. He spent two years in Japanese prison camps—beaten, tortured, brutalized as much as a person can be and still live.

He came back a hero, shocked to be alive. But his life went from rise to descent—rage, alcoholism, destruction. He couldn’t focus enough to make a living, couldn’t stop the downhill slide. His wife, Cynthia, announced she was leaving. One day a neighbor told them of something going on in town, in L.A. An evangelist named Billy Graham had set up a tent and invited the public. Cynthia grabbed at the straw, but Louie refused. He wasn’t going to watch some con man screaming. Cynthia argued for days and finally fibbed. Billy Graham, she said, talks a lot about science. Louie liked science. So he went, grudgingly, and they sat in the back. The following quotes are from Unbroken.

This is what Billy Graham looked like: His remarkably tall blond hair fluttered on the summit of a remarkably tall head, which in turn topped a remarkably tall body. He had a direct gaze and a southern sway in his voice. Studio chiefs saw a leading man and offered him a movie contract. Graham laughed and said he wouldn’t do it for a million a month. He was thirty-one and had been traveling the world for years.

This is what he hid: He was wearing out. For many hours a day, seven days a week, he preached to vast throngs, and each sermon was a workout, delivered in a booming voice, punctuated with broad gestures of the hands, arms, body. He got up as early as five, and he stayed in the tent late into the night, counseling troubled souls. His weight dropped and there were circles under his eyes. At times he felt that if he stopped moving his legs would buckle, so he took to pacing his pulpit to keep himself from keeling over.

It cost him to be Billy Graham. He wanted to end his crusades, but their success convinced him Providence had other wishes.

This is what Billy Graham was not like: Elmer Gantry. Louie expected the sort of frothy, holy-rolling charlatan that he’d seen preaching near Torrance when he was a boy. What he saw instead was a brisk, neatly groomed man two years younger than himself. This man was…serious. He asked his listeners to open their Bibles to the eighth chapter of John.

This is what Billy Graham said: Here tonight, there’s a drowning man, a drowning woman…a drowning boy, a drowning girl that is lost in the sea of life.

He spoke of the Pharisees surrounding Jesus that day in the temple and presenting the woman taken in adultery. Moses in the law commanded us, they said, that she should be stoned. What say you? Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground, as if he hadn’t heard. They pressed; he wrote. He lifted himself and said, Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. They were convicted by their own conscience and left. Jesus, alone with the woman, asked, Has no one condemned thee? No man, she said. He said, Neither do I condemn thee. Go now and sin no more.

But what was Jesus writing on the ground? Graham suggested Christ was enacting the writing of the facts of our individual lives: God takes down your life from the time you were born to the time you die. He will see the truth. You’re going to say, ‘Lord, I wasn’t such a bad fellow.’

Louie felt something tighten. He felt a lurking, nameless uneasiness, like the shudder of sharks rasping their backs along the bottom of the raft.

And so began his conversion. He went on to a life of greatness, helping boys as lost as he’d once been.

That is the importance of Billy Graham. 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.

Louis wasn’t the only one in the tent, Laura Hillenbrand said this week, by phone: Without Reverend Graham, Louie would not have lived.

What reached into Louis’s soul, she added, was Graham’s ability to reach into the individual, the person in front of him—of God being interested in him personally. Louis had to come to terms with two huge things, the mystery of his suffering (why did this injustice happen?) and the mystery of his survival (so many others are gone). But you didn’t have to float on a raft and be tortured to suffer: Everyone suffers. Louis was no different from anyone else in the tent that night.

He’s still no different from anyone else in the tent.

Here I want to say, I think there was something different and special going on between Catholics and Billy Graham. They saw, as Louis Zamperini, raised Catholic, saw, his earnestness, his confidence in his message. They saw him swimming against the modern tide, as they often felt they were. And maybe they looked and imagined the cost.

I asked the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, if he saw this also. He emailed back: When I was growing up, back in the 1950s, relations between Catholics and Protestants were still wary. But Catholic families felt that Billy Graham was the Protestant preacher they could feel a real kinship with. He had the ability to reach across all the fractures in Christianity and speak to the common believing heart. Archbishop Chaput compared him to C. S. Lewis. In a sense, he spoke the same kind of ‘mere’ Christianity that Lewis did so well, but with an American accent.

As the big thing to be desired now is that we hold together as a nation and not split apart, Graham’s ecumenical force should be noted among his achievements.

Throughout his life Billy Graham had an air of I’m not important, God is important. It didn’t seem like a line but a conviction. He said once, I am not going to Heaven because I have preached to great crowds…. I am going to Heaven just like the thief on the cross who said in that last moment, ‘Lord, remember me.’

And Christ said, This day you will be with me in Paradise.

Graham’s son asked what he wanted on his gravestone. He thought and said, Preacher.

Since Wednesday morning one of his quotes was all over social media: Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.

Rest in peace, American preacher man.

THE WISDOM OF OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN

March 29, 2018

Let’s unfurrow the brow and look at something elevated. It’s a small thing, a half-hour television interview from sixty years ago, but it struck me this week as a kind of master class in how to be a public figure and how to talk about what matters. In our polarized moment it functions as both template and example.

In March 1958, the fierce young journalist Mike Wallace—already famous for opening an interview with the restaurateur Toots Shor by asking, Toots, why do people call you a slob?—decided to bore in on Oscar Hammerstein II. (For the record, Shor responded that Wallace had him confused with Jackie Gleason.) Hammerstein was the fabled lyricist and librettist who with composer Richard Rodgers put jewels in the crown of American musical theater—Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and Carousel, whose latest Broadway revival is about to open. He was a hero of American culture and a famous success in a nation that worshiped success.

Wallace was respectful but direct and probing. He asked Hammerstein if critics who’d called his work sentimental didn’t have a point.

Hammerstein said his critics were talented, loved the theater, and there was something to what they’d said. But he spoke of sentiment in contradistinction to sophistication: The sophisticate is a man who thinks he can swim better than he can and sometimes drowns himself. He thinks he can drive better than he really can and sometimes causes great smashups. So, in my book there’s nothing wrong with sentiment because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life: the birth of a child, the death of a child or of anybody, falling in love. I couldn’t be anything but sentimental about these basic things.

What, Wallace asked, was Hammerstein’s message in South Pacific?

Hammerstein said neither he nor Rodgers had ever gone looking for vehicles by which to deliver messages. They were attracted to great stories and wanted to tell them onstage. But when a writer writes anything about anything at all, he gives himself away. He inevitably exposes his beliefs and hopes. The love stories in South Pacific were shaped by questions of race. The main characters learned that all this prejudice that we have is something that fades away in the face of something that’s really important. That thing is love.

Does this reflect his views on interracial marriage?

Hammerstein, simply: Yes.

The King and I, he said, is about cultural differences. The Welsh governess and the Siamese children know nothing of each other at the start: There again, all race and color had faded in their getting to know and love each other. On the other hand, Allegro, about disillusionment and professional achievement, carries a warning: After you’re successful, whether you be a doctor or a lawyer or a librettist, there is a conspiracy that goes on in which you join—a conspiracy of the world to render you less effective by bestowing honors on you and taking you away from the job of curing people, or of pleading cases, or writing libretti and…putting you on committees. He added he was a fine one to talk: he couldn’t stop joining committees.

Is he religious? Here Hammerstein told a story. A year ago he was rushing to work and jaywalked. A policeman called out; Hammerstein braced for a dressing down. But the officer recognized him and poured out his appreciation for his work. Hammerstein thanked him and moved to leave, but the policeman had a question. "He said, ‘Are you religious?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t belong to any church,’ and then he patted me on the back and he said, ‘Ah, you’re religious all right.’ And I went on feeling as if I’d been caught, and feeling that I was religious. He had discovered from the words of my songs that I had faith—faith in mankind, faith that there was something more powerful than mankind behind it all, and faith that in the long run good triumphs over evil. If that’s religion, I’m religious, and it is my definition of religion."

Then to politics.

Wallace: You are an active liberal.

Hammerstein: Yes, I guess I am.

What connection does this have with your work?

I think it must have a connection, because it expresses my feelings, my tendencies, Hammerstein said. As I’ve said before, a writer gives himself away if he’s writing honestly.

Wallace: Would you agree that most of our writers and directors on Broadway and television in Hollywood are liberal and that there is a liberal complexion to their work?

I think I would, yes, Hammerstein replied, honestly and with no defensiveness.

Wallace’s office had just spoken to a militant dissenter from liberalism, Ayn Rand, author of the recently published novel Atlas Shrugged. She said, The public is being brainwashed by the so-called liberal or leftist philosophies, which have a stranglehold on the dissemination of ideas in America. How did Hammerstein respond?

He didn’t like her adding the word "leftist, because you can be a liberal without being a leftist, and many and most liberals are. Beyond that, her criticism was an example of what’s working. I think it’s fine that there is a Miss Rand who comes out stoutly for the conservative. I think it’s fine that we have all kinds of thinkers in the world…. I admit that the majority of writers in this country are on the liberal side."

But he added, of Rand, We need her to hold us back, and I think she needs us to pull her forward.

Italics mine. Because liberals and conservatives do need each other, and the right course can sometimes be found in the tug between them.

Wallace: The public does rarely get anything but a liberal viewpoint from Hollywood or from television, from Broadway, and the charge can be safely made that there is a certain intolerance of conservative ideas among liberals.

Hammerstein, again undefensive: I think so, too.

What’s to be done about it? Nothing, said Hammerstein: Just be yourself, that’s all. If the public likes Miss Rand, there will be a Miss Rand trend. Let the problem work its way out in a free country.

Hammerstein said he tries sometimes to vote Republican just for the sake of switching—just for the sake of telling myself I’m not a party man, which he doesn’t want to be. But somehow or other I always wind up voting Democratic. Balancing the budget bores him. I have an idea that the more liberal Democratic tendency—to borrow and owe money is healthier for us. Most big corporations borrow, and they make progress with the money. When the U.S. borrows money, Hammerstein said, he felt the people in the lower income bracket get the most out of it. But I’m no economist—this is merely a guess.

We’re all guessing, and working on instinct and experience. Moral modesty and candor are good to see.

In our public figures, especially our political ones, they are hard to find. I offer Hammerstein’s old words as an example—a prompter—of what they sound like.

THE MYSTERY AND GRACE OF PAUL SIMON

March 28, 2024

Easter’s coming, Holy Week’s here, and Passover is a few weeks away, so it’s a good time to look at the work of a great artist who’s brought considerable beauty into the world, Paul Simon. Alex Gibney’s two-part MGM+ documentary on the making of his most recent album is also beautiful—moving, mellow, sweet, and deep. It tells of Mr. Simon’s life and touches on three big themes—the nature of creativity and where it comes from; that tricky thing called a career, which carries a talent forward into the world and keeps it there, or not; and, centrally, an ongoing spiritual event in Mr. Simon’s life that sounds like an ongoing miracle, or at least has pronounced supernatural aspects.

Mr. Simon, now eighty-two, is one of the greatest American songwriters of the twentieth century, and you carry his songs in your head—Bridge Over Troubled Water, Scarborough Fair, American Tune, Mrs. Robinson. It was classic after classic. People used to say, ‘Oh, you have your finger on the pulse,’ Mr. Simon says in the documentary. "And I would think, no, I don’t have my finger