The significant livelihoods of folks like Noonan and Frum as speakers and authors are full dependent on the perception of their inside access and the currency of their profile. This could very well be sour grapes. The golden goose was butchered.
I think you, and vaudine in post 52, have nailed it. I am particularly amused by the disingenuous screeching of some of Noonan's defenders in this thread who try to accuse her critics of making ad hominum attacks on her. They desperately demand that while we are free to disagree with her from a language and style perspective, we mustn't dare to question her motives.
This is nonsense. Noonan's criticism isn't just directed at the style of the speech, it's a rejection of its meaning. It's not a just literary criticism; it's also a political criticism. Furthermore, she is damn well aware of it, and of how her criticism will be used by the MSM to attempt to obstuct the implementation of the philosophical and moral vision laid out in the speech. If she were truly intent only in giving a literary critique from the perspective of a professional speechwriter she would have waited a few days to lessen the political impact of her comments. Instead she has chosen to sandwich an entirely justifiable professional critique between two slices of personal agenda: garnering more face-time and publicity for her career, and payback for imagined wrongs or slights.
From last summer, here's a prescient glimpse of Peggy that sheds a little light on her current behavior:
From To The Point™ - http://www.tothepointnews.com
A Spasm of Spite
Jack Wheeler Friday, June 18, 2004
In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service – yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.
The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:
To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. Journal
It is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years – 1983-1988 – I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.
Peggy came late, arriving in Reagan’s second term, and was quickly identified by the other speechwriters as being dedicated to self-promotion. While the others were self-effacing and avoided taking any credit for a speech of the president’s, Peggy would never fail to call up every media contact she had to make sure any speechwriting of hers was fully publicized.
For all her self-promotion, the facts are that she never wrote many major presidential speeches and had quite limited access to the president. The Reagan speechwriters were the ultimate Reaganauts in the White House, and Peggy was an outsider. The saga of how the speechwriters got around senior Administration officials to get speeches President Reagan wanted to give in his hands is one of untold heroism.
Folks like George Schultz and James Baker desperately tried to prevent Reagan from uttering the most famous lines of his presidency, such as Reagan’s calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire or demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The speechwriters were the focus of the effort to advocate and implement the Reagan Doctrine, the strategy that brought down the Soviet Empire. Plainly put, without Reagan’s speechwriters like Tony Dolan, Ben Elliott, Clark Judge, Dana Rohrabacher, Josh Gilder, and Peter Robinson, there would have been no Reagan Doctrine.
Peggy wasn’t a part of this and now, so many years later, she allows her resentment to trash her tribute to Chief Speechwriter Ben Elliott and disgracefully use President Reagan’s funeral service to do so. Of course, Peggy wasn’t sitting with the other speechwriters at the service. I was. Her name never came up. No one asked, “Where’s Peggy?” Her cheap, inexcusable, and completely gratuitous insults of her fellow speechwriters – describing one as a “malignant leprechaun,” another as more concerned with getting a haircut than speechwriting, and yet another as an illiterate hack -- expose a small and petty side to her character that will permanently blemish the reputation she has worked so hard to achieve.
Here’s the question she needs to ask herself: Do you think that President Reagan would think more or less of you for writing what you did, Peggy? You know the answer. He would be ashamed of you. The knowledge of that shame will stain your soul, Peggy. You owe your fellow speechwriters the deepest of apologies - just as you owe an apology to the memory of Ronald Reagan.
She does have a knack for writing the worst articles at the most important times in history. Thanks for the reminder of that article written during Reagans funeral.
Very interesting.
Good post.
She has written some tacky columns about Bush and I think we (or at least I) were willing to cut her some slack because when she's good, she's good.
The Reagan business was bad enough. But this is far worse. Undermining the president on Inauguration Day when he is giving the clearest and most public presentation of what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine was exceedingly short-sighted and foolish.
And she could not have chosen two more damaging ways to undermine it, which I am sure was entirely deliberate.
She tries to split the conservatives by saying that Bush's speech is pie in the sky foolishness.
And she tries to give the liberals ammunition with that stupid business about "too much God," even though Bush only mentions God twice. You can be sure we'll be hearing her complaint repeated in the liberal press for the next 20 or 30 years and written into the history books by all the good little liberal historians.
They will say, "Even religious conservatives complain that GWB talks too much about God, and that he is faking it for rhetorical purposes." Great. We really needed that. Thanks, Peggy.
I remember reading that "malignant leprechaun" column by Noonan and having respect for her I believed her characterizations. I had not read this piece you have posted. Now I have some thoughts to "chew on" (as Noonan stated after hearing the speech yesterday).
Incidentally, I saw Peter Robinson (noted in this column) on tv this morning praising President Bush's speech.
Thanks for the Wheeler update. I think this is the piece I read after the Reagan funeral. It buttressed my opinion of Noonan as a bit too self-promoting, too "mooning" and romanticizing over her past in the WH,and, well, to use her words, a little too nuanced for me.
After reading this piece (I believe in Newsmax, as Wheeler writes regularly for them and he is a favorite of mine), I was not terribly surprised to see her trash the President's inaugural speech. How can the woman be so stupid--is she egotistical enough to think she could do better, and that her reputation is such that she can afford to do this?
It is very telling that all of Reagan's most famous quotes were written by the other writers and gotten to him around his "protectors" like Baker, who would never have dared to allow the President to utter such sentiments. It is much to Reagan's credit to recognize the drama and strength of these utterances.
vaudine