"Blah blah blah I don't feel one bit victimized by you...just stop victimizing me blah blah I have lots of friends and you're offended by Jesus...blah blah blah...you feel sorry for yourself...I just want to be pals..."
Heard this all before, and I'm sorry, but it won't fly. You continue to try to line up in the 'reasonable' team slot now, when you trotted onto the field for the other side. You defended those who attacked Noonan's character and person, and attacked and insulted those of us who found those attacks inappropriate. You want to play all the cards you can to distract from it, but them's the facts, Elroy. Deny all you want, but anyone who looks at the thread will see what you posted and who you carried the ball for.
And I get extra credit for not mixing a single metaphor.
http://reagan2020.com/tributes/noonan_2.asp
snip
Ronald Reagan could do and say anything he wanted--he was the president. But every time Ben fought the bureaucracy to get the right draft to Reagan--to get the president's own conservative views to him--Ben made an enemy. He faced a million swords, and without bureaucratic protection. In politics, friends come and go but enemies accumulate. By the time the bad guys got him, Ben looked like a human pincushion.
We owed him so much. Making his position even more difficult, and painful, there were those on his staff and around him who wanted his job, or who wanted him removed because he didn't assign them enough speeches. They were right, he didn't. He didn't because he was protecting them. Dick Darman, our boss of all bosses, would read a draft from one or another of them and he'd call Ben and say, "If I see another speech by him I will fire him, he is over." And he meant it. So Ben would hide them to save their jobs.
Only he made one bureaucratic mistake: He didn't tell them. Because he didn't want them to feel insecure and oppressed. He didn't want to add to the bitterness of that tough White House. Ben was like "Mister Roberts" in the 1955 film--he protected the crew but the crew didn't know, and some didn't care. Some of the writers were so gifted--Mari, Josh Gilder. Ben worked Josh to the bone. But they were a mixed group, as all groups are. There was one speechwriter who wrote the same speech over and over, or rather he wrote a good one in 1982 and a good one in 1988, and I think he spent the rest of his time getting haircuts. There was another who didn't write but only kibitzed. When Washington gets around to a National Hack Memorial, and it no doubt will, he'll probably pose for the statue. Another looked like a malignant leprechaun and spent most of his time on the phone telling columnists what the president was about to say. What a crew. And Ben protected them all. And me, too, and not only because I was a conservative but also because I was the only woman there.
Ben kept it all together. And it worked. When he left the White House he never said a word, never spoke of his experiences, never went on TV for interviews, never wrote a book. He left Washington, burrowed down into corporate communications, worked for two families, and became a serious and ardent Christian, so that his faith, and not politics, became the central animating fact of his life.
At that great gathering of unsung heroes of the Reagan era, I got to speak of Ben. I got to sing him.
And when I said his name the crowd burst into the biggest applause of the day. Because they knew who Ben Elliott was. Becky Norton Dunlop, who had taken her own hits for RR, took to her feet for her own standing ovation.
And Ben Elliott was there. He was in the audience with his wife, Troy, and his daughter Grace, 11, who did not know her father was a great man, or rather might not have known he was great in this particular way.
It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life to give this man a small part of his due. When it was over, we hugged--what a hugging time it has been--and I told him I loved him.
And there followed, for me, the sole unaffectionate moment of the whole three days. In honor of Ronald Reagan, it was candid.
The Hack was in the audience. He approached me in his greasy political style and said, "I'm so glad you honored Ben." He put his hand on my waist. This was a mistake.
"It's more than you ever did," I pointed out. Hack had been on TV with pictures of him and Reagan, recalling with modesty his small contribution to the president. He was right. It was small.
He said that he'd always tried to honor Ben. I pointed out that this was a lie. Nor had haircut boy in his book. Didn't they know Ben had saved their jobs? They were only there because of him.
At this Hack smiled slyly. "Well, I never wrote a book," he said.
"No, you'd have to be literate to do that," I pointed out.
Afterward I told old Reagan hands about our exchange. They would laugh and say, "Yes!" Because, as I say, they knew the Ben Elliott story. And now someone has put it in print.
Answer to Peggy "Spasm of Spite"
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/6/18/141839.shtml
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.
Jack Wheeler
Friday, June 18, 2004
At this point (and possibly long before), we have hijacked this thread, and no more public discussion is appropriate.