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
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1326752/posts
TAKING BUSH SERIOUSLY
Behind The Lines - Dr. Jack Wheeler
Friday, January 21, 2005
"The appropriate reaction to Bush’s Inaugural Address yesterday is: awe-struck. This was a Babe Ruth moment, pointing to where he wanted to hit the ball and swinging for the bleachers. I couldn’t help laughing when I read Peggy Noonan’s petty, small-minded essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning, grouchily complaining about Bush’s “mission inebriation.” She didn’t like the speech because it was so much better than any she wrote for Ronald Reagan.
I saw three of Peggy’s former colleagues – White House speechwriters for President Reagan – at one of the Inaugural Balls last night, and they all agreed that Bush’s Second Inaugural will be seen as one of the historically greatest of any American President"
just wanted to thank you MEG33 for all the info you have posted on this thread.
i have been reading it all along and am amazed at some who have posted here with total unabashed hypocracy. i have laughed out loud reading some of the blatent railing accusations leveled at others while wondering how they can see to type with the logs in their own eyes.
looks like there is a thought police crowd here who wants to intimidate and curtail free thought by the same old tired tacticts of socialism. how tedious..
seems it's ok for some to be a Noonan-bot (to use their wording) but not a Bush-bot. it's ok to critasize the President (that makes you "original" dontchaknow) but cannot critasize the critasizer (Noonan). how deliciously .... ironic. and unoriginal..
anyway... i loved the President's speech, didn't like Noonan's "critique", thought she sounded childish and pouty, and just fodder to the enemy- hope she's proud of that.
i will defend her right to critasize though, but will also defend the right of others to critasize her. no matter if the thought police want to regulate that or not, that's way it works. as long as it's within forum rules, it makes me no nevermind.. it just shows people's character, so they might want to remember that.
the posts you have put up have been very helpful.
and yes.... prayers of support from me to the President and his family and other soldiers in Christ, that's what we do for each other regardless of the approval and ridicule from others.
God bless W with wisdom and protection.
Gosh, I wonder who the hack was? /sarcasm
The title of this piece is The Ben Elliott Story: What I saw at the funeral. Mr. Wheeler is not responding to a tribute to Reagan (though the piece certainly mentions Reagan, since Noonan and Elliott worked there). There is a Noonan tribute to Reagan on the web site you pull this from, and it is specifically, solely addressing RWR. Both the pieces dealing with the funeral are about just that.
I notice you had to go to newsmax to find Wheeler's screed. Noonan was subtle and classy enough not to name him, though I'm sure everyone who read the piece and knew of their feud immediately knew everyone she was talking about.
But you demonstrate in your production of this little epithet-in-html that again, it's okay to attack Noonan personally in your book. You disagree with her argument, after all. Thus, she must be a bad person, worthy of any kind of abuse you can mete out.