What I Saw at the Revolution.

• Author: Fallows, James

The top speechwriter for Reagan and Bush

takes you behind her lines.

Peggy Noonan is a terrific speechwriter, as she showed most convincingly with George Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 1988. This book shows that she is also a skillful raconteur. What I Saw at the Revolution is a memoir that goes lightly over her pre-political experiences and then concentrates on the two-plus years she spent working at the White House for Reagan and her later experiences with Bush.

The book has the right mix of gossip, score-settling, and story-telling, and it is usually quite funny. (A warrior from the Afghan Mujahedeen resistance comes to the White House for meetings to raise support. Noonan takes him to the White House Mess for lunch. "The polite, attentive Filipino steward approaches and holds out his pad, his pencil poised in the air. The Mujahedeen warrior turns his turbaned head. 'I will have meat,' he says.") There are enough delicious moments in this book to earn it a place with Donald Regan's For the Record and Christopher Buckley's hilarious novel, The White House Mess, on the short list of Reagan-era memoirs that are well worth reading as well as enormous fun to read.

Noonan is wholeheartedly on the side of Reaganism and of Ronald Reagan, but she does not make Reagan out to be some kind of mental giant or perfect man. Near the end of his term, she says, "I knew he was one of the great men of our time ... |but~ when I thought of him in those days, it was as a gigantic heroic balloon floating in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, right up there between Superman and Big Bird."

Having come to Washington in her mid-30s, after growing up and working in New York, Noonan usually remains skeptical of the classic Washington vanities. After she's called in for a meeting with Reagan, she leaves thinking, "I would be able to say, Well, I was meeting with the President the other day, and he says ' for weeks." When she learns that Bud McFarlane has tried to kill himself, because of his humiliation in the Iran-contra business, she says: "In Washington in the eighties a man would attempt suicide when he thought his career was over, and later he would say, 'I did it because I had failed my country, and failure and defeat are difficult for someone with my admittedly achieving nature to countenance.'...not 'I did it because my anguish is so huge, so ineradicable that to remove it I had to try to remove myself.' and not, "Because I'll never be president,' which is what he wanted, I think, because he'd been in that Oval Office.

"It never occurred to him that he didn't have to make a statement."

A Buster Keaton-like comic pathos is built into the speechwriter's condition, and Noonan...