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“Country-and-Western Ghostwriters”

The publication of a Peggy Noonan memoir in 1990 gives Leonard the opportunity to comment on Noonan while excerpting some of the tastier morsels of her book.

About Noonan he writes that she is, “…a dandy maker of phrases, often of sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs” and that she “…stuck around [Washington] long enough to be lip-synched by two different Presidents [Reagan and Bush I]”:

…for the purposes of her memoir she’s invented a literary persona, a sassy crosscircuit of Holden Caulfield and Fran Leibowitz but right-wing smarty-pants too…with a weakness for the sarcastic…and too many exclamation points.

Well said!!!!!!

She also does some “surprising damage to [Reagan] calling him ‘…a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there’s nothing inside’ ” and “…that the battle for his mind ‘was like trench warfare…Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain’ and “quotes a friend(!) of his [Reagan], ‘Behind those warm eyes is a lack of curiosity that is, somehow, disorienting’”…and probably also a bit disheartening.

Peggy and the Prez:

New word: “yahooism” = having a penchant for brutish rowdiness (from Gulliver’s Travels). Interesting as this was written 4 years before Yahoo! The internet company was formed. I wonder if Jerry Yang read Gulliver given the derogatory implications of the term?

New learning: Leonard uses the essay to fight old battles by noting that he left the New York Times because “…people were always messing with my copy”…and strangely works in a reference to former Treasury Secretary Donald Regan about whom it was said “He did not know what he did not know.” A little harsh for a comment about a veteran of Guadalcanal?