"I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps." -- Peggy Noonan
Peggy Noonan (born Margaret Ellen Noonan on September 7, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American author of seven books on politics, religion, and culture and a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She was a primary speech writer and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and in her political writings is considered a Republican.
She is a graduate of Rutherford High School in Rutherford, New Jersey, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Five of Noonan's books have been New York Times bestsellers. Noonan is a trustee of the Manhattan Institute. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Miami University; St. John Fisher College; her alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University; Adelphi College; and Saint Francis College. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on A Tribute to Heroes.
In her political writings, Noonan frequently cites the political figures she admires, including Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Edmund Burke.
"A great speech is literature.""Abortion is either OK or it's not.""Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.""Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.""Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.""I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.""If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.""If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.""Let's cause some senators distress.""My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.""Part of courage is simple consistency.""Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.""Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.""The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.""The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.""TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.""You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone."
Noonan married Richard W. Rahn, who was then chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1985. They lived in Great Falls, Virginia. Their son was born in 1987.
Noonan and her husband were divorced after five years of marriage. In 1989 she returned with her son to her native New York. In 2004, according to an interview with Crisis Magazine, she lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with her son, who attended the nearby Saint Ann's School.
Noonan currently lives in New York City. In 2010 she bought an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
In 1984, Noonan, as a speechwriter for President Reagan, authored his "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech on the 40th anniversary of D-day. She also wrote Reagan's address to the nation after the Challenger explosion, drawing upon the poet John Magee's famous words about aviators who "slipped the surly bonds of earth... and touched the face of God." The latter is ranked as one of the ten best American political speeches of the 20th century according to a list compiled by professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University and based on the opinions of "137 leading scholars of American public address." The "Pointe du Hoc" speech ranks as the 60th best speech of the century.
She also worked on a tribute Reagan gave to honor John F. Kennedy at a fundraising event held at the McLean, Virginia, home of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the spring of 1984.
Later, while working for then Vice President George H. W. Bush, Noonan coined the phrase "a kinder, gentler nation" and also popularized "a thousand points of light," two memorable catchphrases used by Bush. Noonan also wrote the speech in which Bush pledged: "no new taxes" during his 1988 presidential nomination acceptance speech in New Orleans (Bush's subsequent reversal of this pledge is often cited as a reason for his defeat in his 1992 re-election campaign).
Before the Reagan years, Noonan worked as the daily CBS Radio commentary writer for anchorman Dan Rather at CBS News, whom she once called "the best boss I ever had." From 1975 through 1977 she worked the overnight shift as a newswriter at WEEI Radio in Boston, where she was later Editorial and Public Affairs Director.
Noonan also worked as a consultant on the American television drama The West Wing.
In mid August 2004, Noonan took a brief unpaid leave from the Wall Street Journal to campaign for George W. Bush's reelection.
Noonan became increasingly critical of the Bush administration after Bush's inaugural address in January 2005.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Noonan wrote about Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in the Wall Street Journal. In one opinion piece, Noonan expressed her view that Palin did not demonstrate "the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office," concluding that Palin's candidacy marked a "vulgarization in American Politics" that is "no good... for conservatism... [or] the country." Such commentary resulted in a backlash from conservatives.
Noonan is now an author, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and a commentator on several news shows. She is a member of the Manhattan Institute's board of trustees and one of the founding members, along with Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence and Joni Evans, of wowOwow.com, a new website for women to talk culture, politics and gossip.
