The Jane Austen of Speeches

By WALTER SHAPIRO

WHAT I SAW AT THE REVOLUTION by Peggy Noonan

Random House; 353 pages; $19.95

Do you remember one vivid phrase or image from George Bush's recent State of the Union message? Probably not. And a big reason, quite simply, is that Peggy Noonan did not write it. For if words are the weapons of politics, then Noonan -- whether nervously chain-smoking at her computer in Ronald Reagan's White House or minding her baby son at home as she created the "kinder, gentler" persona for George Bush -- commanded a battalion.

Perhaps Ted Sorensen, with his trademark verb-first, ask-not formulations, might rival Noonan as the best White House word crafter of the television age. But Sorensen writing for John Kennedy or, for that matter, Noonan composing soaring scripts for Reagan's second term had it easy. Bush was an infinitely greater challenge. In writing his 1988 G.O.P. Convention address, Noonan miraculously transformed the Bush of the stumbling syntax and clotted catch- phrases into a "quiet" leader sensitive enough to glimpse "a thousand points of light" but strong enough to say flatly, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

Now Noonan, who retired from politics with Bush's Inaugural Address, has written the funniest, most richly textured, nervously self-effacing and deftly observed political memoir likely to come out of the 1980s. What I Saw at the Revolution succeeds because it violates every rule of corridors-of-power autobiography. As Noonan explains at the outset, "Most White House books have been written by men and have an unspoken subtitle: What I Did with Power. Many have another: If Only They'd Listened to Me, the Fools! But I didn't have much power, and sometimes if they'd listened to me they would have been wrong."

Her revelations are subtle yet savory: Noonan hiding behind a pillar to avoid Nancy Reagan's disapproving glance at her outfit, or Bush's handlers trying to censor "read my lips," presumably because "lips are organs, ((and)) there is no history of presidential candidates making personal- organ references in acceptance speeches." Reagan remains almost entirely offstage in the first third of the book, as Noonan's initial meeting with the President (his hapless speechwriters had not spoken with him in a year) is abruptly canceled, and she has to settle for a glimpse of the presidential foot.

Noonan's book can be read as the chronicle of an intense but unrequited love affair. A passionate conservative in the odd-couple post of writing CBS radio commentary for Dan Rather, she joined the Reagan Administration in 1984 because "I felt like Mr. Roberts -- I was missing the war!" But even as her speechwriting success won her greater entree to Reagan, he remained characteristically aloof and impenetrable. Like a teenager in swoon, Noonan treasured each presidential wink; when Reagan wrote "Very Good" on a speech, Noonan taped the words to her blouse as a badge of honor. Yet when a burned- out Noonan left the White House in 1986, her nemesis, chief of staff Don Regan, denied her the courtesy of a farewell chat with the President. As the real Reagan kept drifting beyond her grasp, Noonan found solace in the mythic President whom she likened to "a gigantic heroic balloon floating in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade."

Washington is often portrayed as a peculiarly classless place where birth, breeding and money matter far less than proximity to power. But Noonan, keenly aware of her Irish Catholic, lower-middle-class roots, is a political Jane Austen in depicting the nuances of social standing. Arriving at the White House at 33, she was startled when almost everyone asked what college she had attended. (Fairleigh Dickinson University, originally as a night student -- socially about as far from Princeton as one can get without leaving New Jersey.) Noonan quickly intuited that this Ivy League test was a way that men, especially, size people up. Noonan adjusted quickly, however, keeping a volume of Ezra Pound's poetry on her coffee table to impress the "Harvardheads" from the State Department, with their "thick, neat, straight-back hair and little bitty wire-rim glasses and wives named Sydney," who always wanted to water down her speech texts.

Noonan's nonstop struggles to maintain the purity of her prose can seem naive. Writing words so natural they can convince the credulous that the President himself dashed them off on the back of an old envelope en route to Gettysburg should never be confused with a high-minded artistic endeavor. Nor was Reagan's second term known for its intellectual depth. But these are quibbles. No other memoir serves up such Washington rituals as gushing, "I loved your testimony!" or captures such conversational snippets as "You know him, you saw him on C-SPAN." What I Saw at the Revolution is as good as any of Peggy Noonan's speeches. And this time around, no self-important White House whiz kid edited out the good stuff.