When Jackie Kennedy died, Peggy Noonan distilled America’s love for its First Lady into a little over a dozen paragraphs, nearly all of them perfect. “A nation watched, and would never forget” how Jackie carried herself the weekend of her husband’s murder, Noonan wrote. “The world watched,” too, she said, and “found its final judgement summed up by a young woman, a British journalist who had come to witness the funeral, and filed home: ‘Jacqueline Kennedy has today given her country the one thing it has always lacked, and that is majesty.’”
It was the first of Noonan’s obituaries I remember reading—in high school, decades after it was written—because it was one of the first articles that forced me to ask what kind of character America should memorialize, and why. Noonan makes it obvious. She always has.
This is why the “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” section of essays in Noonan’s latest collection, A Certain Idea of America, was most enchanting. The collection—which Noonan said “is not a book about the day to day of our national political life” but “simply about loving America and enjoying thinking aloud about it”—is mostly about humans: the good ones, the gentlemen, the Marxist, the faithful. As with most of Noonan’s work for the past quarter-century writing a weekly column at the Wall Street Journal, readers get the sense that Noonan knows quite well what animates American life—America’s people.
People like Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018. A memorial Noonan included in this book borrowed from what Stephen Vincent Benét wrote in a 1941 Saturday Review of Literature post about Scott Fitzgerald’s death: “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you better.” America was “begging to be captured” by Wolfe in the twentieth century, Noonan wrote, and it was, in a way that only he could. She tells the story of seeing Wolfe for the last time, at a wedding. The crowd reminded Noonan of “the description in Bonfire [of the Vanities] of a grand Park Avenue party or reception: ‘Their swimming teeth.’” Wolfe blushed. “Did I say that?”
“I said I remember reading it and thinking, ‘Oh I am in a presence,’” Noonan wrote. “He pressed my hand and held it for a moment.”
People like Queen Elizabeth II, whose virtues were “old school,” Noonan wrote. “I think of how moved I was by the clip a few months ago by the queen and Paddington Bear, in which she divulged what she kept in her purse—a marmalade sandwich. The royal band outside struck up Freddie Mercury, and she kept time with a spoon on her teacup. I didn’t know when I saw it why it moved me so much, and realized: because my mind was saying, “Don’t go old friend, we’ll miss you.” Even Americans with little affinity for the monarchy loved the Queen. She wasn’t one of us, but her devotion to and respect for the throne and Britain’s oldest institutions made her, nonetheless, admirable; the Queen “represented the permanent over the merely prevalent.”
People like Ulysses S. Grant, who was arrested for speeding through Northwest Washington, DC, in his two-horse carriage, and who later saved the arresting police officer’s job. “Grant said he admired a man who does his duty,” Noonan said.
Or people like Bob Dylan, whose art informed the American conscious, or evangelist preacher and converter-extraordinaire Billy Graham, or Jimmy, an Italian-American shoe repair-man on Lexington Avenue, or Noonan’s great-aunt Jane Jane, whose lifelong romanticism opened Noonan’s eyes to some of life’s unseen mysteries.
Noonan’s idealism—which isn’t idealism, so much as it is eternal hope in the American project—is a valuable perspective for younger readers.
All the characters to whom Noonan pays homage should sound familiar. They are the presidents we respect, the personalities we read, the thinkers we study, the family members whose quirks and memory we discuss long after their deaths.
Noonan’s certain idea of America fosters praise for great individuals and scorn for bad decisions. In the collection, she details the Uvalde law-enforcement scandal that allowed a killer gunman to roam public school classrooms in Texas, shooting to death nine children and two teachers, while police officers stood outside. The event was one that showed “a broad and general decline in professionalism in America,” a loss of “old habits of discipline and pride in expertise.” Americans needed a hero, she said, and what they got were people “who love to talk, endlessly, about sensitivity, yet aren’t sensitive enough to save the children bleeding out on the other side of the door.”
A Certain Idea of America is not Noonan’s first issue of collected works—after her famous stint as one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters and long career in journalism, Noonan has many writings to compile—though it does contain many of her most recent pieces. Her characteristic gifts of reflection and keen observation haven’t changed over the years, nor have her patriotic instincts. But a younger audience may be less inclined to find solace in Noonan’s romantic idea of America.
Noonan makes a compelling case for optimism, usually through the lens of faith, throughout her work. When her writings are read back-to-back, though, it’s easy to find the optimism idealistic. We are lucky to be here, in this miraculous country, yet we are also divided and facing multiple crises (a loneliness epidemic, a mental health crisis, a general unwillingness from too many Americans to call out the horrors that Hamas terrorists committed on October 7). At every point in history, someone has given a voice to the terribly common thought that this moment in time—this moment—must be the worst moment in history. I don’t think that’s true, and neither does Noonan. She says as much in the section “We Can Handle It.”
But she does discuss the many ways in which American institutions, courts, culture, and social fabric have deteriorated, always ending in a conclusion that reads something like, “We can do better and we must. We are America.” Would most Americans agree? She seems to think so.
Noonan can remind America what matters because she remembers what matters. For younger Americans who have no figures comparable to the leaders and heroes Noonan grew up with and is fond of writing about, it’s difficult to know what matters to the nation—or to form an idea of America at all. Social media makes good times feel transient and bad ones disastrous. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be, and neither are history lessons. Young people don’t know how to talk to each other, and a lot of them don’t think often enough about what it means to be an American, because they aren’t asked to.
Noonan’s obituary of Jackie Kennedy painted a picture of elegance, class, grace, and honor, but more than that, it gave the distinct impression that nearly every American recognized, and revered, that picture. If America’s youth—let’s say those under 25—made a list of men and women to whom the nation owes praise, they could not easily agree on praise-worthy qualities, or actions. Some would list abortion activists, and others would list tech CEOs.
Younger readers equally pessimistic about our generation’s potential to unify around Western values or history may find valuable perspective in Noonan’s idealism—which isn’t idealism, so much as it is eternal hope in the American project. They may, however, come away from her latest with the conclusion that many Americans have lost the ability—one Noonan is famous for—to love their shared heritage.
A thoughtful columnist, Noonan has befriended many in America through her warm, reflective, and, when necessary, stern tone. In small doses, Noonan’s columns do inspire hope and the sense that moral resolve is still something most Americans treasure. Read in bulk, her columns inspired in me something else: A dread that probably, if younger Americans encountered Tom Wolfe at a wedding, too few of them would have the same instinct as their elders did to think: “Oh, I am in a presence.”
