Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, Dec. 7, 2001

In an interview with NewsMax.com, author Peggy Noonan, a White House speech writer for President Reagan and the first President Bush, said Reagan "was the kind of sunny man who could [nonetheless] see trouble down the road.”

Knowing history as he did, Reagan understood that, as an ancient philosopher once declared, "Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

"He knew trouble was coming,” Noonan said of the man who "won the Cold War without firing a shot,” to quote Margaret Thatcher.

The author, whose recollections of the Reagan years were recorded previously in "What I Saw at the Revolution,” said "one of the biggest lessons Reagan would take from September 11” is not that terrorists will restrict their weaponry to suicide bombs and briefcase explosives, but are capable of firing missiles at the U.S. from offshore.

"The biggest lesson Reagan would have taken from September 11, and I assume Bush … has taken is anything can happen,” Noonan believes.

"This [terrorist attack] has not quelled our desire to see it [a missile defense shield] done, developed and deployed.”

Eighteen years after President Reagan urged Americans to support the development of a missile defense for America, leftists on Capitol Hill and in wealthy liberal think tanks are still dragging their feet on what respected national security analysts see as a pressing need.

Further, warned Noonan, "each year, each rogue nation and psychotic leader who has nukes has greater and greater ability to deploy them. So we’d just better watch it. You’ve got to see trouble coming down the road, and you’ve got to plan for it.”

That was Reagan’s gift, to plan ahead, to prepare for trouble. That’s what led him to advocate the missile defense shield. Even after the Sept. 11 terrorist destruction, millions of Americans go to bed at night either unaware of our vulnerability to missile attack or unaware that terrorist forces that killed thousands on our own soil can also fire missiles at us.

Remember "Reaganomics,” the derisive term liberals applied to the Reagan tax cuts?

Rosty Admits Reagan Tax Cuts Worked

Now, a prominent congressional liberal of that era, who fought tooth and nail against the Reagan economic proposals, acknowledges they were good for the country. Noonan got that out of onetime House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., in an interview for her book.

"Look, I thought the Reagan budget and tax cuts would cause rioting in the streets,” Rosty told her. "But you know what? They didn’t and it all worked, and people got off the welfare rolls. And frankly, I guess it was a success.”

Of course, as Noonan observed to NewsMax.com, Rostenkowski offers this retrospective from the vantage point of retirement. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Senate plurality leader Tom Daschle feel they cannot depart from the holy grail of class warfare.

The Reagan influence is evident in today’s White House with the second President Bush. Or so the president told the onetime Reagan speechwriter not long before her book went to press.

"He told me that he thought Mr. Reagan would be well pleased at how he had done,” she said.

Noonan told NewsMax that Bush confirmed her impression that he had watched Reagan carefully during the years his father had served as Reagan’s vice president.

A president has to stand for and breathe in a nation’s soul, the president told her, and "that’s what Reagan did most of all.”

The younger Bush met Reagan when he was just out of college working with a friend on the Florida campaign of a U.S. Senate candidate.

When you met Reagan, you knew you had met somebody big, according to the future president.

But when President Bush refuses to go into Virginia just across the river to campaign for a gubernatorial candidate who might have won with just a little push, isn’t that more the "bipartisan” model of his father, rather than the Reagan approach?

His Own Man

Noonan, who has met all three men, doesn’t "think Bush is patterning his presidency on anything but what George W. Bush thinks is the right thing to do.”

Further, "One doesn’t sense that he is bearing the burden of his father or the burden of the Reagan legacy. He senses he has observed history for 50 years and that now he is going to rock forth as himself.”

As for Reagan’s activism in the Screen Actors Guild, where he ultimately became its president, the then-actor proved his mettle as a mediator and negotiator. These qualities would serve him well later as president of the United States.

First of all, when communists and communist operatives were worming their way into influential positions in Hollywood, he assured the outside world that Hollywood would do its own housecleaning. And he made good on that, working to clean out communist influence in motion pictures, even in the face of threats on his life and plans to toss acid in his face.

At the same time, Reagan worked with those he believed had been unfairly accused and cleared their names.

The infamous "Hollywood Ten” lost their credibility. People such as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo "were stood up to when they tried to insert communist messages in films,” Noonan pointed out.

In fact, the studio chiefs "ultimately came to agree with Reagan and his friends.”

Secondly, the negotiating skills required as guild president enabled him, as U.S. president, to resist the wily Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s entreaties to abandon his pursuit of a missile defense shield.

Clinton the 'Clever Slob'

A book on Reagan with a title such as "When Character Was King” begs for an obvious comparison with an era when character meant nothing: the Clinton years.

"Bill Clinton didn’t have a great presidency,” the author told NewsMax.com. "He didn’t have a meaningful presidency. The poor man didn’t even have a good presidency,” and was "able to do only one thing, and that was to sustain his own personal popularity. Well, you know what? A clever slob can do that.”

And how do you do it?

"You luck out with history. And that’s what Clinton did. He ignored history. He didn’t make plans for the future. He never looked down the road.

"All he did was enjoy the current prosperity that Reagan and the Republican Congress put into place, and enjoy the relative peace that was only a vacation before war started again. Too bad he didn’t do serious things. Too bad he didn’t protect us from the fix we’re in … or to protect and prepare America.”

We all know who Clinton really was, declared Noonan. "He was a slob.”

Get Peggy Noonan's "When Character Was King" at a discount from the NewsMax Store.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Clinton Scandals

George W. Bush

Missile Defense

War on Terrorism

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