providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. ♪ peter: peggy noonan's newest book is called a certain idea about america, nixon, politicians, etc.. how did you choose what to put in? >> i went through just over 400 columns i have written over the past few years and i and an

editor started to go through them and the ones we picked were the ones that were most fun and most alive and we assumed there would be a lot of political columns, and there certainly were, but actually we found ourselves most interested in history, issues of history and culture. we were most interested in fun and liveliness. when i said something like, i loved writing that, she would say, is in. and when she would say i really loved that one, i would say, it is in. so i had the most fun and we loved putting it together. peter: would it be easy to write a weekly column about donald trump? >> know, because you would repeat yourself a lot. he is an interesting and unique

political figure. he presents himself in certain ways, you convinced -- you can describe him and trump's trumpet and once you have written about him, you delve into repetition. that's not the worst thing. when you think a point is important, repeat it if you think it must be underlined. not all the same people are reading you every week so sometimes you repeat something but you're talking to new folks but do not repeat yourself endlessly. do not become boorish. eumaeus -- you must a layoff on your obsession sometimes. peter: you ticked off some folks about donald trump. he wrote, he is biting himself down with thick records of rhetorical inadequacy. he is a not and you know he is.

i do not like him. he is a bad man who will cause and to bungle crises almost from day one. are you a never trumper? >> i never thought of myself as that way. i started off very sympathetic with donald trump in terms of policy. and also sympathetic for what he represented in history, which was back in 2015 92016, kind of upsetting and overturning a political establishment that, in my view, had given us disaster after disaster, who both parties together were cynical, both parties together did not want to deal. for 20 years with the growing chaos at the border. so when trump came, i thought, good, but the column you

mentioned, actually the first sentence of that is he is a nut and you know it but it was sort of written with a poignant feeling on my part because i agreed with him so much on issues but i felt he did not have the essential nature of an american president and study leader who could deliver what must be delivered. that was my judgment. by the end of his first term i lost my temper with him on january 6. but he is an interesting figure, powerful figure, and he has put his imprint on the age. peter: you talk about the five stages of trumpcare denial, anger, bargaining, depression,

acceptance. peggy: [laughter] i think that might have been in 2015, everywhere i was surrounded by republicans who at some point had realized i was seeing the five stages of death, which starts with, this could not be and then goes to if we do this that won't happen or then maybe there's something good here. so i did see the five stages of grief being worked out largely by people who never thought they would be offended and who were shocked by it and trying to simply explain it to themselves. peter: did you have election anxiety or exhaustion this last round? peggy: that's so interesting. i think in the 2015 2016 cycle,

it was impossible to call and i think we all entered a stage of hypervigilance where you would get up every morning and check the news not with a feeling of, what happened overnight, maybe there was an earthquake in japan, but with, oh no, what now? i do not think i felt all that as much in the 2020 or 2020 four cycles. members of my family were very pro-trump and would talk to me about him and i started to feel through them that he might pull it off. and also the smartest person i know writing about politics took me aside in the spring or summer and i was thinking, trump is

going to win this and he said, he might win it by a landslide and it was so shocking to me that someone so extremely intelligent was going down the same path so i did not have a feeling of shock and i guess i felt like i kind of understood it. peter: can you tell us who that person is? peggy: i do not want to because i think he would be so embarrassed. peter: where and how did you grow up? peggy: i was born in brooklyn, new york. if you have ever seen the movie brooklyn, the brooklyn i was born into and from which i got my first memories are in that movie, that is how buildings looked on the sidewalk looked and people on the street looked. born in brooklyn. we moved to long island when i was five. as many brooklyn and bronx and

queens people did, going to the little houses in long island. my parents bought a house in 1955 in long island and we lived in massapequa park in one of those little houses, i think the levitt company built the house we were in. we lived there for 10 years and then moved on to northern new jersey, rutherford, new jersey and i finished high school there. my family was large, nine people, economically stressed, turbulent, full of stress. i hate to say dysfunction because it has been the most boring word in america for 20 years but really a thing that did not work as i guess we all

felt like what we came from but i have so many happy memories of childhood, in part because like many working or lower middle-class, we had the tv on all the time from 7:00 a.m. until someone turned it off at midnight, it was always on. we were always watching. if you were always watching movies in the 50's and 60's, what you were really watching what stations that had no money for programming, no money for a conversation like this. what did they do to fill time, showed the movies from the 1930's, 40's, 50's, made in america. i just watch those movies all the time and i loved them. i kind of think they had something to do with the development of my mind and my

attitudes, as in those movies were written by the fabulous old socialists who ended up getting in trouble in the mccarthy era. they were chased in the 50's and 60's and beat up quite badly. wonderful movies that were kind of class conscious but not in a horrible mechanical way or ideological way, but in a way that showed you class in america. they were early on to talk about race and racial injustice and they were really wonderful. they had really something to do with what i've thought of as america, a place that was fabulous and fantastic and interesting and so much is going on, but also it is always trying to make itself better, trying to make itself good, and always trying to have fun.

so this -- those things were really wonderful and between movies and books as a child, i made it through. i did not go to college after high school. no college would have me. i was a terrible student, i almost did not get out of high school. you had to have a certain amount of credits each year to get out of jr. or senior year and i did not have enough credits unless i passed a specific course but i was feeling it. a chemistry course. i barely managed to pass, i passed the finals with a grade of 68. i was a terrible student. i missed school a lot. i would take off from school and watch tv all day and then at night i would read novels. i did not really feel like going to school.

anyway. bad high school student, worked for two years as a clerk in the insurance business and also as a waitress, which is a job i look back on with great affection because it's a great job. if you are young enough to do it . but it was a great job. i made my way through the next few years, went to fairleigh dickinson university at night, i had a feeling, i actually thought i had a destiny. i thought i was a writer even though i did not appear to be a writer and was not well educated but i had a feeling i was a writer and a feeling of destiny so i started at fairleigh dickinson university it -- at night and did very well, when after work and took spanish classes i never took in high school and stuff like that and i think some math and science courses and then went to fairleigh dickinson in new jersey i did find.

that's a long answer to a short question. [laughter] peter: before we leave your family, is jimmy noonan related to you? peggy: the after -- v actor. i have a brother named jimmy who is an actor and a hilarious person who lives in new jersey. how did you know? peter: he's pretty well known in some circles. what was your first political job. peggy: writing in the speechwriting department ronald ragan -- ronald reagan. peter: how did you get from

fairleigh dickinson to this beach writing -- speechwriting department of the white house? peggy: i went to new york newspapers and asked if i could be a writer, i will start anywhere but i would really like to be a columnist and they last -- they laughed and said honey, new york is where you end up if you have done well, it's not where you start out. i had just graduated college, a friend of mine wrote me a note from boston, she had just lost a roommate. and after college the way i was making my living was as a temporary secretary. executives in the old days would have a secretary who might go on vacation for a month or leave and have a baby and they needed

a temporary secretary to hold on the job and answer the phone. i had a bunch of those jobs. one was that the cbs broadcast center in new york. i took the bus every day for new jersey. at the cbs broadcast center in new york i was looking for a fellow who worked in the human relations area, a great guy. there were women in the office who would sit around chatting and i told them i wanted to be a writer and this woman said, cbs is starting an all-news radio station in boston and they realized they do not have enough writers to fill 24 hours of copy . she said, i know the guy who runs the radio station. you should call him and see if you can get an interview. i called him and got an interview.

i said to my friend who was living in boston that i will come and be your roommate. i packed the trunk of the odd things in your life, i did not pack a bag for a few weeks, i got an old trunk and put everything i had in the trunk and took the train to boston, got my interview, which was a tryout, they sat me down at a desk and gave me a copy from reuters and said, write a news show. i did not know how to write a news show. i thought, what am i going to do now, how do i find the lead? suddenly i realized the sound of the newsradio was being pumped through the newsroom, you could hear what was on the air now. so i listened and i thought, they are pretty interested in president ford today, i have the

ap copy so i wrote a ford story and then something else on something else. the news director came in and said, what are you doing and i said i am taking a writing audition. he said, you are hired. the reason he did that was a writer had just quit to go to a radio station in rhode island. so i got my first job and it was fabulous. it taught me to write for air and to be a journalist and it made me able to call up hops in somerville and say, on the local wire there is talk of a really bad car accident, was anybody killed, and they would give me the facts and i would write it into a local news story and then i got to the point where i could call the local senators on the governor and say? ?

, what is happening here and write it into a story so that was fabulous. it built my confidence, made it possible for me to call people and say, please, talk to me, i am representing a radio station and how to get information, how to be careful about it, and just , when i was in college i became the editor of the student newspaper, the fairleigh dickinson spectator and i wrote the editorial and i was a reader by nature and read all the local newspapers but i absorbed words with my eyes, not with my ears, and i had to learn that quick and learn that a sentence you give an anchor, that first

sentence cannot go five lines and have clauses, it is quicker and straighter. it can be subtle, but you are delivering information in a way that is more conversational then a literary sort of way so learning that took me a while. i was aware i had a lot to learn and i tried to learn and i did. peter: how did you get to washington? peggy: this is the mid-1970's. i was becoming politically shockingly conservative. i was reading national review and had been for a while. the boston i came to was in the middle of the bus and crisis. the america i was involved in

was in the middle of the vietnam crisis. i found myself naturally taking the conservative side on issues. i watched the conservatives running around in america, they were fine but i was not a registered republican, i was just a person with thoughts. after a few years in boston went down to be a news writer at the cbs broadcast center where i had been a temporary secretary. and the wonderful thing happened to me, this is later in the 1970's, i was on the radio side, they kept me on radio. the guys on the radio side at cbs news the 1970's were the on who had invented writing for broadcast with ed morrow. charles collingwood was still

there, douglas edwards, these were my colleagues and i listened to how they put things and what they thought a story was. and charles osgood, a much younger man but a kind of genius. i learned so much and finally i graduated, walter cronkite was the anchor of the cbs news who had a radio show, every day he did a radio commentary written by a wonderful writer, gail minor. when gail minor was on vacation i became one of the people who filled in for him. once when i was filling in for dale, cronkite himself took vacation and a young guy named dan rather came in so i ended up writing for him and then dan became the anchor at cbs and i

became the writer of his commentary, which was a fabulous job and it was like doing a column every day, like a four and a half minute show and four minutes of it was copy. it was, hello, i am dan rather, this is what is happening, this is what i think, and these are the questions we ought to be asking. it was very demanding but excellent and i was a conservative and he was a liberal, i think it's fair to say that at this point. and between the conservative and liberal we had a show that i think was so good and fair and i think it had a generous feel to it, not full of judgment. it started out awkwardly but in time i think it became good. anyway, whenever visited

conservatives came through cbs news like bill buckley doing a talkshow or some writer doing the conservative side of a debate show, they would be brought by to meet me and you should meet peggy noonan, she is our conservative, which was very funny. i know nostalgia is gauzy but i remember media newsrooms in the media in the 1970's as being a little bit more easy-going about political disagreement, the left and right and middle and up and down, whatever, but you can always be friends. they would bring the bike to meet me and sometimes, a writer named jake had a commentary show and he was a visiting conservative and he said to me one day, do you want to stay

here and write and i said no, i want to write speeches for ronald reagan, i just think he is terrific, i support him. he was surprised because he did not fully understand my political views on things. he mentioned it, he was also a writer for national review when he mentioned it in the office to a guy who had gone for a speechwriting job with reagan who had not gotten the job but that guy recommended me to the white house and said, keep your eye on this one. one day the white house called me, a wonderful man named ben elliott come at the head of a speechwriting for ronald reagan, called me and said, i heard about you and i heard you were good but i am really calling because you might not know this but 20 years ago i worked on the fourth floor of the cbs broadcast center and i was the

conservatives. [laughter] so i just wanted to say, buck up and good luck to you and realize you can get through that. and very sweetly he said, and if you ever come by washington, come by and say hello. i totally lied and i said, actually, i am coming by washington tomorrow. i really just made it up, i was not going to washington the next day. could i come see you? he laughed in my face, knowing i had just lied. and he said, i guess, yes you can come see me. i said, this is what i think of reagan on politics and history and i want to work for him and we had long conversations, i had to be interviewed by a lot of people and i had to show everything i had ever written at cbs.

because it is a crazy world and i might have written for dan rather, ronald reagan is an idiot, we really dislike him, we can't stand him and that would have been embarrassing. they would not hire someone involved in that. i keep giving log answers and i am embarrassed. peter: the challenger explosion in 1986. slipped the surface of earth to touch the face of god. was that by you? peggy: it was from a poem by an air force flyer in world war ii in 1938, i think in training he was very eager to get into the war and got in early, turning

canadian forces. he was eager to get into the war and he died in an airplane crash but before that, he wrote a beautiful poem about the joy of flying called high flight. two things happen the day the challenger blew up. i thought of that poem. when i saw the repeated waving goodbye of the astronauts, there was a tape they kept playing that day, we did not have that much tape. it kept showing christa mcauliffe and all of the astronauts waving goodbye before they got on the capsule. that wave goodbye made me think of the poem, which i had learned in a poetry class in seventh grade. i thought of it and i absolutely knew ronald reagan knew that

poem. i did not really know it but i just felt he did and i knew that if that perfect beautiful phrase was included, ronald reagan would use it if he knew that poem, which turned out -- which turned out he did, it had been a very important pump to his friend and was a famous poem and it was written on a plaque outside his daughter patty's school and he would sometimes read it and reflect on it in the morning. anyway, that was quite a day. a dreadful day. it started out as a busy day for everybody in the office because the state of the union address was scheduled for that night. were you a young reporter then? peter: i was on capitol hill. peggy: so you know about the

suddenness. we all knew the state of the union address was coming. in speechwriting, my boss and the people who had written the address were making last-minute changes and additions. i was sitting in my office in the morning catching up on phone calls and paperwork, i had a tv in my office and out of the corner of my eye i could see something happened. i was on the phone and i could see a flash of smoke and i looked and i thought, wow, what is that? nobody knew what had happened when it blew up. they thought, is this some sort of special space shuttle that emits smoke? nobody understood. i turned at the sound on the tv and i heard static. the sound of static and modern media is the sound of shock. it means nobody knows what is happening which is why no one is

talking. and then the line from mission control, all static, and i thought, as the hours unfolded it of course became clear a major disaster had happened, a historic one, the first time we have ever had a moment like this in flight with an astronaut. we had lost astronauts before in training but not like this. it was awful. the faces of the people in the stands who were the relatives of the people on the ship were so awful. it just shook you to see it. at a certain point i realized everything was chaos. i realized the president is either going to have to talk about this tonight in the state of union address, so they will need an important add-on and i

am not one of the people busy with the address right now so i can do it. i went to my boss's office and said, ben, the president is going to have to say something either in the state of the union or a separate address and we do not know when no one in the west wing can tell us anything because they are handling the disaster. the president is on the phone with nasa. they're talking with the secretary of defense, should be go to devcon to because this is a national security story, there was always fear russians might be aggressive in a moment of weakness that i had a lot to handle. i told my bus -- my boss i'm going to start writing about this and get the latest information as i did at cbs so we got somebody to get the latest information off the wires. it turns out the president had

been meeting with network news anchors around the time the challenger blew up because he was talking to them to give them a preshow of the state of the union on what would be said and what his sense of the most important parts of that address were. the president was called out of the meeting and told about the challenger, watched it on tv, the president came back to the anchors and talk to them about what had happened and what his feelings were and they asked him questions. there was a young woman from the national security council on the side of the road taking notes. she took notes on everything he said. went over to speechwriting and said, do you think you guys might be writing something because this is what the president said. they said, it give it to peggy and that became the center of the address.

it all got done. it was all under pressure and pain, that address, and you could see it. you could see the pain on ronald reagan's face. i think he was a little disappointed somehow, there were no words that were going to be equal to that moment and no words to help, you could only do your best but he was not feeling so great about it when it was over, i could tell, the way he looked on tv. i went home that night not feeling so good but by the next morning, i did not come into the office early, i was not one of those people love -- people in at 7:00 a.m., i cruised in around 9:15 and there were messages from people like the

speaker of the house, tip o'neill, and secretary of state george schultz, people i had never met or talked to. i called them back and they just said, we heard you worked with him on that, good work, you did what needed to be done. i thought, how nice of tip o'neill to track down speaker of the house a kid in an office and then the president called, he was very frank, he said, that was some kind of day. he talked about the speech and he said, at first at the end i felt we hadn't, he didn't say this but what he was communicating to me was that he thought what lincoln thought when they speech didn't work, he would say it did not scour. that was a term from plowing. on a farm. if you had a good plow, it

scours the earth and does what needs to be done so good planting can be made so he was saying essentially i did not think it scoured so but then i got a call, frank sinatra called me and said, ronnie, you gotta feel good, the american president said the right things. and that made him feel better. i think he loved frank sinatra. nancy loved frank sinatra but more than that, they respected his professionalism and ability to read the moment and his intelligence and he did not call after every speech so if frank called and gave you a good review, you just got a good review. so reagan felt better about it and told me and then i just thought, oh good, that is over. the next income of the rose garden speech -- the next thing,

the rose garden speech. peter: are you responsible for h w bush is kinder gentler speech? peggy: i worked on that speech. that was george h w bush's acceptance speech. peter: is it true nancy reagan when she heard that said a kind letter, gentler what? peggy: i do not know. the way i heard it was that she had said kinder and gentler than what? i have no idea if she said that. i never asked her. but it has the sound of her piercing intelligence. so i think maybe, but i never asked. [laughter] peggy: peter: have -- how do you view your role as a public writer? peggy: i think it is

challenging. maybe a little more challenging than it was in the 30's, 40's, 50's. i am a big reader of biographies and there is a biography of a wonderful american columnist, dorothy thompson, very important study mind, intelligent woman who was a key figure in the 1930's and 40's journalism. she caught onto hitler pretty early and had a serious foreign affairs mind. she was a big american columnist, new york-based. there is a wonderful biography of her called american cassandra whose author i cannot think of at the moment but when i read it i cannot help but compare the life of a modern columnist to

hers. one thing that is interesting about being a public viewer of things and establish her of your your thoughts in america now is if you put your name on it, which columnists obviously do, you are under a lot of internet pressure. you are so freely insulted, and so often insulted. you sometimes are threatened. people get very excited if a woman has a view that is not like there's an is in fact the opposite. it has been interesting for some time, i really put a lot on the internet and does nothing to do about it, the internet is also helpful and fabulous but it has been very interesting in the trump era to be a public holder

and sharer of information who was also a woman. peter: your columns to generate thousands of comments by viewers each week. do you read them? peggy: sometimes i do. i really try to people say i shouldn't but it is disrespectful not to. peter: it's like a conversation with you in a sense with these viewers. here are aoue of comments. peggy noonan is e of the few columnist whose writing i flo closely. she is either a liberal conservative or conservative liberal, i am never quite sure. i like her optimism and full throated defense of the democratic process. what i do not appreciate is her seeming inability to take a clear stand on much of anything. did that one hurt? i won't read these other ones. [laughter] peggy: that's so thoughtful,

actually. peter: like i said, it's like a conversation these viewers have with you. you are called peg, it's like a conversation. peggy: i'm not sure i ever really thought of it like that. sometimes readers are very familiar with me. sometimes, there was a guy who writes in and says this is it, i will never review again and then he comes in two weeks later and he will never read me again again. sometimes people say they have had enough of me and somebody else will answer them back and say, and yet here you are. which amuses me a lot. i hate the feeling i am disappointing people. and the trump folk who could see my early sympathy for his stance

and for the need of someone to break through this establishment , i came not to like him and they were so disappointed and they are disappointed to this day on sometimes very angry to this day. it is an odd thing. also an odd thing that when you are a public thinker, speaker, writer, you get a base. a base of readers. but if you are really trying to play it straight and give your honest views, your views will not always please your face. does your base and if you continue to hold them, you will lose your base and wind up with another. i can tell sometimes why -- my readers have changed. they all left me, i was pretty tough and a certain point on george w. bush and iraq. i was sort of set off by his inaugural address in 2004 when

he more or less doubled down on iraq by saying we will outlaw people in the world and i blew my top. i know some of my readers stopped reading. but then others read me and it was ok and then i broke with the party on immigration and lost everybody again. it's very interesting to realize there are two ways to play it. one is to know you have a base of readers but be honest and be yourself and call it straight and let life happen and help more readers come in when you do some. the other is the worst thing you can do, whether you have a big radio show or tv show, to act like the tribune of conservative consistency and hold onto your base but privately you disagree with them and you just check

constantly to see where they are going and then you declare where you stand which is conveniently where they are going. people do that a lot. i really don't like it. peter: who is your favorite columnist or least favorite? peggy: i would read them all. i read a lot. i read a lot of essayists. in our paper i read vilma gunn, dan henan sure, angela klein, the new york times his work is serious and true in the sense that he believes what he is writing.

i believe i'm getting his actual opinions. you cannot feel that way with everybody. warren dowd does great work in the third or fourth decade of working at the times. tom friedman, those are just the people i'm thinking of at the moment. peter: from a certain idea of america, this is a column that was first printed in the wall street journal august 17, 2017, against the tear it down vement. once the tearing down starts, there is no knowing where it will end. edmund burke famously said we have a duty to the past, present, and future. in the minds of the tear downers, only the present is important and only their higher mental liability -- higher morality >> i think when you tear down

statues, you are thwarting and killing in the cradle future conversations that could be very helpful. of america should be doing now, do not tear down, build more. build in different ways. there is plenty to celebrate in this country, many great women and men. statues are a funny thing. when you are a little kid, you go with your mom or dad and you go to the park and there is a statue when you say, what is that and they say, that is robert e. lee. who is that? he was a general. that is enough when you are five or six. ages 10 or 11, robert e. lee, he was a great man, right? an honest parent would say it is

complicated. at age 14 you have a serious talk about everything connected to that statue and connected to our history and the civil war and the causes and the meaning and how he viewed it and right and wrong and you wind up at appomattox. these are conversations we have in life. you do not have them if the statues are taken down. peter: november 22, 2023. give thanks for taylor swift. taylor swift is the person of the year. she is the best thing that has happened to america in all of 2023. peggy: isn't she a phenom? the heiress tour, i started keeping track of -- eras tour.

apart from what i wrote, she is so compelling. she is not the greatest singer or dancer or songwriter, but what she has through will and love for the whole thing and desire to bring herself forward become something big and magical. i love the kids who love her. after the column came out i got a wonderful taylor swift bracelet from a little 11-year-old girl who said, you appreciate taylor, my parents showed me your column. you get it so i made this for you, it is a taylor swift bracelet that had her name and underneath my name. it was so touching and wonderful. taylor swift is a phenom, you

just have to hand it to her. what so struck me is she changed the economics of every town and city she went to. they were like an anti-depression anti-inflation taylor swift boom wherever she went. someone said it was like if she went to cincinnati, it was like cincinnati had two super bowls, that was the economic effect. so huge economic impact through her tour but other decisions like how she took on the production of her music and who gets the money. she revolutionized the financial aspects of the music business. she made one or $2 billion on the tour but gave everybody who worked with her a lot of money, like a big tip, the teamsters,

the truck drivers who haul the set scott $100,000. -- call the sets got $100,000. peter: in your book you talk about sitting down at purdue university with the former president and former governor of indiana and he reminded you of a comment you had made 30 years ago that liberals in the media do not hate conservatives. do you think he is wondering if that was still true? peggy: i see. i am sure i said that, it is the way i experienced the past. i am a conservative and i have been a conservative for a very

long time and been in media for a very long time. i do not think those on the left or non-conservatives or liberals hate conservatives so much as very unconsciously they patronize them. they just do. patronize them. if you're going to patronize somebody it should be from a great intellectual or moral height. i would rather not be patronized by people who do not have that height. if you are a conservative, you are familiar with the concept of being patronized by your inferiors. every conservative everywhere has this feeling. and it contributed to donald trump. peter: 7/3/2019, another column in your book of continuing miracle is the ne the

column. we are a people who has experienced something epic gether, we were given this brilliant beautiful thing, this new range of political invention, based on the assumption that we were all equal, that where you start does not dictate where you wind up. i love america because it is where the miracle is. i read that because in this column in the book you talk about three books that i wanted to ask you about. we only have a few minutes left. eb white on democracy. amy and leon pfaff and diana shaw so proudly we hail. david mccullough, pioneers. peggy: yes. all wonderful. one is a compendium of the great things that have been said and written about america. david mccullough is a fabulous book about the founding of ohio, which in the 18th century was

the ohio, is what it was called and it was founded by new englanders who wanted to take this beautiful unspoiled by humans place and make it into a democratic beautiful place. eb white, thoughts on democracy, john meacham said fdr used to like to read eb white on the subject of democracy and how it was the suspicion that more than half the people get it right more than half of the time. fdr liked to read that allowed, apparently the friends and then say them's my feelings exactly. i sort of think i was very lucky in that i entered late in -- life in america that have

respect for itself in some regard for itself. not bad pride, some bad, but some good. we had baseball. hollywood movies. wall street. freedom. we had some things going on here. it was kind of a pride, we had the ford factory and it makes cars and everyone can buy them. i was so lucky to come from a turbulent background into an america that had a good sense of itself and i feel for kids now because they are not going forth at age eight and 10 into america that has a good sense of itself but has a greater sense of not realism and reckoning, but shame. nothing good is built on shame.

so i worry about that and i find myself as i get older writing more about the things we can appreciate and hold onto and bring forward into the future but also just appreciate this place, love it, make it better, but it is lovable, it is worthy of respect and it is worthy of protectiveness. peter: if somebody reads declarations in saturday wall street journal every week, could they come away with the idea that peggy noonan views the american dream and the u.s. as best understood as a continuing project? peggy: sure. sure. why not? let's hope it is. we would like it to continue for a long time into the future. it is called the american experiment. i never quite think of it that way, but it is an experiment.

keep it going. it is a good thing. peter: your first book came out in 1986? peggy: 1990. peter: most recent is a certain idea of america a collection of columns. what is the lifespan of a column? peggy: i hope forever. i don't know. if someone reading it, if it affects them a little bit, a column goes a long time. or maybe it is just a column about what happened on friday and by saturday it is over. you never quite know. peter: how many words do you get per week? peggy: 1230. [laughter] peter: seriously? peggy: yes.

and i cut a column out of that. i am very conscious of it. but it is because i am in the saturday paper, which is more relaxed, gives you certain -- slightly more room. peter: what do you think of the placement and the saturday journal? peggy: i love it. it's in the wall street journal so you have those readers but you have them on saturday morning when everyone is relaxed and having a cup of coffee. i've been around so long people have my email address which i still have in they write to me and give me their opinion. peter: can you be anonymous on the streets of new york? peggy: yes, often. although it is the best of both worlds. movie fame is the mega fame you

cannot escape. television fame is a mega fame. if you are a writer and a newspaper or magazine and you show up sometimes on talk shows, people will often recognize you but it is not like seeing movie stars and no one bothers you. and the people who do come up and say hello are normally just longtime readers and you have fabulous conversations with them. i was walking with my son in central park on a pretty sunday in the spring or summer and somebody came by on talked to me about my work and said, i am so glad you do what you do, we had a lovely conversation and then we moved on and my son looked at me and said, do you mind when that happens? and i said, i worked very hard so that would happen.

i really liked it, it's a really good thing. peter: peggy noonan, a certain idea of america, selected writings, wall street journal columnist has been our guest on q&a. peggy: thank you very much. >> q and a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on c-span now. ♪ >>oh, good evening, everybody.

my name is roger zakheim. as you just heard, i'm the director of the reagan