A Devastating Portrait Of President Reagan, By A True Believer

BOSTON - In the late 1980s, Peggy Noonan did something unexpected. She made a name for herself putting words in other people's mouths.

Speechwriters were supposed to be anonymous or at best arcane footnotes to historic texts. But Noonan became that oxymoron, A Famous Speechwriter, the best-known of the supposed-to-be-unknown.

Noonan was the woman behind the Challenger disaster speech, the one who wrote Reagan's farewell and Bush's hello. And now she has put her own name on a memoir of life in the Reagan White House called, ``What I Saw at the Revolution.''

This is not another kiss-and-tell book. Everybody who kissed has already told. What Noonan has done, better and more openly than any other Reagan devotee, is to say what it was like in his White House, at least for a ``neo-con(servative) from Queens'' in a skirt.

And what she has done, better and more devastatingly than any Reagan enemy, is to reveal the man behind the curtain.

This book is must reading for White House wannabes. But what makes these memoirs compelling reading is the subtext. This is a book that should have been called ``Desperately Seeking Reagan,'' because Noonan's work is at core a search for authenticity: Reagan's, her own, the country's. What is real and how do you find it?

It's no surprise that a hired wordsmith would be obsessed with authenticity. What does it mean to write words for other people? Who owns them? The very job comes with an identity crisis. Indeed, this book may be written in so many voices - naive, feisty, sentimental, funny, love-struck and clear-eyed - because she's struggling to find one to call her own.

Nor is it any surprise that someone with her politically mixed identity would have trouble reconciling its components. Raised in an Irish Catholic family, the founding member of a Jack Kennedy fan club, she left liberalism on a bus headed to an anti-war rally when, looking around at the crowd, she asked herself, ``What am I doing with . . . this contemptuous elite?''

No anti-establishment, ardently conservative woman who worries about a ``contemptuous elite'' could find much comfort in the Reagan White House. An outsider there, she played the role of bad girl at prep school: a sort-of rebellious kid who occasionally drank too much wine and smoked too many cigarettes under disapproving adult eyes in the White House mess.

Noonan's search for the real Ronald Reagan is not easily separated from her own life. Reaganism was, after all, the man she left a family for. He better be worth it.

``I first saw him as a foot, a highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock,'' she writes in a fevered state of political puppy love. ``I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.''

Fortunately, foot-fetishism had its limits; Noonan's adoration for Reagan never left her but was tempered with a months-after honesty.

The president she truly liked - the mystery man - was, she says, ``probably the sweetest, most innocent man ever to serve in the Oval Office. He was a modest man with an intellect slightly superior to the average.''

The rather deaf and distracted soul who never said a nasty word behind anyone's back was the ``least introspective of men . . . living proof that the unexamined life is worth living.''

And the man to whom she looked for intellectual leadership ``wasn't a revolutionary, he wasn't a missile drawn to the heat of a new idea. He didn't really care for new ideas; he was pretty content with the old ones . . . He was conservative in part because he was old-fashioned.''

At the end of her search for the real Reagan, the best she can come up with is a paradox, ``He seemed both phony and authentic. Because he was. He was really acting, but the part he played was Ronald Reagan.''

Much of this has been said or seen before, most recently by those who heard Reagan being interviewed by Barbara Walters or Larry King. But in the hands of a true believer, the portrait of a president is more devastating than reruns of his first debate with Walter Mondale.

The book leaves dangling another ripe question about authenticity in this time. Peggy Noonan helped to forge the national image of Reagan. She wrote the script for the Best of Reagan that lives in memory and archives. Now she rewrites it. Which of these creations will go down in history as real?

Searching behind the curtain she helped to sew, Noonan writes: ``I knew he was one of the great men of our time . . . but it is not without meaning for me that when I thought of him in those days, it was as a gigantic heroic balloon floating in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, between Superman and Big Bird.''

(Copyright, 1990, Boston Globe Newspaper Co.)