Q&A with columnist Peggy Noonan

After serving as a special assistant and speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan has gone on to author several books and is now a Wall Street Journal weekly columnist. She is speaking at 5 p.m. in Carroll Hall Thursday night as a part of the Roy H. Park Lecture Series. Senior writer Kate Albers was able to get her opinion on working for Reagan, working in journalism and being a female opinion writer at a major publication.

Daily Tar Heel: What did you most enjoy about being a special assistant and speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan?

Peggy Noonan: It is a great and fortunate thing to be part of any American president’s administration; it was more wonderful still to be part of a great one’s administration.

DTH: In your time at the White House, what was the most challenging thing about writing someone else’s words?

PN: All speechwriters, especially but not only those who work for a president, find the job and the process challenging. What helps is to really know the workings of the mind of the person you work for — how they think and why they think it.

DTH: Can you tell me about your time after the White House? How did you transition to your current job?

PN: Pretty much everything I had to say about working in the White House, I put in a book called “What I Saw at the Revolution.” It’s about being young and unimportant in a place of power. After the Reagan era ended, I returned to my native New York and became a writer of books and essays, and in 2000 I began a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal.

DTH: As a female conservative, what kind of criticisms do you get from the liberal community?

PN: To be a woman in public life, as anyone who talks about or comments on politics is, can be a challenge.

Those who disagree with you, and on any number of issues in my case that might be conservatives or liberals, have a tendency to respond to a woman in more personal terms and of course, for the past almost twenty years, have been able to do so anonymously and nationally on the web. There’s nothing to be done about it, but know the price of standing where you stand, and forge through.

The upside of internet culture is the wonderful friendships you make and contacts you have with people who in a previous era would have been anonymous readers. People are perhaps still more likely to think you’ll listen to and engage with them when you’re a woman. In any case, I have a lot of back and forth with those who read me, and I am always struck by how thoughtful they are and concerned they are about our country.

I often think of them on Saturday mornings having a cup of coffee and reading.

DTH: What advice would you give to college students who hope to work in the White House or at a major publication?

PN: If you want to go into journalism, you should first be a major reader — read history and literature, read the greats of journalism’s past.

Know your stuff. Want to do great stuff. Get a first job and work.

At the end of the day, if you want to be a writer, write. There are so many venues now, so many websites, so many news sites, and they’re all hungry for what is called content, which used to be called writing. There are so many ways in. But read, develop a point of view, a way of approaching the world intellectually.