Does character really count? Peggy Noonan says character is the very essence of leadership, and one President who had it in spades was Ronald Reagan. Noonan, author and former presidential speechwriter, makes her case in her engaging new book, When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan.


PAT ROBERTSON: Does character really count? Our upcoming guest says that it is the very essence of leadership. And one President who had it in spades, she says, was Ronald Reagan. She makes the case in her new book When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan. From our Washington studio, it’s a pleasure to welcome back to The 700 Club, author, columnist, and former presidential speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. Peggy, you have done it again, congratulations on a great book.

PEGGY NOONAN: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me on your show.

ROBERTSON: Talk to us about Ronald Reagan. His greatness came from what?


NOONAN: First of all, his greatness in sure. If you look back 20 years from the day he walked into the White House, and even those who disagreed with him have to admit he was a great man. The American people just this past February, when they were asked for the one President they thought was the greatest, the guy who came in number one was Ronald Reagan.

His greatness was owed to a number of things. First of all, it is fascinating to me as you research his life, he came from less than any other American president of this century. He came from less economically and financially, and in terms of a family in a position of respect. Most Presidents come from something pretty stable. Ronald Reagan didn't. He didn't call it poverty. But he said very frankly to his friends, "We were poor." And he was, dad was a shoe sales man and also unfortunately an alcoholic, who moved around a lot, lost a lot of jobs. His mother, however, saved him. And Nancy Reagan literally said to me, "Peggy, Ronny's mother saved his life." She saved him through a profound and natural religious belief, a total faith in Christ. That made her understand that life has a purpose and that God is in everything, and that if you don't get something you want, it is because he had something other in mind for you that will be better for you. And she filled the family air with her feelings about this, and Ronald Reagan breathed it in and I think in part it helped to make him the placid and optimistic and life-loving, not life-fearing person that he was.

ROBERTSON: I understand his mother, by the way, accepted Christ in an Aimee Semple McPherson meeting and would be on the street witnessing to the Lord. She wasn't some passive Christian church mother. She was out on the street witnessing and handing out tracts to people. Is that correct?

NOONAN: She was a totally active Christian and a great reader of tracts. She was, as Ronald Reagan said late in life, his dad was a Catholic but not a practicing one. He once said, "My father seems to have given up Mass for Lent and never quite went back." He said that in a private tape… it was very charming and funny. But he said it was his mother who made religion the purpose of her life and the purpose of her family. She was a woman who, though they were very poor, though they ate at night something that was called oatmeal hamburgers which was hamburger made out of pancake stuff, they couldn't afford meat. Nelle Wilson Reagan was a woman who went and got liver from a little store and would say she was going to feed it to the cat, she got a bad cut [of meat], and she would put it in Sunday's stew. So they had all of those problems. But she was not an unhappy person, she was a strong and vital person who always found people who had less money than the Reagans and brought them the scraps they had. And she was big on visiting the local jails and bringing the Bible to local accused criminals and convicts.

ROBERTSON: Peggy, you made a statement about Reagan. He pursued the Cold War to its conclusion and his "evil empire" speech sent reverberations through the Gulag. And on one of the shows yesterday, you said you didn't think Bill Clinton was serious about pursuing terrorism.

NOONAN: I certainly did say Clinton was not very good on terror. I was asked last night by Chris Matthews on Hardball, "What was the problem with the 90s that the American President didn't move forward and make us safer and not only protect ourselves and our interests?" The essential problem was that Bill Clinton was at bottom a profoundly unserious man. Pat, you and I know, he glided through eight years and you know, you would watch him and think, "What he’s really thinking about is, ‘Does my hair look good today.’"

He didn't take the steps that needed to be taken to make our country safer. He didn't help with espionage, he didn't help with intelligence gathering, he didn't help with civil defense, he didn't help rejigger the Army, Navy and Marines so that they would have the appropriate weapons and appropriate potential responses to whatever might be coming from rogue nations and rogues themselves with the ability to bomb us and do nuclear or biological warfare. So he wasted eight years and he was not called on it because I think the American people just assumed we have leaders, if we have trouble, the leaders surely know this. But the leaders were reading literally, a friend of Clinton’s told me, "Clinton will never move forward on the terrorism things you worry about, Peggy," I was one of the people very concerned in the 90s, "Clinton will never move forward on any of the things they want because they are not showing up in the polls and the focus groups now as things people are pushing for. It is not popular and he will not do what is unpopular." So he failed as a leader and I think history will look at the 1990s and paint a big "F" for failure on what happened in terms of the leadership. I feel terrible about it.

ROBERTSON: Thank you, Peggy. If you want her book, ladies and gentlemen, it’s called When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan. Peggy is a brilliant author and I know this will inspire you as you read it.

We regret that this interview was cut short due to technical difficulties.