State of the Union addresses consume copious energy in the White House speechwriting shop, which is odd, given how quickly they are forgotten. President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over” in 1996, but can anyone remember any other address? Thirty years on, President Donald Trump will deliver the State of the Union address tonight.
In 1986, the State of the Union had been prepared; there was a midday luncheon to brief the media on what to watch for.
President Ronald Reagan would speak to the American people that day, but at 5 p.m., not prime time, from the Oval Office, not the Capitol, and from a brief text quickly drafted.
The space shuttle Challenger had exploded upon lift-off.
Schoolchildren had been watching in their classrooms; a teacher had been on board. All seven astronauts had died. The State of the Union was postponed. Reagan instead delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his long career.
And that speech launched a compelling Catholic voice on the national scene.
Peggy Noonan had joined Reagan’s speechwriting team, having honed her skills drafting daily radio commentaries for Dan Rather of CBS. She had worked on Reagan’s 1984 speech at Pointe-du-Hoc for the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. But the Challenger speech was something else. The audience was far larger, the moment immediate and raw, not historic and nostalgic.
Reagan spoke, in turn, to those who mourned – the families, schoolchildren, workers at NASA, the American people. He recommitted to the space program, despite the loss – praised the spirit of adventure and discovery, likening it to the great explorers in centuries past.
He concluded with lines from John Gillespie Magee’s poem High Flight, the national anthem of aviation. He did not mention Magee, nor name the poem. The lines were assumed to be part of the common literary patrimony of Americans.
Magee was born in 1922 in Shanghai to an American father and British mother, both Anglican missionaries. He was the eldest of four brothers and won his school’s poetry prize at age 16.
In 1940, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force – the United States had still not entered the war – in order to fight overseas. He arrived in the United Kingdom in August 1941 and flew his first sortie over occupied France in November. He died in December not over France, but Lincolnshire, colliding midair with fellow airmen on a training flight.
He wrote High Flight after a Spitfire training mission that went up to 33,000 feet. Exhilarated, he mailed it to his parents in early September. After his death, his father published it in his parish bulletin, and it spread through the church press. Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress, discovered it and gave it wider circulation, comparing it with John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, the definitive elegy of the Great War.
Noonan knew the poem – and suspected Reagan did too. After the Challenger speech, Reagan told Noonan that it had been engraved on a plaque at his daughter’s school. High Flight is now engraved on the Challenger memorial.
A posthumously published poem from a brave aviator, testing the then boundaries of flight, was perfect for the Challenger. Magee begins with “I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and concludes with something of a prayer, having “put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
The Challenger speech quoted those lines, and increased Noonan’s renown, remarkable for speechwriters who are usually anonymous. She later wrote of a “kinder, gentler nation” for George Bush, Sr., made so by a “thousand points of light.”
She would write a lovely memoir of the Reagan administration, What I Saw at the Revolution (1990) – a book so popular that it had a twentieth-anniversary edition for the centennial of Reagan’s birth in 2011. She followed with another book on Reagan, When Character Was King (2001), and one on another hero, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father (2005).
She has written a column at the Wall Street Journal for over 25 years, where her Catholic faith is regularly featured. She is the Catholic speaker you call when you want someone accomplished and gracious who will show you something new and make you feel proud to be Catholic. Hence the honorary degrees at Notre Dame and Catholic University of America, and a turn at the Al Smith Dinner in 2022.
In my own writing, I have frequently turned to anniversaries for inspiration, and thought that I had learned that from St. John Paul the Great.
“His lifelong interest in anniversaries and jubilee years derives from his conviction that God’s action in history has sanctified time,” wrote biographer George Weigel in Witness to Hope. “Time is the dramatic arena that God chose to enter for the salvation of the world. Anniversaries and jubilees are occasions to bring the depth dimension of history to the surface of Christian consciousness.”
I think now that I learned it from Noonan. I read What I Saw at the Revolution as an undergraduate because I had watched the Challenger speech in high school. She included in that short speech two anniversaries.
“Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground,” Reagan said near the beginning.
And at the end: “There’s a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, ‘He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.’ Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.”
A deep understanding of history recognizes that there are no mere coincidences in Providence – a phrase John Paul himself used when visiting Fatima on the first anniversary of his assassination attempt.
The arc of the Challenger speech followed the path of aviation, upward from the surly bonds. Later, Noonan would receive a letter from a citizen who had written a poem about the Challenger and sent it along. It concluded, “They left us looking heavenward.”
A great speech does that too. Forty years ago, it did.
