War & Peace Quote by Peggy Noonan

Noonan’s line is a politics-writer’s coup: it flatters Reagan’s mystique while quietly puncturing everyone orbiting it. By comparing the internal competition to shape Reagan’s thinking to World War I trench warfare, she reaches for a metaphor that’s instantly legible in American culture: endless sacrifice, minuscule movement, and a landscape reduced to mud. The kicker is her verdict on the prize itself: “such barren terrain.” That twist converts what could’ve been a heroic image into a bleak joke about Washington ambition.

The specific intent is double. First, she dramatizes the ferocity of the Reagan White House’s factional struggles - aides, ideologues, pragmatists, movement conservatives - all jockeying to be the voice in the president’s ear. Second, she undercuts the premise that winning Reagan’s mind was even worth the casualties. If the “terrain” is barren, then the combatants aren’t crusaders; they’re careerists waging symbolic war over limited, often pre-decided ground.

The subtext is a portrait of Reagan as both powerful and elusive: a president whose public clarity (simple moral language, sunny conviction) coexisted with a private governability that invited projection. People fought to “own” Reagan because he was a vessel for competing versions of conservatism - optimistic communicator, hardliner, dealmaker. Noonan’s cynicism lands because it reframes insider mythology as misallocated intensity: a system capable of epic struggle, aimed at something smaller than its participants admit.