Peggy Noonan: A Certain Idea of America

Renowned journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Peggy Noonan joins us as this year’s Richard Salant Lecture Series speaker. Special assistant and primary speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan, Noonan is the best-selling author of nine books about politics, religion, and culture, and has been a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal since 2000. Copies of her latest collection of essays, A Certain Idea of America, will be available on site by Elm Street Books for sale and signing.  

Among Noonan’s best sellers are What I Saw at the Revolution, When Character Was King, John Paul the Great, and Simply Speaking. She is one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, Character Above All. In 2010, she was given the Award for Media Excellence by the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.  She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and has taught at Yale University. Before entering the Reagan White House, Noonan was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York, and an adjunct professor of Journalism at New York University.  

The Richard Salant Lecture Series is dedicated to deepening the community’s news literacy and understanding of the responsibility of news media in a free society. Programs are intended to foster public interest in news and current affairs and the manner of its dissemination, with a critical eye to how coverage is responsibly and fairly provided. This aligns with the principles of Richard Salant, former President of CBS News who introduced 60 Minutes, CBS Morning News, and Sunday Morning during his tenure. Salant, a New Canaan resident, was a defender of the news media’s First Amendment rights provided its coverage was responsible and fair.