"My parents were ancestral Democrats," she says, chewing a piece of Nicorette gum as she waits for her salad to arrive. "They were working-class folk. It would never have occurred to my grandmother to vote for a thing called a Republican. I'm not sure she ever met a Republican."

Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Noonan was the third of seven children. Her father was a merchant seaman and then a furniture salesman. Her mother was a housewife. When Noonan was five, the family moved to Massapequa, N.Y. As a child, Noonan and her siblings rode around the neighborhood on cheap bikes and spent their summers frolicking in a neighbor's 3-foot pool. Everyone worshipped the Kennedys.

Finally, the family wound up in Rutherford, N.J., where Noonan graduated from high school. She took a job waitressing and enrolled in night school at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J., where she studied for two years before being admitted full-time. Occasionally, Noonan attended anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, one of which featured a speaker who asserted disdainfully that the United States' greatest accomplishment was exporting Coca-Cola. "I couldn't get into the spirit," Noonan later wrote. "There was contempt for the 19-year-old boys who were carrying guns in the war or in the [National] Guard....There was contempt for America." The experience was transformative for Noonan. These were not her people.

In 1972, she graduated with a degree in English literature and a minor in journalism. Without any connections to speak of, she took a job at CBS' all-news radio station in Boston, where she shared an apartment with Lisa Schwarzbaum, the future film critic of Entertainment Weekly. Though they'd met before Noonan "switched teams," as Schwarzbaum puts it in an e-mail, they never stopped being friends. "The thing about Peggy is, she's got a lot of friends who aren't on her team. (Because, really, oy, what a team.) And still we love her, because she can be so warm, so silly, so charming, so compassionate. (Well, except about Hillary, her 'Moby Dick.')"

At CBS Radio, Noonan did well and was transferred to New York in 1977, where she became a producer for Dan Rather. He says her politics were never an issue to him. "I didn't think of her as a conservative. I didn't think of her as anything but a fiercely independent reporter. She's a very good writer and thinker."