When Noonan was in high school, she had a dream the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As she wrote in her 1990 memoir, "Things I Saw at the Revolution": "I saw Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre. He was sitting in a box and suddenly a shadow came from behind and Lincoln turned to look and there was a sharp retort and he slumped in his chair. But the moment before he was shot, I saw his face and he was black."

Shortly thereafter came another foreboding premonition about the murder of Bobby Kennedy.

"Whether those stories are real or not, she and Reagan both had an affinity for right-wing new age-ry," says Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. "Even though she didn't know Reagan that well, her fantasy of herself tracked with his fantasy of himself. The most famous passages of the speeches she did were pure Hollywood."

On June 6, 1984, the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Reagan delivered Noonan's first speech, in which the only thing missing was a John Williams score. "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc," he said. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent."

It was a smash hit, as was an admiring tribute to John F. Kennedy that Reagan delivered at a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum.

By 1986, however, the writing was on the wall. Noonan's boss, Elliott, had been removed from his post as the head of speech-writing, and it was seen around the office as the triumph of the pragmatists over the idealists. She'd recently married Richard Rahn, who was then the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (they divorced in 1990). She had quit smoking and it left her exhausted. She also wanted to have a baby. "Time to go," she thought.

So Noonan resigned in a letter to Reagan, and signed it with x's for kisses. "My secretary said, 'No, they won't like it,' so I sent a plain one, got mad, and sent the kisses," Noonan later recalled.