In 1988, George H.W. Bush drafted her to work on his presidential campaign, where she was responsible for thinking up his famous "Read my lips: No new taxes" pronouncement. "It was a reminder to beware of sound bites that come back to bite you," says Aram Bakshian, the first head of Reagan's speech-writing department. "It was clever, but foolish."

Happily, politics is one of the few businesses in which leaving (or losing) the best jobs is often the best that can happen: book deals, op-ed columns, consultancies at think tanks and lucrative speaking engagements on the lecture circuit. All of which Noonan has enjoyed since returning to New York nearly two decades ago.

First up was her memoir, "What I Saw at the Revolution." It was a bestseller, though reviews were mixed and former White House colleagues such as Pat Buchanan claimed not to recall having had conversations that appeared in it. Similarly, Rather felt Noonan's characterization of CBS as overly liberal served her outsider-ish narrative, but not necessarily the truth. "She described CBS in a way that didn't match my memory," he says. "There were many people there who were Republicans and wanted Reagan to win."

Six more books followed, including a treatise on how to be a more eloquent you, encomiums to Pope John Paul II and Reagan and the anti-Hillary book that came out in 2000, the same year she was given her weekly column in the Journal.

In 2005, after taking a leave from the Journal to campaign for Bush's reelection, Noonan's views began to shift. Increasingly, she came to believe the war in Iraq was a mistake. She also felt Bush's spending was out of control, a common complaint from economic conservatives. Then came the President's inaugural speech. "This was an American president saying, essentially, it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate evil from the world, and to be friends with those countries that are democracies and not friends with those that are not," she says. "To me that's so mad, it stopped me in my tracks and made me reconsider everything. It's both utopian and aggressive. You cannot decide to tell the world how it will govern itself."