Public Nuisances: Hazy Days Are Here Again/Hot Properties
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
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...Morris suffers too for his long-awaited Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan...
...More likely it was inspired by his full immersion into Washington politics where so many famous figures fictionalize so much of their lives...
...Ultimately, Morris has written a fine and informative book...
...A Republic, Not an Empire is Buchanan's studied analysis of the evolution of American diplomacy from George Washington's admonitions against "entangling alliances" to the present Clinton policy of what he in his student days would deride as a policy of "global policeman...
...Some of his views are quirky, but ultimately he comes to the perfectly sensible conclusion that American foreign policy ought to be focused on American national interests rather than the enthusiasms of any American ethnic group...
...No longer is the reader at Reagan's arm...
...As for his literary license, there is nothing cheap or cowardly about it...
...Morris is a man of his time...
...After the fall of the Soviet Union it suddenly has become fashionable for liberals to adopt the view that the "evil empire" no longer posed a threat to the United States after the early 1970's, if ever...
...As he told Newsweek, "I have gradually, over the course of many years, come to the conclusion that he was a great president...
...Who really can reconstruct the years of a nonentity headed for greatness...
...During Morris's arresting and coldly accurate chronicles of such matters as the president's early budget battles and his diplomacy at the brink in Reykjavik, the reader finds himself right there at Reagan's side...
...One p month the Clintons are mired in scandal, the next month their political opposites attract the hornets' nest...
...Buchanan has read widely in foreign policy...
...This is called literary license, and it has angered many...
...so too are other historical characters in the book...
...His literary license illuminates the atmosphere of Reagan's early years if not Reagan himself...
...His judgments of Reagan's policies are sound, though he should have written more about the conservative movement that accompanied Reagan through his public life and the economics that Reagan placed at the foundation of our military recovery and present economic health...
...He was a moral monster, a dangerous opponent to all democracies and worthy Western values...
...Sometimes it works, other times I have my doubts...
...The cacophony is hideous...
...He has not flinched from the essence of Ronald Reagan...
...That breaks the spell...
...biographers do not make up characters...
...so now two conservatives are in hot water, Pat Buchanan and Edmund Morris...
...Frankly, Hitler in his grave poses a threat to our way of life...
...November 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Buchanan is in the eye of scandal for his book A Republic, Not an Empire...
...Now Buchanan is being called proNazi...
...Both leading Republican contenders George W. Bush and Steve Forbes espouse the right values, Forbes Hot Properties most convincingly...
...The haze befogging the Republicans on the Hill today is not very edifying, but the promise of Reaganite leadership from the White House in zoos is cause for, ah, Reaganite optimism...
...This is unfortunate but hardly cause for all the critics' fury...
...He is no more pro-Nazi than America's liberals are pro-Communist...
...Sozzled by the biographer's generally erroneous belief that youth prefigures the adulthood of a great man, Morris spends far too much time on young Reagan...
...More interesting to me than greatness, however, is that he was throughout his life such a strange combination of innocence and wisdom, charm and hard force, gregariousness and aloofness, egocentricity without conceit, aggression without cruelty, imaginativeness and cultural ignorance, sentimentality and emotional coolness...
...As with Buchanan's view of harmless Nazi Germany, the liberals' view of harmless Soviet Russia makes diverting polemics but is no more reprehensible than that...
...This past month has been scandal-free for the Clintons—relatively speaking, of course: Reverberations from the 1993 Waco massacre still rumble, their sub-prime home loan rankles...
...Morris has the facts of the Reagan presidency in place...
...Having made their decision in Reagan's second term, they gave him almost complete access to the working president and to his papers...
...Morris's response is that after exhaustive research all the words he attributes to the president, all the acts and "recounted" thoughts, are factual...
...erhaps there is a symmetry to it...
...Morris has transformed himself into a partly fictional character, Reagan's early acquaintance...
...Morris claims Reagan's elusive character inspired this literary license...
...But then Morris slips in his made up recollections of how some experience of the young Reagan presaged this historic moment...
...Similarly Edmund Morris is under fire for one of his flights of fancy...
...In our time that might drive anyone who got too close to fiction...
...All in all a halcyon time for this 1990's equivalent of the Harding family...
...They hold to the idea that he was enlisted to write a biography...
...Finally, given Morris's unique access to the president, one hopes he will make his notes and other materials available to subsequent writers...
...Morris is describing a great man of history...
...He is a postmodern critic, and such postmoderns rarely get burned for the chances they take...
...The reader is bedizzied...
...Now all these years later Morris has written an eccentric memoir of Reagan's life, so eccentric Morris claims to have witnessed young Reagan growing up when Morris was not yet even born...
...After writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt, he was chosen by the Reagans to write the president's authorized biography...
...The most astounding of his quirky views is that Hitler's Germany posed no threat to the United States after 194o...
...It is most likely that a Reaganite president could give the Congress purpose...
...For that matter, most of our national celebrities are heavily fictionalized...
...When it comes to the White House years the fictional character becomes a distraction...
...He only fictionalized himself and two minor figures...
...Having actually been introduced into Reagan's life during his second administration, Morris introduces himself into Reagan's pre-presidential life...
Vol. 32 • November 1999 • No. 11
