Dutch

...On various occasions in his narrative the author is very respectful, as during the attempted assassination in 1981, the first meeting with Gorbachev in 1985, the Challenger launch tragedy in 1986, the president's farewell speech in 1989, and his very affecting letter describing his struggle with Alzheimer's in 1994...

...that when Reagan visited Bitburg and Bergen Belsen in 1985 (which Morris disapproved) Germany was "sick" and Helmut Kohl "incapacitated" (Kohl continued as federal chancellor for 13 years...

...Morris accurately records this and Reagan's fierce hostility throughout his life to antiSemitism or racism of any kind...

...This book is so idiosyncratic, and so appallingly bad in places, that it is somewhat endearing and rouses curiosity about, and perhaps even solicitude for, its overwrought author...

...Joseph stood aside for her because he thought, accuThe American Spectator • December /999 /January zocto 85 rately, that she would be a better party leader...

...that the USSR was not guilty of "perfidy" at the time of the Warsaw uprising in 1944...

...possessed "subtlety, sweetness, clarity" of written and spoken word and was almost without vanity...

...lack of interest in others except his wife...

...Morris records, "I have not noticed before how low [Reagan's forehead] is, how heavy and confining the thick fine thatch above...

...But as a definitive life, Dutch is a ludicrous imposture...

...Unfortunately, it is a huge disappointment and is virtually confessed to be so by the author himself...

...Reagan is not even spared phrenological aspersions from his official biographer...

...Despite his thorough research Morris is oddly credulous toward Reagan's critics at times and subscribes to the outrageous slur that Reagan equated Nazi war-dead with Holocaust victims...

...Quarrelling intellectuals are like "sex among iguanas...

...Morris would have done better to shorten his book, confine himself to his laboriously collected facts, and leave the reader to make his own assessment of this extraordinary figure, since Morris can't, after 14 years and 700 pages, offer a coherent one himself...

...We are treated to Freudian reflections on the author's relations with his mother...

...The author's ambivalence about his subject stretches from the most personal to the greatest events of his administration...

...Dutch (Ronald Reagan's adolescent nickname) has many elegant passages, a number of interesting insights, and does reflect hundreds of interviews and comprehensive research...

...election campaign funding and thought Jimmy Carter's hokey walk from his inauguration to the White House "a wonderful moment...

...We have to endure endless descriptions of the weather and sunlight, not just on great, but on banal occasions, such as Morris's visits to Reagan's (and Louella Parsons's) hometown, Dixon, Illinois...

...The last years of Reagan's presidency are in an uncoordinated chapter of vignettes called "Album Leaves...

...This last is no small achievement for a man who was conspicuously successful at everything he 84 December 9 99/January 2000 • The American Spectator did...

...He attaches great importance to the evolution of Reagan's handwriting, is dazzled by and repeats the sequence of vehicles in Reagan's presidential motorcades, purports to believe that in the fifties, "paranoia and concealment became the American norm...

...It has been an astonishing career and Morris does record the laudations of opponents...

...Reagan's shortcomings are also amply revealed: superficiality...

...Morris attributes Reagan's ungenerous regard for Gerald Ford to the fact that Ford wasn't elected president, though he quotes Reagan's own, more sensible explanation (that Ford was essentially ineffectual...

...Conservative leader because of Keith Joseph's hubristic embrace of eugenics...

...But each time when he seems to have reconciled his own intellectual condescensions with Reagan's undoubted human qualities, he backslides into carping, as if unable to surrender the approval of Reagan's opponents in the professoriat: the bedraggled, ulcerous, academic left whom Reagan mowed down with amiable disinterest...

...He also records the praise of such early peers as Al Jolson and Cecil B. De Mille and the friendship of Humphrey Bogart...

...There is no reason to fear for Morris's Theodore Roosevelt project, to which he expresses great and understandable happiness to have returned, since he can probably cope with a less enigmatic president who has been dead for 8o years...

...At the very end of the book Morris claims to have been rescued by Reagan when he was a lifeguard at Lowell Park, Illinois, in 1928, many years before Morris was born (in Kenya...

...And there are Morris's pedantic flights into foreign languages, not in search of uniquely expressive phrases: savoir faire and Weltanschauungs would be acceptable, but no such luck...

...As spokesman for General Electric, his television program was an instant and constant success and he became one of America's best known personalities and most effective public speakers...

...He accurately describes how, literally and figuratively, he "towered over his drained little predecessor," Jimmy Carter...

...a cold, almost mechanical aspect central to his CONRAD BLACK is chairman of Telegraph Group Limited...

...T here are some fine descriptive passages, and many of the personality sketches of secondary figures are excellent, but there are too many clumsy images of Reagan as a glacier or iceberg and too many flamboyant metaphors and analogies that don't make it: "the fetid waters of memory and desire...

...In his desperation to get at the real Reagan, Morris devises the spurious technique of claiming to have known him for over 70 years, with the result that many pages are wasted in self-indulgent fiction about a nonexistent relationship...

...indolence in some matters of detail...

...When he finally entered politics, at the age of 55, he had four elections, as governor and president...

...Morris wastes an unforgivable amount of space on himself...

...As a radio sports announcer in Des Moines, California-bound in the Great Depression, he was, according to Sporting News in 1936, one of the most popular in the country...

...Mitterrand admired his strength, cleverness, convictions, and success, even though he found him intellectually unimpressive...

...a tendency to confusion in conversation or repartee, at stark variance to his hypnotic oratorical talents...

...In most respects Morris's judgment and even elemental historical knowledge are scandalously unreliable for a serious historian...

...Morris's interview notes and tapes will be of great help to less disturbed Reagan historians who didn't hover and fester confusedly in the Reagan White House as Morris did...

...There are many sheep in the Falkland Islands, but unless an unreported cataclysm has occurred there, the islands are not "sheep-splattered...

...But the uninformed reader would never guess Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War, or in the tremendous current prosperity of the United States...

...He even claims Reagan unsuccessfully applied for membership in the Communist Party in 1938...

...that Reagan was both an imperialist and a pacifist...

...But interspersed among these compliments are reservations that go well beyond fair comment...

...I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life...

...While describing rummaging through the Reagan Library, Edmund Morris declares "The biographer lives in hope...

...He is frequently nasty and sneering, even describing Reagan at one point as "an apparent airhead," but volunteers that Reagan may simply have been uninterested in revealing much of himself or even have been skillfully practicing concealment of his real motivations...

...Such an act of contrition would not be inappropriate for the author of so uneven a work after keeping his and his subject's admirers waiting for more than a decade before laying this egg...

...Morris asserts that Margaret Thatcher became U.K...

...This was in the introduction and Reagan's light wasn't waning, Morris's was...

...We are labored with a rhetorical "quien sabe...

...Certain words, such as "splotch," "scintillant," and "querulous," are used much too often...

...Nixon inspired Morris to write about Theodore Roosevelt, but like most, if not all presidents during his lifetime except Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, Reagan had little respect for Nixon...

...Nor is it implausiblefor a writer who describes how, during one of Reagan's cancer scares, he prayed fervently and lit a candle for him in a Washington church...

...why not Timothy Leary, Angela Davis, or Gus Hall...

...All four were landslide victories...

...There are also countless repetitive descriptions of Reagan's "thick, dark, brylcreamed hair," as if the reader had no idea what Reagan looked like and needed to be reminded every five pages...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Neurotic Tittle-Tattle Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan Edmund Morris Random House / 874 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Conrad Black As an acquaintance and long-standing admirer of the writing of Edmund Morris, I looked forward to this book, determined to rise above early criticism of the format which mixes fact and fiction confusingly at times...

...He shows a serious ignorance of U.S...

...Morris, waffling sixties flower-person as he partly reveals himself to be, found the music at Nixon's rather uplifting funeral in 1994 (almost all America's great patriotic anthems and marches) "execrable...

...was a talented essayist at university and to the end wrote most of his own speeches...

...Almost the only acerbity he avoids is any reference to the notorious movie Bedtime for Bonzo...

...personality that Morris isolates, mocks, resents, but can't really fathom...

...His friends, such as Margaret Thatcher, were even more positive, and Paul Nitze, who served every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt, started as a skeptic but ended regarding Reagan as "a great man...

...His revulsion at Nazi atrocities began with the first U.S...

...there are frequent lapses into absurd stage directions for a film set, and we are told of the "Cyclopean stare of Richard Nixon...

...This is one of countless unbecoming reflections from the inhabitant of a vast glass house...

...The president actually said that young German conscripts who died without knowing what they were fighting for or against were also victims, and that it was time to integrate Germany into Western civilization...

...Morris describes the pre-presidential Reagan as "so ungreat he couldn't handle power...

...Nixon has been called almost everything, including, by Morris, a "tormented visionary," but never, until now, a one-eyed giant...

...sometimes misplaced stubbornness...

...It presumably didn't color Reagan's viewsof the pre-19o4 unelected President Theodore Roosevelt either, Morris's chronicling of whom, up to his inauguration, led Reagan to the engagement of Morris as his own biographer...

...Army films of liberated camps in 1945 and never wavered...

...Reagan the bachelor is one of Hollywood's great swordsmen in places, and an indifferent lover in others...

...But Morris would have us believe that he knows Reagan better than Reagan knows himself...

...Morris credits Reagan with having outwitted Gorbachev at the Geneva summit meeting, considered the "evil empire" speech to have been a success, but, wearing his pro-life heart on his sleeve, sanctimoniously holds Reagan responsible for 82,000 abortions under legislation he signed in California, "as against the 77 [souls] he took credit for as a lifeguard...

...It is never really made clear that, or why, Reagan's countrymen considered him a great leader and a beloved president...

...The extreme opposite pole to Morris's prayers and offerings for Reagan are completely gratuitous bursts of ridicule of unexceptionable things, as when Reagan, a guest in the Aga Khan's house at Geneva for the 1985 meeting with Gorbachev, conscientiously fed his host's son's goldfish in one of the rooms he was using...

...This consideration didn't prevent Reagan from heading up the Hollywood for Truman campaign for the then-unelected president in 1948...

...He was Hollywood's box-office leading film actor in 1941 after King's Row and You're in the Army Now, at the age of 30...

...No reader slogs through this book to learn about Morris's career ups and downs, fictional or real, or to be told on several occasions about the author's beard...

...Edmund Morris sets out to explain how a president who often seemed conversationally insubstantial could be so successful, as politician and leader...

...So do we all, but the great hope invested in this book was not well-founded...

...Morris unctuously blames "Dutch" for driving Morris's imaginary son underground after the Berkeley disturbances in 1969, as if such an event, had it actually happened, would have been the responsibility of the governor of California...

...This clumsy device pops up even in Reagan's public years...

...These elements, even now, scramble around like asphyxiated cockroaches trying to give Gorbachev the credit that largely belongs to Reagan for winning the Cold War and Bill Clinton all the kudos for the overwhelming success of Reaganomics...

...He credits Reagan with being a sincere opponent of anti-Communist Hollywood witch hunts...

...One gets the impression that only the44 Morris's judgment and even elemental historical knowledge are scandalously unreliable for a serious historian...

...Gorbachev considered him an "authentic" man of "calibre" and "balance...

...Morris rightly called this handwritten swan song a "masterly piece of writing...

...Morris describes Reagan as "courtly, beautiful, brave and blundering," and his fictional characters say scurrilous things about Reagan which the author obviously intermittently believes but oddly doesn't wish to record as his own opinion...

...When one of them died anyway, Reagan had his security unit scour Geneva for identical replacements and left the boy a note which Morris is pleased to describe as an explanation of "the mysteries of death and transfiguration" of goldfish...

...Important issues and perspectives are unrecognizably compressed or passed over altogether...

...Morris is undecided about the firing of the air controllers, the bombing of Qaddafi, Reaganomics in general, and the Reykjavik summit—though the first three were clearly successful and Reykjavik had its uses...

...It does shed considerable light on Reagan, shadowed though it is with Edmund Morris's wingy biases and even jealousies...

...There are also too many insertions of obscure "splotches" of poetry, doubtless designed to impress us with the author's reconditeness, but usually irrelevant...

...He did graciously but almost incongruously conclude that "the old lifeguard....rescued America in a time of poisonous despair and carried her 'breastward out of peril.'" I took this late inspiration as the author's metaphorical confession of how much he and all civilized people owe to Reagan and of his sorrow at his own ambivalence and ingratitude through much of this ramshackle book for which Reagan and his family and entourage gave him almost unlimited access starting early in his second term as president...

...As a jet passes overhead at a summit meeting, Morris "equated it with blood thundering through Gorbachev's birthmark...

...In the same nostalgic leftist spirit, he portentously quotes from the discredited fifties and sixties fellow traveler, C. Wright Mills...

...He accuses Reagan of being cold to his wife, whom he describes as "Poor Nancy, the most patient wife since Cosima Wagner," but all evidence, here and elsewhere, is that he was devoted to his wife...

...0 n the positive side, Reagan "beguiled" de Gaulle and De Valera...

...and several "moments critiques," and "affrontements" and an "entrer en conversation," as if rhetorical questions, critical moments, confrontations, and conversational openings were beyond the imagination of the lumpenangloph ony...

...As a lifeguard, he rescued 77 people...

...I must CC There are countless repetitive descriptions of Reagan's 'thick, dark, bryl-creamed hair.' 1? allow these dusts of myself to sparkle in [Reagan's] waning light...

...He marshals Reagan's strengths: courage, eloquence, a photographic memory for certain details, fanatical determination, unshakable optimism, patriotic fervor, clear and sound principles, tenacity, uxoriousness, physical and moral strength, immense personal charm, longevity—almost indestructibility—sure populist instincts, and an enigmatic cunning the author found particularly elusive...

...This book is often as much a garrulous stream of the consciousness of Edmund Morris, analysand, as a biography of Ronald Reagan...

...86 December r999/January 2000 The American Spectator...

...Morris lurches back and forth like a metronome between acknowledging manifestations of Reagan's greatness and admitting his own inability to explain them...

...House Speaker Tip O'Neill thought him the greatest public speaker and most popular politician he had known in his career...

...smoothest, most processed grain can be blown into that shallow loft, and that once it reaches capacity, it will compact and atrophy into something harder than bone...