America's Lifeguard President
GRAFF, HENRY F.
America's Lifeguard President Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan By Edmund Morris Random. 874 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of histoiy. Columbia University;...
...One is Nancy Reagan's conversation with him about the President's first marriage...
...But he chose a method that will puzzle all readers andinfuriate many of them —as it did me...
...He is our eyes and ears observing the young Reagan, always from afar, while we follow the peregrinations of the Reagan family as John, the father, moves fromjob to job during the years the future President is growing up...
...softhearted he is...
...In 1984, for instance, Reagan invited me to present the White House Library with a copy of my new book on the Presidency...
...In the course of reading Dutch, I was intrigued by an article in the New Republic by Ryan Lizza, who unearthed a startingly similar approach to discussing Reagan—a short story entitled "Dear Mr...
...Just couldn'ttalk about it, somehow...
...What was there about Reagan that inspired the use of fiction—and in two men independently...
...Still, John Hutton, the White House physician, was astonished by the President's rather blasé reaction when he gave him the painful news that Nancy hadjust been diagnosed with breast cancer...
...It is not too much to say that in public Ronald Reagan was always acting, always "on...
...Reagan, who was nicknamed Dutch by his father, was the most detached President in our history...
...The demise of the Communist system will be his permanent monument...
...Still, Reagan is a wooden figure in the national mind—recognized but unknown and, if we may judge from this book, unknowable...
...At its outset, I thought the practice of Presidential intimates rushing to publication with often snitching books, even while their subjects were still in office, would denigrate the Presidency...
...It was "morning in America, again...
...In addition to containing Reagan's reminiscences of all kinds, but particularly of Hollywood, Morris' tome is brimming with personal and titillating discoveries that are sure to enter the bloodstream of Presidential lore...
...Specifically, he created a fictional persona for himself and inserted it into the narrative...
...But he also rescued the Presidency from the torpor it had fallen into after Watergate, Gerald R. Ford's pardon of Richard M. Nixon, the failed war in Vietnam, and the hostage crisis in Iran...
...I recall the last Gridiron Club dinner of his Administration in the spring ofl988.As he and the First Lady were departing to the cheers of the assemblage he stopped, backtracked to the microphone, and in mock seriousness predicted, "You'll miss me when you've had eight years of President Dukakis...
...She is quoted as saying that Jane Wyman, the first wife, in a note to Reagan threatened to commit suicide if he didn't marry her...
...Readers will ultimately have their own opinions of Morris' decision to add fiction to history, but I suspect most will agree with me that it doesn't work...
...The Presidents: A Reference Histoiy" Ronald Reagan contributed as substantially to the United States as any President since Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...While they were "pumping her out," Reagan arrived at her bedside posthaste and immediately promised, "Of course I'll marry you...
...Perhaps Morris refrained from writing about such intricacies because he does not have the feel for them...
...Everybody in the room roared...
...God bless,' he concluded, for perhaps the millionth time in his life, 'the United States of America.' He said it so reverently that I wondered if, for all his uxorial protestations, love for country was not Ronald Reagan's one and only passion...
...Morris himself can point out that Dutch is being presented as a "memoir," not a biography...
...Well, you're doctors, and I'm confident you'll be able to take care of it," Reagan responded...
...I found myself skipping the fantasy even as I admired the author's cheek...
...He was disengaged from the work of his office so thoroughly that when Donald Regan and James Baker decided to exchange jobs—Baker became the Secretary of the Treasury and Regan the White House Chief of Staff— the President never asked them the reason for their odd switch...
...Suffering from Alzheimer's disease, he spoke a few words of thanks...
...His admirers will note that he has never given us the second volume of his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, which would have to include similar matters...
...In 1928 he rescued a drowning youth, and at the end of the book "Morris" reveals it was he who was saved...
...Morris gives us innumerable instances of Reagan's casual approach to issues and policies, yet fails to do the job we normally expect from a biographer...
...When I entered the Oval Office, he leaped from his chair in my direction and said firmly: "Professor, I want to tell you something...
...Thus, although the author was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1940 and his father was an airline pilot, the "Morris" we meet here was born in Chicago in 1912, the son of an opera diva and a wealthy meatpacking titan...
...While all of these tidbits are discomforting to read, they add up to Morris' general judgment and thesis that Reagan's interior was completely empty...
...editor...
...The master performer was once more "leaving them laughing...
...He often failed to recognize members of his own Cabinet, or sometimes even his own children...
...The next day, though, he stepped into Hutton's office to say, "John, I handled it very badly...
...Did he steal it from me...
...Lizza quotes Voll, who says he was dumbfounded when he read Dutch : "Was this an original device...
...Dutch provides no answer...
...BothMorris and Voll make much of Reagan's experience as a lifeguard...
...But there aren't a lot of stories out there about what it's like for Ronald Reagan to blow breath into your lungs...
...Rebuffed, she swallowed "a lot of pills" and had to be rushed to the hospital...
...Observes Morris: Reagan "still personified la notion de l'état, and the room was hushed with respect for him...
...He shies away from the complications of politics, so we find out almost nothing about Reagan's two Presidential campaigns, and nothing to speak of about the Iran-contra episode...
...But I have been forced to conclude that without them the public would not understand, let alone know, what is going on in the White House...
...About my book he asked simply, "Am I in it...
...Fabricated footnotes are supplied as well...
...But if Reagan was an unreal man, how explain his inordinate popularity through most of his Presidency...
...There are two other invented characters: Paul Rae, a columnist, and Gavin, the fake Morris' son...
...Morris recalls the scene when, late in George Bush's Presidency, Reagan was awarded the Medal of Freedom in a White House ceremony...
...President" by Daniel Voll, published in Story magazine in 1994...
...What we do learn is that the Reagans were both often in their pajamas by six in the evening...
...At least 10 of the genre were issued during Reagan's two terms...
...Actually, he had made himself ready the night before by putting on his pajamas and watching a private screening of The Sound of Musici Pertinent questions about the President's modus operandi are not taken up in Dutch...
...In Ronald Reagan the country had a virtual President, and some of his closest associates tried to tell us that...
...And how did Reagan even bamboozle other world leaders...
...The American people had intuited that long before, and honored their man accordingly...
...No wonder Edmund Morris, who was given unprecedented access to the President in order to write his biography, had trouble discovering the real Reagan—and also discovering a mode for telling us about his quest...
...Who knows...
...Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, thought Reagan was admirably prepared for the Group of Seven meeting in 1983...
...Were the media at fault in failing to tell us who was in the White House...
...What the public saw, though, was a dazzling hero who stood high above the crowd and wore his patriotism like a garment...
...Yet his memory for anecdotes was so good that when he repeated some of them in conversations with Morris—as he frequently did—he told them in exactly the same words each time, as if they had been recorded...
...Reagan added: "You know how soft...
...Morris has neverthelessusedhis unique opportunity to produce a brilliantly written book that will surely long stand high on the list of works about the 40th President...
...Mrs...
...It's a bizarre coincidence at the very least...
...Morris, the real one, says he never read Voll's story, and that in fact he wrote the conclusion of his volume in 1993...
...Back when I was a sportscaster, against the prevailing opinion, I predicted that Lou Little's Columbia would beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl"—a stunning football upset of 50 years earlier...
...Reagan's charm, nonetheless, lay in good measure in his ability to call up the right anecdote forevery occasion...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 14
