Ronald Reagan and his Imaginary Friend

...An apparent airhead" emerged in the interviews with the author...

...As a featured actor, Reagan is described as showing "that infallible sign of a bad actor, the inability to listen...

...The day was hot and still...

...I cannot find those words in Dutch...

...He began to read...

...Mr...

...The arms buildup in the face of a rampant Soviet Union on the march worldwide is derided ("the Pentagon became a second Fort Knox...

...Why "Dutch," a nickname not used by anyone for sixty years...

...An advertising copywriter in London and New York before surprising the world with his Roosevelt book, he makes it clear that he neither likes nor understands politics...

...Neglecting the political give and take of Reagan's rise, Morris dwells on the details of the 1981 assassination attempt: "Apart from the debilitating effects of surgery and fever, he had traded half of his own fresh blood for the staler, cooler contributions of strang-ers—a major psychological insult from which he would never entirely recover...

...He suggests that for the asking, Reagan could have been Richard Nixon's vice president after Spiro T. Agnew's resignation, when in fact it never was possible...

...Morris largely ignores Reagan's complaint spelled out in his autobiographical Where's the Rest of Me...

...And Morris makes clear that, for better or worse, the important decisions of the Reagan administration were the president's own...

...Reagan's great accomplishments are minimized or glossed over while irrelevant failings are dwelled Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator...

...When Morris tells Reagan this, the president replies in shock: "That's me...

...Reagan eventually became "free to identify himself with the kind of rich Republicans he had gotten to know since marrying Nancy: hard-tanned men who wintered in Scottsdale, talked mostly in digits and ornamented their dens with Steuben glass eagles...

...Its indiscriminate accumulation of facts, whether sterile or insignificant, its braying religiosity, its virginal jokes & muscular Christianity arouse his simple wonder that the world can be so ordered & decent, so endlessly interesting...

...As for his famous, heart-stopping speech at Moscow University, Morris writes that the Russian students understood that Reagan "is old and somewhat naïve and the dupe of some of his own sentimentalities...

...Morris describes his research at the Reagan Library: "I would pull another gray box toward me, wondering which of its miscellaneous folders might disgorge Dutch's Rosebud...

...The loops fell away, leaving behind pale ghosts of themselves...

...They discussed it with the local Party leader, who asked around, and word came back that Reagan was a flake...

...in 1965 (a fascinating book deemed by Morris to be "unreadable by anybody of sound mind") that his conservatism deprived him of movie roles...

...Morris was not at the historic Iceland summit, bumped from the plane by the chief of staff, Don Regan...

...been fresh and innovative when John Dos Passos did it seventy-five years ago...

...His solution was to transform a biography into a "memoir" by inventing a doppelganger of himself, a contemporary of Reagan born a quarter century before the real Morris, not in Nairobi but in northern Illinois, who was briefly a classmate of the future president at Eureka College and tracks him until he supposedly merges with the real Edmund Morris in the late 1960s...

...Reagan's introduction to Communist-battling as head of the Screen Actors Guild is obscured by snideness...

...Along with about fifty other hacks, I had to write a thousand words a week for what eventually became Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide (Chicago, 1939...

...Morris contends that "El Salvador's current 'democratic' regime was so reactionary as to make Somoza's [dictatorial regime in Nicaragua] look benign," when in fact the Salvadoran president at the time was the liberal Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte...

...It is difficult to believe that this is the Edmund Morris who wrote so elegant a conventional biography as The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt...

...But the seminal event of Reagan's Hollywood years, his evolution from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican, is lost amid Morris's preening...

...Reveres it as the sum of all human wisdom, monthly added to...

...The biographer is addicted to single sources for his revelations...

...Morris was so perplexed that, addressing fellow authors years after the book was due, he revealed a massive writer's block...

...Quite apart from his unprecedented access to Ronald Reagan and the presidential diary, he poured through thousands of boxes in the Reagan library and interviewed hundreds of sources...

...Just as Jordan is essentially a basketball player, so Reagan was quintessential^ a politician, from all the way back to his early manhood...

...The worst error is the biographer's judgment about the Iranian-laundered aid for the Nicaraguan contras: "My suspicion, for what it's worth, is that Dutch did authorize the transfer, not having the smallest comprehension of the laws he was subverting...

...Morris also ignores the eye-opening quality of the New Deal supertax on rising actor Reagan, except to comment—in his doppelganger role—on Reagan's complaints in the 1950s about the 91 percent federal income tax rate: "If I had known what a passionate tax reformer he was to become, I guess I would have taken note of the early assaults upon Uncle Sam...

...The 674-page tome (followed by 155 pages of notes) is filled with irrelevant and tedious digressions, yet hurries over an incomplete exposition of great events...

...On hand as official biographer to record the first Reagan-Gorbachev encounter at Geneva, Morris takes exception to Reagan's tough line recollecting Moscow's reluctance to give Allied bombers landing rights in World War II: "I thought he might have had the grace to acknowledge that the Red Army spilled a lot more blood to win the war than we ever did...

...Indeed, he is...

...Dutch disposes of Reagan's 1980 campaign in a page and a half and his 1984 reelection in half a page...

...Nor is he the sole fictional character...

...What truly interests Morris is Reagan's relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Morris admires extravagantly...

...Morris's fictitious "war diary" of 1943 relates: Dutch has discovered Reader's Digest...

...The occasion too staged, the crowd too small and well-primed, to make for genuine drama...

...Morris attempts to connect this Dutch Reagan with the mature Ronald Reagan...

...As for Reagan's role as an FBI informer, pointing out subversives in the motion picture industry, the author can only write: "I taxed him on the subject one day, and he retreated behind such a fog bank of circumlocution that there was no way to pursue him without shipwreck...

...Neither fear now seems justified...

...He did not ask the one man who would know, because "by proclaiming himself to Congress as a liar, Colonel North has forfeited any claim to the truth...

...The trepidation the admirers of Reagan felt while waiting for this long-overdue book (originally scheduled for 1991) derived from two sources...

...This surely was not what Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver had in mind when, entranced by the Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Roosevelt, they selected Morris to write about the man whose greatness they wanted to preserve for posterity...

...The paralysis of sensibility was what steadied his heart when he walked down those steps in Geneva to introduce himself to Mikhail Gorbachev...

...Morris's failure to come to grips with this reality leads him to complain about his "unfathomable" subject, with secrets "buried in the alabaster depths of Ronald Reagan...

...When, after taking a Hollywood screen-test, he told the studio that he must return to his radio job in Des Moines before hearing the results of the test, Reagan was intuitively evoking an aloofness that would always serve him well...

...Nor can I find an appreciation of how the man lifted the spirits of the nation, another point made by the author in television interviews...

...Morris's account of Reagan's governorship omits and confuses important events known to any political reporter...

...I craned my neck to look at the title: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs...

...Certainly, Edmund Morris did not spend the last fourteen years idly waiting for the muse to seize him...

...Contrary to unsubstantiated claims that Reagan showed "a growing remoteness in his manner" after eight years as governor, he shed his movie star aloofness and became accessible to rank-and-file state legislators...

...They know he is talking nonsense, but they forgive him because they know his heart is good...

...Not really...

...The early years that might be swiftly covered in a conventional biography's first chapter stretch out for a hundred pages as Morris indulges the pretentious analysis that sets his tone: "the child was already sheathed in a strange calm...

...What puzzles liberals as well as his biographer is not Reagan's complexity but his simplicity...

...Beyond amazement, I was distressed by the relentless banality, not to say incoherence, of the president's replies...

...The essentially irrelevant controversy over Reagan's visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg is called the "crisis of his career...

...The sole basis for the astounding claim that before World War II Reagan tried to join the Communist party is the superannuated Communist novelist Howard Fast, who is quoted as saying Reagan "said he was determined to join...

...That may explain his hasty and incomplete exposition of a historic event in which the president, overpowering Secretary of State George Shultz and other advisers, adjourned in disagreement rather than abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative...

...In a television interview on 60 Minutes to usher in the book's promotion, Morris calls Ronald Reagan "a great president and a great man...

...Whether Edmund Morris was saying one thing for the book-buying public and writing something else for posterity, Ronald Reagan awaits a true biographer to do him justice...

...He quotes a supercilious Canadian ambassador to Washington as calling Reagan "the most enigmatic character of modern times...

...Why the book's dedication to Christine Reagan, the child of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman who lived only a few hours after her birth in 1947 and whose memory was limited to her parents' recollections...

...He yelled a warning at some urchins leaning over the platform rails, sat down under an oak tree, took off his glasses and opened his book...

...Morris's imaginary columnist friend Paul Rae is quoted as saying of Reagan's widely praised performance in the film Kings Row: "Dutch too nervous, straining at charm—the effort makes him seem over-rehearsed...

...Ronald Reagan and his Imaginary Friend Edmund Morris's "memoir" of the fortieth president BY ROBERT D. NOVAK Somewhere in this collage of fancy, notes, and errant musings might be found a legitimate biography of the fortieth president of the United States...

...I was introduced to Dutch several times, and each was the first as far as he was concerned," he writes in his fictitious guise as a Eureka student—reflecting a lifelong characteristic of Reagan...

...Whatever the inherent merits or demerits of court biographers, the choice of Edmund Morris was monumentally bad...

...The high points of a historic presidency are consistently misinterpreted and distorted...

...A native Kenyan and naturalized American, Morris is neither an academic historian nor a professional political writer...

...Gorbachev, tear down this wall,' declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance...

...The author invents for his character parents (his father ran for mayor of Aurora, Illinois), a son (an SDS Weatherman who helped write the Port Huron statement and was then driven underground by Reagan), and a fellow Eureka student who becomes a newspaper columnist...

...Over the last three years of the presidency Morris (as the authorized biographer and silent observer of presidential meetings) had the opportunity to view Reagan closely, and in Dutch he refers to the president's "encyclopedic ignorance" and "hardening of his mind...

...It's not worth much, since he has no sources...

...Morris sometimes quotes verbatim from his own notebook and is prone to rely on unsubstantiated sources...

...Reagan lacked "intellectual energy" and "had long since abandoned inquiry for the reiteration of old certainties...

...T]he work was delightful...

...Presently he shrugged off the top of his damp suit...

...Abjuring any attempt at seamlessness, the biographer is almost always present—sometimes as the doppelganger and sometimes as the real Edmund Morris...

...The problem is not merely that Morris inserts these apparitions into an otherwise conventional biographical structure...

...It was rumored that Morris would report that Alzheimer's disease actually seized Reagan while he was still president...

...Secretary of Housing Sam Pierce was not "the only black man in the Reagan Administration...

...The account of the epochal eight years of the administration (a point reached four hundred pages into the book) is abysmal...

...It is as though David Halberstam disdained basketball when he set out to write his biography of Michael Jordan...

...When Morris gets to Reagan, the tone is dismissive...

...Reagan's breaking of the air controllers' strike, against the wishes of his political advisers, is not treated as the signature early event that signaled to the rest of the world that here was a man that could not be trifled with...

...But Morris's digressions to create an imagined life for his doppelganger in fact diminish the focus on the young Reagan and grow tedious as the author strives for verisimilitude: Signing on with the Federal Writers Project had been easy, given the Chicago office's self-image as a relief agency for intellectuals...

...From the beginning, the author poses unanswered questions about his arch techniques...

...And it was feared that Reagan would be presented as a hollow man, a puppet king manipulated by his captains...

...Considering the fourteen years committed to the project, Dutch abounds with mindless errors...

...Reagan was, after all, an old man, with scar tissue near his heart and steadily atrophying powers of concentration...

...He omits Reagan's surrender to state income tax withholding—an example of the man's pragmatism when he saw no alternative...

...If the literary affectations and fictional aberrations were ruthlessly torn from Dutch, might a skilled editor uncover a valuable account of Ronald Reagan...

...In his recounting of a student play at Eureka, he writes: "How often in later years I was to see that same frown when aides altered the President's schedule...

...But he never returns to the subject...

...How could someone so primitive in his belief in his country, private enterprise, and the evils of communism capture the affection of his countrymen and, albeit begrudgingly, be considered a successful president...

...But to Morris it was "that fatal insolence, equally composed of adrenaline and testosterone that surges up in young men at moments of uncontrollable excitement...

...Ignoring the impact on Reagan made by the 100,000 General Electric workers he addressed as the company's official spokesman, Morris suggests it was "the same worker 100,000 times...

...All that one needed to do was confirm that one had tried and failed to sell manuscripts to commercial publishers and I certainly had proof of that...

...One of Morris's least equivocal findings is that the disease did not seize Reagan until he was at least three years out of the White House...

...The 1981 tax cut that revived the economy is viewed with contempt ("nobody really knew just how many billions of debt the President was about to visit on the Treasury...

...But having said this, Dutch presents—and embroiders—the conventional liberal wisdom about Ronald Reagan, and the book will be read with satisfaction by the president's detractors...

...Perhaps because of Morris's attempts to link Reagan's unexceptional boyhood to his extraordinary manhood...

...Dutch in his way is more of an ideologue than Gorbachev—who at least acknowledges the derelictions of his own system...

...Reagan, Jane Wyman, "said she would kill herself if he didn't marry her...

...I think I'm an open book...

...For all the emphasis this book places on the U.S.-Soviet relationship, Morris misses Reagan's rhetorical triumphs...

...The fictitious Morris, strangely obsessed by the young Reagan as a lifeguard, spies on him one summer day: Apparently, he had just been for a dip, because the fabric steamed the sun...

...Morris's imaginary mother declares: "He's a bit too oilyslick for my taste...

...Amid all this bashing, the biographer is oblivious to strong currents in Reagan's development...

...FFE' (the former first lady, Nancy Reagan) is the sole source for the claim that the previous Mrs...

...For this book, Morris interviewed Gay Talese, Charlton Heston, and Pat Boone, but not Oliver North...

...It was the turning point of the Cold War, after which the Kremlin knew it could no longer compete, but Morris does not understand: "A public relations blitz engineered by his communications director Pat Buchanan had persuaded many Americans that Reykjavik was the greatest diplomatic triumph since the Louisiana Purchase...

...Strip away Morris's pretentious bric-a-brac, and what would be left is still a grossly inadequate biography...

...On occasion he turns his book into a motion picture script that might have This is surely not what Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver had in mind when they selected Edmund Morris to write the president's biography...