At the appropriate point in the narrative of his new book—not quite two-thirds of the way through, when the action has advanced to 1979—Edmund Morris records, “I published an 863-page biography entitled ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.’ ” And a very good biography it was, too. Vividly written, deeply researched, and imbued with the restless energy of its subject, it was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Now, twenty years later, Morris is entitled to write, “I knew I had achieved something fine,” adding modestly, “if only because of the fineness of the book’s central character.”
“The book’s central character”—that would be Theodore Roosevelt. But who is the central character of Morris’s new book? As we have all been hearing over the past couple of weeks, the answer to that question is far from clear. Morris appears to have sensed from the very beginning that Ronald Reagan would be a hard nut, so to speak, to crack. The Reagan White House first felt him out in 1983, after a private Valentine’s Day dinner for the First Couple and a clutch of biographers at the Georgetown home of Senator Mark Hatfield. Morris, in the prologue to his book, describes how, that night, the President charmed the Woodrow Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link—whose “detestation of the Gipper was legendary”—to the point where Link, “almost sobbing with adoration,” begged the Reagans to save their billets-doux for posterity. “Imagine what would have happened if Mrs. Wilson had burned those wonderful love letters Woodrow wrote her,” Link cried. “How little we would know of his passionate humanity!” In a note to Senator Hatfield a few days later, Morris recalled Link’s outburst and wrote:
Nevertheless, not until two and a half years later, in the summer of 1985, did Morris finally accept the invitation—extended through Michael Deaver, the choreographer of Reagan’s public image and Nancy Reagan’s West Wing confidant—to become the President’s official biographer. At that point, Edmund Morris set out in earnest to find Ronald Reagan—more precisely, to see what he could discover about Reagan’s humanity and the quality of his personality. Now, fourteen years on, he has sent us an account of his search. He didn’t find what he was looking for. At any rate, he makes no such claim. He isn’t sure what he found, or if what he sought was even capable of being found. Or perhaps he is simply perplexed by what he sometimes fears, but cannot quite credit, that he found: a great vacancy, a glossy head enclosing nothing at all, a huge, inert, inexplicable gravitational force in human form. The result is a very strange, very interesting, very exasperating book—a book full to bursting of both lies and honesty.
Morris has entitled it not “Ronald Reagan: A Biography” or “Reagan: His Life and Times” but “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” (Random House; $35). The title gives fair warning that something unusual is going on here. Obviously, this radically eccentric, thoroughly absorbing, sometimes quite stark-staring mad work of—what? quasi nonfiction? quasi fiction? fictionally enhanced nonfiction? metapostmodernism? autohistoriography? docudramedy?—is not the “definitive,” settle-all-questions and reveal-all-secrets biographical dreadnought that Random House presumably thought it was contracting for when, fourteen years ago, it tendered Morris an advance (a reported three million dollars) that was said to be the largest in publishing history for a single book. Except for Ralph Ellison and his never-finished second novel, it’s hard to think of a work in progress that has been freighted with such large and unnerving expectations.
And such impossible and superfluous ones. The life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan are among the most thoroughly documented and picked-over of modern times. Reagan’s only clear superior in this respect is Richard Nixon, whose decision to tape-record everything was a stupendous gift not only to his enemies but also to its intended recipient, history. Reagan’s associates have proved to be almost as graphomaniacal as Nixon’s; among the seventy-two works listed in Morris’s bibliography of frequently cited sources are no fewer than fifteen firsthand accounts by members of the Reagan Administration, and at least as many more have been published that he does not list. Reagan is a prominent character in the memoirs of dozens of other acquaintances, ranging from Hollywood types like Doris Day to California politicians like Edmund G. (Pat) Brown (Reagan’s defeated opponent in the 1966 gubernatorial race) and diplomatic interlocutors like Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan’s movies, his rhetoric, his foreign and domestic policies—all have been monographed and memoired to death. He is the subject of at least twenty biographies, of which the most notable are Garry Wills’s “Reagan’s America” (1987) and the two by Lou Cannon, “Reagan” (1982) and “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” (1991).
Nor is our understanding of Reagan’s life and work likely to undergo fundamental revision in the light of secrets as yet unrevealed. Most of the really embarrassing stuff—the Reagan-era equivalents of Nixon’s arsenal of smoking guns and Kennedy’s romps with Mafia girlfriends—is already out there, in some cases courtesy of Reagan’s friends and relations. One of the many ways in which the Reagan Administration was unusual is that it paid the salaries of its own revisionists, some of whom did their revising in real time. The pioneer was David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, who outlined the fraudulence of the Administration’s economic program in a series of interviews with William Greider and then, after the sensational results appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, placidly kept his job for another three and a half years. Another in-house iconoclast, Donald Regan, who served as Secretary of theTreasury and then as White House chief of staff, revealed, in a memoir published before Reagan left office, that the President’s schedule was often dictated by his wife’s astrologer. Three of his four children—his children, no less!—have come out with books attesting to his emotional distance as a parent. The theme of Reagan’s out-of-itness has been explored in a shelf of books about the Iran-Contra affair, among other places. His ignorance about nuclear weapons, his alarming natterings about Armageddon, his inability to recognize members of his own Cabinet, his failure to distinguish between movies and reality, even his promiscuity between marriages—if any of these things were ever secret, they long ago stopped being so. The difficulty of finding anything startling or revelatory to say about Reagan was wittily illustrated by a 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which Phil Hartman, as Reagan, feebly heh-hehs and head-bobs his way through an Oval Office photo op with a Girl Scout, and then, once the Girl Scout and the photographers have been ushered out, turns snarlingly on his trembling staff to instruct them on their next Iran-Contra moves in crisp, well-informed detail.
In a way, Morris’s burden was lightened (though it felt no less heavy to him) by the vastness of the existing archive. He may have missed his deadline by eight years, but even this late date is too soon for a fully definitive Reagan biography (and if and when one is written, sometime in the unforeseeable future, its author will be someone who appoints himself or herself, unofficially and enthusiastically, to the task). Until then, the two Cannon books, in their Dreiserian sprawl and meticulous chronicling, will hold the fort nicely. So it doesn’t much matter that Morris was unable to write the book he envisaged.
Anyway, what could Morris offer, and what could be offered to him, that would enable him to add meaningfully to the already prodigious record? The answer, it must have seemed at first, was access. Morris was promised the run of the White House. He could attend meetings of the senior staff, including the regular “issues lunch” with the President; he could travel with the official party on Presidential trips abroad; he could buttonhole whatever members of Reagan’s staff or family cared to make time for him; he could peruse the President’s handwritten diary, a half-million words strong. Best of all, he would have a monthly session with the President himself, just the two of them, at which he could ask any questions he chose. Like no independent writer before him, he would be in a position to gain insight into the intangible human reality of a President’s life.
For the most part, these promises were kept. But when the going got tough—as it did during the Iran-Contra mess, for example—the doors got closed. The White House lawyers barred him from meetings dealing with “national security and other vital policy,” lest (he was told) he become a subpoena magnet. Of course, Morris could always take advantage of one of his interviews with the President to ask about something he had missed. But when he did the results were unsettling. For example, after a 1986 economic summit:
Uh-oh.
Even when Reagan’s comments scanned, however, they were hardly more enlightening. Morris, attempting to engage Reagan in a discussion of his notorious visit to the cemetery at Bitburg, with its Waffen S.S. graves, posed a question that happened to end with the word “history.”
“History!” the President interjected. “That reminds me, now . . .”
After a year or so of this, Morris writes, “things were not going well for the Official Biographer.” The O.B.’s many conversations with the President and his entourage, his closeup observations of Reagan in action in dramatic settings like summits with Gorbachev, and his researches into the pre-Presidential years are yielding plenty of colorful set pieces but nothing in the way of insights into the man’s inner life. Morris is “distressed by the relentless banality, not to say incoherence, of the President’s replies in interviews.” He is confounded by Reagan’s monumental incuriosity. When he comes to read the President’s leather-bound diary, he finds that although in a way it is “coldly impressive, the work of a man who knew exactly what he believed and wanted and was not interested in anyone else’s dreams,” it is also
“Dutch,” Morris writes, calling Reagan by the youthful nickname he uses throughout the book, “remained a mystery to me, and worse still—dare I entertain such heresy, in the hushed and reverent precincts of his office?—an apparent airhead.” Yet surely this was impossible. Here, after all, was a man who scored spectacular successes in movies (he was Hollywood’s No. 1 box-office draw in 1943) and television (his “General Electric Theater” topped “I Love Lucy” in the ratings), a man who won political prominence first as a New Deal liberal and trade unionist (he was five times president of the Screen Actors Guild) and then as the unquestioned leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, a man who served two terms as governor of California and two as President of the United States (defeating incumbents to get both jobs, and winning reëlection to the second by a historic landslide), a man who has been given credit (never mind how deservedly) for winning the supposedly eternal and unwinnable Cold War. How could such a man—the protagonist of such a gaudy, tumultuous, outsized life—turn out to have nothing inside?
This was the question that drove Edmund Morris around the bend, where he collided with a writer’s block of terrifying proportions. His stratagem for resuscitating himself and his book, as the world knows, was the creation of a doppelgänger. “Edmund Morris” was born in Chicago, in 1912 (a year after the birth of Ronald Reagan); went to school in Canterbury, England, and summered in the vicinity of Dixon, Illinois (where Dutch Reagan went to high school and summered as a lifeguard); and attended Eureka College, in Eureka, Illinois (as a member of Reagan’s class). In these and many other particulars “Edmund Morris” may be distinguished from Edmund Morris, who was born in Kenya, in 1940; went to school in Nairobi; and attended Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa. In 1968, both “Morris” and Morris were making the move to America, but the former was fifty-six at the time, the latter only twenty-eight.
“Edmund Morris” crosses paths with Dutch Reagan so often as to risk arrest for stalking. When Dutch patrols the beach at Lowell Park, “Edmund” is in the water, or is sitting on the sand, taking careful note of the lifeguard’s reading matter (“A Princess of Mars,” by Edgar Rice Burroughs). When Dutch plays football for Dixon High, or delivers a speech to protesting Eureka students, or is strangled in an avant-garde play by Edna St. Vincent Millay at a collegiate theatre festival in Chicago, “Edmund” is in the audience. In 1938, “Edmund” sees Dutch and “his cutie,” Jane Wyman, on the beach off the Santa Monica Pier. In 1941, “Edmund” gets a job on the set of a Ronald Reagan picture and keeps a diary of the production. (“There’s something disturbingly mechanical about RR’s grin,” he writes.) At the beginning of 1943, “Morris” goes to the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit and is welcomed to the Culver City headquarters by the base personnel officer, First Lieutenant Ronald Reagan; they serve together till the end of the war, “Morris” keeping voluminous notes on Dutch throughout. In 1953, “Morris,” who happens to be working for Dutch’s brother Neil Reagan at the McCann-Erickson ad agency, helps torpedo a proposal from Dutch, whose movie career is faltering, for a radio series about his life on the ranch with Nancy. In 1958, “Morris,” who is doing freelance public-relations work, flacks for the annual convention of the California Fertilizer Association. The guest speaker: Ronald Reagan. And so on.
The “Morris” stratagem enables Morris to write about Reagan’s pre-Presidential life with some of the same immediacy, informality, and attitude that he brings to his descriptions of what, later, he actually saw. By the book’s halfway point, though, “Morris” has pretty much grabbed center stage, with the help of a half-dozen other imaginary friends—most prominently “Paul Rae,” a fellow Lowell Park beach habitué and Eureka College classmate, who grows up to be a bitchy, Dutch-obsessed gossip columnist, peppers “Edmund” with (fake) letters and (mostly fake) clippings about Reagan, and eventually dies of aids. The chatty, abbreviation-speckled, literary-allusion-dotted letters and diaries of “Morris,” “Rae,” and the rest all sound more or less alike. But fictional characters, even poorly drawn ones, have a way of escaping the control of their creators and taking on lives of their own.
When the narrative reaches the nineteen-sixties, the fictionalizing reaches its apotheosis. Unto “Edmund Morris” a son, “Gavin Morris,” is given. Like Edmund Morris (but unlike “Edmund Morris”), “Gavin” is born in 1940. In the background, Ronald Reagan is touring the country on behalf of General Electric, tacking hard to the political right, delivering his famous televised address on behalf of Barry Goldwater on the eve of the 1964 election, moving into the governor’s office in Sacramento, and dispatching the National Guard to Berkeley to show who’s boss. In the foreground, “Gavin” is becoming a radical. Not just any radical, though. In 1962, he travels to Port Huron, Michigan, for the crucial organizing meeting of Students for a Democratic Society, and then goes back to New York with Tom Hayden to help him polish the Port Huron Statement, the essential document of the early New Left. In 1964, he becomes a grad student at Berkeley, just in time to be in Sproul Plaza for the event that launches the student movement of the sixties. His “father,” still living in London, is vaguely aware that something must be happening—listening to the BBC, he hears “a girl named Joan (in my diary I spelled it ‘Byass’) singing The times they are a-changin’ ”—but he doesn’t know what it is. (Joan Baez, by the way, had appeared on the cover of Time two years earlier.) “Edmund” gets the details in a letter from “Gavin,” who, it seems, is not just another face in the crowd:
Nor is this all. In 1966, “Gavin” throws himself into the campaign against Reagan for governor, helping to carry the city of Berkeley for Pat Brown. By 1968, when he isn’t busy working on a dissertation about French radical thinkers (“I could only hope he would concentrate on Camus and resist the Marxist blandishments of Sartre, that nègre in so many a scholarly woodpile,” his “father” somewhat tastelessly records), he’s befriending the Black Panthers. (“Bad cats I dig in Oakland,” “Gavin” calls them, sounding more like Sammy than Angela Davis.) And he doesn’t just befriend them; he boasts that he’s the one who has introduced them to the works of Frantz Fanon. Also in 1968, he goes to Paris for the May uprising (“SDS needs somebody on the scene who’s hip in French”) and then, in August, to Chicago to help lead the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention. He sends his worried “dad” an anachronistic telegram—“chill out i’m okay”—followed by a chirpy letter:
In 1969, “Gavin” is covering the People’s Park riots for the Berkeley Barb, and participating in them, too. “Dad” flies in, but “Gavin”—last seen throwing a rock at one of Governor Reagan’s helicopters as it swooped down and sprayed Sproul Plaza with tear gas—is nowhere to be found. The story rushes to its melodramatic conclusion:
The extreme improbability that a twenty-nine-year-old founding member of S.D.S. would join the Weathermen—a violent, lunatic splinter that had nothing but contempt for what the Port Huron Statement stood for—is the least of this passage’s troubles. Perhaps I’m misreading it, but it certainly seems to be saying that Ronald Reagan was responsible for driving the only and beloved son of “Edmund Morris” to suicide. When Edmund Morris gets to the White House, though, he doesn’t make a big deal of it. It’s never mentioned again.
Once Reagan becomes President, “Morris” ’s appearances grow rare. But he comes charging back in the book’s final pages, when the author makes two “pilgrimages.” The first is to Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Reagan, in an effort at balance, had spoken before his visit to Bitburg. “It was,” Morris writes, “the most awful yet beautiful landscape I had ever seen. And when, walking back past the long graves, I stopped at the Jewish memorial and saw its frieze of lopped-off trees (some much shorter than others), I thought of my father and Gavin, and Dutch and Anne Frank, and wailed like a Jew.” The second, on August 2, 1998, is to Lowell Park. Looking out at the water over which Dixon’s most famous lifeguard once kept watch, Morris, or, rather, “Morris,” now reveals the identity of the beneficiary of the twenty-fifth of young Reagan’s seventy-seven rescues (a rescue that has been described, way back on page 62, in a purported clipping from the Dixon Evening Telegraph of August 3, 1928):
Wow.
This came as a surprise to me, though it will not come as one to anybody who picked up last week’s Time (where, by way of raining on Newsweek’s parade of Morris excerpts in its issue for the same week, the secret was prominently disclosed), or to anybody who has been watching television or listening to the radio lately. The shocko ending is written in a husky, sonorous tone that suggests a solemn effort to tie everything together. But perhaps Morris is only having a bit of fun.
By contrast, it’s no fun at all to be put in the position of having to join what will presumably be a gaggle of stuffed shirts, all querulously (to use one of Morris’s favorite words) scolding Morris for being a bad, bad boy. “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” has some solid merits. Morris can write beautifully, especially when he is limning action or sense impressions; his account of the 1981 attempt on Reagan’s life, for example, is a marvel of muscular description, as is his quick portrait of what the Warner Bros. studio looked, felt, and sounded like when Reagan joined it, in 1937. His research has turned up some reportorial gems: a strong suggestion that Reagan, in 1938, was eager to join the Communist Party, and that the Party, wary of his flakiness, dispatched Eddie Albert to explain to him that he would be more useful to the cause on the outside; a catty charge by Nancy Reagan that Jane Wyman tricked Ronnie into his first marriage by threatening suicide; a searing glimpse of the bitterness of Holmes Tuttle, the principal sponsor and bankroller of Dutch’s political rise, at the Reagans’ blank ingratitude. There are other merits, too; but the obligatory analysis of Morris’s “Morris” stratagem leaves less room for a reviewer to discuss them—much, perhaps, as “Morris” ’s account of “Gavin” ’s Berkeley adventures (sixteen pages) leaves less room for such details as the 1980 general-election campaign (a page and a half).
One feels for Morris. Presented with unexampled access, a colossal advance, and the subject of a lifetime, he kept drilling holes and, he thought, coming up empty: no gusher of revelation, no mother lode of meaning. In due course, his desperation drove him to a kind of madness. It happens to be a madness that much of the best modern fiction consciously strives for: the “unreliable narrator,” whose skewed vision becomes the engine of the story. It’s the madness of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote, the academic critic who annotates a long poem by the Frostian poet John Shade—a poem called “Pale Fire.” The novel, in the shape of the poem and Kinbote’s increasingly unhinged explication de texte, is a dizzying portrait of the critic’s growing frustration, his obsessive pursuit of his subject, and his spiral into despair; and it is very funny. But one needn’t be a harrumphing traditionalist to suggest that the conversion of frustration into deception is quite another matter in biography.
Fiction relies on the suspension of disbelief. What “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” induces in the reader is a suspension of belief. The accumulation of fake scenes, fake letters, and fake documents, all scrupulously documented by fake footnotes, eventually takes its toll, and one begins to wonder about the “true” passages as well. It’s natural to be cautious about the reliability of the observations and quotations in a passage footnoted “EM Diary, Sept. 21, 1928,” because EM—the real EM, that fellow with a beard who was on “60 Minutes” the other night—did not exist in 1928. But what about a passage footnoted “EM Diary, Jan. 14, 1993”? Doubt steals in. Might not its observations and quotations have been tampered with, too, in the service of drama or clarity or elegance? The book never surrenders its hold upon the reader’s interest, but as the narrative progresses that interest eventually turns morbid. Historians will treat “Dutch: A Memoir” as source material—as a quarry that, mined with the right degree of critical skepticism, will yield things of great value. But history “Dutch” is not.
Curiously, Morris has in fact succeeded where he claims to have failed. Despite his protestations of bafflement, he has shed new light—harsh, bright light—on Reagan’s character. That character turns out to be roughly as we knew it to be. The public Reagan is the affable performer, docile on the set but stubbornly attached to a few large, simple notions. The private Reagan, too, is affable, docile, and stubborn. He is also, as Morris shows with great acuity, narcissistic, egocentric, happy, trustful, childish, and oblivious. He is intellectually inert, a terrible bore, a practitioner of denial, and a cold, unimaginative man who has no interest in, curiosity about, or genuine compassion for other people.
It’s clear that, at bottom, Morris dislikes Reagan. It’s also clear that he thinks Reagan was a great man and a great, or nearly great, President, because he restored the country’s optimistic spirit, revitalized the economy, and brought the Soviet Union to its knees. But Morris does not show how Reagan did these things, or even that he did them. Morris is incapable of making an argument of that kind. He is interested only in character—in personality. He is not interested in politics, which is the medium through which character makes its impact upon events. He himself has no apparent political opinions or preferences, apart from a dislike of abortion and an amorphous sympathy for the homeless. In “Dutch: A Memoir” there is almost nothing about electoral politics, nothing at all about ideological politics, and not a word about political economy. About international politics there is narrative, some of it very strong, but no analysis. Reagan may or may not be an empty vessel, but, in Morris’s rendering, he is surrounded by emptiness, drifting weightlessly in a vacuum. Morris has told us more than we knew before about “Reagan’s own humanity” and about “the quality of his personality.” But it is fair to ask the question: So what? ♦
