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'Dutch: A Memoir Of Ronald Reagan' by Edmund Morris

Insider’s detours detract from Reagan bio

Sunday, October 17, 1999

By Bruce Clayton

	Dutch: A Memoir Of Ronald Reagan By Edmund Morris Random House $35.00

Unless you’ve been in Siberia, you’ve heard the huffing and puffing about Edmund Morris’ highly unorthodox life (make that “memoir”) of Ronald Reagan. Morris, an acclaimed biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and the choice of the Reagans to be the unofficial biographer-in-residence at the White House from 1985 on, decided to put himself (and sundry members of his imagined family) into the book as contemporaries of the Gipper.

Morris’ fictional unnamed character pops up as early as “Dutch” Reagan’s boyhood, providing a running commentary on Reagan’s life. Now and then, the fictitious observer almost steals the spotlight.

But how, ask eminent writers and biographers as diverse as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Haynes Johnson, does one distinguish between the book’s fact and fiction?

Morris has defended himself, saying that careful readers will be able to sift the fictional chaff from the historical wheat. Maybe so. But he complicates matters by referring to himself as “I” both when he’s the fictional contemporary and the critical historian. Frankly, I found the made-up characters a nuisance.

Morris’ book was expected to be good. During most of Reagan’s second term, he was allowed to sit in on many top-level meetings, read virtually every unclassified document, interview the president weekly and often be part of the entourage at presidential summits -- though he paid his own way, thus guaranteeing his official freedom. And Dutch, as Morris insists on calling the president whether he’s tying his shoes or meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, opened his diaries and papers.

But is “Dutch” first-rate biography? Yes and no. All the bases are deftly touched -- Reagan’s small-town Illinois boyhood; his easy triumph as an Iowa sportscaster; those forgettable Hollywood films; his brief marriage to Jane Wyman; his memorable marriage to Nancy; and his championing of actors’ rights to unionize.

Morris also discusses Reagan’s big change in 1952, when he became a pitchman for General Electric and its TV show, his emergence as a loquacious conservative Republican and his rise to political power, first as governor of California and later as one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history.

But something big is missing. For all his 14 years of dogged research, Morris never gets a biographer’s full nelson on his subject or his times. He doesn’t probe Reagan’s relationship with his alcoholic father or his deeply religious mother. As Morris admits, Reagan was in some mysterious ways a “religious” person, seldom going to church, but given to ruminating on the coming Apocalypse. Morris might have followed Garry Wills’ lead in “Reagan’s America” (1987) and looked deeply into Reagan’s childhood in a fundamentalist church.

Reagan’s Hollywood years -- when he was a liberal -- are examined in a workmanlike way, but Morris adds little to what is known. Nor does Morris have much insight into Reagan’s turn to the right. Reagan’s conservative credo -- his blasting of Big Government and pronouncements that “socialized medicine” had been rammed down America’s throat -- prompted GE to fire him.

Morris freely admits that after years of research, he couldn’t fathom a man he had come to like and even admire. Morris confesses that, at bottom, he found Reagan shallow, completely self-centered, interested in very few things and, when not playing a public role with a script, “boring.”

The man was an “airhead,” Morris concluded in frustration. When the full weight of Dutch’s lightness of being fully dawned on him, Morris fell into a funk, unable to write.

Only by coming up with the device of inserting himself into the text -- thus providing Reagan an audience -- could the biographer write.

Did Morris, for all of his gifts as a writer, allow his bright idea to lead him astray? I think he did. Too often, he resorts to clever musings by his fictional self or by his “son,” Gavin, who’s at University of California at Berkeley when Gov. Reagan fires the university chancellor and cracks down on students.

Suddenly, Gavin is as important as Reagan. When Reagan, a newcomer to politics, allows a convicted killer to be executed, Morris shifts to how upset this makes Gavin -- and borders on trivializing the issue of capital punishment.

What’s more, Morris tells us little new or perceptive about Reagan the president. He’s as uninterested in the intricacies of supply-side economics as Reagan was, but the president backed the policy to the hilt.

Morris is reduced to repeating the conventional wisdom that Dutch restored public confidence in a way reminiscent of FDR, imposed his economic faith on the nation -- that Congress could cut taxes and spend lavishly -- and faced down the Soviet Union and set it on its way to destruction.

These were major accomplishments. But I came away from this book with an image of Morris wringing his hands in wonderment that he had studied a hollow man for 14 years.

Bruce Clayton is the Harry A. Logan Sr. Professor of History at Allegheny College and the author most recently of “Praying for Base Hits: An American Boyhood.”