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Dutch

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Given that Edmund Morris had an unprecedented amount of access to Ronald Reagan and the White House, he had a duty as a historian to write a solid, historical work, impeccably researched, well annotated, and one that could form, at a minimum, a baseline for other future efforts.

Instead, the book he wrote is a travesty; a series of ramblings presented from a bewildering array of real and fictional characters. Morris unbelievably writes from the first person -- and writes of times, palces, and events which he could not have experienced first hand, except through his imagination. One never knows whether an insight or an opinion is that of the actual Morris or the fictional Morris whom he invented that went to Eureka College with Reagan in the 1930s. Given this, can one take the quotes Morris includes from Cap Weinberger or James Baker seriously? Legitimate and interesting historical questions Morris raises (did Reagan, the idealistic young Democrat, flirt with Communism in the 1940s?) are ruined because the author does not maintain the appropriate distance.

For such an important historical figure as Reagan, this is especially unfair treatment.

Morris is trying to make a point with all this -- which is that if you scratch the surface of Reagan, you will find that there is nothing there. But instead of using this to write a legitimate history, he becomes so disillusioned that he can only write this disturbing act of literary and historical vandalism. If Morris beleives that Reagan "was an airhead", he should lay out the facts, back it up with research and quotes, and lay the record bare. This collection of musings, half-truths, and speculation ultimately is an unfair assassination of character.

Although Morris is a far bettter writer than Dinesh D'Souza, I am forced to conclude that D'Souza's book, which is a one-sided apologia for Reagan, not only is more accurate but is a better work of history.

I am saddened by this book, Dutch, as I have been by few others. Reagan, the American people, and history deserve better.

The death of Ronald Reagan brought me back to this book, which I last read a couple of years ago. It chronicles everything important, and definitely many things of which I (a socialist-leaning college student during his Presidency) had been unaware.

The best work Morris does in this book chronicles two processes: First, the rise of Reagan's political career, giving generous attention to his subject's tenure at GE Theatre, which gave him the opportunity to share some of his new views (remember, he'd been a staunch FDR democrat up until the 60's), the Goldwater campaign, and the California governership. Second, a wonderfully detailed account of the summits with Mikhail Gorbachev and the President's defense of SDI, popularly called "Star Wars". The result shows a man, a former lifegaurd "who saved 77 lives" we are oft reminded, much more intelligent than he is portrayed in the popular press. He is not above, however, using his appearance of naivete to his advantage His insistance on calling Gorbachev "Mikhail" (with a twinkle in his eye) during the Reykyavic converence, even though he'd been briefed that it was impolite not to refer to him without his patronymic, i.e. "Mikhail Sergeievitch", unsettles the General Secretary just enough to cause annoyance, but not censure. There was no question, Morris contends, that Reagan knew exactly what he was doing.

I found Morris's use of fictional devices annoying, too. And although he has explained that his subject was so cold and distant at times, he needed the two fictional protagonists to pull the story together, truly the rest of the "story" stands on its own. At times his fictional characters overshadow the real ones. And then it's only the promise of page after page of accurate revelations that keep one from abruptly ending the book and calling it a stalemate. My hope is that he has learned his lesson about this and will continue to apply his talents in research and prose without artificially inserting devices that simply confuse the reader.

Fittingly, I feel compelled to interject a story from my own life as I begin this review. You see, I believe that there is a personal episode which illuminates the controversy surrounding this book. When I attended Colgate University (Class of '83), I was a History major, which required completion of a Senior Seminar including a major research project and paper. But, truth be told, I was not a particularly good student and as the deadline for this paper approached, I realized that I could not possibly hope to complete the volume of research that was expected of me. So I approached the professor, on the day the paper was due, and received tearful permission to alter my topic slightly, but this seemingly minor adjustment allowed me to essentially write an extended essay instead of a true research paper. Freed from the requirement that I actually go through the drudgery of research, I rattled off a really good twenty page essay in a couple days.

It seems to me that Edmund Morris found himself in much the same position and resorted to a similarly dishonest ploy in order to complete his Reagan biography. It is obvious that he did extensive work on Reagan's early life (say up to the end of his acting career) and, of course, he was in attendance for several years of the presidency. But what is missing here is the context and the background for Reagan's political career, let alone a detailed account of those years. Among the really pivotal events that go unmentioned or are dealt with in passing are all three presidential campaigns, the Panama Canal debates, the PATCO strike, the Tax Reform bill, etc. These are not little things. In fact, they are central to an understanding of what makes Reagan a seminal figure in recent history. No serious biography of Ronald Reagan can conceivably be complete without tackling them. So what happened?

Well, this is a really interesting illustration of my maxim that the commonly accepted wisdom is always wrong. Edmund Morris was hired to be Reagan's semi-official biographer on the strength of his Teddy Roosevelt biography, which truly is a great book. But there is one vital fact that noone realized at the time, and which still seems to elude critics and commentators; the book ends before it gets to the presidential years. We all just assumed: major political figure as topic + great book = ability (and or desire) to write a great political biography. But there is really no evidence that Morris understands, nor is curious about, the actual mechanics of politics and the impact of political ideas. In retrospect, it should have been seen as troubling that he was willing to set aside the Roosevelt story just as he got to what most biographers would consider the crux of the tale.

So we have here a terrific author, but foreign born and apparently uninterested in politics, trying to take on a man who transformed the political world. In order to begin to understand what had happened, Morris would have had to immerse himself, not just in personal interviews and old yearbooks and the like, but in research on the Cold War on American anti-Communism on the growth of the New Deal and the Great Society on Goldwater and Bill Buckley and so on. So he did what I did, he figured out a way to get around the heavy lifting. All the dodges and devices that he trots out are simply there to disguise the fact that he didn't feel like learning what he needed to in order to produce a genuine political biography. Instead, he gives us a book that is almost entirely personal. There is one particularly revealing passage late in the book, Morris's Diary entry of December 31, 1988:

For whatever reason, there was born here, far from the mattering world, an ambition as huge as it was inexorable. Out of Tampico's ice there grew, crystal by crystal, the glacier that is Ronald Reagan: an ever-thrusting, ever-deepening mass of chill purpose. Possessed of no inner warmth, with no apparent interest save in its own growth, it directed itself toward whatever declivities lay in its path. Inevitably, as the glacier grew, it collected rocks before it, and used them to flatten obstructions; when the rocks were worn smooth they rode up onto the glacier's back, briefly enjoying high sunny views, then tumbled off to become part of the surrounding countryside. The lie where they fell, some cracked, some crumbled: Dutch's lateral moraine. And the glacier sped slowly on.

In that sense, I suppose, one could say that the story of Reagan's life is a study in American topography. Thirteen hundred miles southeast of Tampico this winter day, the glacier has at last stopped growing. The nation's climate is changing; so is that of the world. New suns, new seasons, are due. Yet when all the ice is gone, when fresh green covers the last raw earth and some future skylark sings heedlessly over the Ronald Reagan National Monument, men will still ponder Dutch's improbable progress, and write on their cards, How big he was! How far he came! And how deep the valley he carved!

First, to give him his due, it is writing of this quality that had folks so excited about the prospect of a Ronald Reagan biography by Edmund Morris. But, to borrow his metaphor, the essential problem with the book is that it is completely focussed on the glacier and, when you get right down to it, we don't really care as much about glaciers for their intrinsic qualities, we care about the massive change that they wreaked on the environment that we now inhabit. Morris recognizes that Reagan changed the American topography, but he never examines that change. For him, the remarkable thing about Ronald Reagan is that he became president. For humankind, the remarkable thing about Reagan is that in the depths of the Cold War, when the USSR and Communism seemed to be winning and thirty years of Big Government had left America ill equipped to fight back, he imagined the West's eventual victory and the renaissance of an unfettered American economy and he imposed that dream upon an unwilling Western intellectual establishment, American Congress and seemingly ascendant Eastern Bloc. Today we live in the world that Ronald Reagan, but precious few others, envisioned. While Edmund Morris pursues the glacier to its end, he fails to comprehend the change left in its wake, perhaps because he fails to understand the constancy of purpose and the force of ideas which drove the glacier's progress.

The end result of all this is that Morris delivers up:

1) An excellent novel

and

2) The best written memoir we are ever likely to have by someone who knew Ronald Reagan

but

3) An extraordinarily inept and inexcusably lazy biography

GRADE: as a novel: A; as a biography: F

After more than 10 years, Edmund Morris delivers a book ofdeceptive fiction. Nowhere are there clues to determine what isfactual and what is not. Most of the 700 pages are devoted to the development of fictional characters. When Morris writes of the time when he actually did have access to Reagan, he provides little factual detail, and he continues to insert fabricated dialog and events without providing notification to the reader. Portions of the story build and are never resolved, and upon reading the last third of this book the reader is rewarded with a hastily assembled collection of notes and transcriptions intermingled with more undeterminable fiction.

Typographical errors such as "hinself" are annoying, as is the writer's habit to drift into French sentences throughout the book. As if this is not bothersome enough, Morris attempts to prove his intellectualism by finding the most obscure words possible in his thesaurus and scattering them about each page. This book should be sold with a French language dictionary, as well as an English dictionary.

Morris describes Reagan's father passing out drunk in a "Cruciform" position, and later dieing in a "Cruciform" pose. Inventions such as this are littered throughout the beginning of the book in an attempt to somehow illustrate a perverse parallel between Reagan's Christian faith and possible occurrences during his life. Heaven and hell both censored with dashes, however the word f--k used more times then necessary, and spelled out completely - mostly in Morris's invented passages regarding Reagan's sex life.

Morris did not understand why he was not permitted to "live" alongside Reagan 24 hours a day, and his contempt for the Reagan administration due to his lack of access is manifest in his malicious and paltry fabrications.

Morris admits to waiting for Reagan to die before releasing his story, however I suppose that Reagan's current condition did suffice. One can only speculate as to why Edmund Morris would not have wanted to face Mr. Reagan with this, the product of an unprecedented opportunity.

A frustrated intellectual who admits to a life of failure, Edmund Morris attempts to prove himself through this insolent invention of delusional nonsense.

So much work. So little reward. I gasped and wheezed climbing this literary mountain, and when I arrived at the top, what was the reward? The fog of conventional wisdom. No new insights gained. This journey did nothing other than reinforce the popular impressions of President Reagan formed early in his presidency. Yes, the author gives us some new tidbits, i.e. Mike Reagan's not being recognized by his father at his high school gradution. But the portrait drawn -- an engaging, emotionally absent man fueled by simplistic convictions and an absolutist's sense of right and wrong -- is hackneyed.

The author presumably realized he had no product. Thus, the fictitious, distracting puffery. Thus, the publication of a book that epitomizes the maxim, "All style, no substance."

Rarely must I be armed with a dictionary when reading (and I read a lot). But here, Webster's was a constant companion. Practically every page was larded with $1,000 words that ruined narrative flow, that created an antogonistic relationship with the author.

Great biographies inspire, awe, engender rage, evoke feelings that endure. McCullough's "Truman" comes to mind. This biography, in contrast, is a flatliner, one that does not jolt or change anyone's perspective. This biography glosses over history (less than one sentence devoted to the pivotal 1980 New Hampshire primary?) but spends page after page acquainting the reader with the author's literary accomplishments, his love affair with Teddy Roosevelt. This book was an exercise in literary self-gratification.

As for the blurring of fact and fiction, I ask: why? I understand that the author invented a son, Gavin, to embody the resentments and political agenda of the Berkeley generation. But wouldn't those resentments and agenda have been conveyed more forcefully, more clearly by the author's quoting firsthand historical sources rather than by forcing us to view events through some literary prism?

This book did not stir any feelings about Reagan. But it did make me think that I'd hate to be seated next to the author at a party. What a bloviating snob.

This is a weird hallucinogenic view of Reagan's life. Morris has mixed patiently distilled fact with well-executed but goofy fiction and sprinkled brilliant observations throughout. Reagan, like Robert E. Lee, did not make available his inner self to the picklocks of biographers. Morris' main error is to believe that because he could not see Reagan's soul, he had none. It's obvious that there is a lot to Ronald Reagan. It takes a considerable intelligence to pick your contests and win them in such deft strokes. It takes a lot of effort to appear effortless. Reagan, the actor, would not let others into his thoughts the same way that Fred Astaire would not let people watch him rehearse his dance routines. Morris simply dismisses Reagan.

Morris' lack of passion for his subject displays itself in the lumpiness of the narrative. Reagan's early years are well-covered though it's hard to tell fact from fiction. However, when Morris reaches Reagan's presidential years it feels like he said the hell with it let's get this damned book done. There are lots of pages on a few high level meetings Reagan had with Gorbachev that Morris witnessed but it's awfully thin on the meat of Reagan's presidency.

Many times in the book when Morris rambles on about his own fictional biography which he interweaves with Reagan's real biography you just wonder what the heck the book is trying to achieve. However, even though Morris' inventions in the book are exasperating he does do a good job of giving you a feel for Reagan's view of the world and himself. Just when you want to give up on the book, Morris gives you a brilliant paragraph.

When you slam the cover shut on this volume, you feel sorry for the waste of effort here. Morris took fourteen years of his life to write this rather mediocre piece of work. His previous book on Teddy Roosevelt shows you that he is capable of much better work. I just wish his editor would have slapped him up the side of the head when he started sliding off the road into his goofy literary inventions.

I read the reviews before I bought the book. I understood that the author had introduced himself as a narrator of sorts. I had no idea how intrusive this tactic would be. I normally read books at a pretty fast clip and retain the information pretty well. In this case, I had to keep checking to make sure I understood whether the author was talking about Reagan or about himself, which isn't even quite himself, but a person similar to himself that might have lived when and where Reagan lived. I found the book very informative, but I thought gaining information was relatively painful.

I really wanted to read this book because I was curious about Reagan: Some think him an idiot, others think he's one of the greatest presidents in history. I wanted to decide for myself. This book might have been useful in that decision, because it covers most of Reagan's life, but the more I got into it, the more annoying the author seemed. The author's style of writing is pretentious, and he is so full of himself, I couldn't get past his obnoxious self-examination to enjoy the book.

For example, he writes of himself: "Loss, the biographer's torment: longing for treasures unrecoverable, hardly assuaged by the recovery of trifles--an oar or a floating hat, after everything else has gone over the weir. Private loss, too. So many other 'last chances.' Budding opportunities unblown, [...] not cupped in my hand, scripts unfilmed and books unfinished, a marriage in ashes, a boy gone underground. Loss of youth, of middle age, of Time itself. Sydney Ann. Gavin. Father. And before them all, before everybody who ever lived, young and beautiful and wise, Bess--lost, too!--sing Schubert in our big music room on Lake Shore Drive in the spring of 1919." (If you like this style of writing in a biography, you might like the book, but I didn't.)

Morris is peeved that Reagan doesn't connect with people at a deep level and considers it a mystery that Reagan is not very introspective. Morris should get out more: Lots of men are like that. Morris also seems to have made up his mind about Reagan-that he's an inferior human being because of his superficial relationships-very early on, and he uses his material, fictional and nonfictional, to support that premise. Even when he's talking about Reagan's good points, he seems subtly sarcastic and dismissive. May I suggest that you check the book out of your library before possibly wasting your money on it?

May I also suggest the book "How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life," written by one of Reagan's speechwriters, Peter Robinson. This book is also biased, but it reveals a lot and is written in an engaging, endearing style. Also good, I think, is Landslide, the Unmaking of the President 1984-1988 by journalists Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus, which only covers his second term. After reading Landslide, I really understood what all the fuss was about re the Iran-Contra debacle. Comparing Reagan in his second term (Landslide) with Reagan in his first term led me to guess that he might have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's in those last few years.

The best book of all about Reagan, in my opinion, is Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism by Peter Schweizer. I liked it so much that I bought an extra one and gave it to my local library. This book finally lifted the veil of deception, perpetrated by the media, that Reagan was a dolt and an idiot. My husband also read it and changed his mind about Reagan and now admires him.

If you read this book, you will understand why a poll done by one of the news networks showed people naming Reagan as the greatest president of all time. He really did save this country almost single-handedly. Read the book and find out how.

This refers to the audiotape version.

I generally don't write bad reviews, but, in this case, I felt the need to warn others before they waste their money.

I am a big fan of _The Rise of TR_ and so I bought these tapes without hesitation, but, man, was I ever disappointed. I love Presidential biographies and can read/listen to them for days, but this book is bad! I mean really bad. I don't know what Morris was thinking - maybe he was just trying something new - but it just didn't work for me. If you are a fiction fan maybe this will work for you, but if you like traditional bios, you had better pass this one up.

First, let me say I am not the brightest person in the world and I don't have much patience, so the rest of what is written herein can be discarded, if you are up to the mental gymnastics necessary to follow the author's style and have lots of hours to read through the parts of the book that I, and apparently other readers, thought seemed like a total waste of time and paper.

I am fortunate enough to have a new "toy" called a "Quicktionary", which is a hand-held scanner to look up the meaning of words while you are reading. Boy, did it get a workout. Between the number of words I didn't know and then found to mean something "way simple", and the words that weren't even in the dictionary, well.... Then there are the continual references to "the gods" (in describing their mindset when they were "doing the scene" in L.A.; for example, "Eros, to us, was a pantheistic god, indistinguishable from Narcissus." I mean, there's got to be an easier way to say that love was everywhere and so was self worship. Isn't there?). And, the constant use of foreign phrases to impress whomever...; it just about killed me. Then, if you think you like handling all those things, there's the old trick of trying to stuff every last thought and tangent comment about the thoughts into one sentence. Drives me nuts.

To put it in perspective, James Hillman's writings (like "The Souls Code") is ten times easier to read (and believe me, it is difficult stuff), and has more value per page than this book has in its entirety.

Of course, his "literary style" is sure to turn heads. I just hope we don't have a new genre starting here where the author gets to stuff his "baggage" on top of the subject's and then allows his writing ideosyncracies to be the most memorable part of the book.

Can't believe I invested so much time in reading it. But, did I mention I was stubborn, too? (Thought I would copy Morris a little and get as much of "ME" in this review as possible.)