For good reason. Expectations were puffed up by Morris's $3 million advance, and the author, now 59, would take 14 years to complete Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald-Reagan. It finally hit bookstores Sept. 30. With its description of an "airhead" chief executive whose "hidden depths" are remarkably shallow, the book distressed such Reagan partisans as former Attorney General Edwin Meese. "[The President] was amazingly well informed," Meese says.
At the same time, Morris—who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 biography of Theodore Roosevelt—has offended journalists and scholars alike with an odd device: inserting a fictionalized version of himself to narrate portions of the nonfiction book. "It looks like he made a huge mistake in judgment," says Bob Woodward, who has written five books on the White House. "Morris has wounded himself more than he's wounded Ronald Reagan." Adds author David Halberstam: "Any time you invent one little thing, it opens the door to questions about everything."
Morris demurs. "I think my method is an advance in biographical honesty," he told Newsweek, "because by giving the narrator flesh, as it were, I make the reader more aware that this narrator's opinions are not necessarily fair." Conservative pundit William F. Buckley says the method proves Reagan's enigmatic quality. "If his mystery is profounder than Edmund Morris's powers to penetrate it," he says, "isn't that a good story?"
Perhaps, but critics are finding fault with the book's substance as well as its method. Dutch has "some huge errors," says Lou Cannon, who has written three books on Reagan. "The book is sort of a waste of time."
Not that it doesn't contain revelations. Morris writes, for instance, that as a young Hollywood actor, Reagan once attempted to join the Communist party. And he reports a claim voiced by Nancy Reagan that Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, only after she sent him a note threatening to kill herself if he didn't. The marriage ended in 1948, a year after Wyman gave birth to a baby girl who died within hours (the couple had already had Maureen, now 58, and adopted Michael, now 54).
Morris was born in 1940 in Nairobi, Kenya, where his British father, a pilot, mapped air routes through Africa. After a year of college in South Africa, Morris became an advertising copywriter in London, moving to the U.S. in 1968 with his wife, Clare Boothe Luce biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. A 1976 screenplay he wrote about Theodore Roosevelt led to his award-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
The book sold well and also attracted the attention of Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver, who helped arrange the meeting at Senator Hatfield's home. For three years, Morris observed Reagan up close, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, flying on Air Force One, meeting monthly with his subject and poring over reams of documents, including Reagan's diary. Morris found Reagan to be maddeningly elusive. "When you asked him a question about himself," he told Newsweek, "it was like dropping a stone into a well and not hearing a splash." And after the President left office, Morris's struggle to pin down his subject led to a massive case of writer's block.
Then during a 1992 visit to Eureka College in Illinois, Reagan's alma mater, Morris concocted the idea of inserting himself as a fictional narrator, born around the same time as Reagan and observing him through his life. But even Morris, who came to admire his subject greatly—"He is...the bravest and most incorrupt figure I have ever studied," he told Newsweek—has called Dutch "a strange book about a strange man." And the author isn't alone in his bafflement. "Every person I interviewed, almost without exception," Morris told 60 Minutes, "eventually would say, 'You know, I could never really figure him out.' "
Thomas Fields-Meyer
Linda Killian in Washington, D.C.
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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