Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Guyotte, Roland L

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. By Edmund Morris. (New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. xx, 874. $35.00)

Well into The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), Edmund Morris paused to appraise TR's early book about The Naval War of 1812: "Its merits are as simple as those of any serious piece of academic writing: clarity, accuracy, and completeness backed by massive documentation" (p. 154). Yet TR's approach failed to satisfy Morris, who said, "There is something almost inhuman about the young author's refusal to swashbuckle, taste the triumphs of victory and the pain of defeat, and dramatize character where well he might." (p. 154-155). That is, Roosevelt chose to be a historian rather than a novelist or a screenwriter. In Dutch, whose dust jacket boasts that the book is "the only biography ever authorized by a sitting president - yet written with complete interpretive freedom," Morris, a middle-aged author (b. 1940), invented a narrator, "Edmund Morris" (b. 1912, in Chicago), to follow Ronald Reagan around up to the 1980s, when the "authorized biographer," Edmund Morris, could take over.

The resulting almost 900-page "Memoir of Ronald Reagan" is buttressed by several hundred acknowledgements ("co-contributors"), almost fifty archival collections, and one hundred fifty pages of notes. More than three dozen of these notes purport to document various fictional characters Morris scatters through his text. Dutch devotes about one hundred thirty pages to the Illinois and Iowa years, about two hundred to Hollywood and Reagan's pitchman work for General Electric, less than a hundred to California politics and the long road to the White House, and about two hundred fifty pages to his presidency. An Epilogue recounts Reagan's post-presidential years and his acknowledgment of Alzheimer's Disease.

Dutch's subtitle explains much about this odd book, which might better be called, "My Life with Ronald Reagan." For it is the frustrated "authorized biographer's" failure to have something new to say about Reagan's personality that apparently drove Morris to the narrative strategies that have aroused such controversy since the book's publication in late 1999. These include unlikely chapters devoted to a literary review of Reagan's high school papers and unpublished college short stories, a dialogue with a Hollywood screenwriter, "Four Short Scenarios" crosscutting between Reagan's House Un-American Activities Committee testimony and the breakup of his marriage to actress Jane Wyman, an extended analysis of a 1958 Reagan speech to the California Fertilizer Association, and a montage of seemingly undigested excerpts from Morris's "author's notes" during 1987 and 1988. "Edmund Morris" makes his debut during Dutch's account of Reagan's Illinois upbringing, about which Gore Vidal once wrote, "This story has been told so much that it now makes no sense at all" [Vidal, United States (1993), p. 986]. Building on the detective work of others, and on his subject's two autobiographies, "Morris" casts a scornful eye on rural Illinois, dubbing Reagan's birthplace, Tampico, "then as now, a home for the homely" (p. 13), suggesting that such surroundings helped produce "the immense insularity of Dutch's personality" (p. 22). The author notes President Reagan's lack of interest in the details of his origins, then launches into the tale of "Edmund Morris" - sent off to an English prep school, afflicted with polio, returned to "a lakeside house in Ravinia," then taken to Grand Detour, IL, all so that he could be driven to Dixon and shown Lowell Park, site of the teen-age Reagan's exploits as a Rock River lifeguard.

The fiction continues. "Morris" attends Eureka College with Reagan ("lovely it was not," p. 66), goes to the student meeting where the freshman Ronald Reagan makes his first "political speech," opposing the college's president, and then departs, to be posted by another fictional character about Reagan's later years in college, his brief, successful career as an Iowa radio sports announcer and his early life in late-1930s Hollywood. Dutch pays special attention to Reagan's undergraduate acting performance in an Edna St. Vincent Millay play presented at a Northwestern University drama tournament, his first marriage, his World War II U. S. government filmmaking, and his conversion from New Deal liberal to anti-communist leader of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s, a prelude to running for public office.

By the time Dutch reaches the 1960s, its author's disdain for electoral politics gives short shrift to Reagan's election and career as California governor, instead supplying an extended passage about "Morris's" fictional son, Gavin, a philosophy graduate student at Berkeley during the student uprising. The book spends almost no time on the 1980 presidential election. A major exception to the book's anti-political tone is Morris's confirmation of Reagan's opposition to abortion, even as he criticizes him for signing a California law legalizing it: "Before the end of his first term as Governor, some eighty-two thousand souls would be debited to that signature, as against the seventy-seven he took credit for as a lifeguard" (p. 352).