Edmund Morris, author of the controversial new Ronald Reagan biography, "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan," fell into an abyss after the book was published by Random House. He felt, Morris told one writer, like "the most reviled biographer in America."
So Morris has gone from TV network to TV network, defending his work in a plaintive, unruffled manner, always speaking positively about his decision to tell the story through a fictional narrator -- the device that has generated so much heat.But the writer is convinced the controversy is already fading, replaced by an emphasis on Reagan's place in history.
"Ronald Reagan is a particularly compelling subject," said Morris, speaking from his New York apartment during a telephone interview with the Deseret News.
"There is a nationwide nostalgia for him -- without question. Already the debate is shifting from my technique to Reagan the man."
Despite his being damned by much of the scholarly and historical world for mixing "fiction" with history, the author and his book have been in the news spotlight for a couple of weeks. And Morris defends his approach.
The book "is authentic and documented, packed with footnotes," Morris says. "The narrator exists only to observe and record. That's the only part he plays in the story. He fills the role of a projector in a documentary movie. All I ask of the reader is that he accept the projector and watch the true story unfold."
Morris achieved a moment of fame in 1980 when his biography of Theodore Roosevelt won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Yet, the native of Kenya was anything but a conventional American history professor with a Ph.D. He was educated at the Prince of Wales School, Nairobi, and Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, and worked as an advertising copywriter in London before emigrating to the United States in 1968.
Once in America, Morris tired of the advertising world and began writing for magazines. When a screenplay he wrote about Theodore Roosevelt never made it to television, he fleshed out the research to strengthen it and turn it into a full-length biography, his first book.
On the basis of that book, he was selected by Reagan and his advisers to do "an authorized biography" of the president and was given unprecedented access. He attended high-level meetings, had regular sessions with Reagan and accompanied the president to such historic encounters as the 1985 Geneva Summit with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He was given carte blanche to work with Reagan's personal papers and his handwritten White House diary.
Morris remains grateful for his role of "in-house historian," although he says he was "near Reagan but not close to him." That is his way of underscoring how distant a personality he considered Reagan to be.
Morris also criticizes Presidents Bush and Clinton, each of whom considered appointing an "in-house historian" of their own, "but didn't have the guts to do it without controlling him." Bush, said Morris, put so many restrictions on Christopher Buckley "that he laughed and walked away." And Clinton tried unsuccessfully to control Taylor Branch.
Neither Reagan nor his wife, Nancy, ever tried to control what he wrote, Morris maintains.
Actually, the close proximity to Reagan was in some ways "inhibiting, because I need distance from a subject before I can deal with it. Being in the White House was intoxicating. I don't see how anyone can write objectively about it until the dazzle has died. That's why I didn't start writing until after Reagan left the White House. I didn't get into my stride until 1992. "
To hit his stride required finding the key to writing about Reagan, and that happened while he was wandering the campus of Reagan's alma mater, Eureka College in Illinois.
"It was," said Morris, "a moment of empathy with Ronald Reagan. I think all biographers have these moments, when, after years of study, they suddenly begin to feel the character in their mind's eye. I had studied his youthful letters, looked at photographs, tried to dive into them, as it were. The moment I stepped on an acorn at Eureka College was the moment I realized, in the biographical sense, I was there. I decided to convert the usual off-stage biographical observer to an on-stage observer."
Morris thought the unusual technique necessary because of Reagan's nature.
"He was a performer all his life. I'm not disparaging him by saying that," Morris said. "He has to be seen from the point of view of spectator, audience, camera. In fact, all great political leaders have understood the elements of drama -- DeGaulle, Churchill, Napoleon, Disraeli."
To this august group, Morris adds Reagan, whom he considers a great president.
"Where's the Soviet Union?" he asks. "Where's the Berlin Wall? Where's the 'national malaise' Carter talked about? Where is the welfare population? Where is the paper tiger?"
When asked about the major corruption of Iran-Contra, Morris said, "Iran-Contra diminished his presidency, especially the Iran initiative. It was a moral lapse. It went against his own moral philosophy. He persuaded himself he was executing good intentions, but the evidence of what he did is a matter of historical fact. All great men make mistakes, sometimes serious ones. In the uproar over my book -- for it or against it -- there is a rising consensus that this man was a giant. I've not been aware of that before. He's beginning to achieve his historical place."
Which is not to say he will ever lose his mystery.
"But," said Morris, "I figured him out enough to make literature out of him. He is a man of huge historic stature." Morris says that he is a historian who has "never been in the least a political person," but who is "conservative by instinct, like most immigrants. I voted for Reagan both times. I'd vote for him again."
And is there anything wrong with electing an actor, someone who is always giving a performance?
"It's a democracy, a free country. If a lawyer can become president, why not an actor, or an athlete, or a woman, for that matter?"
Morris decries today's tendency to strip political history of its narrative power.
"It's no a longer a story, but a science, obsessed with institutions, statistics, demographics. It has completely lost its narrative power. That's why the only people reading history these days are historians," he said.
"With this biography, I'm trying to bring back 19th century, personalized, narrative history, to revitalize the discipline by going back to the primeval desire all readers have for a story that is going to move and convince -- in the tradition of Francis Parkman."