Reagan's

Edmund Morris' new biography of Ronald Reagan uses a fictionalized narrator to tell a partly fictional story. Smelling a new genre, and--more importantly--a hot topic, Crimson Arts trailed Morris on a morning of guest appearances, interviewing him all the while. Here's the transcript. (See Review page B-5)

Scene: T. Anthony's Pizzeria and Restaurant on the corner of Babcock and Commomwealth, 9 a.m. on Friday, Oct.8. A large neon sign screams "Espresso" on the window of the shop, vaulting the otherwise unchanged 50s era exterior into the 90s. Edmund Morris has just ordered scrambled eggs and ham, a blueberry muffin and a cappuccino. "I think the cappuccino has all the necessary ingredients of the continuation of life," he'll assert later in the day, and insists on buying me one. The cappuccino is handed to us in paper cups, having shot, fully formed, out of a large brown machine with the push of a finger. If Mr. Morris noticed this lack of sophistication, which, considering the level of observation shown in his book, I'm sure he did, he didn't comment. He's much too polite for that. We sit in a vinyl booth, at a table covered in red Formica, underneath a wall filled with photographs of the BU football team while electric fans hum overhead. Two burly Boston cops sit in the booth behind ours, shouting at the short order cook in a Boston accent worthy of a Jordan's Furniture commercial. Their noise does not drown out the precise, thoughtful speech and South African accent of Mr. Morris, however, and somehow the two tables, worlds apart, settle into an even coexistence. The short order cook begins to sing the theme song of the brady bunch over the strains of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" coming from the juke box, as I ask my first question.

The Harvard Crimson: You've researched two American Presidents--TR and RR. What do you think makes a great president?

Edmund Morris: A great president should embody with out any equivocation the hopes and desires of the American people at the time of his election. I think in the case of Theodore Roosevelt, the new young president (he was the youngest we've ever had, by the way) embodied the intoxicating feeling at the turn of the century that America had at last become a world power. Reagan, at the moment of his accession, embodied a general national desire to put aside all the self-doubt and gloom of the 1970s and recover the optimism and patriotism of the 1950s. So to put it very simply, our presidents should represent the best of us. And when they represent the worst of us--as in the case of Nixon--the American people themselves begin to have a feeling of self-doubt, as was the case in the aftermath of Watergate. You weren't even alive. As your father will tell you, the 70s was a depressing time.

THC: Well, it's interesting because I was a child running around with my mother working at the White House for Reagan when I was little, so I have a very a childlike, but very strong, idea of his physical presence as what a President should be.

EM: Physical presence--yes, exactly. There is a very important phenomenon called the Physicality of Power...The physical--the body--should not be underestimated...when you're trying to explain the mesmerism of something that's past. And it's not necessarily a question of physical beauty either, although Reagan certainly was beautiful--

THC: Yes, my roommates certainly thought so when they saw his earlier pictures!

EM: Thought that he was gorgeous? He was. Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, was not gorgeous, he was very ugly. But somehow his physical apparatus was overwhelmingly tactile. When Theodore Roosevelt walked into a room and when Reagan walked into a room, you could see people luxuriating in their physical aura. A lot of Hitler's power had to do with his strange beak, the fat curved back, awkward gestures and that hyptonisingly strange face. Never underestimate the power of the body in politics.

THC: So are you going to vote for Bradley next time?

EM: Well, he's got a big body, but to me he's dull. He's got a dull body, a dull face. But bigness certainly helps--short guys have a very hard time--as we know with Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter.

THC: What was your relationship with Reagan like before and after the book?

EM: My relations with him were always the same as anybody, anybody who came into his orbit. Reagan had no interest in individual human character. Therefore it was all one, whether the Biographer walked into the oval office, or a Labor Union leader, or the President of Bangladesh. So I never got past that genial bon ha mie.

THC: Expectations, perceptions?

EM: At first I belittled him because I was looking for uniqueness and complexity and hoping for self-revelatory remarks. I got none of these things. What I got was a distressing ordinariness when I was alone with him. He seemed to have no culture, no originality, no curiosity. And my perception of him changed only very, very slowly over a period of the full 14 years working on this project. And I realized more and more that he was a man who could only be understood in terms of his public performance. What he did was what he was. There is a perfect example of that in a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Action is character." And in retrospect, now looking back on him, I realize that he was indeed a great President.

THC: Was Jane Wyman right? She said she got tired of his talking all the time. Is that an accurate portrayal of him?

EM: That was certainly what a non-political person would think. Since I'm a non-political person too, I was just bored to stupefaction by his endless political monologues.

THC: Was the title of Official or Authorized Biographer a blessing or a burden? And did it in any way change the way you wrote the book?

EM: It was a burden, particularly when the word "Official" was used. Because people instantly thought that I was doing something that Reagan and Nancy Reagan would have to approve, which was never the case. If they'd ever tried to get any control and look at what I wrote, I'd have walked away from the project.

THC: Have you heard from Nancy?

EM: No. Nancy is preserving a shocked silence...I can recognize her voice in some of the things George Will has been saying--he is her current PR representative. Some one told me the other day that when you go to George Wills' house he has a whole corridor of pictures of Nancy Reagan.

THC: That's so bizarre!

EM: That's an awful lot of them.

Later, in a car on the way to the Chris Lyden Show:

EM: Maureen Dowd and George Will have both published attacks on the book. There's a rule of life: Never, never never do anything original or inventive in front of people with red hair and thin lips. They always react violently.

THC: Did you feel a lot of pressure after writing Theodore Roosevelt? Is that why you did something so unexpected with Dutch?

EM: No, in fact I'd already written half of another Theodore Roosevelt volume, which I've put aside. That book eliminates the narrative voice, the editorial voice, to an almost total extent. I wanted to see if I could write a biography of a President who lived between 1901 and 1909 in which there was absolutely no intrusion of the present. The reader gets the feeling from the first page to the last that they're back in the first decade of the century. So it couldn't be more different than the approach I took writing about Ronald Reagan. And the method I took with Ronald Reagan grew directly out of his own stage personality.

THC: What was your purpose writing this book?

EM: My purpose in writing the book? Well, just simply to tell a story -- which is all I've ever wanted to do in my life, is just to tell a story. What drew me to Theodore Roosevelt, and what drew me to Reagan is the fact that both had extraordinarily interesting life stories. And were both extraordinarily interesting characters. I did not want to write about Reagan for any political reasons, his politics bore me. I did want to make money, so that was certainly a consideration. But on the other hand, if I'd only been after money I'd have written it much more quickly.

On the Chris Lyden Show. "Reagan never cared less what Harvard thought of him," Morris says to Lyden. The production director, all business, lifts her head from the control panel to shout, "Hear that, Harvard?"

Chris Lyden: You spent most of 14 years looking for the inner man and there were many moments in that time apparently when you decided there wasn't anybody at home, there wasn't anybody there and you'd never get your hands around it. What'd you decide in the end?

EM: I remember saying to him once in a moment of frustration, "Mr. President, I just have great difficulty understanding some of the things you think and some of the things you do." He said, "But why? I'm an open book." "Yes," I said, "but your pages are all blank." He looked at me with his head on one side, generally puzzled that I found him puzzling.

In the car again:

THC: Were you surprised by Dutch's reception?

EM: Oh no, not at all. I knew the method was going to be very controversial, I knew that from the start, and I greatly enjoy the controversy. I think the art of biography does need shaking up.

THC: The question nobody seems to be asking is "What is biography?" Biography is usually a pretty staid genre.

EM: Well, yes, you're right, that's what I meant by [the above answer]. I think biography should take advantage of all these new communicative techniques we've got these days. The technique of the screenplay, sound effects, and computer techniques. Several chapters in Reagan's life were so cinematic that I've actually written them cinematically. Why not? It's the truthful way and the appropriate way to describe that they were episodes almost cinematic in themselves. He remembers them as cinema, so I write them as cinema.

THC: Do you think Dutch will change the way other people think about biography, and lead to other more experimental kinds of biography?

EM: Oh I hope so. Any art form is going to be a dying art form if experimentation doesn't continue. Some of the devices I've used are actually not new but they had been forgotten. For example, the technique of dialogue, of a dialogue chapter, is a Victorian form where two erudite men, say, would have a long conversation that would be written out in chapter form. There's a dialogue that Oscar Wilde wrote, for example, which discusses socialism. But the discussion is conveniently couched as two very articulate men talking. And it's a fascinating form which has fallen into disuse, and I've revived it. I have a whole chapter of dialogue between myself and Philip Dunne, which is a new way of telling the story of Reagan's political radicalization. It comes out in conversation rather than in orthodox biographical style.

THC: What was the impetous for the fictional narrator in Dutch--that you felt you couldn't get at Reagan in another way, or that this was the appropriate way to understand him?

EM: Well, I observed him in the White House so close-up and I had the luxury of being able to write about him in such detail, that I wanted to be able to use the same closeness and vividness for the years when I was not at his side, the seventy years where I was not. And this device enabled me to obseve him with that kind of closeness. The device of an omnipresent spectator of whom Reagan is unaware, but who is very much aware of Ronald Reagan. Somebody called Stanley Fish, who's a professor at Duke University and often writes on scholarly subjects, wrote a piece in the New York Times Book Review 6 weeks ago, just before my book came out, saying that all biography is actually autobiography, in the sense that it always reflects the prejudices and sentimentalities of the biographer...I must say I think [Dutch] is more honest; the narrator actually comes out front.

into Saks...

THC: You spoke about biography being autobiographical. There's a lot in the biography that has a lot to do with you--references to Clare Booth Luce, to Teddy Roosevelt, and the musicality of the text. How much is this also a book of you, and how much is it a book of the United States during this century?

EM: Yes, yes, Reagan was the all-American. Well actually there's not as much of me in it as you'd think. The narrator is rather unlike me, he's mathematical and Germanic, I am neither of those things. Also well-born and elitist, which I am not. The musical part is me--I couldn't help that because I think in terms of music. I only incorporate things like the TR book because it's directly related to how I became Reagan's biographer, and when I do talk about myself it is for structural reasons. And you are absolutely right about Reagan representing all aspects of America. Indeed, what draws me to people like him and Theodore Roosevelt, as an immigrant, is that in studying men like that it's an education for me [about] the actual folk character of my adopted country. The midwest, which seems so banal and blah to most native Americans, to me as an immigrant is very exotic and strange.

THC: In the biography you don't talk about Reagan's children very much at all. Is that indicative of Reagan's treatment of them?

EM: Yes. I paid about as much attention to his children as he paid.

THC: Was there ever any moment when you were with Reagan when you thought "This is Ronald Reagan."?

EM: Yes, there was actually. And you know I don't think I write about it in the book. It was in August of 1988, when I went up to his ranch to spend the afternoon as he chopped trees and pruned the landscape--what he loved to do. And he was in these jeans, work clothes, and he was working with buzz saws and tree hooks with two guys, ranch hands. The President and these two guys communicated entirely in grunts. And I realized that this is the real Ronald Reagan here, a hard, quiet, taciturn man's man, working with his body. In the current Talk Magazine there's an article by me talking about Reagan chopping down trees and this personal force of his, and there's a photograph of us at the ranch that particular day I'm telling you about, and he's holding a buzz-saw, and my hand is on his shoulder saying goodbye. That's when I saw the real, real Ronald Reagan.

THC: What's next? Are you going to finish Theodore Roosevelt?

EM: I sure am. I've already got the last line of the third volume written in my head. There in the distance like those palm trees at the far end of the Sahara, and I'm floggin' my camel!