Dutch : A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Rating:
Summary: The faults in this book are the author's not the subject's.
Review: The audio cassette version of "Dutch" is an interesting 9 hour listening experience detailing the life of Ronald Reagan as seen through the eyes of Edmund Morris. Ronald Reagan's life makes for a thoroughly interesting story and is a true story of one persons rise from a mediocre beginning in life to greatness at the end of his life. This book would have received 5 stars if the author had simply told the story of his life.

But Edmund Morris makes many mistakes in his presentation of the life. The first is that he approaches Reagan from the flawed theory that in order for his biography to be objective that he can't give his subject all the praise he deserves. There are several places where he seems to strain to find something to criticize Reagan about (though, don't get me wrong, his overall view of Reagan is a positive view; it's just that Morris doesn't want it to be "too positive"). Secondly, Morris does slip into too much flowery writing in his descriptions. Thirdly, his controversial technique of slipping an imaginary form of himself called "E" into the narrative is just bizarre and completely unnecessary (Morris seems to have forgotten is that this biography is about Reagan solely and not about Edmund Morris at all). And lastly, Morris barely gives any coverage at all over his movie career which he seems to largely consider irrelevant to the story, thus giving us an incomplete picture of those years of Reagan's life.

Still, though, "Dutch" has its entertaining moments.

Rating:
Summary: Little man attempts Big Book
Review: As one proceeds through this book it becomes apparent the subject
and task are too big for the author. That he resorts to a form
which injects himself into one of the more epochal periods
of our history-the defeat of the 'Evil Empire'-suggests some need
to be important. Unlike other presidential biographers, he seems to lack the creative ability and understanding of his subject to succeed in a more traditional form. His opinions override the content and soil it.
It is an unimportant book.

Rating:
Summary: Not pure history, but more than a novel
Review: If a reader wants to get a feel for Ronald Reagan, this may be a good book to read. Written more like a novel than a scholarly history tome, in a literary style absent from most biographies, it allows the reader to see Ronald Reagan through the eyes of someone who knew him. What gets confusing is the fact that though Edmund Morris did know Reagan fairly well in his capacity as the official Reagan biographer, in the book he gives himself a fictional altar ego and places him in the shadows of Reagan from college days through Reagan's final ride into the sunset. Stylistically, this works. As solid history, I found it lacking. Any time you mix history and fiction, you are being less than honest with the reader. Where does the truth stop and the fiction start? Morris has made a valient effort, and on many levels, a successful one--he has captured some of what Ronald Reagan was in a way that makes one both appreciate and wonder at our ex-President. He has also produced a brilliant book, stylistically superior to most biographies, very interesting to read. I enjoyed the book a great deal, and come away with a better understanding of Reagan. However, I caution anyone who reads "Dutch" to be very aware that this is a literary experiment involving history and biography, and not a biography in the academic sense. It contains universal truths about Reagan and his world, but these truths are delivered by mixing fact and fiction, and in the end, this diminishes the veracity of the project.
Morris had no intention of writing the biography of Reagan in this way. He turned to it, it seems, in desperation, in an attempt to explain the man he had tried so hard to know and understand, when he realized that the forces which drove Reagan and his ideas were essentially mystical and unexplainable--to Reagan and all who knew him. The man was an enigma, even to himself.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest biography I've ever read
Review: I waited long before buying Dutch. The controversy about Morris' narrative technique put me off. I was angry with him for spoiling his opportunity spent years with a president in office.
I was wrong. The job was not waisted on Edmund Morris. He wrote the best biography I ever read.
Most books in this genre don't become really interesting before the subject's career takes off. Dutch is different. Reagan really comes to life from the moment of his birth.
Morris imaginary persona sucks you into the story. It's like being a college student with Reagan in the 20s. Like being in the Iowa studio while he is doing a baseball report. You see unspoilt California through his eyes when he migrates in the 30s.
Although Morris doesn't paint a very nice picture of Reagan, he does have compassion. The president can be an impressive personality when he wants to be, he is not genuinely interested in most people, according to the author.
Reagan has strong feelings on some subjects - like fighting communism - but he is not really curious. Doesn't ask questions.
He holds some remarkably backward views - like diseases in Africa being caused by prohibition of DDT poison and trees causing acid rain.
But Morris concludes he was a great president after all, for defeating the Evil Empire.
Even great books have flaws. I would have liked to read more
about Reagan's politics and the role his aides played. I missed the stories from his campaigns. Morris hardly mention the gubernatorial races as well as the presidential elections.
But even with these major flaws I recommend this book to everyone. It is in my top 10 of all books read.

Rating:
Summary: A great read - with no analysis
Review: This is the most absorbing presidential biography I've read, and perhaps - who really knows? - the one that comes closest to its subject. I tolerated the gimmick of the fictitious narrator - except when I found the situation of "Gavin Morris" more interesting than that of - by then - Gov. Reagan. Morris's licence, perhaps more than any other technique, seems best to identify and circumnavigate the emptiness within Reagan, more so than a straight biography that would've required a much more explicit (and sure, in some ways more preferable) authorial intrusion. And Morris tells a good tale - DUTCH fairly races along; not since Caro's TIMES OF LYNDON JOHNSON have I so quickly devoured a political biography (and that for rather different reasons).
But those looking for political and economic analysis are going to come away empty-handed. Yes, I agree a full evaluation of a leader's policies and decisions is not the task of a biographer, but DUTCH is very much a memoir of Reagan, not an assessment of his years of leadership, so only those decisions that sprung most from Reagan's inner (non-)core - welfare reform in California, tax cuts and defence spending in the early eighties - receive any detailed discussion.
I also objected to Morris's preaching on abortion, and not merely because I disagree with him - I wanted to see the evolution of Reagan's views, rather than read a foetophilic diatribe.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately a dissappointment
Review: I was drawn to this biography largely for two reasons: Morris' previous work and my fascination with the enigma and person of Ronald Reagan. Morris has proven ( especially his work on Teddy Roosevelt which is a must read!) to be an author who not only carefully researchs his subject but also renders his narratives with a hand fully capable of impressible verbal dexterity.

In "Dutch:A Memoir of Ronald Reagan", Morris continues to display his many great talents. BUT . . .

. . . although I respect his artistic license with the fictitious first person narrator (and Morris follows in a long line of authors who have successfully utilized such a convention), it simply doesn't work for me.

The presence of the contrived voice immediately aroused in me questions of Morris' validity. While it is obvious that Morris has continued his uncanny ability to collect, examine, reflect, and expand upon a great many facts gained through years of painfully detailed research, the conventions of fiction simply made it very difficult for me as a reader to filter out the facts. In building, as all successful biographers must, the wider frame of historical reference, Morris has to spend pages building his imagined narrator's backstory. Because I was constantly having to differentiate between the apparently imagined world and the historic in these digressions, I found this book a far too exhausting and frustrating read.

Granted, perhaps that is Morris' final point, that he found himself unable to cut through the battle in Reagan's life between the imagined and the real to paint a compellingly personal portrait. I admit that Morris' literary choices are an admirable tactic to overcome such a daunting obstacle to: "Bring Forth So Great An Object."

It is just as a reader, I like to keep my fiction and my history seperated. At least as much as possible.

Rating:
Summary: Dutch:A Memior of Ronald Reagan
Review: Totally disappointing. Continually tried to grasp the author's intend. Convened entirely too much to author and many, many others not remotely related to memoirs of Ronald Reagan. Too many paraphases, acronyms, abbreviation and meaningless paradoxes. Failed to convey any sustantial contributions to Ronald Reagan. Would not recommend reading to anyone. I purchased copies for myself and a friend. Have decided not to give to friend.

Rating:
Summary: A riveting story with a transcendent conclusion
Review: The only thing conventional about Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, is the fourteen-year effort through which Edmund Morris contrived it (his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris, worked fifteen years on her biography of Clare Boothe Luce). "The book's been delayed" - Random House originally scheduled it for publication seven years ago - "because of the fanatical perfectionism of the neurotic author," Morris said. He also quoted Anatole France: "A work of art is never finished, only abandoned."

In actuality, the classic struggle to understand the workings of Reagan's mind held Morris up. (Morris keeps four yards of subject-indexed note cards containing his Reagan research in his desk; one of the larger headings is Inscrutable.) "Any biographer finds out sooner or later that human character is mysterious," Morris said. "But what made Reagan uniquely difficult was that he was incurious about himself. Therefore, he lacked introspection." [...] In reality, Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 27, 1940, to middle-class parents, Eric Edmund Morris, a pilot for East African Airways, and May Morris. But through the benefit of what Random House hails as "literary projection," Morris ages twenty-eight years, changes his birthplace to Illinois, and restyles his parents into Bess Morris, a former Chicago opera singer, and Arthur Morris, a wealthy Roosevelt Republican who campaigns successfully to become Mayor of Aurora. Thus a Reagan contemporary, Morris can glimpse the future President on a Dixon High School football field; bump into him beneath the elms of his Illinois alma mater, Eureka College; report for duty to Lieutenant Reagan at the Army Air Force's first motion picture unit.

The Zeligesque narrator also has a fictional son, named Gavin, who is a political radical of the sixties, as well as a friend named Paul Rae, who works as a gossip columnist. Morris says that he invented characters to represent Americans who "noticed Reagan more and more as the years passed"; clearly, Gavin is Reagan's foil.

Traditionalists criticize Morris for the temerity of putting himself inside the biography. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her Liberties column (New York Times; 10/22/99), Morris "exercise[d] . . . fearless egotism. . . .He has pioneered the Ally McBeal school of historiography, in which we regularly cut away from the action for wacky out-of-body fantasies." Michiko Kakutani, also writing in the Times (10/2/99), agreed: "He" - a "novelist manqué" – "has produced a bizarre, irresponsible and monstrously self-absorbed book—a Ragtime-esque 'memoir' featuring a self-annotating narrator out of a Philip Roth novel and childlike hero out of Being There." Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, said, "If this is the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, I think I’ll wait for the unauthorized biography."

But, isn't Morris’s technique the same as the practice of those biographers who purport to see the world from the perspective of their subjects? And, as Douglas Harbrecht noted (Business Week, 10/18/99), if, in his Henry IV plays, Shakespeare fabricated a character named Falstaff to disclose truths about a historical figure, the young Prince Hal, why can't Morris, a renowned litterateur, invent an alter ego in order to shed light on a United States President?

This argument is different from mine against the veracity of In Cold Blood. Whereas Capote professed his book a "true account," Morris fully discloses his novel literary technique, distinguishing in his first chapter, "The Land of Lost Things," that "I want to make literature out of Ronald Reagan."

Morris's tone in Dutch is as if one were there; the publisher's brief catalogue copy promoting the book calls this "an almost photographic immediacy." Throughout, Morris manages to be both balanced and sensitive. His breadth of languages - he liberally intertwines French phrases, which I almost always had to look up - suffuses the book with erudition, and his character descriptions hark back to T.R.'s witticisms.

Certainly, any discussion of Dutch – Reagan's father referred to his infant son as his "fat little Dutchman" - must encompass Morris's Doppelganger. But as one reads on - and such is the force and fascination of Morris's narrative style - he begins to see the benefits of the author's unorthodox technique. (In less skilled hands, Morris's technique will doubtless prove a disaster.) The reader who surrenders to this Boswell's admittedly self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a "higher truth" justifying the book's technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Who better suited to plumb a phantom subject than a phantom narrator?

Rating:
Summary: A bit too postmodern for my taste
Review: Going through the reviews I am intrigued by the American fascination with Ronald Reagan. People are disappointed about the biographer Ð but thatÕs what you get when you elect a clown for president. The biography simply canÕt be better than its subject. Recently I had a little exchange with one of the reviewers who posted on their own website a list of the 10 greatest cultural figures of the 20th century. I couldnÕt believe my eyes. Are these guys serious? Allowing that culture is the way people do things and different cultures do the same thing in different ways, it still boggles the mind to find some or other pope on the list, a certain Brian Lamb, George Orwell, John Wayne (huh?), Elvis (has he been sighted lately?), Barry Goldwater?????!!?, and Ronald Reagan, while Henry Ford, Eisenhower, Einstein, Planck, Turing, W. H. Auden, James D. Watson & Francis Crick, or Henry J. Kaiser are not. Go figure. But I admit there is a good deal of snobbery on my part. In a true democracy everybody is allowed to have a shot at the presidency, and if a clown makes it at the ballots he has the right to show his red nose from the White House balcony. Yes you guessed it Ð I am a chauvinist Limey and diehard colonialist who goes with KiplingÕs idea of good government: a small cadre of professional administrators and the many administrated minding their own business; and I donÕt like the latest reforms in the House of Lords. Hereditary peers have proven their value as last line of resistance when all other means of opposition had failed against Margaret ThatcherÕs insane policies. But seriously, no president has more brazenly violated the law and lied to the public - even outdoing Nixon - and got away with it only because he looked the part. So with this in mind, I couldnÕt help shaking my head over the witch-hunt against Clinton by AmericaÕs righteous hypocrits. Reagan and Margaret Thatcher - a match made in a place I donÕt want to be: never had a deadlier combination of amateur politicians messed up the destinies of our nations in a briefer span of time, especially the economy. It squandered to the last penny BritainÕs windfall from its North Sea oil reserves, and saddled the USA with the greatest deficit any state had ever had at any time, anywhere in history. And what do you know? They get away with it. Textbooks are glowing with their praise. Next thing is Adolf Hitler is going to become a catholic saint. In what kind of world are we living here? Mr. Morris is a sympathetic and intelligent observer, who obviously likes Ronald Reagan. He shares the perception of this politicianÕs greatness, and has a compassionate eye for ReaganÕs human side. But Morris is bright enough not to idolize his subject. So if you look for a piece of idolatry, read something else; if you just like Reagan or want to freshen up on the facts, this is a good book to begin with, provided you are willing to put up with this new journalistic style of flaunting smack in the middle of the facts what should be the least important person in a biography: the author.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughts about Dutch
Review: So unsatisfying. Mediocre. That is my original impression of the book, Dutch, by Edmund Wilson. Unsatisfying like a skimpy meal, where the diner rises from the table hungry.

The book is good in places, especially the descriptions of Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva. Also, the sharing of some of the writing of the youthful Ronald Reagan. You think to yourself: This is what the whole book should have been like, and you say a little prayer: Please Lord let it continue this good. But it never does.

Was the historian blocked somehow? Obviously. But how? This book has a watered-down feeling about it. It has a thinness of content. So much is left out. This book is filled with narrative, with brief sketches, often one sentence long, but it is empty of history.

This book is also a flipper. A flipper is a book many of whose pages you turn without reading because you already know it is going to be boring, that the writer is simply filling space, or that it has nothing to do with the subject you are interested in. To be fair you stop every few pages and read a sentence or two. Usually, however, a flipper stays a flipper. Most of the novelistic and drama stuff I flipped through.

What doesn't it talk about? Jane Wyman. Oh, he talks about her a little-her neediness, her mental breakdown. His first wife is a sketch, no more. Why couldn't we have been treated to a biography? How about something more than just sketches of the children. Or at least of Nancy, his life partner, his other half.

What of his cabinet officers? What they did. Why not at least a biography of William Casey-the spy who helped Reagan win the cold war. Nothing. Or Casper Weinberger, James Baker, or many others?

What did Reagan do in his free time, to relax? Who were his friends? So much in this history is missing. What about his ancestry? Who were the people he came from? Nothing here either. It would be interesting to know more about his high school years, his girl friend.

This book is written as if it were censored all the way through. So much is missing. At least bring Nancy alive. I really wonder what Ronald Reagan's mother was like, too? How empty this book is!

This subject needs a Robert Caro, Paul Johnson, or Newt Gingrich. Many historians could have done better. How about the professional "presidential historians" on PBS? Even they could have done better.

I do not think that this historian likes Ronald Reagan at all. At least part of him does not like Reagan. And that being true, he should probably have never taken on this job, or asking it another way: Did that dislike create his block?

The absence of any discussion of the spiritual reality of the president is the greatest deficiency of this biography. Spirit, the presence of God, prayer, the activity of God in the affairs of men, tithing, the spiritual path, etc.-none of this is dealt with anywhere in the book. Yet, spiritual reality is what grounded Ronald Reagan; the notion of depending on God for everything is what guided and led him all his life. We find none of that in this biography. Without an understanding of his subject's spiritual beliefs, the biographer cannot begin to understand Ronald Reagan. To not understand Reagan's spiritual dimension, is to miss it all.

I guess everyone thought that after Teddy-Mr. Wilson's informed, intelligent, empathetic history of Theodore Roosevelt-he would be the perfect historian to write about Ronald Reagan's presidency. Wrong.