Dutch : A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Rating:
Summary: Greatest American of the 20th Century
Review: The title of my review says all there needs to be said. The 5 stars I have given this book doesn't neccesarily mean that I fell in love with Mr. Morris' style of writing, but have give the 5 stars because of the subject of the book. Like a previous reviewer states, I too, remember exactly where I was on the day he was shot; I was in the fourth grade, and remember this mainly because it was my birthday, and it grieved me so to see my President weak, hurt, dying. I have not, nor will I ever pray as hard as I did that day. It proved to be one of his most truimphant moments. This book is worth the purchase, without a second thought. There is no doubt in mind that History shall indeed look back upon Ronald Wilson Reagan with the greatest of favor.

Rating:
Summary: Morris tries to depict Reagan - The Man not the Enigma
Review: It does not bother me one iota that Mr Morris chose to invent the narrator as being a character in Ronald Reagan's life. It is an interesting device and provides a different perspective on Mr Reagan who is an enigma to a person of my generation. What is he like?? Even now, when you hear people talk of the President, there is a vagueness about what he is like as a person. I really would like to find out more about his personality and what made him tick. How did a Hollywood B-actor get to be the leader of the world?

For such an opaque personality, nothing would have been more tedious than to have read a biography of Reagan that is as dry as sandpaper, listing facts like phone-book numbers. I think the author has tried to give us a sense of what the character of the man is like and on this I think Morris has succeeded moderately well.

I did, however, find the many sections of the book dealing with the fictional life of the narrator and his imaginary conversations with his pals on subjects not remotely connected to Ronald Reagan distracted from the book. Eventually I had to skim read these passages as I found them too frustrating. I think Morris's editor was looking elsewhere, or was consumed with panic over the narration technique, and failed to take a decent red pen to the text itself where this merited it.

Like another critic below, I find myself at the end of this book wanting to know more about the enigmatic Mr Reagan and fear I will have to buy one of those sandpaper books in order to do it. It is a real shame because otherwise I think Mr Morris deserves praise for presenting a view of Mr Reagan to us that might otherwise have been missed.

I would recommend this book to anyone - it is most certainly an experience!! But if you are looking for a nuts and bolts biography with every little fact thrown in, this will not be the biography for you.

Rating:
Summary: The anti-hero as protagonist
Review: I like what Morris has done. Approach it as a novel with facts about a real person at the forefront of the plot, and you'll get bonus biographical information in addition to a good narrative. Approach it as a straight biography and you'll be frustrated by the novelistic embellishments.

Reagan himself is a fictional character the story of whose presidency is peopled with mostly victims. How best to profile someone who presented only a shadow of a human being than to treat him as such?

Rating:
Summary: Prospecting using 3-D imaging
Review: Geologists can't see through rock. As I read "Dutch" I couldn't help but sympathize with Edmund Morris' predicament and the tools he had to resort to. With 200 pages devoted to sources it's hard to argue with the accuracy of Morris' basic account of Ronald Reagan. Much like the latest tools used by geologists, a pattern of well-placed seismic blasts can reveal textures and characteristics that would otherwise be buried deep underground. Reagan's past is brought into relief like the rivers of oil 3-D imaging software the prospectors use. While many critics are disappointed with Morris' placement of himself in the narrative, I thought his character helped add perspective and texture. I'd recommend this book to any Democrat who never really "got" Reagan's appeal, yet were fascinated how someone like him could be so popular.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible read!
Review: How an author can manage to write such a terrible biography on such a fascinating subject is beyond me! His use of fictional characters (including himself!) makes you wonder at times who this biography is really about. I do not care to hear about Edmund Morris's father. As a great Reagan fan, I wanted to learn about what was going on inside the White House while he was President. While we do receive a few interesting anecdotes, the book is peppered with totally useless verbatim that keeps our attention away from what is truly important. It was such a terrible read, I could not even finish it! I will have to read Mr. Reagan's autobiography in order to satisfy my hunger for insights on his presidency because this book did not serve its purpose at all.

Rating:
Summary: Hero
Review: I read this biography a couple of years ago and was very moved by it then. I am now buying a copy on tape for my grandmother, who I know will also appreciate the story of one of the greatest Presidents of our time, particularly in the midst of the election debacle. Readers have complained that there is too much text devoted to the biographer's own life, but I believe that it really adds to the impact of the story. You will find that you have a greater understanding of the times in which Reagan grew up, went to school (and became a Democrat), went to Hollywood (still a Democrat), entered public office (became a Republican..."I didn't leave the Democratic party...the party left me!")and went on to become our President. I can remember exactly where I was, as a little girl in third grade, when Reagan was shot. The story of his survival and recovery is amazing, particularly as told by an observer, one who was both close by and also an ordinary American watching the coverage on television. At the close of the book, we read about Reagan's decline into Alzheimer's and it broke my heart. Having just read about his amazing accomplishments, and blunders! in office (great in-depth coverage of his relationship with the then-Soviet Union), I cried over the description of the way in which he was eventually forced to abandon his full life. Reagan has been misunderstood by many Americans, particularly, but not only, the Left. He's been blamed for the arms race rather than credited for staving off such a confrontation, which he did. He's been blamed for the economy in the 80s rather than credited with the booming market we enjoy today, which is a result of both the market's cyclical nature and Reaganomics (not Clinton as he would like us to believe). This book was written for any American who is still proud of their country and wants to believe the best about its people. Reagan is a great inspiration and one of my personal heroes. By the way, I plan to read Edmund Morris'Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Teddy Roosevelt next. Enjoy! And then buy a copy for your grandmother.

Rating:
Summary: great novel, bad bio
Review: Fittingly, I feel compelled to interject a story from my own life as I begin this review. You see, I believe that there is a personal episode which illuminates the controversy surrounding this book. When I attended Colgate University (Class of '83), I was a History major, which required completion of a Senior Seminar including a major research project and paper. But, truth be told, I was not a particularly good student and as the deadline for this paper approached, I realized that I could not possibly hope to complete the volume of research that was expected of me. So I approached the professor, on the day the paper was due, and received tearful permission to alter my topic slightly, but this seemingly minor adjustment allowed me to essentially write an extended essay instead of a true research paper. Freed from the requirement that I actually go through the drudgery of research, I rattled off a really good twenty page essay in a couple days.

It seems to me that Edmund Morris found himself in much the same position and resorted to a similarly dishonest ploy in order to complete his Reagan biography. It is obvious that he did extensive work on Reagan's early life (say up to the end of his acting career) and, of course, he was in attendance for several years of the presidency. But what is missing here is the context and the background for Reagan's political career, let alone a detailed account of those years. Among the really pivotal events that go unmentioned or are dealt with in passing are all three presidential campaigns, the Panama Canal debates, the PATCO strike, the Tax Reform bill, etc. These are not little things. In fact, they are central to an understanding of what makes Reagan a seminal figure in recent history. No serious biography of Ronald Reagan can conceivably be complete without tackling them. So what happened?

Well, this is a really interesting illustration of my maxim that the commonly accepted wisdom is always wrong. Edmund Morris was hired to be Reagan's semi-official biographer on the strength of his Teddy Roosevelt biography, which truly is a great book. But there is one vital fact that noone realized at the time, and which still seems to elude critics and commentators; the book ends before it gets to the presidential years. We all just assumed: major political figure as topic + great book = ability (and or desire) to write a great political biography. But there is really no evidence that Morris understands, nor is curious about, the actual mechanics of politics and the impact of political ideas. In retrospect, it should have been seen as troubling that he was willing to set aside the Roosevelt story just as he got to what most biographers would consider the crux of the tale.

So we have here a terrific author, but foreign born and apparently uninterested in politics, trying to take on a man who transformed the political world. In order to begin to understand what had happened, Morris would have had to immerse himself, not just in personal interviews and old yearbooks and the like, but in research on the Cold War on American anti-Communism on the growth of the New Deal and the Great Society on Goldwater and Bill Buckley and so on. So he did what I did, he figured out a way to get around the heavy lifting. All the dodges and devices that he trots out are simply there to disguise the fact that he didn't feel like learning what he needed to in order to produce a genuine political biography. Instead, he gives us a book that is almost entirely personal. There is one particularly revealing passage late in the book, Morris's Diary entry of December 31, 1988:

For whatever reason, there was born here, far from the mattering world, an ambition as huge as it was inexorable. Out of Tampico's ice there grew, crystal by crystal, the glacier that is Ronald Reagan: an ever-thrusting, ever-deepening mass of chill purpose. Possessed of no inner warmth, with no apparent interest save in its own growth, it directed itself toward whatever declivities lay in its path. Inevitably, as the glacier grew, it collected rocks before it, and used them to flatten obstructions; when the rocks were worn smooth they rode up onto the glacier's back, briefly enjoying high sunny views, then tumbled off to become part of the surrounding countryside. The lie where they fell, some cracked, some crumbled: Dutch's lateral moraine. And the glacier sped slowly on.

In that sense, I suppose, one could say that the story of Reagan's life is a study in American topography. Thirteen hundred miles southeast of Tampico this winter day, the glacier has at last stopped growing. The nation's climate is changing; so is that of the world. New suns, new seasons, are due. Yet when all the ice is gone, when fresh green covers the last raw earth and some future skylark sings heedlessly over the Ronald Reagan National Monument, men will still ponder Dutch's improbable progress, and write on their cards, How big he was! How far he came! And how deep the valley he carved!

First, to give him his due, it is writing of this quality that had folks so excited about the prospect of a Ronald Reagan biography by Edmund Morris. But, to borrow his metaphor, the essential problem with the book is that it is completely focussed on the glacier and, when you get right down to it, we don't really care as much about glaciers for their intrinsic qualities, we care about the massive change that they wreaked on the environment that we now inhabit. Morris recognizes that Reagan changed the American topography, but he never examines that change. For him, the remarkable thing about Ronald Reagan is that he became president. For humankind, the remarkable thing about Reagan is that in the depths of the Cold War, when the USSR and Communism seemed to be winning and thirty years of Big Government had left America ill equipped to fight back, he imagined the West's eventual victory and the renaissance of an unfettered American economy and he imposed that dream upon an unwilling Western intellectual establishment, American Congress and seemingly ascendant Eastern Bloc. Today we live in the world that Ronald Reagan, but precious few others, envisioned. While Edmund Morris pursues the glacier to its end, he fails to comprehend the change left in its wake, perhaps because he fails to understand the constancy of purpose and the force of ideas which drove the glacier's progress.

The end result of all this is that Morris delivers up:

1) An excellent novel

and

2) The best written memoir we are ever likely to have by someone who knew Ronald Reagan

but

3) An extraordinarily inept and inexcusably lazy biography

GRADE: as a novel: A; as a biography: F

Rating:
Summary: Fact, Fiction or What Exactly?
Review: I almost gave up after the first fifty pages when I realized that I knew more about Edmund Morris than about Ronald Reagan at that point. Inserting himself into the narrative was clever--had it been a work of fiction, it would have been interesting to see this device extended to its fullest capacity. But, ultimately, cleverness isn't what generally works in a BIOGRAPHY. It takes away from the subject and makes the reader wonder how much is fact and how much is simply imagination and creativity. It does not guarantee veracity, or even credibility.

Understanding Morris' difficulty in grasping Reagan, I do give him credit for admitting this weakness--a historian and biographer can only do so much, even with unprecedented access to his subject. I do think that, in a way, granting Morris (or anyone) such access probably worked to Reagan's advantage in the end since it gave Reagan the ability to manipulate the entire process. Reagan was an enigma while in office and that will be his personal legacy.

Rating:
Summary: Dutch, A Simple Amazing American
Review: Edmund Morris, as he showed in "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt", is an outstanding writer. However, he agreed to be the biographer of a subject without any extensive depth. Ronald Reagan is a great man, a man who served his country to the best of his abilities. He was always an actor at heart. The President always had an amazing sense of drama. His performances were so strong, that he inspired the largest vote total in American history. President Reagan was not a man inclined to give deep thought to many subjects, unless they were of great stature. When giving issues, such as the cold war, the consideration they deserved, the president did not share his thoughts openly, but rather absorbed the opinions of others, and decided the best approach on his own. The President was also not a man who recorded many of his thoughts or feelings in writing. These facts contributed to Mr. Morris' need for a fictional character, to explain the Presidents actions, where factual evidence failed to exist. This character only contributes a greater understanding of the former President. If the reader begins this book with an open mind, they will find an outstanding biography of a great American with a great All-American story. This is by far the most informative book ever written about the former President. Mr. Morris was granted unprecedented access, and with his insightful and riveting writing style, presented the definitive biography of the former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan

Rating:
Summary: More than a biography.
Review: Morris has attempted to write more than a biography, that is an analysis and history of a person. He has tried to explain America's relationship to Reagan and how that relationship evolved. The narrator is of course not Morris himself, but a stylized "Morris", an academic who is familar with Reagan from his childhood but of different social standing in key ways. (This is why we need to learn about the narrator's family history.)

Reagan was a polarizing figure both in the 1960s and again when first elected President. It is unlikely he would have been elected against any other candidate than a Jimmy Carter struggling with the hostage crisis and failing economy. How did he become so popular? We see this explained, not explicitly by the narrator, but by how the author has the narrator react to Reagan.

The narrator is not an "everyman" but an academic with a reflective personality -- precisely the type of person who would have the most difficulty appreciating a man like Reagan. (The book starts with comments on how his fellow academics disliked Reagan -- at least until they met him.) He finally does appreciate Reagan, as do the other academics at a conference he attends late in the book.

In seeing how the narrator comes to love Ronald Reagan we begin to understand how Reagan overcame his upbringing and America's fears in the 1970s and 1980s to become a popular president.

The book is not perfect, I found it a bit long. But it is well written. In trying to understand the narrator and why Morris used it, we begin to understand a little bit of the complex relationship between Reagan and the America he loves.