Morris tried to capture Reagan in fact and fiction

I read with regret of the recent death of Edmund Morris, an accomplished historian and biographer with two enviable feathers in his hat. One was a prize study of Theodore Roosevelt, the other a controversial “memoir” of Ronald Reagan that became a sign for the times. It was called “Dutch,” Reagan’s longstanding nickname. And it may have changed presidential biography and with it the very idea of what presidents do.

Many recent presidents have invited historians into the White House, as John F. Kennedy did Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and FDR the playwright Robert Sherwood. Morris’s invitation was, however, unique: He was to have unprecedented personal and official access — a special case of a general practice. The result was a brilliant but unorthodox portrait; and thereby hangs a tale.

I did not know Morris well, but I recall a supper at the house of mutual friend’s house in Baltimore in the early Reagan years when he was just settling into his task. Morris was happy to have the assignment, a biographer’s dream — but utterly disconcerted. He told us that evening that Ronald W. Reagan was “the most unusual man” and in some ways the strangest he had ever met. The veil was not translucent.

Ronald Reagan was known to be given to amiable illusions — such as the tale of the captain who told his badly wounded navigator in a shot-up bomber who was unable to bail out, “Don’t worry son, we’ll ride it down together” — an heroic tale that turned out to be an old movie script. He also claimed at times that he had been present at the discovery of the Nazi death camps.

But these fables and foibles weren’t what worried Morris — it was Reagan’s impenetrable personality. He had to drag reminiscences out of Reagan and occasionally asked himself whether the president was merely a bore. Something unusual could be anticipated in the book he published five years later as “Dutch.” It was a beautifully wrought but self-conscious work whose startling novelty was scores of pages of invention — a fictionalized narrator and voices, no-nos in historical writing. Orthodox historians belabored Morris for squandering a gilded opportunity.

But perhaps the technique fit the changing conditions. Anyone who observes the post-TV (now post-digital) presidency is well aware that the office offers lavish resources for illusion. Indeed its current occupant has shown that demagoguery and constant fabrication lie just around the corner. So perhaps the issue raised by “Dutch” was whether it fostered more fiction than it dispelled, reinforcing the appearance of presidential government as a solo act, a theatrical star turn, eclipsing and antiquating the legislative and judicial branches.

Did Ed Morris crack the mystery he outlined with anguish that night in Baltimore? Certainly it pushed him to extremes, for which he offered this defense: ”Readers will have to adjust, at first, to... a new biographical style. But the revelations of that style, which derives directly from Reagan’s own way of looking at life, are I think rewarding enough to convince them that one of the most interesting characters in recent American history looms here like a colossus.”

Eloquently said, but his professional colleagues aren’t yet buying. The TV/digital presidency that Reagan exemplified may be beyond recall to mundane historical documentation — a mythic idolatry floating free from the workaday world. “Dutch” signaled a new world, inventive but disturbing for those of us who believe in the vital function of mere politics.

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is retired after a career as a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.