Dutch : a memoir of Ronald Reagan
This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President--yet written with complete interpretive freedom--is as revolutionary in method as it is formidable in scholarship. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris developed a fascination for the genial yet inscrutable President and, after Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, put aside the second volume of his life of Roosevelt to become an observing eye and ear at the White House. During thirteen years of obsessive archival research and interviews with Reagan and his family, friends, admirers and enemies (the book's enormous dramatis personae includes such varied characters as Mikhail Gorbachev, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elie Wiesel, Mario Savio, Francois Mitterrand, Grant Wood, and Zippy the Pinhead), Morris lived what amounted to a doppelgAnger life, studying the young "Dutch," the middle-aged "Ronnie," and the septuagenarian Chief Executive with a closeness and dispassion, not to mention alternations of amusement, horror, and amazed respect, unmatched by any other presidential biographer. This almost Boswellian closeness led to a unique literary method whereby, in the earlier chapters of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Morris's biographical mind becomes in effect another character in the narrative, recording long-ago events with the same eyewitness vividness (and absolute documentary fidelity) with which the author later describes the great dramas of Reagan's presidency, and the tragedy of a noble life now darkened by dementia. "I quite understand," the author has remarked, "that readers will have to adjust, at first, to what amounts to a new biographical style. But the revelations of this style, which derive directly from Ronald Reagan's own way of looking at his 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."
Biographies
1 online resource : illustrations
9780307791429, 0307791424
774399139
Publisher's note
Prologue
The land of lost things
The rainbow on the roof
A dark form half hidden in the snow
A world elsewhere
Chimes at midnight
Air and water
The indifferent figure in the sand : a review
Long blue shadows
Inside story
Love is on the air
On the beach with Ronnie and Jane
A lonely impulse of delight
The end of the beginning
Celluloid commandos
The regeneration of the world
Star power : a dialogue
Down the divide : four short scenarios
Red or palest pink : a letter
This dismal wilderness
And then along came Nancy
The unexplored mystery of ploughed ground
Remember old Ma Reagan : a studio interview, 1954
Ladies and gentlemen of the California Fertlizer Association : a speech
Dark days
Reagan country
A sixty-year-old smiling public man
The ripple effect
I, Ronald Wilson Reagan
Back into the iron vest
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
Physicians of memory
Almost Air Force One
One on one
Explosions
The beginning of the end
Album leaves, 1987-1988
The shining city
Epilogue
Contains genuine and fictional characters
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