Mixing Fact and Fiction

It was the summer of 1989, as I recollect, the kind of swampy, sweaty Washington day that makes cheap, polyester, short-sleeve shirts stick to the bulging middles of the bureaucrats. Edmund Morris and I ducked into the coolness of the F Street Club. Edmund had driven over from his Capitol Hill town house in his new Jaguar sedan. But even the soothing luxury of the club didn't seem to console Edmund.

"I just don't get him," he complained. He was working on the first authorized biography of a sitting President, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Part of Morris' mountainous $3 million advance was already earning interest in the money market. "He seems so vacant, so empty," Morris complained. "Yet he did great things; he was a great President. Maybe as great as Teddy Roosevelt." Edmund had won a Pulitzer for his 1979 biography of the heroic T.R.

I hadn't spent as much time with Reagan as Edmund had, but I had covered him as candidate and as President. I first interviewed Reagan in 1967, when he was Governor of California. I told Edmund that story, hoping it would be instructive:

I was ushered into the Governor's office in Sacramento, and there sat Reagan, suit coat buttoned, appearing to pore over some documents. I clicked on the tape recorder, or thought I did. Assured of a magnetic record, I neglected to take notes. We talked for nearly an hour. Back at the hotel, I discovered that the tape had not worked. When the panic subsided, I replayed the conversation in my head, for in those fine days, my memory was still crisp. Reagan had said nothing of interest. Blank tape, empty notebook, shallow man.

The first part of this reminiscence is fictional, although some of the specifics are true. I have never met Edmund Morris. The account of the interview in Sacramento is true, or is at least my best recollection.

And that's what it's like reading Morris' new biography, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Random House; 874 pages; $35). There is fact and there is fiction, and they are jumbled together. The facts are meticulously footnoted in an epic 115-page section at the end of the book. But so is the fiction. Morris has created detailed and utterly false notes to buttress the fanciful parts of his book, which feature a fictional character, also named Edmund Morris, who is a contemporary of Dutch Reagan's. That he called the book a "memoir" and not a biography is of course a tip-off to the game.

This dramatic departure from standard biographical orthodoxy has already, even before the book goes on sale this week, set off alarms, with traditionalists condemning Morris and Morris himself scheduling a blitz of appearances on the TV yack shows to explain and defend his heterodoxy. The Old Guard from the Reagan White House, who had arranged Morris' appointment as official chronicler, are all holding their breath, concerned only that their beloved President be lovingly portrayed, by whatever device. Said Ken Duberstein, Reagan's last White House chief of staff: "I'm not looking forward to it, and I don't know anyone who is." Perhaps not accidentally, the very boldness of Morris' device is bringing a flood of attention to the book, 14 anguished years in the making, and will surely spark an initial rush to buy it. Finally, it will rekindle the debate over whether Reagan moved the history of his time or was merely present at its creation.