>>Hard not to have some sympathy for Edmund Morris even though I viscerally object (w/o, I admit, having read his book) to the literary conceit he chose. He has listed a string of characteristics, all amply documented, that add up to an airhead. And he is being repeatedly pressed by a shocked commentariat to justify his pasting of the label "Great" onto this individual. On Charlie Rose, he gave these reasons for his meta-conclusion that, overall, the airhead he portrayed was a great man.
Your unreasoned, raging hatred clouds your head. You embarrass yourself and your friends feel that embarrassment. Despite your addled "fabulations", Morris never said Reagan was an airhead. In fact, he said the precisely the opposite:
COURIC: There has been a lot of outrage expressed by President
Reagan's friends and associates about your use of the word airhead...
Mr. MORRIS: Yes.
COURIC: ...to describe him. George Bush says it's brutal, grossly
unfair, untrue....[Couric lists other angry responses]
Mr. MORRIS: I agree with every single one of those. It's brutal and
grossly unfair. I did not call him an airhead. The quote as published first in
The Washington Post dropped the word "apparent" before head. What I
said in the book, what appears plainly on the pages, I found him at first an
apparent airhead. And the whole course of the book makes quite obvious
that that first impression was wrong.
COURIC: So you do not believe today that Ronald Reagan was an
airhead?
Mr. MORRIS: Oh, good God, no. He was a very bright man. At first
I was surprised and--and dismayed by the apparent banality of his
Conversation couldn't reconcile this — but the — the —the utter
ordinariness of the private man with how magical he became when he
stepped out in f be shallow. He seemed to have no culture. He seemed to
have-to be resistant to new ideas from outside. He seemed all these things.
One of the reasons it took me 14 years to write the book was to come to
grips with this apparent simplicity which concealed depths and depths and
depths.
COURIC: So you believe, today, that he is a man of great depth, or
was?
Mr. MORRIS: Oh, absolutely. He was a huge and important man. He
had a-he had a presidential mind. He was a statesman. He kept himself to
himself, which is one of the reasons it was hard to penetrate him.
COURIC: Indeed...
Mr. MORRIS: Ronald Reagan was a formidable person.
COURIC: You describe him as a great president.
Mr. MORRIS: I believe him to be a great president, without any =
question. It took me years to come to — to that conclusion. And I think
it's a material conclusion. We look around, what has he — what —the
world has changed. Where is communism? Where is our national malaise?
Where are our self-doubts of the 1970s? They're all gone. Why?
COURIC: .... capabilities. You seem to be back pedaling significantly
from those characterizations.
Mr. MORRIS: No, no, no. If you were with Ronald Reagan in
private, he would start telling you stories. And the stories were delicious.
And you would convulse with laughter. Then, when you saw him again,
you would hear that same story repeated, with exactly the same emphasis,
the same pauses, the same words. And after you'd heard that story 17, 25,
32 times, always the same story, it began to be alarmingly boring. You see,
he didn't really care who his audience was, as long as he could continue to
perform and make his points..... He was not curious about other people's
characters. He didn't have — he was not remotely interested in who you
were and what you felt. He had large statesmanlike objectives, and he had
no self-doubt about himself whatsoever. That's the most striking thing
about the diaries. This man never doubted himself.
COURIC: Maureen Reagan, the president's eldest daughter, read
excerpts and called them fiction. She added: 'I suspect when all is said and
done, given the unprecedented access graciously provided the author, the
American people will conclude that the author wasted an incredible and
irreplaceable opportunity.'
Mr. MORRIS: Well, Katie, you can never do business with families.
They're always protective. I had fabulous access. I made the best use of it.
And nobody who has read this book, I'm convinced, will come away from
it without thinking this was an extraordinary president and somebody who
was deeply admired by the author.
COURIC: ...which is quite interesting, and very unique. You use
semifictional characters. .... Why did you need to do that?
Mr. MORRIS: Because I wanted to bring the same closeness of
observation to him when he was young that I had in the White House. You
know, in the White House I was sitting across the desk from him. I could
hear his voice, I could look at his hair, I could look at his clothes, I could
—I could smell his cologne, I could listen to the texture of his voice and
watch the play of expressions in his face. And I had copious documentary
evidence of what he was like when he was younger. But because I was
physically not there for the first 70 years, it was difficult to write about him
in conventional style as vividly as I was able to write about him as
president.
COURIC: So you have fictional characters in fictional situations Having
fictional conversations based on things you knew about Ronald Reagan or
believed to be true?
Mr. MORRIS: Never — never fictional conversations with him.
COURIC: Well, obviously, there are some fictional conversations
between the young Edmund Morris and Ronald Reagan because...
Mr. MORRIS: No, no, no. No, absolutely not. There are no fictional
conversations. .... Every word that Ronald Reagan speaks in the book,
every thought he thinks, every detail, like if I talk about the smell of liniment
on a particular day, it's because I have documentary evidence that the
smell of liniment was in the air.
COURIC: Do you think that there's anything dishonest about this
technique?
Mr. MORRIS: On the contrary, I think it's more honest because all I
ask of the reader up front is to accept the presence of a storyteller, just as
when you were a child you accepted the presence of the projector in the
movie house. You looked up, you saw that it was projecting a movie, and
from then on you forgot about the projector and for the rest of your life
you've been watching movies coming out of this camera. All I ask of the
reader is that they think of me as the camera, projecting a documentary
movie about Ronald Reagan in which every detail is true. |
