To: Ilaine who wrote (58518 ) 10/11/1999 9:49:00 PM From: Lizzie Tudor Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Sorry if this is redundant, this is my last post on this topic....nytimes.com The notion that it makes no difference whether Reagan experienced something in person or from film is even more outrageous than any of the fictionalized characters in this book. But the difference clearly did not matter to Reagan. His world was famously populated with welfare 'queens' who did not exist, with trees that caused pollution. If Bill Clinton's reputation is for telling lies, Reagan's was just for saying things that were not true. That he was able to sell this fine distinction to the public surely qualifies him as a political genius. Morris agrees: Reagan wasn't lying, because he believed what he said, even after being told that it was false. In the end, 'Dutch' is not political history but a character study of a world-bending personality possessed of firm beliefs and a hollow core. Some of the personal details are known, but they are shocking when laid out in Morris's narrative: the grandson whom Reagan never found time to meet; the fact that three of his children have written of moments when he seemed not to know who they were; Nancy Reagan's rueful admission that there have been times when she too felt frozen out. (She briefly stopped speaking to him during the Iran-contra scandal and was devastated when Reagan failed to console her when she learned she had breast cancer. ) At the end of the book, Morris visits Dutch in late 1994 and the image of the isolated lifeguard returns unbidden. Reagan, closed off more than ever by Alzheimer's disease, rambles incoherently, but then poignantly he shows his visitor a watercolor of a riverbank. 'This,' Dutch says, snapping into focus, 'is where I was a lifeguard for seven [sic] summers. I saved 77 lives. And you know, none of 'em ever thanked me!' The truth, as Morris reminds us repeatedly, was just the opposite. Reagan never thanked anybody for anything. Morris is hardly the first writer to notice that Reagan came of age in a dream factory. But there has never been as complete a portrait of Reagan's vanity, passivity, ambition and fantasizing tendencies from such an admiring source. The description here of Dutch arriving at the walled and gated city of the Warner Brothers back lot powerfully conveys a sense of a young man meeting his destiny. He had, after all, been dramatizing, embellishing and perhaps fictionalizing his life for years. An often-told Reagan anecdote recalls his shock at finding his father lying on the doorstep in a drunken stupor. Morris's research has taken him to an obscure novel loved by Reagan, in which just such a scene also takes place.
