David Corn's
Loyal Opposition

Wednesday, October 6, 1999

In Dutch

Damn that Edmund Morris.

Here was a guy who had the chance to answer an important historical question: was Ronald Reagan a genius or an airhead? And he was well placed to do so. Morris was handpicked by the Reagan crowd to be Reagan's authorized biographer. He was granted unprecedented access to Reagan in the White House. He attended meetings, where he would be the only non-Reaganite in the room. He had one-on-one sessions with Reagan, where he could ask the old man anything. He was an outsider who could roam through Mr. Reagan's Neighborhood and then report back to the rest of us and supply the true skinny on Ronnie.

While Morris believes he has done that, his recon mission has been tainted by the now famous and infamous device he used to write Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan: he created a fictitious version of himself to serve as narrator. I was one of those critics who pounced on Morris before the book was even available for perusing. Biography ought to serve truth before literary form. Call me a fuddy-duddy conventionalist on this score. But having written a biography a few years ago--an arduous project in which I discovered it was tough to tell the story of a person's life while being restrained by facts--I resented Morris' easy-way-out technique of inserting fiction into nonfiction. (That he received $3 million from Random House for this exercise rendered him more worthy of blows to the knees.) After the first round of wrath descended upon him, I wondered if I might have been too rough on the fellow. But when the initial excerpts emerged, it turned out that he had gone beyond concocting an imagined narrator: he had written several fictitious people into the book and had crafted fictitious scenes in which the unreal people interact with the supposedly real Reagan. At one point, Morris, writing as "Morris" (who happened to have been born 28 years earlier than the author and who grew up in Illinois, conveniently in the vicinity of the young Reagan), tells the reader: "I was introduced to Dutch several times, and each was the first as far as he was concerned. Paul [another fictional character] asked if he recognized us from the beach at Lowell Park, whereupon he tapped his glasses and shook his head, smiling."

None of this happened. To depict it as the truth is lying. Too rough on him? No. Morris deserves all the available scorn. If Morris had wanted to create a new form, he should have labeled the book fictory, or fi-hi. But Dutch is not as Newsweek (which ran a lengthy excerpt of the book) calls it, "a controversial memoir." A memoir is purportedly true, even if most memoirists recreate past events. Morris--credit him for being honestly dishonest?--manufactures the reality of another and blends it with the "realities" of those who do not exist. One more example: when Morris, in four paragraphs, takes on the matter of Reagan's non-policy on AIDS, he rightfully notes that Reagan remained "unconcerned" with the disease during the early 1980s. To attach a human face to Reagan's neglect, Morris reports that fictitious Paul (a friend of the fictitious Morris) died of AIDS in 1982. This was laziness on Morris' part. Who cares about Paul? To bring to life Reagan's irresponsibility on AIDS, Morris should have sought out the public health advocates or gay activists who tried to convince the White House to care about AIDS. The story of their interaction with the Reagan Administration would have been more telling than Paul's demise. (Actually, on the last page of the book, Morris then notes that Paul died in 1985. Even the fiction in the book is not consistent.)

So Dutch is not to be trusted. Which is too bad, for Morris has, more or less, sided with the airhead view of Reagan, though, covering his bases, he hails Reagan as one of the great presidents. He refers to Reagan's "encyclopedic ignorance" and describes Reagan as a man who lived in an alternative-reality of his own--one in which Lenin had a plan for invading the United States through Mexico, Bolivians speak Portuguese, private cars have "exactly the same" fuel-efficiency rating as a bus, acid rain is caused by too many trees, coal plants produce more radiation than nuclear plants, he is younger than most other heads of state, South Vietnam and North Vietnam were "separate nations for centuries." (In case you don't know, none of that is true.) Morris attempts to be a bit sympathetic, explaining that Reagan dished out idiotic replies because he had to answer hundreds, if not thousands, of questions a day, frequently when he was groggy with fatigue. But Morris adds, "What horrifies, though, is that Reagan says exactly the same things when he is fresh, and after he has been repeatedly corrected; his beliefs are as unerasable as the grooves of an LP. The only reliable way to recognize the approach of a Reagan untruism is to listen for signal phrases: I have been told...and, As I've said many times..."

Morris, after spending years near Reagan, concluded that Reagan was something of a dunderhead, but one who believed in core principles (communism is evil, charity begins at home, more military spending is better than less military spending, government is bad) and was able to communicate these notions with masterful skill. Thankfully, Morris notes, most of the work of a president--at least, this president--entailed "initialing the recommendations of underlings."

Morris' conclusions, however, are trumped by his means. He has merely reignited a debate on Reagan, not settled it, which he had been in a position to do. The evidence, after all, was massive that Reagan resided in a factual fantasyland. When Reagan was in the White House, Mark Green, now New York City's public advocate, put out two editions of Reagan's Reign of Error, a delightful and frightening compendium of the foolish things Reagan had said before and while he was caretaker at 1600 Pennsylvania. Albert Gore gets crucified for remarking he helped create the Internet, Reagan got away with much more. He lied about the Iran-contra affair, stating at first his administration did not trade weapons for hostages. (Morris makes the point that even when Reagan eventually conceded this was false, he maintained he still believed it to be true. Such were Reagan's powers of belief.) While commander-in-chief, he commented that submarine-based nuclear missiles once launched could be recalled. They cannot. Of the brutal military in El Salvador, he said, "We are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador." Justifying his constructive engagement policy with the racist government of South Africa, he said, "Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" The leaders of the ruling Afrikaners of South Africa had been Nazi sympathizers. He claimed real earnings were increasing when they were decreasing. In 1983, he maintained, "There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge." Wrong. The US Forest Service estimated only about 30 percent of forest lands of 1775 still existed 208 years later. He once told the story of a brave WWII bomber commander who stayed behind with an injured subordinate and went down with the plane, noting that this commander was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News checked and found no such event had occurred--except in a 1944 movie. In 1985, Reagan quipped, "I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom." (It's svoboda.)

There are scores of other "Reagan untruisms" recorded in Green's book. In the 1987 book, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, Gary Wills notes that on two occasions, Reagan told visitors to the White House that when he was in the military he had filmed the Nazi concentration camps. That was false. He had served in Los Angeles, where he had made training films. Even Reagan's devotees could not avoid the obvious. In Triumph of Politics, David Stockman, Reagan's White House budget director, writes of one meeting with the boss: "What do you do when your president ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles? I could not bear to watch this good and decent man go on in this embarrassing way. I buried my head in my plate."

In the end, Morris was an appropriate selection as Reagan's chronicler. To catch a weaver of fiction send a weaver of fiction. It is unfortunate that the grand opportunity offered Morris--to tell us what life was really like on Planet Reagan--was subsumed by the author's ego, arrogance and misjudgment. Reagan may have received the biography he deserved. The reading public did not.

Back To Form

How reassuring to see Republicans act like Republicans. But then budget fights do bring out the worst in Washington, for that is where the money is. Last week, as the GOP-led Congress wrestled with the legislation that funds the government (measures that should have been passed weeks earlier, before the October 1 deadline), the Republicans passed spending bills that gutted Bill Clinton's 100,000-new-teachers initiatives and the AmeriCorps volunteer program. They also whacked at funds for low-income housing, cut money for the Wye River Middle East peace accords, and revived a plan to delay the benefits of an earned income tax credit for the working poor. Despite all this activity, they were not too busy to shove into these bills numerous provisions that weaken environmental regulations. These riders would allow mining companies to dump more waste on federal lands, permit companies to log in national forests before wildlife surveys are conducted, and defund international efforts to fight ozone depletion. So here we have the GOPers cutting money for teachers, student volunteers and the poor and protecting polluters. It was almost enough to make one believe there is a difference between the two parties. But then Texas Governor George W. Bush, who had previously supported the congressional Republicans' budget-busting tax cut scheme, denounced the House Republicans for their attempt "to balance their budget on the backs of the poor." Here was Bush ripping off a Bill Clinton riff. Remember how Clinton tried to distance himself from congressional Democrats? Welcome to GOP triangulation. Will Republicans desperate to win the White House with W. sit back and take it? I hope not. There is always room for more infighting within the Republican Party.

Forsaken

Tragedy. Dan Quayle left the presidential race. Even after he promised to stay the course following his embarrassing showing in the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Well, he explained in retreat, he looked at George W. Bush's $50-million bank account, reviewed the front-loaded primary schedule and concluded 2000 was not to be his year. What took him so long? Quayleless, the Republican contest will be less entertaining. He had provided some of the best moments so far. Such as when he proclaimed himself the GOPer most qualified to defeat Bill Clinton--who certainly will not be the Democratic nominee in 2000. But when Quayle folded, what first came to mind was a remark he had made to a Christian Coalition activist a few months ago: "If God is in this, I will be the next president of the United States." So is Quayle now undergoing a crisis of faith? Or does he now believe God--like one out of two Americans--will not be voting in this election?

Gore Caves

Several months ago, this column noted that Vice President Al Gore was part of a US government effort to force South Africa to cease efforts that would make AIDS medicines more affordable and accessible to its citizens. Responding to the health crisis ravaging southern Africa, the South Africans had passed legislation that would allow the manufacturing of generic AIDS medicine and the import of AIDS medicines from countries where they are less expensive. Drug companies were not keen on these steps, which could cut into their massive profits, and the administration threatened South Africa--where as many as one out of six people may be HIV positive--with trade sanctions. Because Gore is the cochairman of a U.S.-South Africa binational commission used by Washington to bully South Africa, AIDS activists and others directed protests at him. Demonstrators interrupted his presidential announcement in June. At other Gore campaign events, they chanted, "AIDS Drugs for Africa" and "Gore's Greed Kills." The pressure was too much for Gore and the Clinton Administration. Recently, the US Trade representative and the South African government announced the United States would end its campaign against the South African laws. Score a win for citizen activists.

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