For the next four years, Morris interviewed Reagan once a month in the Oval Office. He sat in on cabinet meetings and flew to Geneva to watch the president stare down Mikhail Gorbachev. But such nearness wasn’t enough for the besotted scribe. Reagan treated him as no more than a minor staff member or, worse, a journalist. Morris wanted to experience the real Reagan, the inner man who dwelled behind the one-liners and the speeches he used to both charm and deflect the world. The man who was known only to Nancy, if even to her. He wanted to be Reagan’s friend.
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“I wish I had a dollar,” Morris writes early in the book, “for each of the friends and family members who complained to me that Dutch never let them ‘get anywhere near.’”
Wow! As a first encounter, that’s as electric as the meeting of Troilus and Cressida. At least it is for Morris. Is it too much to say that a physical attraction is at work here? Maybe not. Morris is kept up on Dutch’s doings by cousin Paul, who becomes a classmate of Reagan’s at Eureka College and stalks him as ardently as the writer Aschenbach stalked his boy love Tadzio in Death in Venice. Paul’s letters are full of news about Dutch’s girlfriends, his football career, his acting, his lifeguarding.
Morris’s prologue tells us of a White House reception for eminent historians. There, Dutch melts Arthur S. Link, an Ivy League professor who enters the room a Reagan hater. The president jokes and flatters until the crusty academic is a puddle of affection. Finally Reagan suggests that nobody will be interested in his letters. “This was too much for Arthur, who by now was gazing at Reagan misty-eyed. ‘Mr. President!’ he roared, almost sobbing with adoration. ‘Six hundred years from now, historians will still be fascinated by your manuscripts!’…There was nothing to do but let rapture run its course.”
“I mean a President who feels what power is, and doesn’t have to compute it from poll figures.”
Morris also left Reagan’s presence “unsatisfied and insecure.” The last two years of Reagan’s presidency, when Morris had his greatest access, are described largely with tidbits of gossip picked up in White House hallways, Reagan diary entries, and anecdotes of the Oval Office sessions between biographer and subject. In these last, some of Morris’s stabs at chumminess are completely weird and embarrassing to read. On election day 1988, he tells Reagan he plans to vote for “Zippy.”
