Edmund Morris - Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

As you read onand such is the force and fascination of Mr. Morriss narrative that you cant help reading onyou begin to see the benefits of his highly unorthodox technique. Is Dutch then finally flawed by Mr. Morriss technique? To judge from the books extensive notes, it in no way distorts the record of Mr. Reagans life, only the viewpoint from which it is told. Its difficult to approve the technique in theory; in less skilled hands it will doubtless prove a disaster. But it certainly succeeds in this case.

C HRISTOPHER L EHMANN -H AUPT , The New York Times

A compelling, richly informative, conceptually courageous book that constitutes a relentless pursuit of truth the most insightful book in print about Ronald Reagan and the meaning of his presidency, and it may very well remain so for many years.

M ICHAEL P AKENHAM , Baltimore Sun

Dutch paints a powerful and surprising portrait of a great world leaderthe greatest American president since Harry Truman.

D EIRDRE D ONAHUE , USA Today

As Morris accompanied the President to meetings in the Oval Office, summits with Mikhail Gorbachev and political events around America, he must have realized that his experience would give unusual depth and richness to his overall portrait of Reagan. Nor was he wrong. [He] gets the Big Picture triumphantly right.

J OHN OS ULLIVAN , National Review

Morris can write beautifully, especially when he is limning action or sense impressions; his account of the 1981 attempt on Reagans life, for example, is a marvel of muscular description.

H ENDRIK H ERTZBERG , The New Yorker

I read and read, with increasing fascination and enjoyment. I also found myself living the book, enjoying the book, loving the book in places and putting it down, finally, feeling wistful about Reagan and thinking that he would understand Morriss approach. Dutch is Edmund Morriss Citizen Kane. A compulsively readable bookand one that strikes me as fundamentally true and fair.

R ICHARD C OHEN , The Washington Post

Now, ten years after the end of [Reagans] term, we have a biography that makes exceptional efforts to explain him. I read the book not at the wasting pace you ordinarily read large biographies but in a thrall. Dutch rocks.

M ICHAEL W OLFF , New York magazine

A superlative read, a page-turner. Dozens of historians and biographers in the coming decades will work over the Reagan years. Many will be policy wonks, well-equipped to interpret what happened and why. None will come closer than Morris to the man himself. This is a wonderful book.

D AVID W ARSH , The Boston Globe

An absolute page-turner. It takes as its model what is generally regarded as the greatest biography in the English language, James Boswells Life of Samuel Johnson.

J OSEPH E LLIS , The Washington Post Book World

A reader who surrenders to Morriss blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a higher truth justifying the books technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Dutch never fails to evoke the power and mystery of its subject.

S TEVEN R. W EISMAN , The New York Times Book Review

The perspectives with regard to Reagan are neither damaged nor diminished by his technique. Indeed, they are enhanced. The book is well-written, copiously documented, and a delight to read.

T HOMAS V. D I B ACCO , Orlando Sentinel

Morris is a master prose stylist and leaves the reader in awe of his powers. Dutch is a major work, one that approaches Reagans persona as closely as may be possible.

J AY S TRAFFORD , Richmond Times-Dispatch

Plausible, dramatic, literary, and lit with dazzling flashes of insight.

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The author has done the considerable research that the biography of a major figure requires. Morriss many-faceted mirrors give us vivid, varied impressions of Dutch.

W ILLIAM S. M C F EELY , The Boston Globe

It contains astonishing observations and insights, wonderful stories and incomparable story-telling.

T ERRY G OLWAY , New York Observer

Controversial in form, and monumental, complex, and imaginative in substance.

J OHN M ERONY , The American Enterprise

Morris has observed power in action more closely than anyone who wasnt actually employed by the administration. He has written an authorized presidential biography in a wildly unconventional and idiosyncratic form, and Dutch is compelling, vastly readable and extraordinarily well written.

S ARA W HEELER , The Weekend Telegraph

Reagans stature makes it more, not less, imperative for his biography to be imaginative, to do whatever it can to explain the man behind the polite smile. Readers will decide if Morris created a plausible image of the beloved and mysterious Reagan. The biographer, however, broke no rules because there are no rules to break.

J ULIA K ELLER , Chicago Tribune

What [Morris] produced was something like a Picasso. It was both more and less than people bargained for, and so it seems like an anomaly in the gallery. He stepped over the limits assigned to him, trying to explore the unexplorable, to express the inexpressible. The result has all the hallmarks of a great creative work, not the least of which is that its greatness is not apparent at first glance.

J OAN G IVNER , The Toronto Star

Copyright 1999 by Edmund Morris

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

M ODERN L IBRARY and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book was originally published in hardcover, without the Publishers Note,
by Random House, Inc., in 1999.

Portions of has been adapted from an article in Time, August 19, 1996.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to
reprint previously published material:

Commentary: Excerpts from A Guide to Reagan Country, by James Q. Wilson (Commentary, May 1967), and excerpts from Bitburg: Who Forgot What, by Midge Decter (Commentary, August 1985). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Editions Gallimard: Eight lines from LArtiste et son temps (in French) from Actuelles II: Chroniques 19481953, by Albert Camus. Copyright Editions Gallimard. Reprinted by permission.
Estate of James Baldwin: Excerpts from Notes for a Hypothetical Novel, by James Baldwin, collected in Nobody Knows My Name, published by Vintage Books. Copyright 1961 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Used by arrangement with the Estate of James Baldwin.
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