September 22, 1999
LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD
Forrest Gump Biography
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ASHINGTON -- Fourteen years ago, Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, began a quest to find Ronald Reagan's inner life.
He traveled far and wide, basking
in unprecedented access to his President, hunting for the golden fleece of
biography -- the inner life.
But, as the seasons faded away, as
the Random House deadlines faded
away, as the poor former President
faded away, it became ever more
apparent: the futile search for the
inner Reagan had driven his biographer barking mad.
The more access Mr. Morris got,
the more elusive Dutch became. Every time the biographer scratched
away one veneer, he found an identical veneer underneath.
Was Ronald Reagan an "airhead,"
to use Mr. Morris's words, or "a colossus"? A colossal airhead? An airy
colossus?
Suffering from a historic case of
writer's block, the historian distracted
himself by swanning around town, dining at fancy tables, whining that he
couldn't quite get a grip on his subject.
He was beginning to suspect the
worst: the President who had helped
bring down global Communism and
shore up global capitalism, the President who loomed larger a decade out
of power, had no inner life.
In 1990, Mr. Morris confessed his
despair to fellow historians in a
speech at the University of Virginia.
He described the former President
as "the most mysterious man I have
ever confronted. It is impossible to
understand him." He said he had gone
through "a period of a year or so of
depression because I felt that with all
my research, how come I can't understand the first thing about him?" Mr.
Reagan, his Boswell said, "grew more
puzzling the more I tried to study him.
I only came out of this despair when I
found out that everybody else who had
ever known him, including his wife, is
equally bewildered."
But in our society, nothing succeeds
like failure. After many, many, many
years, Mr. Morris had a brainstorm.
He would squander the unparalleled
-- and contemporaneous -- access.
Unable to find Reagan's inner drama,
not satisfied with such an intriguing
President, Mr. Morris decided to
make up some drama of his own.
In an exercise of fearless egotism,
he inserted himself into the life of his
subject, appearing in Ronald Reagan's biography as Edmund Gump,
historian. In his book, Mr. Morris, who
in real life was born in 1940, first
meets Dutch at Dixon High in the 20's
and then encounters him regularly
throughout the course of Mr. Reagan's career. He invented a different
Morris family tree, a more patrician
family from the Midwest with different first names and professions. (Mr.
Morris was born in Kenya to a middle-class family.)
Looking for foils with inner lives, he
invented a son for himself, a member
of the Weathermen, to comment on
Mr. Reagan from a radical 60's perspective, and stuck in an imaginary
columnist to be snide about Mr. Reagan in the Hollywood years. He even
devised bogus footnotes to document
his bogus characters.
His most delightful stratagem was
to omit all acknowledgment of this
fiction from his book. He feared that
the dramatic effect would be ruined;
and he worried more about dramatic
effect than historical veracity.
Random House got nervous and
mentioned it on the book flap, struggling to present Mr. Morris's lunacy
as a virtue: "Morris's biographical
mind becomes, in effect, another
character in the narrative."
Biographers say they have to guard
against taking on the characteristics
of their subjects. But Mr. Morris has
surrendered completely. He has himself become a creature of Reagan
esque unreality. He has become "an
authentic phony," as James Reston
described Mr. Reagan.
It was very rich to hear the same
Reagan aides who used to have to
defend the Reagan figments expressing outrage over the Morris figments.
Mr. Morris's batty book is surely
destined for commercial success.
There's a lot of nostalgia for Reagan
and Reaganism. And we have become
a culture of morphing. Entertainment
has overwhelmed truth, and the universities are riddled with professors
who deny that objectivity is possible.
Mr. Morris's timing is fortuitous.
He has pioneered the Ally McBeal
school of historiography, in which we
regularly cut away from the action
for wacky out-of-body fantasies.
"If this is the authorized biography
of Ronald Reagan," says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New
Republic, "I think I'll wait for the
unauthorized biography."
