The long-awaited authorised biography of former President Ronald Reagan is out and a lot of people are unhappy that the author may have squandered his chance to write the definitive work.
It was a bad mistake to choose Edmund Morris to write the life of Reagan, the admirers of the film star who became president are now complaining. Morris, who was born in Kenya 59 years ago and brought up in South Africa, does seem a somewhat unlikely person to explore the life and times of Reagan.
He is being denounced for how he approached his task but not for his industry which has produced a book of 874 pages including notes called Dutch - A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Dutch was the name his father called him and it stuck during Reagan's early years.
Incidentally, Morris is dismissive of Reagan's Irish roots and claims that "the O'Regans of Ballyporeen had been famous for their liquor consumption".
What is irritating both admirers and critics of Reagan is that Morris has mixed fact with fiction in an attempt to get inside the head of his subject who is now sadly ending his days in California suffering from Alzheimer's and being lovingly cared for by his wife Nancy. Morris himself was surprised to be approached in 1985, just as Reagan began his second term, to write the authorised biography and promised enviable access to the president, his papers and his closest friends and aides.
Morris had won a Pulitzer prize for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt which was widely admired in Republican circles and was working on the second volume when the call came to the White House.
A $3 million contract and the promise of full co-operation persuaded Morris to switch from Roosevelt to Reagan but he soon began to worry about what he had taken on. "After three or four meetings, I realised that culturally he was a yahoo and extremely unresponsive in conversation," Morris this week told Newsweek.
"When you asked him a question about himself, it was like dropping a stone into a well and not hearing a splash. I never got anywhere in interviews, except for odd moments of strangeness, like the time I showed him a leaf and he began talking about his boyhood . . . I do not hide the fact that Reagan was frequently an old spaced-out man, inattentive to detail." But Morris also insists that Reagan did not begin to suffer from the effects of Alzheimer's until after he left office in 1988.
As the years passed and Morris got more bogged down trying to figure out Reagan, he had "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?"
Then one day as Morris was walking around Eureka College, Illinois, the small university attended by Reagan, he got inspiration. "I literally got the taste of electricity in my mouth," he says. "I thought of Reagan. If only I could have been there in the fall of 1928. I could describe him as vividly as I could describe him as president."
And that is what Morris did which is causing the present uproar. He inserted himself into Reagan's life as a "semi-fictional" character who pops up in the earlier periods of Reagan's life long before Morris was born in 1940. But he does not alert the reader to what he has done.
Morris even provides fake footnotes for his fake character and invents a son and several friends from whom he quotes. The "For rest Gump Biography" sneers columnist Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. "A Dishonourable Work" thunders another critic, George Will, in the Washington Post and on it goes.
Morris defends his method as "the perfect technique to capture a person whose entire life was a performance." Morris has also infuriated Reagan's vice-president, George Bush, and his wife by quoting from a conversation where Bush says about his boss the he "didn't seem to want us upstairs in the White House."
"That's ridiculous," Bush has told NBC television. "Upstairs? I mean that's kind of an English . . . upstairs and downstairs approach to life. I don't even use the terminology."
Maureen Reagan, daughter of the former president, is also not enamoured with the Morris approach. "I have decided that I have read all the fiction about Ronald Reagan I intend to read, so I think I will pass on this book."
"So much for the maturity of her judgment," snaps back Morris.
Three other Reagan children, Michael, Patti and Ron, have expressed their support for Morris based on his TV appearance. But Michael said that he was upset that Morris dedicated the book to Christine Reagan who died soon after she was born prematurely to Jane Wyman, Reagan's first wife. What Nancy Reagan, who approved of Morris as biographer of her beloved Ronnie, thinks of the result we do not yet know. It was she who told Morris that Jane Wyman tricked him into marriage with a suicide threat.
Morris is also trying to extricate himself from calling Reagan "an apparent airhead". He now says that he used that phrase only to convey what he thought of the president early on and to describe "the utter banality of his private conversation, in contrast to the magic of his public performance".
Former President Bush called the "airhead" observation "brutal and grossly unfair and untrue".
Morris appears to veer between exasperation with the protective wall Reagan put up against him and his admiration for his qualities and his achievements as president.
He will be glad to get back to Teddy Roosevelt.