Edmund Morris, who died last week at 78, has the peculiar distinction of having written one of the best biographies of any American president, his three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt published between 1979 and 2010, and one of the worst, his “official” life of the 40th president, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan published in 1999. Let this be a lesson to biographers and presidents alike.
Morris was a graceful and perceptive writer. His life of Roosevelt, especially the first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, was not only a penetrating character study but did much to revive TR’s historic reputation, long overshadowed by his distant cousin Franklin. That, along with Morris’s conservative temperament and friendly feelings toward Reagan, seems to have persuaded such White House lieutenants as Michael Deaver, in the mid-1980s, to recruit Morris as Reagan’s authorized biographer. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off.
To begin with, strictly speaking, Morris was not an academic historian but a onetime advertising copywriter, raised in Kenya and South Africa, with an interest not in politics or history or, especially, ideology but in the psychological lives of his varied subjects. When it was announced in 1985 that Reagan’s official biographer would be granted unprecedented access to the president, putting Morris at his elbow at meetings and global summits and interviewing Reagan privately at least once a month, Newsweek observed that “the White House can expect a work as much about the person as his presidency. His greatest challenge, Morris predicts, ‘will be to define … this mysterious power that [Reagan’s] personality has upon the American people.”
A dozen years later, in effect, he conceded defeat. Morris could not diagnose that mysterious power. “He was truly one of the strangest men who’s ever lived,” Morris wrote of the Gipper. In desperation, Morris resorted to the unconventional device of inserting himself into Reagan’s personal history as friend and fictional character, showing up at opportune moments in Reagan’s long life. The upshot was a predictable mixture of interesting insights and surreal vignettes. Most of all, however, Dutch was a missed opportunity for chronicling a deeply consequential presidency and setting the tone for future Reagan scholarship.
To this day, while there are admirable accounts of Reagan’s considerable influence on his time, such as Steven F. Hayward’s notable two-volume Age of Reagan, there remains no truly satisfactory biography.
Part of the problem, of course, is that “official biographies” are largely intended as authorized versions of political events, with eyes fixed firmly on the judgment of posterity. Yet this was never really Morris’ intent. Fascinated by Reagan’s mysterious power, as well as the poignant details of his life, Morris was largely uninterested in the ideas and policies that, especially in contrast to the temper of his time, make Reagan such an important president.
The other problem, too, is that most successful American presidents have been enigmatic, self-contained, opaque characters — “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest,” as Abraham Lincoln’s law partner recalled — who, like Reagan, are benevolent strangers to family and friends. Ironically, this explains Morris’ success as well as his failure. The conventional wisdom on the subject was nicely captured last week by his New York Times obituary: While Morris “wrote an acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt,” it explained, “[he is] best known for his life of Ronald Reagan.”
The truth, however, is likely to be the opposite. Whatever emerges in the annals of Reagan scholarship, Dutch is unlikely to hold center stage; the same can hardly be said of Morris’ Theodore Roosevelt.
The great virtue of its three eloquent volumes, thankfully completed after Morris’ Reagan interlude, is its insightful thesis: TR was not simply a force of nature in national life but the center of a sweeping circle of acquaintances who shaped and defined modern America. Roosevelt, too, possessed “mysterious power,” which Morris was content to describe with thoughtful sympathy. If only he had taken the same approach with Reagan.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
