Book Review

Methods/Theory

This is the first harlequin historical romance to be reviewed in the AHR, and it arrives covered in scandal. Everyone knows that Edmund Morris invented his own fictional family and counterfeit scholarly apparatus to propel himself back into the early life of the man known as Dutch only until Hollywood gave him back the name he had been born with. The fictional narrator keeps company with Ronald Reagan from his Duck River lifeguard early life through the Hollywood blacklist, the divorce, and the remarriage. The fictional narrator's fictional son—co-author of the Port Huron statement, instigator with his "buddy" Mario Savio (p. 328) of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement's first sit-down, then a violent black power militant and troublemaker at the Chicago Democratic convention, and finally lost in the Weather Underground—speaks for the un-American activities that elected Reagan governor of California. Instead of history taking over from fiction once Reagan is in the White House, the author's inventions bleed seamlessly into the president's.	1
Morris knows exactly what he is doing. The "revelations" of "what amounts to a new biographical style," he explains on the jacket cover, "derive directly from Ronald Reagan's own way of looking at his life." "Revelations" is the right word. Any apologia that pretends that this president did not live in his imagination is vulnerable to documentary refutation. Morris's Reagan believed he was present at the liberation of the death camps because he had seen the footage on film. In the world he inhabited, not that of ordinary mortals, he had employed a defensive super-weapon in the movies before he embraced Star Wars in life; he never traded arms for hostages; he did not orchestrate the Hollywood blacklist, since there never was such a thing; he recycled fiction as fact. Reagan transcended the mere earthly distinction between history and fantasy by answering to a higher call: "Imagination, not mendacity, was the key to Dutch's mind" (p. 398). Dutch is Parsifal, the "innocent fool" who recovered the holy grail.	2
The Wagnerian leitmotif brings Parsifal on stage early in this quest romance by way of a screenplay scenario "(Softly we begin to hear the Innocent Fool motif from Parsifal)," in which young Dutch comes upon his father, "his arms spread out as if he were crucified," passed out from drink (p. 39). There follows the stage direction: "CHOIR: Durch Mitleid wissend, Der reine Tor!" Morris goes straight from Parsifal through John Bunyan to Reagan's invocation of "a shining city on a hill" (p. 401). Since Reagan's innocence of evil is the condition for his triumph over it, what seems like moral insensitivity—at Bitburg, about race discrimination, against the homeless—is the condition that allows him to "appeal for the protection of innocents from incoming missiles" (p. 477), whether he is opposing abortion (as in the phrase just quoted) or sponsoring the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). What defeated "the evil empire" was "the fundamentally childlike, bipolar quality of the President's mind" (p. 458).	3
Innocent mind and glorious body, for the overheated descriptions of Dutch's physique are as organic to this romance as is the Wagnerian theme. He won the Cold War not only by battering the Soviet Union with SDI but also by physically dominating his Soviet counterpart. At Geneva, the massive innocence of "der reine Tor" evoked "something akin to tenderness" from Mikhail Gorbachev (p. 566), who told the former Hollywood actor that he enjoyed "particularly [the movie] where you lost your legs" (p. 567). Even Gorbachev fell under Reagan's spell. The book's prologue has already pointed forward to this Cold War climax. "His shoulders were broad and he walked with extraordinary grace," as the narrator describes seeing Dutch for the first time. "'Who's this fellow?' I whispered. Paul shrugged. The square-cut youth and I briefly exchanged glances" (p. 56).	. . .