Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Reagan Biographer Speaks About Former President

Reagan Biographer Speaks About Former President

By Andreas Andrea Hoya Staff Writer

Edmund Morris, author of Dutch, the official biography of Ronald Reagan, spoke to a group of approximately 45 students about the controversial book in Copley Formal Lounge on Monday.

The brief address and question and answer session was Morris’s second visit to Georgetown this year. Morris came to Georgetown earlier in the year to sign copies of Dutch, a New York Times best-selling book. Morris’ wife Sylvia was also present at the event.

Morris said that his challenge in writing Dutch was to “tell the story of the extraordinary life story of the president of the United States and figure out the image and the real man behind the desk.”

One of the underlying themes of Dutch, as Morris explained, is that Reagan was “all through his life, by nature, an actor.” Morris said that Reagan’s first “acting” experience was at a 1928 student strike at Eureka College, where he was picked to give a speech to the administration.

According to Morris, Reagan was hard to understand because he needed a “role” to play in life, and without that role, he was incomplete. Ronald Reagan, Jr., believes that none of his father’s roles, from sports announcer to president, ever seemed to rub off on him, Morris said. Reagan, Morris said, was just an ordinary man in between roles.

Reagan could never tell his family or neighbors in his small Illinois town that he wanted to be an actor because, according to orris, Reagan said that his community was so conservative that they would have thought he was either homosexual or crazy.

Morris’s methods of telling Reagan’s story from his birth to his November 1995 disclosure of Alzheimer’s disease is “not used in scholarly biography but dates back to Homer.” He continued to defend his method during the event and said, “from the first to the last it is authentic and documented” and that the only fiction was the narrator.

His logic for using the narrator was that since Reagan’s nature was that of an actor, the only way he could tell Reagan’s story was through the perspective of an observer or an audience.

As far as getting a reaction from the Reagan family, Morris said that he got “varied” feedback, with Reagan’s three youngest children supporting Morris, but Reagan’s eldest daughter, Maureen, saying that the book was “disrespectful.”

Morris also said that he did not see any signs of Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease while he was in the White House, although he did see signs of Reagan’s aging. The first signs of Alzheimer’s orris saw were four years after Reagan left the presidency.

Speaking about more current political issues, Morris said that Arizona Senator and Republican presidential hopeful John McCain is the “most substantial and admirable” person running for president. orris also described President Bill Clinton (SFS ’68) as “the Internet, free-flowing” character who just goes with the newest fad but who is probably more in tune with the current times than is cCain.

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