With the exception of NBC's Today, network stories on the Reagan biography by Edmund Morris relayed both his negative and positive assessments of Reagan, though giving precedence to the derisive comments, as the controversy over Morris's use of fictional characters sometimes became the lead. All the stories let former Reagan aides contradict Morris's claims and Dan Rather dubbed the book "a controversial new fiction biography."
MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens pointed out how NBC's Today twice opened the show this week by highlighting how Morris dismissed Reagan as an "airhead."
At the top of Monday's broadcast, co-host Katie Couric exclaimed: "Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead! That's one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that's drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999."
Tuesday morning Today featured a taped interview with President Bush who denied Morris's claims that he and Reagan were distant, but co-host Matt Lauer still opened by citing the "airhead" charge: "Good morning. For the first time President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. And in particular the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead." George Bush: "And it's brutal and grossly unfair and untrue."
MRC Cyberalert 9/30/99:
Reagan biographer Edmund Morris told Today’s Katie Couric on Wednesday that he never called Ronald Reagan "an airhead," which means Couric distorted his assessment in order to impugn Reagan when she opened Monday’s Today by happily blurting:
"Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead! That's one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that's drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999."
In the first day of three days of interviews on Today, Couric spent most of her time on September 29 quizzing Morris about the appropriateness of his fictional characters. But she started out by telling him, as transcribed by MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens:
"There has been a lot of outrage expressed by President Reagan's friends and associates about your use of the word ‘airhead’ to describe him. George Bush says it's ‘brutal, grossly unfair, untrue.’ Ed Meese, former Attorney General, said it's ‘not fair, not true.’ Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary says it's ‘totally inappropriate’ to describe the former President that way." Morris replied: "I agree with every single one of those. It's brutal and grossly unfair. I did not call him an airhead. The quote, as published first in the Washington Post, dropped the word 'apparent' before 'airhead.' What I said in the book that appears plainly on the page is I found him at first, 'an apparent airhead.' And the whole course of the book makes quite obvious that that first impression was wrong."
Couric: "So you do not believe today that Ronald Reagan was an airhead?"
Morris: "Oh good God no! He was a very bright man. At first I was surprised and dismayed by the apparent banality of his conversation. I couldn't reconcile this, the utter ordinariness of the private man with how magical he became when he stepped out in front of the cameras."
Undeterred, Couric pressed on: "In fact what you say Mr. Morris, in your words, from the book is, quote, 'What you see is what you get, several of the above named intimates had warned me when I asked about his hidden depths. Nevertheless I could not believe how little one indeed got and how shallow those depths appear to be.' Are you saying now this morning that you found President Reagan to have great intellectual depth?"
Morris: "'Shallow the depths appeared to be.' You see he was all mystery. He seemed to be shallow. He seemed to have no culture. He seemed to have, to be resistant to new ideas from outside. He seemed all these things. One of the reasons it took me 14 years to write the book was to come to grips with this apparent simplicity which concealed depths and depths, and depths."
Couric: "So you believe today that he is a man of great depth or was?"
Morris: "Oh absolutely. He was a huge and important man. He had, he had, a presidential mind. He was a statesman. He kept himself to himself which was one of the reasons it was hard to penetrate him. Ronald Reagan was a formidable person."
As for the "airhead" quote Couric so eagerly repeated on Monday, the Today writers sure picked an unusual way to open their September 27 show as the misquote appeared on the jump page of a Washington Post story from five days earlier. Today also had to skip over a more positive assessment to find the airhead line. Look at how Washington Post reporter Linton Weeks led into the airhead graph in his September 22 story:
Asked by American Enterprise magazine -- for an interview that will appear in its November-December issue -- what was the biggest revelation in "Dutch," Morris replied, "That Ronald Reagan was a massively substantial person of considerably more deliberation and philosophical seriousness than he's ever been given credit for."
At points in the book, however, Morris is more dismissive of Reagan's intellect. He writes that he could not believe how shallow Reagan's "hidden depths" appeared to be. He refers to Reagan's frequent use of cue cards, to his deference to aides on matters of substance, and to the often rambling answers the president gave to interviewers. After following him around for seven months, making friends with Reagan insiders such as Michael Deaver, Donald Regan, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, Morris writes that he was stumped. "Dutch remained a mystery to me, and worse still -- dare I entertain such a heresy, in the hushed and reverent precincts of his office? -- an airhead."
END Excerpt
According to what Morris told Couric, he wrote "-- an apparent airhead." While that clarification should hardly make Reagan fans any happier with Morris’s book or powers of perception, a reading of the original Washington Post recounting makes obvious that Today and Couric distorted Morris as he was referring to how he viewed Reagan in late 1985 after following him around for a few months, a view he eventually realized was wrong.
Now for a little Morris bashing courtesy of Couric, here’s the next exchange in Wednesday’s interview:
Couric: "But do you think that many readers might come away confused....You use semi-fictional characters. You for example have a fictionalized version of yourself, a young Edmund Morris, whose basically a contemporary of Ronald Reagan. He's the same age. He observes him at college football games, has a job interview with him in Hollywood. And he's even saved by Reagan when he was a lifeguard. Edmund Morris is saved from drowning. There are a number of other..."
Morris, cutting her off: "You gave away my ending."
Couric: "Oh sorry. There are a number of other fictional characters. Well it is a memoir not a novel, right?"
Good question.
Katie specifically denied that today with Ann, she blamed it on Matt Lauer.