Replies

September 27, 1999, Monday

NBC'S TODAY SHOW, 7:00 AM

KATIE COURIC, co-host:

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.
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September 27, 1999, Monday

REPORTERS: BOB KUR

KATIE COURIC, co-host:

On CLOSE UP this morning, Ronald Reagan. The official biography of the former president 14 years in the making hits book stores this morning. Already "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan," is raising eyebrows and generating controversy. We asked NBC's Bob Kur to take a look.

BOB KUR reporting:

Pulitzer prize-winning author Edmund Morris had extraordinary access to President Reagan for many years, beginning in 1985 during Reagan's second term. Morris predicts his blunt appraisal of Reagan's intellect, his state of mind in the White House, will disturb some readers, especially Nancy Reagan. He writes, "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 apparent airhead."

Mr. EDWIN MEESE (Former Reagan Aide): That just was not Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a very intelligent person. He didn't pretend to be an intellectual.

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September 28, 1999, Tuesday

KATIE COURIC reporting: Thank you Stone.

(Voiceover) We'll look at the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. Does the author go too far? We'll ask him.
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September 28, 1999, Tuesday

MATT LAUER, co-host:

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.

President GEORGE BUSH: It is brutal and grossly unfair and untrue. LAUER: And Mr. Bush has more to say today, Tuesday, September 28th, 1999.

Announcer: From NBC News, this is TODAY, with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, live from Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza.

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September 29, 1999, Wednesday

COURIC: Then, Matt, another man who's getting a lot of attention. He's written the biography of Ronald Reagan. Edmund Morris was the first writer ever named an authorized biographer of a sitting president. He received unprecedented access to President Reagan in the White House and it took him 14 years to finish the book. But it's taken less than four days for Reagan's friends and associates to assail the author for some of his conclusions. This morning Edmund Morris gets to respond.

LAUER: And apparently, some people think he has some explaining to do.

COURIC: That's true.

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September 29, 1999, Wednesday

EDMUND MORRIS DISCUSSES HIS BOOK, "DUTCH: A MEMOIR OF RONALD REAGAN"

KATIE COURIC, co-host:

On CLOSE UP this morning, the book on Ronald Reagan. The long-awaited biography of the 40th president written by Edmund Morris will be published tomorrow. Already, though, "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" is generating a ton of interest and a lot of controversy.

Edmund Morris, good morning. Welcome back to today.

Mr. EDMUND MORRIS (Author, "Dutch"): Thank you, Katie. COURIC: Are you surprised at the--the controversy that has resulted so far from this book?

Mr. MORRIS: I'm not surprised at the controversy. I kind of expected it as far as the technique of the book is concerned, because it is a revolutionary, new advance in biographical technique. What did surprise me was the misquoting that's come about. And that has distressed me somewhat. But I fully expected and welcome the controversy about the technique.

COURIC: There has been a lot of outrage expressed by President Reagan's friends and associates about your use of the word airhead...

Mr. MORRIS: Yes.

COURIC: ...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.

Mr. MORRIS: 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 head. What I said in the book, what appears plainly on the pages, 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?

Mr. MORRIS: Oh, good God, no. He was a very bright man. At first I was surprised and--and dismayed by the apparent banality of his conversation--I couldn't reconcile this--but the--the--the utter ordinariness of the private man with how magical he became when he stepped out in front of the cameras.

COURIC: 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 appeared to be." Are you saying now this morning that you found President Reagan to have great intellectual depth?

Mr. 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?

Mr. MORRIS: Oh, absolutely. He was a huge and important man. He had a--he had a presidential mind. He was a statesman. He kept himself to himself, which is one of the reasons it was hard to penetrate him.

COURIC: Indeed...

Mr. MORRIS: Ronald Reagan was a formidable person.

COURIC: You describe him as a great president.

Mr. MORRIS: I believe him to be a great president, without any question. It took me years to come to--to that conclusion. And I think it's a material conclusion. We look around, what has he--what--the world has changed. Where is communism? Where is our national malaise? Where are our self-doubts of the 1970s? They're all gone. Why?

COURIC: And yet some of the characterizations that seem to leap from the pages of your book that your critics are seizing on describe him as boring socially, an apparent airhead...

Mr. MORRIS: Mm-hmm.

COURIC: ...we'll concede that, pretty banal in terms of his intellectual capabilities. You seem to be back pedaling significantly from those characterizations.

Mr. MORRIS: No, no, no. If you were with Ronald Reagan in private, he would start telling you stories. And the stories were delicious. And you would convulse with laughter. Then, when you saw him again, you would hear that same story repeated, with exactly the same emphasis, the same pauses, the same words. And after you'd heard that story 17, 25, 32 times, always the same story, it began to be alarmingly boring. You see, he didn't really care who his audience was, as long as he could continue to perform and make his points.

COURIC: But you describe his diaries, for example, as--and--and--and you can correct me, because I'm paraphrasing, 'lacking insight of any kind.'

Mr. MORRIS: Yes. He was not curious about other people's characters. He didn't have--he was not remotely interested in who you were and what you felt. He had large statesmanlike objectives, and he had no self-doubt about himself whatsoever. That's the most striking thing about the diaries. This man never doubted himself.

COURIC: Maureen Reagan, the president's eldest daughter, read excerpts and called them fiction. She added: 'I suspect when all is said and done, given the unprecedented access graciously provided the author, the American people will conclude that the author wasted an incredible and irreplaceable opportunity.'

Mr. MORRIS: Well, Katie, you can never do business with families. They're always protective. I had fabulous access. I made the best use of it. And nobody who has read this book, I'm convinced, will come away from it without thinking this was an extraordinary president and somebody who was deeply admired by the author.

COURIC: But do you think that many readers might come away confused? Of course, much of the controversy is focused on, as you alluded earlier, in your writing style...

Mr. MORRIS: Right.

COURIC: ...which is quite interesting, and very unique. You use semifictional characters. You, for example, have a fictionalized version of yourself, a young Edmund Morris, who's 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. He--he's even saved by Reagan when he was a lifeguard. Edmund Morris is saved from--from drowning. There are a number of other...

Mr. MORRIS: 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. Paul Rea is another example. Why? Why did you need to do that?

Mr. MORRIS: Because I wanted to bring the same closeness of observation to him when he was young that I had in the White House. You know, in the White House I was sitting across the desk from him. I could hear his voice, I could look at his hair, I could look at his clothes, I could--I could smell his cologne, I could listen to the texture of his voice and watch the play of expressions in his face. And I had copious documentary evidence of what he was like when he was younger. But because I was physically not there for the first 70 years, it was difficult to write about him in conventional style as vividly as I was able to write about him as president.

COURIC: So you have fictional characters in fictional situations having fictional conversations based on things you knew about Ronald Reagan or believed to be true?

Mr. MORRIS: Never--never fictional conversations with him.

COURIC: Well, for example, his doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital following his colonoscopy...

Mr. MORRIS: Uh-huh.

COURIC: ...said that he never had that conversation with you.

Mr. MORRIS: Oh, really?

COURIC: Yeah.

Mr. MORRIS: No. John Hutton and I cooperated for years. And he's one of the most informative and helpful people that I met in all my time at the White House.

COURIC: Well, obviously, there are some fictional conversations between the young Edmund Morris and Ronald Reagan because...

Mr. MORRIS: No, no, no. No, absolutely not. There are no fictional conversations.

COURIC: When you and the young Edmund Morris, the fictionalized version...

Mr. MORRIS: Right.

COURIC: ...is interacting with the young Ronald Reagan, you were very careful about not having them...

Mr. MORRIS: Yes, very.

COURIC: ...have any--any dialogue that you have basically made up?

Mr. MORRIS: Yes, yes, indeed. Every word that Ronald Reagan speaks in the book, every thought he thinks, every detail, like if I talk about the smell of liniment on a particular day, it's because I have documentary evidence that the smell of liniment was in the air.

COURIC: Do you think that there's anything dishonest about this technique?

Mr. MORRIS: On the contrary, I think it's more honest because all I ask of the reader up front is to accept the presence of a storyteller, just as when you were a child you accepted the presence of the projector in the movie house. You looked up, you saw that it was projecting a movie, and from then on you forgot about the projector and for the rest of your life you've been watching movies coming out of this camera. All I ask of the reader is that they think of me as the camera, projecting a documentary movie about Ronald Reagan in which every detail is true.

COURIC: You talk about how everything is meticulously footnoted in the book. But the fictional characters and sources are footnoted right along with the real ones. And many people are, frankly, confused by that.

Mr. MORRIS: I don't think they should be. If they accept the fact that this fictional narrator is, in a sense, me. I wrote these diaries that I refer to. If I talk about a diary which describes Ronald Reagan in World War II, I wrote that diary. It exists. I quote my own diary. I quote correspondence--excuse me.

COURIC: That's all right. But you slip quite easily, though, from fictional characters to--to real characters and--and--and real situations, sort of seamlessly, which makes it a bit perplexing for some readers.

Mr. MORRIS: There has to be a leap of faith right at the beginning of the book and once that leap is made, once the reader accepts the presence of this narrator who is--is, in effect, a camera, then the book just tells its story. It weaves its own spell. And the story it tells is true.

COURIC: In retrospect, do you wish that you had told readers what they would uncover as--as they read this memoir, explained your technique a little better?

Mr. MORRIS: Technique doesn't have to explain itself. The book states right up front in the copyright page that every word or action and thought of Ronald Reagan is a matter of fact and of record. The reader has simply to accept the presence of the storyteller and then the story is compulsively true.

COURIC: You've said that--I know that the president and--and Mrs. Reagan hand-picked you as their authorized biographer. You have said that Mrs. Reagan will be disturbed by this book. What will disturb her the most?

Mr. MORRIS: It's honesty. Nancy is a loving wife. She adores this man. And it's very hard for a loving wife to accept that her beloved husband, in private, could have some ordinary qualities; that he could, in private, be capable of astonishing displays of ignorance, to claim that brown smog coming over the rim of the Pacific Coast Highway was ozone and things like that. Nancy's distressed by that. She won't like to--the fact that I refer to gray stubble on his chin during my last interview with him when he was suffering from Alzheimer's. To me the little patch of silvery stubble is infinitely touching.

COURIC: Have you heard from her?

Mr. MORRIS: No.

COURIC: You also take a rather bleak view of the Reagans' relationship with the Bushes. You write that President Reagan didn't respect George Bush, and you also talk about a conversation you had with then Vice President Bush and his wife in which Mr. Bush is quoted as saying, 'I kind of wish they'd shown, you know, a little appreciation'--excuse me--'didn't seem to want us upstairs in the White House.'

Now, we asked President Bush about that remark. And here's what he had to say.

Mr. GEORGE BUSH: (From interview with Jamie Gangel) Well, that's ridiculous. I mean, that's all I can say. Upstairs? I mean, that's kind of an English kind of upstairs and downstairs approach to life. I don't even use those terminology.

COURIC: Why do you think that George Bush has such a different recollection of that conversation?

Mr. MORRIS: You know, George Bush once said to me, Edmund, I'm never going to write my memoirs because I have a terrible memory. His memory is not good. I noticed it even during that interview. I have--I'm blessed or even cursed, you could say, with a very precise memory. I remember that conversation. I remember the dog lying on Barbara's lap. I remember the sound of her knitting needles. I remember this extraordinary object outside the bathroom upstairs that he took me to see. And I remember what they said. I made notes. I--I stand by what I wrote.

COURIC: And why is he backpedaling, in your view, then?

Mr. MORRIS: He's a loyal man and he's a lovable man. He kept saying, even during the course of this interview, on Christmas Eve, 1988, you know, 'I love this guy. I really don't want to say anything critical about him.' But you could see he was perplexed by the fact that Reagan was so solitary. Didn't seem to need children around him. Didn't seem to need friends. Bush said, you know, when I go up to Camp David with--with Bar, we like to have children and friends with us. The Reagans never seem to need anybody. It perplexed him.

COURIC: Today President Reagan is not in position to respond to this book, so we'll never really know his thoughts. But given your technique, the way you've woven in your observations and the method that you've used, what do you think he would say?

Mr. MORRIS: Reagan was not particularly interested in what people said or thought about him. He was so massively self-certain that whatever was said for or against would not bother him. Reagan, I think, would--would look around at the world today and say, I'm happy with what I did. I know I changed my life, and I don't care if--if biographies contradict this, which my biography does not. I admire this man to the point of reverence, and I've written a book which is true to his character and his achievements.

COURIC: Well, the book is called "Dutch." It's a memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Edmund Morris, thank you so much for coming in. We look forward to talking with you more in the next couple of days.

Mr. MORRIS: Thank you, Katie.

COURIC: And we'll be back in a moment. This is TODAY on NBC.