Free Republic

Edmund Morris, who wrote an acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt but is best known for his life of Ronald Reagan, in which the author inserted himself as a fictional narrator, a device that baffled and angered some historians, died on Friday in Danbury, Conn. He was 78. His death, at a hospital following a stroke on Thursday, was confirmed on Monday by his wife, the author Sylvia Jukes Morris. He lived in Kent, Conn. Mr. Morris’s “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1980. He followed that with two other well-received books...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz4BvgTKQIE "A documentary about the 40th President of the United States, taking a closer look at his life from a lifeguard to a radio announcer to an actor, all the way up to becoming a Union leader and Politician. It reveals his transition from a Democrat to a strict new liberal republican, and it unearths problems of his presidency such as the Iran Contra scandal." It involves interviews from people such as his sons Ron and Michael Reagan, his advisor Stuart Spencer, his speechwriter Peter Robinson, biographer Edmund Morris, author Mark HertsGaard, journalist Frances Fitzgerald, author Thomas Frank, author Thomas...

It has been argued that Ronald Reagan was a myth himself, a construct of his own and other people's imaginings, rather than an extraordinary American about whom some untruths are told... in private a person of no ego and little charisma, in public a statesman of formidable purpose. 1. He was a bad actor... 2. He was but a movie-set soldier in World War II. It's true that Reagan spent virtually all the war years flying a desk at the First Motion Picture Unit, USAAF, in Culver City. But that hardly means he did not passionately want to fight for...

TWENTY-FIVE years ago last Thursday, in another era, another century, the president of the United States walked into a salvo of bullets, one of which brought him to the brink of death. It's possible that as the doctors worked desperately to overtake the flood of blood draining from him, he may have dreamed, as dying people are supposed to do, about his past life. We only know that he survived and cheated death — if not dementia — for another couple of decades. Without being as speculative a biographer as Lytton Strachey was about Queen Victoria drifting off, I think...

DiCaprio is Theodore Roosevelt Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have been named by Paramount Pictures to respectively star and direct in the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Edmund Morris book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, says Variety. The film adaptation, currently being written by Nicholas Meyer (The Human Stain), will chronicle the political career of Roosevelt (DiCaprio), from a slight and privileged New York politician with a Harvard degree, right up to his ascension to the White House as the 26th U.S. president. At present, DiCaprio and Scorsese are working on their third film together - after Gangs of New...

CINDY Sheehan's attempt to have President Bush tell her - again - how sorry he is about the death of her son in Iraq is escalating into a protest more political than personal. As such, it is a legitimate expression of antiwar sentiment. But the individual cry for attention at the heart of it - "Mr. President, feel my pain!" - is misguided. Ms. Sheehan cannot expect a commander in chief to emote on demand. I once spent two days at Ronald Reagan's side, for the purpose of seeing what it was like to be president of all the people,...

Four and a half years ago, reviewing Edmund Morris' much-maligned Reagan biography, Dutch, I ended the piece by saying Ronald Reagan was the greatest U.S. president of the 20th century. Well, who else? Franklin Roosevelt is the only contender. But FDR worsened the financial collapse he inherited from Hoover by raising taxes, pursuing a tight money policy and failing to rescind the Smoot-Hawley trade tariffs. It took Reagan, with help from Paul Volcker, less than three years to get the economy booming after the Carter-era malaise. FDR deserves hero status for helping to save the world in the 1940s. Let...