Edmund Morris's highly unorthodox but "authorised biography" of one of America's most popular presidents has landed him in huge trouble. "I'm the most reviled biographer in America", he wailed to one of his friends as he traipsed into yet another interview and further abuse for squandering his opportunity of unrivalled access to Mr Reagan before Alzheimer's struck the former president.
Consequently, most reviews in the US of the massive biography tend to be examinations of the Morris method of inserting himself into his subject's life as if he were a contemporary instead of being 30 years younger. Morris has defended this technique as the only way he could try to get inside Reagan's mind. "What was really frustrating was his tendency to blank out on events closed to me", he complains.
In spite of unprecedented access as a biographer to a living President, Morris was in despair after his early sessions in the Oval Office. "Dutch (a childhood nickname for Reagan) remained a mystery to me, and worse still - dare I entertain such heresy in the hushed and reverent precincts of his office? - an apparent airhead."
In interviews following publication, Morris has tried to explain away the "airhead" comment as his first impressions of the former Hollywood actor become President of the world's greatest power. These early impressions were gradually replaced with admiration for a "great President", he now tells interviewers.
But the impression from his curious book is that Morris swings between snobbish disdain for the cultural dimness of the old actor and grudging admiration for his assault on the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, rescuing America "in a time of poisonous despair." It must be said that this is a fascinating portrait of Reagan once one filters out the fictional characters, which include the biographer's imaginary relatives. We are assured in tiny print, which most readers will probably miss, that "all the words (written or spoken) of Ronald Reagan, all his recounted thoughts and acts, and indeed those of every historical character in the text, are matters of fact and of record".
It may seem strange that only one-third of the book covers Reagan's two-term Presidency from 1980 to 1988, but he was 69 when he was elected and as a biographer Morris had much to explore in the varied careers up to that point. The Hollywood years and Reagan's work as a union organiser as head of the Screen Actors Guild reveal a much different man than the conservative politician the world observed at work in the White House in the 1980s.
Reagan in the Hollywood years was a liberal and a Democrat who was appalled at the thought of Richard Nixon, an "ambitious opportunist", being elected Vice-President in 1952. In a letter, Reagan writes that he is praying for the health of President Eisenhower "because the thought of Nixon in the White House is almost as bad as that of `Uncle Joe'."
But there is irony in Reagan's denunciation of Nixon as "subsidised by a small clique of oil and real-estate pirates", as he himself was later pushed by wealthy California businessmen into the Governor's mansion in Sacramento in 1966 and into the successful run against President Carter in 1980. By then Reagan was articulating his vision for America, which resonated with a country tired of Carter's whine about the "malaise" affecting his Presidency.
MORRIS is bemused at how the simple Reagan ideas about the "city shining on a hill", an America where the sun is always rising and the mission to bring down the "evil empire" had such an appeal even to sophisticates. For clues he turns over the earlier Reagan life as lifeguard, sports commentator, film actor, union leader, General Electric propagandist and California governor who sent the National Guard to quell rebellious students at Berkeley.
Morris quizzes Reagan in the Oval Office, only to be fobbed off with Hollywood anecdotes. He talks to Nancy Reagan and the Reagan children. He seeks out former girlfriends and aides who worked closely with his subject for years, he scours the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand and Mikhail Gorbachev in search of the real Reagan, but to no avail. Even Nancy "has never pretended fully to understand Ronald Reagan's aloof yet ardent nature."
Morris began his 14 years of work believing he could discover Dutch's secret, but now he knows better.
Joe Carroll is Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times