Download Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan AudioBook Free
This book, really the only biography ever authorized by a seated President - yet written with complete interpretive flexibility - is really as innovative in method as it is formidable in scholarship or grant. When Ronald Reagan shifted in to the White House in 1981, one of is own first literary friends was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris developed a fascination for the genial yet inscrutable president and, after Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, reserve the second level of his life of Roosevelt to become an observing attention and hearing at the White House. Coming and choosing Reagan's benign approval ("I'm not heading to trip up San Juan Hill for you"), Morris found the president to be a man of outstanding power and enigma. Although the historical early successes were ordinary to see - the recovery of American optimism and patriotism, a repowering of the nationwide economy, a massive arms buildup deliberately forcing the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism to come quickly to terms - no person, let alone Reagan himself, could explain how he succeeded in shaping situations to his will. And when Reagan's second term came up to grips with a few of the most fundamental moral issues of the later 20th hundred years - at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, at Geneva and Reykjavík, publicly beyond your Brandenburg Gate ("Mr. Gorbachev, rip down this wall!"), and deep within the mother monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church - Morris became aware that he had taken on a subject of epic measurements. Thus began an extended biographical pilgrimage to the center of Ronald Reagan's enigma, beginning with his beginning in 1911 in the center of rural Illinois (where he is still remembered as "Dutch", the dreamy son of your alcoholic dad and a fiercely religious mother) and progressing through just how stations of a wonderfully varied job: young lifeguard (he preserved 77 lives), aspiring copy writer, ace sportscaster, film superstar, soldier, union leader, corporate spokesman, governor, and president. Reagan granted Morris full usage of his personal papers, including early on autobiographical tales and a handwritten White House diary. The pilgrimage climaxes in 1993, when, in an instant of aching poignancy, Morris escorts his older and failing subject support the stairs of his birthplace. "An peculiar, Dantesque reversal of functions had occurred, as if I were now the first choice as opposed to the led." During 13 years of obsessive archival research and interviews with Reagan and his family, friends, admirers, and foes (the book's great dramatis personae includes such diverse personas as Mikhail Gorbachev, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elie Wiesel, Mario Savio, François Mitterrand, Grant Timber, and Zippy the Pinhead), Morris resided what amounted to a doppelgänger life, studying the young "Dutch", the middle-aged "Ronnie". and the septuagenarian leader with a closeness and dispassion, not forgetting alternations of amusement, horror, and impressed respect, unrivaled by some other presidential biographer. This almost Boswellian closeness led to a distinctive literary method whereby, in the earlier chapters of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Morris's biographical mind becomes in effect another figure in the narrative, documenting long-ago situations with the same eyewitness vividness (and overall documentary fidelity) with that your author later describes the fantastic dramas of Reagan's presidency, and the tragedy of any noble life now darkened by dementia. "I quite understand," the writer has remarked, "that visitors will have to adjust, initially, to what sums to a fresh biographical style. However the revelations of the style, which derive immediately from Ronald Reagan's own way of considering his life, are I believe satisfying enough to influence them that one of the most interesting personas in recent American history looms here like a colossus."
