Who's the Airhead Here?
Dear Dinesh,
Well, let's not worry too much about our happy state of
agreement. I'm sure we'll find something to argue about--probably beginning
today.
It will not surprise you, I'm sure, that I have never
been a great admirer of Ronald Reagan, although it may surprise you that I
feel, as you do, that he is one of the most important presidents of the
20 th century and that he displayed a certain
genius for leadership that, whatever his other limitations, helped make his
presidency enormously successful and influential. Morris seems to sense that
and at times to concede it, but he is so preoccupied with Reagan's unremarkable
personal opaqueness that he doesn't really convey the power of his personality
adequately or fairly. And I think you are right that his own self-conscious
displays of erudition (which include his very mediocre poetry) lead him to
evaluations of Reagan that are both condescending and politically naive.
I confess that I have only today worked my way through
the last chapters of Morris' book, and what strikes me is that it actually gets
worse as it moves farther away from its unconventional literary techniques. The
autobiographical elements are less intrusive in the chapters on the
governorship and the presidency, but Morris' limitations as a historian and
biographer are much more glaringly on display--as you also note. You and I will
undoubtedly be alarmed by different examples of these weaknesses. But let me
give several illustrations of a kind of historical simplemindedness that is in
many ways as bad as, or worse than, the simplemindedness he sometimes
attributes to Reagan.
Here, for example, is Morris' riff on the
extraordinarily complicated 60-year history of the modern American welfare
state: "Under the 1935 Social Security Act, a family on welfare was
re-classified as 'self-supporting' the moment Pop was hired ... Wives thus
'abandoned' [when husbands left home to preserve welfare benefits] found it
profitable to go on having babies--by whomever--in order to notch up the family
income." This problem remained contained, he says, until the '60s, when "the
New Deal idea of 'benefits' as emergency help, to be applied for reluctantly
and granted responsibly, became the Great Society concept of 'entitlements.' "
(I've left out only a few sentences of this passage and have not, I think,
altered its meaning in doing so.) It is hard to know where to begin to critique
this monumentally ignorant description of the welfare system. There is no
evidence that ADC in the '30s (or long after) caused husbands and fathers to
abandon their wives, and no evidence at all to support the insulting statement
that women "went on" having babies "by whomever" in order to increase their
very meager welfare payments. Even in the '60s and beyond, there is very little
evidence to support the argument that AFDC is responsible for illegitimate
births. The Great Society did nothing to change the definition of entitlements
under Social Security (although it did of course add new ones--Medicare and
Medicaid). Morris' footnotes cite only a few stray magazine articles, a book on
Nixon's welfare reform efforts that makes none of the claims that Morris does,
and, significantly, Charles Murray's Losing
Ground .
The last chapters of the book are filled with these
casual, simplistic, and uninformed observations about American public policy.
Morris claims, for example, that the New Deal launched a 50-year effort to
force the distribution of wealth downward. In fact, there was virtually no
downward distribution of wealth during the New Deal or in the 50 years after
World War II--and only a modest downward distribution during World War II,
caused not by taxation but by economic growth and rising wages. Nor did any
president advocate or attempt to produce downward distribution of wealth; even
Democrats (Kennedy and Johnson included) explicitly rejected that as a social
goal.
Even more astonishing is his flippant dismissal of
Reagan's economic program--a dismissal visible in the very scant attention he
gives it in this 700-page book and in his remarks at several points about how
bored he was to hear Reagan talk about it. I don't think much of Reagan's
economic policies, although I concede that some good things flowed from them;
but whatever one thinks of them, they do mark an extraordinarily important
moment in American history. Morris can't be bothered with them. When Reagan
returns to his "tax program" in an interview, Morris tells us that "my heart
sank, and I mentally deducted 10 minutes from the time remaining." In fact, it
seems there were many things about Reagan's life and career that Morris
considered too boring to attend to. There is almost nothing in this book about
Reagan's campaigns, and an astonishing passage on Page 645 perhaps explains
why. Morris describes sitting in the Oval Office interviewing Reagan in January
1989. (Whether this is the 48-year-old "real" Morris or the 75-year-old
fictional one is not clear.) He reads him a passage from Lord David Cecil's
famous biography of Lord Melbourne--a favorite of Anglophiles the world
over--and asks for Reagan's response. The president begins talking about some
early presidential campaigning in 1968, and Morris "let my Sony do the
listening. Fortunately, I had several photocopied pages of Cecil's biography in
my folder, and read them with surreptitious enjoyment while Dutch retraced his
steps to the '68 Republican convention. The great clock ticked on an on." I
have a similar sensation reading Morris' book.
More tomorrow.
Alan
