Naming Evil, Ranking Reagan, Going Dutch

Nick Gillespie | June 8, 2004

Over at National Review Online, Reason Contributing Editor John J. Pitney Jr. recounts one of Ronald Reagan's most controversial utterances: calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire."

In a Reason review of Dinesh D'Souza's 1997 Reagan bio, Pitney was a bit tougher on Dutch, writing, "Given all the political constraints, Reagan could not have won a total victory against big government, but he could have done much more. In this respect, free-
market activist Fred Smith got it right: "[T]he Reagan revolution hasn't failed--it really hasn't been tried."

Whole thing here.

And while I'm talking about Reagan, let me give a shout-out to the most-attacked volume about the guy: Edmund Morris' 1999 Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, which was pretty much universally panned, particularly for its fabulist dimension (at various points, Morris inserts a fictive version of himself into the narrative). Yeah, it was a decade overdue, and Morris unfortunately evokes the "raised binding is a giveaway!" caricature on TV, but Dutch is actually a good read and one of the few interesting attempts to get at a character who has famously defied his biographers. That Morris' metafictional conceits were plainly borne out of desperation--he ends the 700 page bio with "Three Poems" inspired by Reagan, including one featuring the line, "We fear our glass will darken when you drown"!--makes them no less interesting.