Ronald Reagan biographer and Montgomery Fellow Edmund Morris told a Cook Auditorium audience yesterday that Reagan is an extraordinary man.
Morris said that with the onset of Reagan's Alzheimer's disease he cannot visit the subject of his upcoming book "Dutch" because it is "distressing to see a magnificent personality and beautiful body begin to be fallible."
"A theatrical person in the best sense of the world," Reagan was "gentle and gentlemanly," Morris said, but added, "It was in his nature to control everything he saw in a quiet, personal way."
Morris recounted how he was asked to write Reagan's official biography and started observing the president everyday in the White House in 1985. He was also allowed to read Reagan officials' diaries and interview Reagan's friends and family.
Morris said Reagan did not enjoy confrontations and while in private he exuded real emotion, in public he was distant and would retreat into silence.
The historian praised Reagan's fairness and said that quality made him presidential.
Reagan lacked President Jimmy Carter's desire to destroy his enemies, Morris said. He called Reagan's ambition "both formidable and benign."
In all areas of his life, beginning with college and then a career in sports broadcasting, "Reagan always seemed to come out on top," Morris said.
As president, "he filled us with an almost overnight national sense of well being and purpose," Morris said.
These successes are disconcerting because Reagan seemed so ordinary, Morris said.
Reagan was quiet and almost dull, according to Morris. In office he modeled himself after President Calvin Coolidge, who was known as "Silent Cal" for his reclusive personality.
Morris praised Reagan for working with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbechev to end the Cold War and for being cool when besieged with emotional situations.
Reagan's widely criticized wife Nancy actually did not wield as much political power as the public believes, Morris said.
Only one man influenced Reagan's political views and that was Reagan himself, Morris continued.
Nancy admitted to Morris that in addition to not being able to control her husband's mind, she was also not able to understand it at times.
Reagan's wife protected him against enemies he didn't know he had, Morris said. The president's weakness was that he tended to like everyone.
Morris spoke as part of the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment's Power and the Presidency series. Previous lectures in the Winter term series have been filmed by the C-Span television network and will be broadcast Monday in honor of President's Day.
