Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

The biography has caused confusion for containing several characters who never existed, and scenes where they interact with real people. Morris goes so far as to include misleading endnotes about such imaginary characters, further confusing readers. Some scenes are dramatized or completely made up.

After the unprecedented success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was given the green light by the Reagan administration to write the first authorized biography of a sitting president, granting him behind-the-scenes access never before given to a writer at the White House. Apparently the privileges were of little use; Morris claimed to have learned little from his conversations with Reagan and White House staff or even from the president's own private diary.

Morris eventually decided to scrap writing a straight biography and turn his piece into a faux historical memoir about the president told from the viewpoint of a semi-fictional peer from the same town as Reagan: Morris himself. The person comes from the same town as and continually encounters and later keeps track of Reagan. The first time the fictional narrator sees him is at a 1926 football game in Dixon, Illinois. He asks a friend who the fellow running down the field "with extraordinary grace" is, and he is informed that it is "Dutch" Reagan.

Regarding Reagan, Morris claimed, "Nobody around him understood him. I, every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, 'You know, I could never really figure him out.' "[1]

Dutch was published by Random House and edited by executive editor Robert Loomis.[2]

Whether Dutch can be accurately considered a biography remains a matter of controversy,[2] with multiple fictional characters featured in the "unusual and critically scrutinized" work.[3] Joan Didion faulted Morris as beholden to the subject, incurious about policy matters, and uninterested in the Iran–Contra affair while resorting to narrative gimmicks to tell a vapid tale. Didion ultimately suggests Morris was little more than a mouthpiece for the Reagan administration.[4]

• The Hollow Man – New York Times review of Dutch
• Washington Monthly review by Jonathan Alter
• BusinessWeek Online review by Douglas Harbrecht
• Presentation by Morris on Dutch at the American Enterprise Institute, December 7, 1998
• Presentation by Morris on Dutch at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, October 12, 1999
• Booknotes interview with Morris on Dutch, December 5, 1999.