Still Trying to Live Down That Reagan Bio

Edmund Morris got into hot, that is to say scalding, water in 1999 when he published "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan." This wasn't the authorized biography that had been expected. After close acquaintance over nine years, with privileged access to the White House and attendance at summit conferences, Mr. Morris had found Reagan to be "a hollow subject" without "depths to probe." Whereupon he had an idea: He would give the intellectual dimension missing from the story of Reagan by telling it from the point of view of a narrator who wasn't actually Mr. Morris but could be mistaken for him. What emerged from this self-indulgent device was a literary curiosity midway between fact and fiction, and it gave offense to large numbers of people.