Scandal stalks the new authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. The author -- Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Morris -- was granted unprecedented access to a sitting president and seems to have been so deeply burdened by this good fortune that he needed an extra decade to finish the book. And that's not all: Morris has invented a doppelganger to help him tell the story, a fictitious "Edmund Morris" who is Reagan's contemporary (the real Morris was born in 1940) and reports as an eyewitness on the doings of the young future president. This novelistic device has justifiably provoked an initial storm of outrage, though it will be interesting to track the reactions of academics. On the one hand, there must be an unimaginable reservoir of pent-up professional envy that a talented non-academic like Morris got this plum assignment in the first place. On the other hand, it's a good bet that Morris will find defenders in the trendier university departments (not least for his symbolic desecration of Reagan).
Morris, in fact, telegraphed his technique in a striking 1991 op-ed for the Washington Post, "Truth in Substance," in which he explained why he and the historian David McCullough had filed a brief with the Supreme Court defending the journalist Janet Malcolm, who stood accused of concocting quotes. Not that Morris was entirely comfortable with the practice. "Scholarly biographers are not ordinarily supposed to be parties to such tinkering with the truth," he archly noted. "God knows, I lock my study door and drop all the blinds before deleting so much as a dot from a four-dot ellipsis in somebody's quoted remarks. Biographers and historians are generally more conscientious about accurate quotation than journalists are. Not only that, we have to document our sources, whereas reporters will go to jail rather than reveal theirs."
Needless to say, this was all throat clearing, deeply ironic in retrospect, as Morris worked himself up for one hell of a "however" clause: "What, ultimately, is Truth? . . . The ultimate test of any piece of nonfiction writing must be its success in saying something -- or quoting something -- that a majority of readers 'can't help but believe.'"
The moral of this story, THE SCRAPBOOK can't help but believe, is that when popular historians start asking in newspaper columns, What is Truth? (with a capital T) and find themselves unable to give a persuasive answer, the game is up. Perhaps Edmund Morris should have stayed locked in his study, pondering the ellipsis in his career.