Overview

Read by the Author6 cassettes / 9 hours Edmund Morris has been absorbed in the life of Ronald Reagan for the last thirteen years, with unparalleled access to his papers, his friends, and his family. This audiobook will inform, engross, and even astonish those who believe they already know Ronald Reagan--as well as those who do not know him at all. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. An extraordinary relationship--genial yet mysterious on the President's side, admiring yet unsentimental on Morris's--developed between the two men. Reagan granted Morris monthly interviews in the Oval Office, plus unrestricted access to his papers and family and friends. The result, after fourteen years of obsessive research, is a biography that is as much a memoir as narrative--a pilgrimage to the heart of Ronald Reagan's mystery. It begins with his birth in 1911 in the heart of rural Illinois (where he is still remembered as Dutch ), and progresses through the way stations of an amazingly varied career: young lifeguard, aspirant writer, ace sportscaster, film star, soldier, union leader, corporate spokesman, Governor, and President. Here, recreated with participatory vividness (and some original historic audio clips) are the early achievements of the Reagan Era: a restoration of American optimism and patriotism, a re-powering of the national economy, and a massive arms buildup deliberately forcing the Evil Empire of Soviet Communism to come to terms. Here, too, is the septuagenarian President who came to grips with some of the most fundamental moral issues of the late twentieth century--at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, in Geneva and Reykjavik and Berlin. This audiobook closes with an achingly tender account of Reagan's pst-presidential decline into dementia.

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So what did he see that night in the mirror of the Washington Hilton Hotel holding room, just before he turned to face his family and clicked his newly presidential heels? More to the point, what did the mirror see? <br> A man just about to turn seventy, one inch taller than six feet, weighing about a hundred and eighty-five pounds stripped, broad as a surfboard and almost as hard, superbly balanced, glowing with health and handsome enough for a second career in the movies. Hair so dense and fine as to amount to a Marvel Comics helmet, slicked with Brylcreem and water to a blue-black sheen, diffusing any hint of gray. Teeth white, gums like a boy's dentists even praise the clarity of his saliva), breath sweet, fingernails naturally shiny, unribbed, lucent as seashells. No fidgety mannerisms; an air of always being comfortable in his clothes. Rather fewer wrinkles, especially about the jowl, than photographers remember seeing a few years ago. Absolutely no makeup--just a clear and sanguineous complexion that blushes the moment he sips alcohol, or fears a woman has overheard one of his ribald jokes. <p> From the Hardcover edition.

So what did he see that night in the mirror of the Washington Hilton Hotel holding room, just before he turned to face his family and clicked his newly presidential heels? More to the point, what did the mirror see? A man just about to turn seventy, one inch taller than six feet, weighing about a hundred and eighty-five pounds stripped, broad as a surfboard and almost as hard, superbly balanced, glowing with health and handsome enough for a second career in the movies. Hair so dense and fine as to amount to a Marvel Comics helmet, slicked with Brylcreem and water to a blue-black sheen, diffusing any hint of gray. Teeth white, gums like a boy's dentists even praise the clarity of his saliva), breath sweet, fingernails naturally shiny, unribbed, lucent as seashells. No fidgety mannerisms; an air of always being comfortable in his clothes. Rather fewer wrinkles, especially about the jowl, than photographers remember seeing a few years ago. Absolutely no makeup--just a clear and sanguineous complexion that blushes the moment he sips alcohol, or fears a woman has overheard one of his ribald jokes. From the Hardcover edition.

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