Edmund Morris: Dutch Returns to His Hometown
[Edmund Morris is the author of “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” and, most recently, “Colonel Roosevelt.”]
BACK in 1992, when Ronald Reagan first began to be strange (a bewilderment in his amethyst gaze, a hesitancy in speech and step), he impulsively said that he wanted to visit his birthplace. This desire was a surprise to those around the former president. He had never shown any interest in Tampico, Ill....
In 1992, I found myself returning there with him, pointing out landmarks along Main Street and telling him about a commotion he may have heard as he lay kicking and gurgling upstairs at No. 111: the team of creamery horses that bolted and dropped a cartload of barrels in the dust.
Biographers of old people often find themselves instructing their subjects about things long forgotten. Of course, Reagan could not have cared less about 60 gallons of spilled buttermilk. But his heavy silence was so disturbing, as we strolled along the sidewalk to the museum, that I felt I had to keep up some sort of patter to entertain him. Nancy walked alongside, her face a mask....
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BACK in 1992, when Ronald Reagan first began to be strange (a bewilderment in his amethyst gaze, a hesitancy in speech and step), he impulsively said that he wanted to visit his birthplace. This desire was a surprise to those around the former president. He had never shown any interest in Tampico, Ill....
In 1992, I found myself returning there with him, pointing out landmarks along Main Street and telling him about a commotion he may have heard as he lay kicking and gurgling upstairs at No. 111: the team of creamery horses that bolted and dropped a cartload of barrels in the dust.
Biographers of old people often find themselves instructing their subjects about things long forgotten. Of course, Reagan could not have cared less about 60 gallons of spilled buttermilk. But his heavy silence was so disturbing, as we strolled along the sidewalk to the museum, that I felt I had to keep up some sort of patter to entertain him. Nancy walked alongside, her face a mask....