Reagan’s Boswell

The major political concern of first-term Presidents tends to be the next verdict of the electorate. The political preoccupation of second-term Presidents is more likely to be with the judgment of history. That’s one reason--lucrative contracts are of course another--why every surviving President from Harry S. Truman to Jimmy Carter has promptly on leaving office produced memoirs that, naturally enough, sought to put the best possible light on his White House years. Ronald Reagan probably will be no exception. But the Reagan presidency, and indeed the whole of Reagan’s life, is now to be subjected to a different kind of insider’s scrutiny that could serve the historical record very well indeed.

More than three years before he is due to leave office, Reagan has agreed to let a professional historian and biographer roam freely through the daily record of his presidency. The writer he chose is Edmund Morris, whose splendid first volume of a projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt was published about five years ago. Morris expects to be granted unprecedented contemporary access to the inner workings of the White House, including regular interviews with Reagan. None of this will preclude other historians from later examining the archival material of the Reagan Administrations. Morris, though, has won the chance to be there first, which is why a publisher has already bid $3 million for his Reagan biography.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. performed a similar Boswellian function when John F. Kennedy was President. The difference is that Schlesinger was a member of the White House staff who made no secret of his personal sympathies and ideological compatibility with the President he served. We know nothing of Morris’ political bent or personal loyalties. We do know, on the basis of his Roosevelt biography, that he is a fine writer and an assiduous researcher. Reagan will have no approval right over the book that Morris will publish. That offers the chance for what could be an unusually candid and uniquely objective contribution to presidential history.