the man who wasn't there

The NYT has a fascinating review of a new book about Ronald Reagan, by his son. Ron Reagan writes very well, and movingly, about his father, who became stranger and more mysterious the closer you got to him.

Reagan had what his son calls a “preternatural talent for excising unpleasantness from his picture of reality"; always amiable, happy, a pleasure to be around, yet oddly distant, even to his family:

“His children, if they were being honest,” Mr. Reagan writes, “would agree that he was as strange a fellow as any of us had ever met. Not darkly strange, mind you. In fact, he was so naturally sunny, so utterly without guile, so devoid of cynicism or pettiness as to create for himself a whole new category of strangeness. He was, in some respects, too good — like a visitor from an enchanted realm where they’d never even consider inventing a Double Down sandwich or credit default swaps. I often felt I had to check my natural sarcasm and sense of absurdity at the door for fear of inducing in him a fit of psychological disequilibrium.”

Though the younger Mr. Reagan — an avowed atheist with decidedly liberal leanings — would have philosophical arguments with his father over the years, their difficulties had nothing to do with politics but with emotional connection. The author says that he never felt that his father didn’t love or care for him but that he often seemed to be “wandering somewhere in his own head.”

His son speculates that Reagan's uncanny determination to fashion a kind of heroic narrative from the raw materials of his life stemmed from his insecure, crisis-scarred childhood.

Link to review.

Comments

[Quiet Riot Girl]

I wrote a piece with the same title a while back:

http://gamespervertsplay.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/the-man-who-wasnt-there/

I find men of mystery the most interesting at first, but as you suggest this bio may be saying, sometimes the 'mystery' is just hiding sadness/trauma/problems.

[Cheap Supra Skytop For Sale]

Mr. Reagan writes, “would agree that he was as strange a fellow as any of us had ever met. Not darkly strange, mind you. In fact, he was so naturally sunny, so utterly without guile, so devoid of cynicism or pettiness as to create for himself a whole new category of strangeness. He was, in some respects, too good — like a visitor from an enchanted realm where they’d never even consider inventing a Double Down sandwich or credit default swaps. I often felt I had to check my natural sarcasm and sense of absurdity at the door for fear of inducing in him a fit of psychological disequilibrium.”