Word: writing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fact I'd already written half of another Theodore Roosevelt volume, which I've put aside. That book eliminates the narrative voice, the editorial voice, to an almost total extent. I wanted to see if I could write a biography of a President who lived between 1901 and 1909 in which there was absolutely no intrusion of the present. The reader gets the feeling from the first page to the last that they're back in the first decade of the century. So it couldn't be more different than the approach I took writing about Ronald Reagan...
...purpose in writing the book? Well, just simply to tell a story -- which is all I've ever wanted to do in my life, is just to tell a story. What drew me to Theodore Roosevelt, and what drew me to Reagan is the fact that both had extraordinarily interesting life stories. And were both extraordinarily interesting characters. I did not want to write about Reagan for any political reasons, his politics bore me. I did want to make money, so that was certainly a consideration. But on the other hand, if I'd only been after money...
...sound effects, and computer techniques. Several chapters in Reagan's life were so cinematic that I've actually written them cinematically. Why not? It's the truthful way and the appropriate way to describe that they were episodes almost cinematic in themselves. He remembers them as cinema, so I write them as cinema...
...Well, I observed him in the White House so close-up and I had the luxury of being able to write about him in such detail, that I wanted to be able to use the same closeness and vividness for the years when I was not at his side, the seventy years where I was not. And this device enabled me to obseve him with that kind of closeness. The device of an omnipresent spectator of whom Reagan is unaware, but who is very much aware of Ronald Reagan. Somebody called Stanley Fish, who's a professor at Duke University...
...there was actually. And you know I don't think I write about it in the book. It was in August of 1988, when I went up to his ranch to spend the afternoon as he chopped trees and pruned the landscape--what he loved to do. And he was in these jeans, work clothes, and he was working with buzz saws and tree hooks with two guys, ranch hands. The President and these two guys communicated entirely in grunts. And I realized that this is the real Ronald Reagan here, a hard, quiet, taciturn man's man, working with...