THE DIRECTOR:

Portrait of the President as a Young Man (EDMUND MORRIS, 4/02/06, NY Times)

Even in youth, and in abundant good health, Dutch Reagan showed a freakish ability to remember, as it were, his own future.

His teenage short stories, which I discovered in a trunk of junk in the basement of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, are so permeated with his later personality that you can practically see the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" walking toward you, unhurried but unstoppable. And how about the self-portrait reproduced at right below, which he drew for his high-school yearbook? Nobody who ever walked into the Oval Office between 1981 and 1989 can look at it without a shock of recognition.

Note, by the way, the film strip uncurling from the desk. Even at 17, Dutch saw himself as a creature of Hollywood. When he went on to college, his remembrance of things to come extended, more creepily, to a short story that amounted to a virtual synopsis of his starring role in "Knute Rockne, All American" (1940). At the time he wrote it, in 1932, he was nothing more than a bespectacled frat boy whom nobody thought destined for great things.

Except, perhaps, when he seized a broomstick and, pretending it was a sportscaster's mike, improvised imaginary games of football and baseball, complete with redheaded urchins rising in the bleachers for fly balls and "long blue shadows" slowly filling the stadium of his imagination. That power of visualization was so strong that when he became a real sportscaster, in 1933, he broadcast his first game with a pleased sense of déjà vu.

I could mention, also, the recurrent dream Reagan had from early childhood of a "white house with tall windows," which was available to him for occupancy. He must have thought the dream had come true when he went on location for his first movie, "Love Is on the Air" (1937), and found himself — déjà vu all over again! — standing outside a white house with tall windows. A sign hung on one of the front columns: "To Let." But he used to chuckle, as president, that he kept on dreaming about it until he finally moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Then there was George Washington's desk, which so caught his fancy when he first saw it at Mount Vernon, in 1939, that his first wife, Jane Wyman, bought him a replica to work at — as if training himself for future executive responsibilities. Later, bored by his incessant monologues on world affairs, she divorced him. "If he's gonna be president, he's gonna do it without me."

I should emphasize that Ronald Reagan, a man strangely constituted of self-certainty but little egotism, never had a conscious image of himself as destined for power. Yet his subconscious will seemed to work at it all the time. That teenage silhouette showed him in control of his own scenario. It was captioned "the Director."

Mr. Morris was justifiably ripped for his biography of Ronald Reagan, but it's a book that folks should still read, just approaching it as a novel.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 2, 2006 9:53 AM