Word: em
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...EM: 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...
...EM: Yes, yes, Reagan was the all-American. Well actually there's not as much of me in it as you'd think. The narrator is rather unlike me, he's mathematical and Germanic, I am neither of those things. Also well-born and elitist, which I am not. The musical part is me--I couldn't help that because I think in terms of music. I only incorporate things like the TR book because it's directly related to how I became Reagan's biographer, and when I do talk about myself it is for structural reasons...
...EM: Yes. I paid about as much attention to his children as he paid...
...EM: Yes, 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...
...EM: I sure am. I've already got the last line of the third volume written in my head. There in the distance like those palm trees at the far end of the Sahara, and I'm floggin' my camel...