Later, in a car on the way to the Chris Lyden Show:

EM: Maureen Dowd and George Will have both published attacks on the book. There's a rule of life: Never, never never do anything original or inventive in front of people with red hair and thin lips. They always react violently.

THC: Did you feel a lot of pressure after writing Theodore Roosevelt? Is that why you did something so unexpected with Dutch?

EM: No, in 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. And the method I took with Ronald Reagan grew directly out of his own stage personality.

THC: What was your purpose writing this book?

EM: My 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 I'd have written it much more quickly.

On the Chris Lyden Show. "Reagan never cared less what Harvard thought of him," Morris says to Lyden. The production director, all business, lifts her head from the control panel to shout, "Hear that, Harvard?"

Chris Lyden: You spent most of 14 years looking for the inner man and there were many moments in that time apparently when you decided there wasn't anybody at home, there wasn't anybody there and you'd never get your hands around it. What'd you decide in the end?

EM: I remember saying to him once in a moment of frustration, "Mr. President, I just have great difficulty understanding some of the things you think and some of the things you do." He said, "But why? I'm an open book." "Yes," I said, "but your pages are all blank." He looked at me with his head on one side, generally puzzled that I found him puzzling.

In the car again:

THC: Were you surprised by Dutch's reception?