administration. This "fly-on-the-wall" privilege was made doubly unusual by Reagan's willingness to let Morris write his biography without any editorial control. Morris spent the next fourteen years researching and writing the story of Reagan's life in Washington D.C. and Santa Monica, California. He continued to see the former president in retirement, and worked extensively in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, enjoying special access to Reagan's personal papers. His manuscript, prepared under conditions of great secrecy, was edited by Robert Loomis, executive editor at Random House. The biography's long gestation was the result of a radical change in narrative method, caused by Morris's frustration with what he has described as Reagan's lack of "curiosity about himself." Morris confided his frustration in 1989 to a group of fellow scholars at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. His remarks were leaked to the press and gave rise to rumors that Morris did not understand his subject. In 1999, Morris published Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. The book caused an international sensation because it was presented, without explanation or apology, as a work of nonfiction by an imaginary author. Although the story of Reagan's life was authentic and documented with 153 pages of notes, the parallel "story" of its author, one "Arthur Edmund Morris" born in Chicago in 1912, enraged many critics and readers who had been expecting a conventional presidential biography. Dutch rose quickly to No. 2 on the New York Times Best Seller list. But despite a minority of favorable reviews, and the endorsements of three of Reagan's children, reactions to it were generally so negative that it soon fell off the list. Morris explained in many interviews that his book's unique narrative form, a memoir written by a close observer of whom Reagan is never really aware, was a literary device reflecting the essentially thespian nature of his subject. Reagan, he said, was an enigma to anyone who sought to explain him by orthodox means. Widely beloved, the man had no close friends; seemingly passive and gentle, he yet exerted unstoppable force; although his id was formidable, he had no personal vanity. On CBS's 60 Minutes, Morris told Lesley Stahl: He was truly one of the strangest men who's ever lived. Nobody around him understood him. I, every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, "You know, I could never really figure him out." Morris