By turning his biography into the work of a novelist manque, he could show readers he could write _ not just the sort of sedate prose that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his biography of Teddy Roosevelt, but also something more purple and poetic . ( " All his life, Ronald Reagan has ridden a long road dissolving, at the limit of sight, into something scintillant yet ethereal . " ) By tricking up his narrative with the distracting pyrotechniques of fiction, he could try to conceal his own inability to understand his subject _ never mind the fact that earlier biographers like Lou Cannon and Garry Wills, and dozens of reporters with considerably less access, managed to make sense of Reagan in the past.
