![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One such eyewitness to history is Anders Little, a staffer on the National Security Council. Better to imagine what others thought of him, as Gore Vidal did with Lincoln, an exercise in subjectivity that reveals more about the observer than the observed. Only at the end, when Reagan is in the throes of Alzheimer’s, does he inhabit the great man’s now diminished point of view. In both instances he remained frustratingly inscrutable, a “deeply shallow man,” to quote one world leader’s oxymoronic assessment, who “seemed all at once very close and far away.” Mallon, an old hand at free indirect style, keeps his distance from this affable sphinx. But this period saw the president at his best (at least, according to his admirers), with his conduct at the Reykjavik summit, and at his worst, with the unraveling of the Iran-Contra scandal. All but two chapters, the prologue and a sweetly sad epilogue, are set in the final months of a single Reagan year, 1986. The subtitle of Thomas Mallon’s new book, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, is a bit misleading. ![]()
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