‘Killing Reagan’ a misfire for Bill O’Reilly franchise
Tale of dementia lacks the historical edge of other work in series
KILLING REAGAN
eegE Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard Henry Holt 306 pp.
Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and his co-author, Martin Dugard, have carved a comfortable and lucrative niche with their series of “killing” books about the violent deaths of historical figures. So far, they’ve tackled the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Jesus and Gen. George Patton. Some, particularly Killing Lincoln, succeed as histories and profit generators. Lincoln was a highly readable and compelling account of the assassination of President Lincoln, a violent act that altered American history in ways that were immediately obvious and others that we are still discovering.
Their latest effort, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a
Presidency, is a curious look at our 40th president, one that doesn’t reach the standard set by some of O’Reilly and Dugard’s earlier books.
To start with, no one killed Ronald Reagan, who was 93 when he died in 2004. The schizophrenic drifter JohnW. Hinckley Jr. tried, shooting Reagan in the chest outside theWashington Hilton on March 30, 1981, just two months into Reagan’s administration.
Hinckley also seriously wounded three others, including James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, who suffered a grievous head wound.
O’Reilly and Dugard show howHinckley came to be at theHilton that day, but Del Quentin Wilber’s Rawhide Down in 2011 provided a more complete and detailed account of the assassination attempt.
Instead, Killing Reagan deals more with Reagan’s gradual descent into de- mentia, the result of his fight with Alzheimer’s disease, which was officially acknowledged in 1994.
The authors contend, contrary to the claims by Reagan loyalists, that Reagan exhibited signs of the illness during his presidency.
It’s perhaps surprising, given Reagan’s iconic status formany of O’Reilly’s Fox viewers, that Killing Reagan often focuses on the negative parts of Reagan’s life and career. The authors delve into his extramarital affairs in Hollywood, indifferent parenting, disputes with his second wife, Nancy, and the multiple instances in which Reagan appeared to be not quite there.
“He delegates much power to Nancy,” O’Reilly and Dugard write of Reagan in 1987. “Occasionally, he avoids the Oval Office altogether, spending hours during the day watching television reruns in the upstairs residence. Evenmore troubling, it is no longer given that the president will take the time to read important policy papers.”
Much of this was suspected at the time, as Reagan periodically seemed adrift and disengaged. Part of that was his nature; he was a big-picture leader, not a detail man such as his predecessor, Jimmy Carter.
But dementia was just as prominent, O’Reilly and Dugard suggest. The assassination attempt played a part. Either way, Reagan’s presidency owed much to his dedicated wife and aides who kept theWhiteHouse running. That is the lesson from Killing Rea
gan: A genial, but flawed, politician rose from being a B movie and TV actor to become one of the most successful politicians of the 20th century, only to have an assassination attempt and Alzheimer’s rob him of greater success as president.
All of that is worthwhile material for a biography, but little of it has to do with killing anyone.
Instead, Killing Reagan is more an engaging and easy-to-read collection of anecdotes than a cohesive narrative. Its subject, a man whose children have said they never could figure out, holds our interest.
But this book may be the final sign that it’s time for O’Reilly and Dugard to kill off this series.