I don’t follow Bill O’Reilly, so I don’t know what possessed him to write a history of the Lincoln assassination. I could have predicted that it would be bad. Making a real contribution to the scholarship on a topic that has already been extensively covered is not an easy task. It would require a tremendous amount of time and effort in order to master the available primary sources and take into account all the existing theories. Even if he had the will to do so, I doubt that O’Reilly has the time he would need to tackle all of this.
No big surprise then that O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln, which he co-wrote with Martin Dugard, has been a critical flop. For starters, O’Reilly wasn’t doing original research. According to a review at the Washington Post, the book doesn’t directly cite its sources, and seems to have come entirely from secondary works. So that’s how O’Reilly and Dugard avoided the lengthy stages of research, they synthesised the works of previous historians.
That’s not a killing flaw – or even a flaw at all if you admit that’s what you’re doing. Since O’Reilly is apparently doing commemorative “great man” history, he can probably get away with it. It doesn’t require much original research at this point to extol the virtues of Lincoln; there are libraries of books doing that already.
What has killed the book are the mistakes. There are tons of little mistakes, like incorrect measurements and confusion about dates. These could be slips of the pen, but they’re not encouraging. Jason Colavito sees them as the result of the poor state of editing in modern publishing. He’d know better than I, but I still suspect that O’Reilly has protection from editors. [Warning: TvTropes link]
There are tons of moderate mistakes, like mentioning the Oval Office, which did not exist yet. Here there really is no excuse, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a case of bias. Just pure sloppiness.
What is more disturbing is that O’Reilly has resurrected some old myths. The authors suggest that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was somehow involved in the assassination. They acknowledge that there is no concrete evidence for this, but insist that “circumstantially, he was involved,” a nice little hand-wave that allows them to assert without proof.
There are also some weird ideas that don’t seem to be grounded in anything. Every great man needs a villain, so the authors enlist Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Now, Johnson was in many ways an embarrassment, but O’Reilly apparently wants the long time Democratic stump speaker to be a fire-breather hostile to the south. Would that it were so, but Johnson was far more lenient towards the south, and far less interested in black equality, than the Radical Republicans.
Again, I don’t know what possessed O’Reilly to set himself up for this. It doesn’t seem to be a partisan work, just a bad one.
O’Reilly. Ya gotta love his confidence in his own opinions. Who needs to do careful research when you’re always right?
And speaking of history, I miss the UF forums. What’s the word on them? The last update was “we’ll be back up later this week”, but that was posted eleven days ago.
I miss the forums too.
Me three!
Can teh servr monkeez please fix teh forumz??? Pleez!!!!
We have an infinite number of server monkeys working on an infinite number of servers trying to restart the forum. Eventually we will recreate every internet forum that has ever existed.
Tell them to lay off the Shakespeare. This is more important.
I don’t know which is more important. Sure, the forum is nice, but wouldn’t it be great if teh servr monkeez produced all of the Shakespeare plays that Shakespeare himself never got around to writing?
OK, I’ll add a proviso that I’m only interested in seeing the plays that are better than ‘Coriolanus’.
It should be up soon… sorry guys, I don’t have any control over the timeframe. I am at the mercy of the patheos server gods.
It cracks me up when Republican talking heads ignore things like Lincoln’s suspension of writs of habeas corpus, but go nuts when Obama uses executive powers to make tiny tweaks to mortgage policies and student loans.
Or how about the fact that a huge portion of the modern Republican “base” would have been on the opposite side of Lincoln in that little skirmish we had during his administration?
Since Lincoln was nominally a Republican, O’Reilly and others want to claim him as their own. He’s on Mt. Rushmore, after all. The GOP wants it both ways – to co-opt the great emancipator as one of their own while ignoring the fact that Lincoln himself wouldn’t recognize the collection of half-wit bigots that now makes up the Republican party.
O’Reilly has shown his penchant for heresay and innuendo over facts on his own truly unwatchable hour of prime time. So, it’s no surprise he’d do no better in a more serious forum.
Lincoln would no more recognize today’s Republicans than Jesus would recognize today’s “Christians”.
Whenever I see a big celebrity put out a book like this, and it has a co-writer, I think it’s pretty safe to assume the co-writer did most, if not all of the writing. I know that was the case with Palin’s book last year. O’Reilly’s name is probably just printed on their to sell copies.
That’s not to say the criticism isn’t still valid. When he slapped his name on there he took responsibility for the contents.
Next thing you know O’Reilly will be writing another fictitious second edition of the 2nd New Testament with even more allegories, myths and forgeries.