I have known guys like Bill O’Reilly all my life, and they have all annoyed me. He’s Cathoic working class, just like me, just like a lot of guys I went to school with. He’s smart, but bombastic, smug, pugnacious, anti-intellectual, and on top of that, cynical. He always wants to pick an argument, and then prove you wrong. Having logged a lot of time with prototypes of his ilk, I can’t imagine wanting to spend an extra minute with him. And for as long as he has been on the air, I never have.
He has a sidelight: writing (co-writing with Martin Dugard? Slapping his name on?) a series of best-selling books about the deaths of famous people–Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, Killing Jesus. Evidently unwilling to did too deep into the barrel–“Next up: Killing Tupac!”–he recently went farther afield, and began writing books about people who weren’t actually `killed’ in the way we understand the term, such as Killing Patton. O’Reilly’s latest is Killing Reagan, which is a stretch, since John Hinckley Jr. didn’t actually kill Ronald Reagan per se. Instead, argues O’Reilly, the wounds Kinckley inflicted required surgical procedures that weakened Reagan, and brought on the dementia that weakened his presidency and eventually killed him almost 23 full years later.
It’s a crap book, pretentious, full of vignettes that don’t actually figure in the story at all. This being gift-giving seasons, the book no doubt would have had its little run atop the bestsellers’ list, and then faded away. Instead, columnist George Will went after the book. But curiously, Will comes up short in his critique.
“O’Reilly “reports” that the trauma of the assassination attempt was somehow causally related to the “fact” that Reagan was frequently so mentally incompetent that senior aides contemplated using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office,” writes Will. “But neither O’Reilly nor Dugard spoke with any of those aides — not with Ed Meese, Jim Baker, George Shultz or any of the scores of others who could, and would, have demolished O’Reilly’s theory. O’Reilly now airily dismisses them because they “have skin in the game.” His is an interesting approach to writing history: Never talk to anyone with firsthand knowledge of your subject.Instead, O’Reilly made the book’s “centerpiece” a memo he has never seen and never tried to see until 27 days after the book was published. Then Dugard asked the Reagan Presidential Library to find it. . . .The “centerpiece” memo was written by Cannon at the request of former senator Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) when Baker was about to replace the fired Don Regan as Reagan’s chief of staff. The memo assessing White House conditions apparently included disparagements of Reagan from some unhappy Regan staffers. The memo was presented to Baker at a meeting at Baker’s home attended by A.B. Culvahouse, who the next day would become counsel to the president. Culvahouse remembers the normally mild-mannered Baker brusquely dismissing the memo: “That’s not the Reagan I met with two days ago.” Neither Baker nor Culvahouse considered the memo important enough to save. Meeting with Reagan the next day, Baker and others found no reason to question his competence.”
First. the question of Reagan’s mental competency does not rest on the memo. Those of us who were alive during his tenure know what we saw: an elderly man who often seemed mentally competent but who also seemed to have moments when he was slow and when he slipped up. In his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, a halting, stumbling Reagan was so ineffective that he lost seven points off his lead. At one point in that debate, he said “people should understand that two-thirds of the defense budget pays for pay and salary, or pay and pension. And then you add to that food and wardrobe, and all the other things. . .” Wardrobe? We have all seen our parents have these moments; many of us have already had them ourselves. We don’t need a White House memo to know that there must have been days when he had troubles, particularly when such days came during a time when he was having prostate surgery and working through the Iran Contra scandal. I’d want to watch soap operas too.
Second, it’s not clear what the memo actually said, and since it is missing, there will be no knowing anytime soon. The memo, whose contents was widely reported and not disputed, reported that Reagan frequently skipped work, and that when he attended meetings, he seemed dazed and inattentive.James Cannon wrote the memo, and Howard Baker, the chief of staff, resolved to observe Reagan’s behavior for signs of incapacity. Baker’s rejection of the memo — “That’s not the man I met with two days ago”–ended the gossip and rumormongering.
But does it mean that Reagan was well? I once attended a meeting with the editor-in-chief of a magazine. I was trying to push a story about a Hollywood figure and his drug usage. The editor was discouraging me. He listed all the evidentiary hurdles the story would have to clear. With each objection, I pushed back, arguing that we could meet the standards. “You don’t understand,” the editor eventually said, “I don’t think you can ever write a story that is good enough.” And with that, I did understand. The director and the editor were social friends, and the editor wanted to kill the story without getting blood on his hands.
The absence of the letter doesn’t mean the letter was false. It did exist at one time, it was promulgated on the testimony of White House staff who believed that ad seen a dangerously weakened Reagan, and Cannon is not around to say why he has repudiated his entire letter. It could mean that Baker didn’t agree that Reagan was sick enough to warrant removal, and so he quashed the letter, and had everyone close ranks. It’s happened before. The health problems of presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy were covered up by staff.
Howard Baker was an eminently honorable man, and a patriot. He knew that it would be traumatic to remove an elected president, even if that president wasn’t always functioning. Baker amy well have thought that his job was to help the president succeed rather than usher in a replacement. If that is what he did, it would have been humane, honorable, and arguably in the country’s interest.
It’s true that O’Reilly accepts at face value the contents of a letter he has never seen, but it is not the fulcrum of his argument. Rather, he uses it to represent an incident in a chain, including statements from Michael Deaver, Edmund Morris and Ron Reagan Jr that say that the presidents had episodes like this during his presidency. Without the memo, O’Reilly could still make the argument, albeit less dramatically, that Reagan had days as president when he wasn’t up to doing the job. Will has nothing to say about the other pieces of evidence; indeed, pointedly refused to try to refute the Deaver and Morris statements.
Instead, Will accuses O’Reilly of not being a true conservative, of doing the work of the left, “which knows in order to discredit conservatism, it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as a president.” It’s an amazing statement, both ill-founded and astonishingly revelatory. Reagan’s presidency can be attacked in many ways, but to argue that it can be undermined by saying that it is a product of dementia is unhinged; nobody would make the case, nobody would believe it. How does that work? Communism was undone because Reagan was senile? It makes no sense.
But Will is accurate when he grounds the legitimacy of modern conservatism in Reagan’s presidency, and its perceived success. And he is right: the left would love to persuade people that Reagan’s support of marketism and his delegitimacy of government contribute mightily to injustice and inequality in America. Conservatism does have to rely on Reagan, for otherwise, what is it? The terrible presidency of George W. Bush, the insubordination and paranoia of Cheney and Rumsfeld, the nihilism of the Tea Party, the woman-hatred and science-hatred of evangelicals, the sheer nuttiness of Palin and Bachman and Cruz, and the caudilloism of Trump.
No wonder Will feels he needs to overreact on Reagan’s behalf. He has nothing else.