Once
upon a time, Bill O’Reilly had balls when it came to investigating the
Kennedy assassination. Back in 1991 — as a reporter for the tabloid TV
news show, “Inside Edition” – O’Reilly
had the guts
to track the epic crime all the way into the dark labyrinth of the
CIA. Following up on the important work done by investigators for the
House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late ‘70s, O’Reilly
boldly told his “Inside Edition” audience that there were “crucial”
links between alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. O’Reilly
also reported that the CIA had infiltrated the office of New Orleans
District Attorney Jim Garrison, who brought the only criminal case in
the JFK assassination to trial, in an effort to sabotage Garrison’s
investigation.
That was then – when O’Reilly was a scrappy
reporter for low-budget syndicated TV. But now, of course, he’s BILL
O’REILLY – Fox News icon, a lavishly paid centerpiece of the Murdoch
empire. Everything he says – every windy pontification and dyspeptic
remark – is writ LARGE. He can no longer afford to have the courage of
his suspicions. In O’Reilly’s new ideological mold, the CIA is not the
incubator of an unspeakable crime against American democracy – it’s the
defender of the greatest nation in the world.
And so we have the Fox News star’s latest instant bestseller,
“Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot,” co-written by Martin Dugard, who collaborated with O’Reilly on his earlier runaway success,
“Killing Lincoln.”
There is almost nothing in this Kennedy for Beginners book that
indicates O’Reilly once did some original research on this murky and
still deeply haunting subject. Most of this surprisingly dumbed-down
book is a biographical rehash of the Kennedy story that will contain
nothing new for even casual readers of People magazine and viewers of
Kennedy soap opera biopics over the years. Once again, we get the story
of JFK’s PT-109 heroics in the South Pacific; the lurid tales of Jack’s
womanizing and Jackie’s anguish; the requisite cameos of Sinatra,
Marilyn and the Mob; the familiar snapshots of a deeply disgruntled
Lyndon Johnson, continually humiliated by the Kennedy brothers and their
elite Harvard crowd. None of this is worth the book’s $28 price of
admission.
When
it comes to the assassination of President Kennedy, these days Bill
O’Reilly embraces the lone nut theory, pinning sole blame on Lee Harvey
Oswald. But his case against Oswald is feeble, and he’s obviously still
haunted by the suspicions of the younger, freer Bill O’Reilly. In
“Killing Kennedy,” he can’t help returning to those earlier suspicions,
in fleeting moments of the book, as if darting a tongue at a nagging
tooth.
O’Reilly floats the name Allen Dulles, the CIA spymaster
who became deeply embittered toward Kennedy when the president fired him
in the wake of the spy agency’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of
Cuba. He also throws out the name Curtis LeMay, the Strangelovian Air
Force chief who was willing to risk doomsday by launching preemptive
nuclear attacks on Cuba and the Soviet Union – and who considered JFK
weak for putting the brakes on the military. And he considers the Mafia,
whose godfathers expected lenient treatment from the Kennedy
administration, after their cozy relationship with family patriarch Joe
Kennedy, but instead came under relentless pressure from the morally
fervent young attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy.
But, in the
end, O’Reilly returns to the safe path, following the hapless young
ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald on his trail toward infamy. O’Reilly cuts
back and forth between the JFK story line and Oswald’s. If his portrayal
of Kennedy is at least reassuringly conventional, his portrait of the
accused assassin is hopelessly muddled and confusing. O’Reilly tries to
make a case for Oswald as a “crack shot,” a man supposedly capable of
pulling off the magical act of marksmanship in Dealey Plaza. But then he
acknowledges that Oswald couldn’t even hit an easy sitting target, when
he allegedly took an errant shot at former Army general Edwin Walker,
while the reactionary military man was huddled over his taxes in his
Dallas home.
O’Reilly seems intent on building a profile of Oswald
as a bitter loser who resented JFK for everything from his sex appeal
to his war on Castro’s Cuba. But, in the end, O’Reilly – who employs a
weird use of the present tense that is more corny than dramatic —
concedes that “Oswald does not hate the president … in fact, Oswald
would very much like to emulate JFK.” O’Reilly observes that Oswald was
so smitten by Kennedy that he checked out JFK biographies and the
president’s bestseller, “Profiles in Courage,” from the New Orleans
Public Library.
Predictably, O’Reilly then makes a stab at tying
Oswald into a vague communist plot. “Castro definitely wants [Kennedy]
dead,” he flatly asserts, without offering a shred of evidence. In fact,
in the months before the president’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963,
Kennedy was sending out peace feelers to the Cuban leader, to the great
alarm of Washington national security hard-liners when they found out.
As news of JFK’s violent death reached Havana, a deeply unnerved Castro
blurted out, “Everything is changed,” according to a French journalist
who was interviewing him at the time. Castro predicted that the
post-Kennedy U.S. government would make life much tougher for him.
In
the end, O’Reilly is at a loss to explain Lee Harvey Oswald. The Fox
News anchor is clearly unsettled by the fact that Oswald never proudly
took credit for the assassination, as do most slayers of kings and
presidents, including John Wilkes Booth (“Sic semper tyrannis!”), the
villain of his last book. In contrast, Oswald proclaimed his innocence
to the end, shouting out to reporters in the Dallas police station, “I’m
just a patsy!” O’Reilly finds the remark “tantalizing,” but does
nothing to follow it up.
O’Reilly continues to be intrigued by a
key player in the Oswald story, an elegant, White Russian, globetrotting
oilman named George de Mohrenschildt. In his new book, O’Reilly writes
that de Mohrenschildt “may have CIA connections.” But back in his
“Inside Edition” days, the TV newsman was more definitive, calling him
“a crucial link between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald.” In fact, de
Mohrenschildt was a CIA contract agent with long family ties to Allen
Dulles – the man who perhaps looms largest in the Kennedy assassination
drama. Even after he was fired by JFK as CIA director in 1961, Dulles
continued to play a subterranean role in U.S. intelligence that was
unknown by Kennedy. And following the assassination, Dulles took the
dominating role in the Warren Commission investigation, carefully
guiding the panel away from CIA-related areas he found too sensitive.
Many
Kennedy assassination researchers have concluded that de Mohrenschildt
acted as Oswald’s CIA “baby sitter,” when the young man returned to
Texas from the Soviet Union, after a “defection” that observers in the
U.S. embassy in Moscow found oddly “staged.” Later, de Mohrenschildt
introduced Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, to another young Dallas
couple, Michael and Ruth Paine, whose family also had deep personal and
business connections to Dulles. It was Ruth Paine who would find Oswald
his job in the Texas Book Depository a month before the gunfire erupted
in Dealey Plaza.
O’Reilly waits until the end of the book to break
his only bit of news. In the afterword, he reveals that in March 1977,
as a young TV reporter, he tracked de Mohrenschildt to a home in swanky
Palm Beach, Fla., and was knocking on the door to interview him when a
shotgun blast exploded inside. Authorities later declared that the
mysterious de Mohrennschildt, who had been subpoenaed to testify by the
House Assassinations Committee and was a figure of growing interest in
the JFK case, had taken his own life. But some assassination researchers
who looked into de Mohrenschildt’s death, like attorney Mark Lane,
insisted that the former CIA asset had been silenced because he knew too
much. Again, Bill O’Reilly – the tough guy who prides himself on his
bulldog news instincts – leaves this story dangling. He has nothing new
to add to this perplexing Kennedy footnote.
In a reader’s note
that prefaces “Killing Kennedy,” O’Reilly comments that the tragedy of
John F. Kennedy is “somewhat personal for me … my Irish-Catholic family
had deep emotional ties to the young president and his family.” But
there is nothing to indicate the tribal toughness of the Irish in this
weak and limp effort. O’Reilly’s book simply exploits the public’s
powerful curiosity about the assassination without offering any fresh
insights into the monumental crime. With friends of the Kennedy family
like Bill O’Reilly, who needs enemies?
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Salon founder David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller,
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