Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly’ defended his new book Friday by attacking one of its fiercest critics as a “hack” and a secret member of a “cabal” that wants to “deify” America’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan.
The book, Killing Reagan, which claims that the failed 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan triggered his mental decline, has drawn sharp criticism from several historians.
Among those who’ve had sharp words for of O’Reilly’s latest offering is syndicated columnist George Will, who wrote this week that the book’s, “perfunctory pieties about Reagan’s greatness are inundated by its flood of regurgitated slanders about his supposed lassitude and manipulability.”
“This book is nonsensical history and execrable citizenship, and should come with a warning: ‘Caution — you are about to enter a no-facts zone,” he added.
In response to Will’s criticism, O’Reilly hosted him Friday, presumably to set the record straight. But instead of countering Will’s assessment of Killing Reagan with a point-by-point rebuttal, O’Reilly spent most of the interview quizzing the conservative columnist on his knowledge of the Reagan administration.
The interview ended eventually with O’Reilly repeatedly shouting, “You’re a hack!”
“You’re in with a cabal of Reagan loyalists who don’t want the truth to be told!” he added.
But Will is not alone in challenging the thesis of the cable news host’s book.
Historians Craig Shirley, Kiron K. Skinner, Paul Kengor and Steven F. Hayward have also accused O’Reilly of engaging in outright revisionism.
“Killing Reagan … is supposed to be a book of new scholarship on the Reagan presidency,” they said last month in a Washington Post op-ed. “Instead, it restates old claims and rumors, virtually all of which have been discredited by the historical record.”
O’Reilly has maintained in all this time that the book’s detractors are merely afraid of telling the truth, and that they’re hell bent on keeping the public from learning about the reality of Reagan’s mental deterioration.
