After a knockdown, drag-out fight last week with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, syndicated columnist George Will struck back Tuesday, asserting that the cable news host’s new book on Ronald Reagan is an utter travesty.
“Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him,” Will wrote in his column Tuesday. “It has, however, already done so.”
O’Reilly’s latest book, Killing Reagan, posits that a failed assassination attempt in 1981 triggered the mental decline of America’s 40th president, prompting members of his cabinet to consider having him removed from office. But Will and others in the press have said the book is thinly sourced, poorly researched and relies entirely on lurid innuendo, debunked rumors and tired tall tales.
O’Reilly hosted Will on his show last week, presumably to address the criticism, but the interview quickly degenerated into a screaming match, as the Fox host repeatedly shouted at the conservative columnist, “You’re a hack!”
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On Tuesday, Will fired back, repeating in his column that Killing Reagan is nothing more than gross revisionism from a play-pretend “historian.”
“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. But neither O’Reilly nor [co-author Martin 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.”
The Fox host explained last week that he and his co-author didn’t speak to any of Reagan’s former aides because they “have skin in the game.”
Will continued, writing, “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.” Will also cites evidence that the memo fell short of proving that Reagan was mentally ill.
He added, “The ‘centerpiece’ memo was written by [former White House aide James] 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.'”
Baker and Culvahouse didn’t consider the memo important enough to keep, Will wrote.
Also, when Cannon wrote the note, he was not a member of the Reagan administration, meaning that the Reagan Library wouldn’t have it on hand. It hasn’t “disappeared” from the library, as O’Reilly has suggested, Will said.
Will then turned his attention to the Fox host’s penchant for accusing his book’s detractors of being part of a shadowy cabal that is hell-bent on protecting the public from the “truth” of Reagan’s legacy.
“O’Reilly impales himself on a contradiction: He says his book is ‘laudatory’ about Reagan — and that it is being attacked by Reagan ‘guardians‘ and ‘loyalists.’ How odd. Liberals, who have long recognized that to discredit conservatism they must devalue Reagan’s presidency, surely are delighted with O’Reilly’s assistance,” he wrote. “The diaspora of Reagan administration alumni, and the conservative movement, now recognize O’Reilly as an opportunistic interloper.”
The conservative columnist concluded with a twist of the knife, writing, “In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who ‘smashed up things’ and then ‘retreated back into … their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’ Tidying up after O’Reilly could be a full-time job but usually is not worth the trouble.”
He added, “When, however, O’Reilly’s vast carelessness pollutes history and debases the historian’s craft, the mess is, unlike O’Reilly, to be taken seriously.”
