Killing Lincoln or Killing the Reader?

Killing Lincoln

Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, written with (or more likely by) Martin Dugard, has certainly generated its share of controversy. It has garnered a mere three stars on Amazon based on nearly 2,400 reviews. Certainly many of the poor reviews are from people who’ve never read the book, but merely dislike O’Reilly (a dislike which is almost always based not on actually watching O’Reilly’s program, but merely what the leftist blogosphere says about O’Reilly – based on their own non-experience with O’Reilly). Yet, since some of poor reviews seemed legitimate, I was leery about this book despite being deeply interested in the Civil War and Lincoln’s presidency. However, after hearing O’Reilly interviewed about the book and the bad wrap it has received, I decided to give it a chance. It turns out a three-star rating is rather accurate for this book.

The assassination of President Lincoln remains a seminal even in American history. Its significance simply cannot be understated. With his death, America forever changed – robbed of its innocence in ways even deeper than the wounds inflicted by the civil war from which the nation had just emerged. Thus, study of the Lincoln assassination remains an important topic in American history. Killing Lincoln should have been a welcome addition to this study.

I really tried to like this book, yet I could never get beyond the feeling that it was a great story continuously being held hostage to mediocre writing. O’Reilly and Dugard decided to write the book along the lines of a modern day “thriller.” As Michael Shaara showed with The Killer Angels, it’s possible to write exciting, but highly accurate, narrative history. Thus, the concept of writing narrative popular history isn’t a problem in itself. The problem here is in its execution. First, the writing seems very “forced” and clichéd, for example several of the first chapters begin with the line, “The man with [xxx] weeks to live…” I find such writing very annoying. Second, and something I find even more annoying, is that the story is written in the present tense: “He furls his brow…”, “…Lincoln steps up to the podium…”, etc. I have no idea why they chose to use this poor and unacceptable writing style. I suppose they thought it would add to the “tension” of the story, however for someone with a basic knowledge of proper writing, it merely adds to the reader’s annoyance.

My other pet peeve with works of popular history such as this is its failure to clearly list sources. O’Reilly and Dugard make some extraordinary claims – in particular digging up the largely discredited conspiracy theory that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was part of a massive conspiracy within the US government to assassinate Lincoln. They seem to rely heavily on the work of Ray Neff, a person they describe as “a controversial amateur historian.” They similarly go on to note “Neff’s hypothesis and his entire body of work has been repudiated and dismissed by the vast majority of trained historians and assassination scholars.” Despite this, they not only use him as a source, but also quote heavily from a “decoding” by Neff of an 1868 article by Lafayette Baker (the “detective” retained by Stanton to hunt down Booth) which, according to Neff’s “interpretation,” exposes the conspiracy by members of the US government to kill Lincoln. Yet, here again the authors admit, “[t]here is no consensus about whether Neff’s hidden message is authentic.” Some claim the moon landings were staged in a Hollywood sound studio – would O’Reilly and Dugard use such nonsensical “theories” if writing about the Apollo program?

A perusal of the authors’ short bibliographic essay reveals they apparently relied heavily on secondary sources for their book. In other words, they seemingly present nothing new, but merely a re-hash of already existing research. Given only brief mention (in fact, simply included in a list without comment) is Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by Edward Steers Jr., considered one of the most important recent scholarly works on the Lincoln assassination.

Overall, Killing Lincoln is a great story continuously bogged down by poor writing and backed up with weak reference – not only weak reference, but apparent overreliance on someone whose work has been largely discredited. It’s not a terribly bad book, but it’s certainly not a terribly good book either.