Across America, historians blasted Killing Lincoln for being a poorly-researched font of disinformation. Museum gift shops that sell Honest Abe coloring books determined it to be beneath their standards. The deputy superintendent of the Ford's Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, D. C. cited numerous errors and a lack of footnotes in recommending Killing Lincoln be kept off its book store shelves as a disservice to Lincoln's memory.
Meanwhile, the actual murder weapon used for killing Lincoln is on display at Ford's Theatre, under glass.
I don't think this is a great book myself, or an especially vital history. There are errors, factual ones which were corrected in subsequent editions. I have the first edition, so assassination conspirator Mary Surratt is still "chained to the bowels" of her prison ship wearing a "thick padded hood." The soldier on the scene at the attempted killing of Secretary of State William Seward is still demoted from sergeant to private in successive sentences. And President Lincoln still contemplates his war policy in an Oval Office that won't be built for another 44 years.
But Killing Lincoln reads well, tells a fascinating story with vim and energy, presents some intriguing tangents, and perhaps most important, sold a lot of copies. That sounds a bit mercenary, but if you care about historiography, the understanding of how history is recorded and remembered, Killing Lincoln's place on the best-seller lists makes it worth attending to. Even if it isn't exactly right in all its details, and it has been amended since the first edition, it is a part of the story of how the United States remembers the demise of its most-beloved president, and will remain so for a while.
As a reading experience, Killing Lincoln is a unique sort of history. It's written as a kind of airport-fiction narrative, telling a moment-by-moment account of April, 1865. There's some attention paid to the winding down of the Confederacy, but mostly we see Lincoln in his last days, dealing with policy issues and his habitually-unsteady wife Mary Todd Lincoln, alternating with the noted Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, who watches Lincoln deliver his Second Inaugural Address from only a few yards away with murder in his heart.
"He is everything an effective assassin should be: methodical, passionate, determined, and an excellent strategist and planner," O'Reilly and Dugard write. "He is prone to depression, as many assassins are, but his ability to turn angst into rage makes him even more dangerous."
It's the only presidential assassination without lone-gunman theories. Booth had his fellow conspirators, a motley band that included a psycho, a drunk, and a pretty widow. Four of them would pay the penalty of being hung which Booth himself escaped by being shot in flight; Killing Lincoln examines in brief their relative levels of guilt.
Killing Lincoln notes the plan as recently as a few days prior to Friday, April 15, 1865 was to kidnap Lincoln, not slay him. But history moves mysteriously and quickly in this book, and soon Booth is bent on assassination, probably after hearing Lincoln talk at the Second Inaugural about black suffrage. The killing was to have occurred the day before as all Washington D. C. celebrated the Confederate Army's surrender at Appomattox with a boozy blowout, but Booth couldn't find his target that night and if he had, his bar-hopping might well have spoiled his aim.
The story takes in a lot of "what-if" elements, probably the part of Killing Lincoln I enjoyed most. The name John Parker should have gone down in infamy but instead is completely forgotten, him being the fellow who was assigned to sit outside the entrance Lincoln's presidential box at Ford's Theatre and keep guard, but who went off and got drunk instead. O'Reilly and Dugard present him at Taltavul's, a tavern next-door to the theater, all-but-sharing a bottle with John Wilkes Booth, who happens to be a stool or two away from Parker drinking up some last-minute courage for what he is about to do.
The main drawback of Killing Lincoln is the authors' approach errs invariably on the side of readability. There are no caveats or grey shadows of doubt for the reader to sift through. At times, the authors tell us what so-and-so was thinking at such-and-such a time, and it often seems pure speculation. For example, we are told early and often of Lincoln's abiding religious belief as if it were a matter of simple fact. I'd like to think he was a believer, but I know there is a lot of informed argument on the subject, and no clear answers in the public record. Killing Lincoln doesn't entertain any such questions. There's no time to; he's got a date at the theater.
The best example of this unwillingness to wrestle with ambiguity comes in the book's climactic scene. We see Booth as he approaches Lincoln, raises his Deringer to the president's head, pulls the trigger, and jumps from the presidential box to the Ford's Theatre stage. Then he says...what?
"The South shall be free!" is the quote O'Reilly and Dugard offer as recalled by one witness, actor Harry Hawk, then on stage delivering his big punch line from Our American Cousin. And that's all we get for the rest of this book, even though earlier on, O'Reilly and Dugard record Booth mentally preparing himself to say a line he plucked from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Sic semper tyrannis!" [Translation: "Thus always to tyrants!"]
In fact, there's a lot of conjecture by historians whether Booth said "Sic semper tyrannis" just as he planned, whether the actor blew his biggest line, or if he said something else entirely. Booth may have been handicapped at the moment of his delivery by a clumsy landing from the presidential box nine feet above. The conventional story, repeated in Killing Lincoln, is that he broke his leg on the stage, complicating his escape. This fractured fibula is another bone of contention among historians; a recent theory that has many supporters suggests he didn't break a leg at Ford's Theatre at all, but did later that night when falling from his horse. Advocates of this theory ask how Booth could have managed such a quick exit on one leg?
O'Reilly and Dugard don't really address this, either, except to say that the boot he was wearing acted as a kind of splint in those first moments. I imagine the adrenaline coursing through his system probably helped drown some of the pain. Booth did write later that he broke his leg on the jump, so I think O'Reilly and Dugard are correct in their interpretation. I just wish they found some time to allow for this smidgen of doubt.
I know what a reader might be thinking here: Doubt isn't Bill O'Reilly's style. It's the one carryover you might expect from the FOX News television pundit, he has his viewpoint and he's sticking to it, and shut up if you disagree. I suspect O'Reilly's take on the murder of our 16th president is less a problem for many of his professorial critics than O'Reilly himself, and the politics with which he is identifed. If this was some other celebrity writing this book with his quasi-ghost-writer, and garnering new interest in what happened on that fatal Friday nearly 150 years ago, Killing Lincoln would be on those museum-store racks beside the postcards and toy deringers and souvenir stovepipe hats.
Me, I think they should stock the book. It's hardly the definitive story but will give a reader an appetite to learn more. I know it did for me.
I don't think this is a great book myself, or an especially vital history. There are errors, factual ones which were corrected in subsequent editions. I have the first edition, so assassination conspirator Mary Surratt is still "chained to the bowels" of her prison ship wearing a "thick padded hood." The soldier on the scene at the attempted killing of Secretary of State William Seward is still demoted from sergeant to private in successive sentences. And President Lincoln still contemplates his war policy in an Oval Office that won't be built for another 44 years.
But Killing Lincoln reads well, tells a fascinating story with vim and energy, presents some intriguing tangents, and perhaps most important, sold a lot of copies. That sounds a bit mercenary, but if you care about historiography, the understanding of how history is recorded and remembered, Killing Lincoln's place on the best-seller lists makes it worth attending to. Even if it isn't exactly right in all its details, and it has been amended since the first edition, it is a part of the story of how the United States remembers the demise of its most-beloved president, and will remain so for a while.
As a reading experience, Killing Lincoln is a unique sort of history. It's written as a kind of airport-fiction narrative, telling a moment-by-moment account of April, 1865. There's some attention paid to the winding down of the Confederacy, but mostly we see Lincoln in his last days, dealing with policy issues and his habitually-unsteady wife Mary Todd Lincoln, alternating with the noted Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, who watches Lincoln deliver his Second Inaugural Address from only a few yards away with murder in his heart.
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| While Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, John Wilkes Booth watched from a platform just above, as the invited guest of a senator whose daughter Booth was courting. Photograph by Alexander Gardner, from lincolnssecondinaugural.com. |
It's the only presidential assassination without lone-gunman theories. Booth had his fellow conspirators, a motley band that included a psycho, a drunk, and a pretty widow. Four of them would pay the penalty of being hung which Booth himself escaped by being shot in flight; Killing Lincoln examines in brief their relative levels of guilt.
Killing Lincoln notes the plan as recently as a few days prior to Friday, April 15, 1865 was to kidnap Lincoln, not slay him. But history moves mysteriously and quickly in this book, and soon Booth is bent on assassination, probably after hearing Lincoln talk at the Second Inaugural about black suffrage. The killing was to have occurred the day before as all Washington D. C. celebrated the Confederate Army's surrender at Appomattox with a boozy blowout, but Booth couldn't find his target that night and if he had, his bar-hopping might well have spoiled his aim.
The story takes in a lot of "what-if" elements, probably the part of Killing Lincoln I enjoyed most. The name John Parker should have gone down in infamy but instead is completely forgotten, him being the fellow who was assigned to sit outside the entrance Lincoln's presidential box at Ford's Theatre and keep guard, but who went off and got drunk instead. O'Reilly and Dugard present him at Taltavul's, a tavern next-door to the theater, all-but-sharing a bottle with John Wilkes Booth, who happens to be a stool or two away from Parker drinking up some last-minute courage for what he is about to do.
The main drawback of Killing Lincoln is the authors' approach errs invariably on the side of readability. There are no caveats or grey shadows of doubt for the reader to sift through. At times, the authors tell us what so-and-so was thinking at such-and-such a time, and it often seems pure speculation. For example, we are told early and often of Lincoln's abiding religious belief as if it were a matter of simple fact. I'd like to think he was a believer, but I know there is a lot of informed argument on the subject, and no clear answers in the public record. Killing Lincoln doesn't entertain any such questions. There's no time to; he's got a date at the theater.
The best example of this unwillingness to wrestle with ambiguity comes in the book's climactic scene. We see Booth as he approaches Lincoln, raises his Deringer to the president's head, pulls the trigger, and jumps from the presidential box to the Ford's Theatre stage. Then he says...what?
"The South shall be free!" is the quote O'Reilly and Dugard offer as recalled by one witness, actor Harry Hawk, then on stage delivering his big punch line from Our American Cousin. And that's all we get for the rest of this book, even though earlier on, O'Reilly and Dugard record Booth mentally preparing himself to say a line he plucked from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Sic semper tyrannis!" [Translation: "Thus always to tyrants!"]
In fact, there's a lot of conjecture by historians whether Booth said "Sic semper tyrannis" just as he planned, whether the actor blew his biggest line, or if he said something else entirely. Booth may have been handicapped at the moment of his delivery by a clumsy landing from the presidential box nine feet above. The conventional story, repeated in Killing Lincoln, is that he broke his leg on the stage, complicating his escape. This fractured fibula is another bone of contention among historians; a recent theory that has many supporters suggests he didn't break a leg at Ford's Theatre at all, but did later that night when falling from his horse. Advocates of this theory ask how Booth could have managed such a quick exit on one leg?
O'Reilly and Dugard don't really address this, either, except to say that the boot he was wearing acted as a kind of splint in those first moments. I imagine the adrenaline coursing through his system probably helped drown some of the pain. Booth did write later that he broke his leg on the jump, so I think O'Reilly and Dugard are correct in their interpretation. I just wish they found some time to allow for this smidgen of doubt.
I know what a reader might be thinking here: Doubt isn't Bill O'Reilly's style. It's the one carryover you might expect from the FOX News television pundit, he has his viewpoint and he's sticking to it, and shut up if you disagree. I suspect O'Reilly's take on the murder of our 16th president is less a problem for many of his professorial critics than O'Reilly himself, and the politics with which he is identifed. If this was some other celebrity writing this book with his quasi-ghost-writer, and garnering new interest in what happened on that fatal Friday nearly 150 years ago, Killing Lincoln would be on those museum-store racks beside the postcards and toy deringers and souvenir stovepipe hats.
Me, I think they should stock the book. It's hardly the definitive story but will give a reader an appetite to learn more. I know it did for me.
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