How does one write about a murdering a person where the victim, a U. S. President, lives on for a quarter-century?
If
you are producing a lucrative series of books with a running title like Killing
So-and-so, you find a way of tying that person’s eventual demise to the murder
attempt. That is what Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard did in the case of Ronald
Reagan, who went down in history not as a victim of an assassin’s bullet but instead
Alzheimer’s disease.
Killing
Reagan
doesn’t flat out declare that being shot in March 1981 was the reason Reagan
died in June 2004, at 93. But in its speculative fashion, it suggests it as
trigger point for his later mental decline:
Reagan
slowly lapsed into a dementia so severe that it had been a decade since he
appeared in public. The root cause could have been genetic, for his mother was
not lucid in her final days. Or it might have been the result of a near-death
experience caused by a gunman’s bullet twenty-three years ago. Whatever the
reason, Reagan’s decline had been dramatic.
Killing
Reagan
was the fifth and last of the O’Reilly/Dugard books whose title drew upon the
death of an actual person; after it, the pair used the title in a more
sloppy fashion about the defeats of nations in war or the round-up of Nazi
war criminals. Someone was getting killed, anyway. Reading Killing
Reagan, one senses the whole concept running out of
gas.
Which
is a shame, because as a series, the books had something going for them. Not so
much in terms of research (they were almost entirely based on secondary
materials, usually older books), but for red-meat readability. Any
of the Killing books I’ve read are great for passing time in waiting
rooms or airplanes; they hold my attention.
Where
does Killing Reagan fit in? Well, the first half isn’t bad. It keeps to
the formula, of flat, clear statements with everything in the present tense. We
get a pair of stories, the main one being about Ronald Reagan, who we see take
on communism first as president of the Screen Actors Guild, then as a spokesman
for capitalism through the medium of television in a well-received ad for
General Electric that launches him full-bore into politics.
Movies
made Ronald Reagan, who starred in many during Hollywood’s Golden Age. A movie
nearly killed him, too. Not Bedtime For Bonzo, which paired Reagan
with a chimpanzee and became the butt of much humor for the rest of his life. As
this book points out, in one of many stray-if-fun tangents, Reagan gave a
solid, amiable performance there, and the movie did well at the box office.
Rather,
it was this other movie, Taxi Driver, made long after Reagan left acting. It connected with a rich but
disaffected loner adrift in Reagan’s home state of California after being
kicked out of his family’s Colorado estate:
In
reality, the only good thing in John Hinckley Jr.’s life right now is up there
on the screen at the Egyptian. Taxi Driver gives him hope and a sense
of purpose.
That
movie, about a cabbie who becomes a gun-wielding assassin wannabe, also gave Hinckley a
love object in an underage prostitute character played by Jodie Foster.
Hinckley soon began pursuing Foster, alternately writing her poetry and plotting
her murder.
The
story O’Reilly/Dugard tell here has been told before, and better, most notably
in Del Quentin Wilbur’s Rawhide Down, which remains a definitive account
of the Reagan assassination attempt. But if you want a faster-paced tale that just
gives you highlights in a gripping way, the first 200 pages of Killing Reagan deliver.
As
Wilbur did, Killing Reagan explains how Reagan wasn’t Hinckley’s first
choice as murder victim. He followed then-President Jimmy Carter to Nashville,
Tennessee, where he was arrested carrying firearms. Somehow Hinckley dodged
serious charges there.
He
kept stalking Foster, by then an undergraduate at Yale University. Unlike most people in
his life, Foster took Hinckley seriously, enough to alert authorities about this
dangerous stalker. Little was done, beyond his worried parents hiring a
psychologist.
The
shrink proved comically worthless, as O’Reilly/Dugard note:
John
Hinckley trusts [Dr. John] Hopper enough to confess that he is “on the breaking
point” mentally, but rather than be alarmed, the psychiatrist thinks him a
typical socially awkward young man who exaggerates his obsessions. Hopper
treats Hinckley by attaching biofeedback electrodes to his forehead and
thermometers to his fingers in an effort to teach him relaxation techniques.
The
confluence of Hinckley’s wayward trickle with the bustling river that was
Ronald Reagan would only begin in 1980 as the latter became the front-running
candidate to replace Carter as president. Tiring of Carter’s sanctimony and all-around impotence, Americans jumped at the chance to replace him with the
more likable and strong-talking Reagan, which they did in a landslide that
November.
Hinckley
struck on March 30, 1981, outside a hotel where President Reagan was addressing
a union. It was not a successful speech; it was very nearly Reagan’s last. Hinckley’s bullets that day struck four people; three directly,
Reagan via a ricochet off the bullet-proof presidential limo. One of the other
victims, Press Secretary James Brady, nearly died outright from a bullet to the
brain. Brady never fully recovered, making him a kind of delayed murder victim when he did pass away in 2014.
Only
a quick-thinking Secret Service agent, Jerry Parr, saved Reagan. Parr made the
call to send Reagan to George Washington University Hospital for a
precautionary exam for what was initially thought to be a broken rib and a cut
lip. Reagan had actually taken a bullet to the lung which stopped less than an inch from his heart.
Reagan walked into the hospital, then collapsed once inside. It took doctors a painfully long time to find the bullet as the president fought for his life. His blood pressure dropped by more than half.
Reagan walked into the hospital, then collapsed once inside. It took doctors a painfully long time to find the bullet as the president fought for his life. His blood pressure dropped by more than half.
“He
was close to dying,” Dr. Joseph Giordano, the presiding surgeon, later
recalled.
To
this point, Killing Reagan is pretty decent. O’Reilly/Dugard’s appetite
for throwing up tangential facts every other page is perfect fare for those of
us who enjoy aimless dips into Wikipedia for the chance to click through
assorted links. Killing Reagan has all kinds of sidetrips:
- Reagan once acted in a TV movie opposite James Dean.
- Ronald’s wife, Nancy, was so overcome en route to the hospital that she nearly exited her limo in the middle of a traffic jam.
- Months before his murder attempt, Hinckley attended a vigil for murdered Beatle John Lennon, and carried a Lennon button in his left pocket when he shot Reagan.
- Shooting victim Thomas Delahanty, a D. C. cop with the canine unit, only got assigned Reagan’s security detail because his service dog was sick with heartworms.
After Reagan emerged from the assassination, he used the goodwill he had gained to push his agenda. The liberal press was not amused. “We’ve been kinder to President Reagan than any president I can remember since I’ve been at the [Washington] Post,” executive editor Ben Bradlee grumbled.
But every silver lining has a cloud. For O’Reilly/Dugard, it is the need to justify the title Killing Reagan after the murder attempt is long over and Reagan still kicking.
But every silver lining has a cloud. For O’Reilly/Dugard, it is the need to justify the title Killing Reagan after the murder attempt is long over and Reagan still kicking.
This they
attempt by presenting again that case of diminished capacity:
Ronald
Reagan is not engaged in many day-to-day White House activities. He delegates
much power to Nancy. Occasionally, he avoids the Oval Office altogether,
spending hours during the day watching television reruns in the upstairs
residence. Even more troubling, it is no longer a given that the president will
take the time to read important policy papers.
Killing Reagan co-author Bill O'Reilly. Image from https://www.mediaite.com/print/washington-post-accuses-oreilly-of-fabricating-exchange-from-killing-reagan/. |
Any
book with O’Reilly’s name on it was sure to draw flak, especially back when he
still had a job as right-leaning pundit on FOX News. Such animus misses the
point; his only agenda here is to tell a real-life story in thriller form. The
problem arises when the story doesn’t cohere enough to the title that the
authors are forced to scramble in order to justify it. They can’t and don’t;
the result is a book that limps to a close.
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