Killing Reagan – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2015 ★★

He Did It for Jodie

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.

President Ronald Reagan signs a bill while his wife Nancy looks on. According to Killing Reagan, Nancy's control over her adoring husband became a serious problem after his shooting. Image from https://timeline.com/ronald-nancy-reagan-war-on-drugs-crack-baby-just-say-no-cia-communism-racial-injustice-fcfeadb3548d.

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.

Even their prior book, Killing Patton, which went out of its way to spin an outlandish conspiracy theory, had a zippy, factoid-firing-flow about it. Before it, Killing Jesus transformed the New Testament into first-class thriller fare and stands out to me as the best in the series. Despite some key structural and factual flaws, I came away from Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy, the first and second books, entertained and edified. Solid historiography, if not great histories.

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.

Ronald Reagan, at left, shakes hands with President Gerald Ford after losing the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Killing Reagan records that Reagan was so miffed by his tough loss to Ford that he didn't vote for his fellow Republican at the ballot box that year. Ford went on to lose to Jimmy Carter. Image from https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/ronald-reagan-vs-gerald-ford-the-1976-gop-convention-battle-15818.

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.

Robert De Niro in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, which earned him an Oscar nomination. According to Killing Reagan, his Travis Bickle character became a role model for John Hinckley, right down to drinking peach brandy as Bickle did. Image from https://www.indiewire.com/2016/04/the-8-best-things-taxi-driver-super-fan-quentin-tarantino-has-said-about-martin-scorseses-enduring-classic-289562/.

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.

Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, looking at De Niro. According to Killing Reagan, the underage Foster received precautionary psychiatric counseling to ensure she was not emotionally harmed by the film's mature subject matter. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0vFDxszZN8.

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.

President Ronald Reagan waves to onlookers seconds before being struck by a bullet fired by John Hinckley. Next to Reagan, in the light coat, is Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent whose actions in those first minutes saved Reagan's life. Parr died in 2015. Image by Getty Images from https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/09/30/hold-bill-oreilly-killing-reagan-didnt-understand-ronald-reagans-nobility/.

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.

“He was close to dying,” Dr. Joseph Giordano, the presiding surgeon, later recalled.

Arms extended, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy stands in front of Reagan as Parr shoves the President into the limousine. Killing Reagan notes that footage of McCarthy's actions here would be used in training by the Secret Service for years after. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jerry-parr-secret-service-agent-who-saved-president-reagans-life-n442236.

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.

A recovering Reagan enjoys the good wishes of his White House staff in the days after his successful life-saving surgery. While he remained vigorous, Killing Reagan notes he required long rest periods throughout 1981, and never regained his earlier vigor. Image from http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/03/30/avlon.reagan.shooting/index.html.

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/.

Killing Reagan got a lot of press in the form of attacks from old Reagan hands and conservative pundits. George Will dubbed it “a no-facts zone.” One meeting between President Reagan and some top Republicans is presented in Killing Reagan as a precursor for removing Reagan, but nothing comes of it. It’s no surprise the surviving principals of that meeting deny the motive for the meeting the book suggests; the evidence offered here is thin.

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.