RSN: Bill O'Reilly, Ronald Reagan, and the History We'd Rather Not Know

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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | Bill O'Reilly, Ronald Reagan, and the History We'd Rather Not Know

Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "In Bill O'Reilly's latest book, Killing Reagan which obviously didn't happen, but go with it O'Reilly inadvertently (and without proper attribution, as we shall see) stumbled into that shadowland that lies between the history that we believe, and the history that we'd rather not know."
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Dispatches from the shadowland.

ill O'Reilly has taken to styling himself as something of an expert on historical murders. This has not been an easy process. For example, his book on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was so flawed that the museum bookstore at Ford's Theater refused to sell it. His book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy contained self-aggrandizing fabulism of how O'Reilly, hot on the trail of the killers, arrived at the home of George de Mohrenschildt just as that old friend of Lee Harvey Oswald killed himself. And, as for Killing Jesus, let's just say O'Reilly's gifts for scripture history are on a par with his gifts for romantic small talk. As I said, it's hard out there for a hard-boiled historian. But in his latest, Killing Reagan—which obviously didn't happen, but go with it—O'Reilly inadvertently (and without proper attribution, as we shall see) stumbled into that shadowland that lies between the history that we believe, and the history that we'd rather not know.

The folks at Media Matters have been on this for a few days. O'Reilly says the "linchpin" of his latest book is a 1987 meeting between senior advisers to President Reagan at which they agreed to watch him to see if they could detect signs that the president was slipping into the Alzheimer's disease that eventually would overtake him. As MM correctly points out, this meeting was described for the first time in Landslide, the essential book by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManue on the second Reagan administration. But that is as far as MM takes the story. Also in Landslide is an account of how that meeting came about. A veteran Washington lawyer named James Cannon had been tasked by then-White House Chief-of-Staff Howard Baker to analyze the functioning of the White House in the wake of the dismissal of Baker's predecessor, Donald Regan. What Cannon found out about the staff was bad enough. What he found out about Reagan's approach to the job of being president was worse. According to Mayer and McManus, Cannon wrote a memo to Baker that suggested he consider invoking the presidential succession provisions of the 25th Amendment. Then, as O'Reilly says, and as Mayer and McManus said first, they held that meeting and Reagan seemed fine and that was pretty much that.

I can say this with absolute certainty. There is a consensus among many Alzheimer's researchers of my acquaintance that, for at least four years, the country was presided over by a symptomatic Alzheimer's patient. One of them cited Reagan's baffling performance in the first debate against Walter Mondale in which the president seemed unclear about what was going on around him. "I watched him," said this researcher, "and I saw what I see every day in my clinic." I believe that, had one of the panelists in Louisville asked the president where he was, he would have been stumped for the answer. But, in the second debate, he made a joke about his age, so everyone decided that they should be reassured. The story of Reagan's infirmity became part of the history we'd rather not know.

There's been a lot of that over the past few weeks. We have been asked in several distinct areas to confront the fact that America breeds its own distinctive kind of horror stories that it then decides not to discuss in polite society. It began with the revelation that Exxon knew about the dangers of climate change as long ago as 1981, but that the company funded the climate-change denial movement for almost three decades anyway. Then, we obtained even more evidence that the Iraq debacle was in the works long before C-Plus Augustus used the deaths of 3000 Americans as a marketing tool—and that Tony Blair was every bit the poodle his critics said he was. And, finally, in a similar vein, we have the remarkable re-litigation of the greatest national security failure in American history, courtesy of Donald Trump's instinctive ability to find Jeb (!) Bush's last nerve and jump up and down on it.

"Okay, I think I have a bigger heart than all of them. I think I'm much more competent than all of them. When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time…He was President, okay? Don't blame him or don't blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign."

Now it can be argued—and I certainly would argue—that Jeb (!) asked for this when he tried to use The Great Mulligan as a talking point in the last Republican debate. But, subsequently, under Trump's relentless prodding, Jeb (!) has been having an attack of public apoplexy on the topic. Most recently, he's taken the advice proposed by, among other people, Fox and Friends meatstick Brian Kilmeade and tried toblame the 9/11 attacks on Bill Clinton.

"One is a threat that has to be taken out, as it relates to creating a strategy that calls it a war. Or we view it as a law enforcement operation, where people have rights. I think the Clinton administration made a mistake, of thinking bin Laden had to be viewed from a law enforcement perspective. Similarly, President Obama's policies seem to be focused on that as well."

This is such arrant bullshit that its only value to the public debate is as a measure of how badly Jeb (!) is floundering under pressure. (If the Obama administration treated Osama bin Laden as a law-enforcement problem, why is his body at the bottom of the ocean instead of in SuperMax?) This, of course, delights the Libidinous Visitor no end. Now he's saying that C-Plus Augustus and the lads "knew it was coming." Jeb (!) may die of a brain bubble before Christmas.

Of course, The Great Mulligan always was a creature formed in the gap between the history we believe and the history we'd rather not know. It is how we allowed the last administration to stonewall an independent investigation into their failures. It is how we allowed Condoleezza Rice, the worst national-security advisor in the country's history, to get promoted and not fired. It is how we allowed the predominant image of those awful days to be C-Plus Augustus on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn, instead of its being him on his hellhole of a Potemkin Ranch, pretending to work and blowing off CIA briefings while the plot went on in the summer of 2001. If all those issues are re-litigated now, the people who did their damnedest to keep them from being litigated at all have only themselves to blame.

Long ago, Harry Truman warned us that, "The only thing new in the world is the history that you do not know." History is the most important tool that we have in the never-ending work of building a self-governing political commonwealth. It is also the most dangerous tool we have if it is not used wisely, or if it is converted into an anesthetic that deadens us to the horrors and neglect of which the country is capable. It is best suited as a defense behind which we can bravely look at our shortcomings and the terrible things done in our name, and make sure that they do not happen again. History, in the long run, should be nothing more or less than justice.