Killing Lincoln

© 2011 by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard


First, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. I can review this book without commenting on O’Reilly and his Fox News show, and I intend to do so.

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I began reading Killing Lincoln. As an armchair historian, I pick and chose what I’m interested in (often, something beyond me chooses this interest). While I spent a great deal of time and read a good many books about the Kennedy assassination, of Lincoln’s murder I realized I was shockingly uninformed. I knew John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln in Ford’s Theater and was himself killed in a barn some days later somewhere else. That’s it. I was aware of Seward as a member of Lincoln’s cabinet (“Seward’s folly” being the purchase of Alaska) but I could not name another, save for Vice President Johnson. I didn’t know Seward was also attacked the night Lincoln was assassinated. True, I did read Lincoln by Gore Vidal about six or seven years ago, but, not particularly liking that ugly book, I forgot most of it.

My gut is trying to form a conclusion something like this: (ahem!) Killing Lincoln is a surprisingly great read if it’s what you’re looking for; if it’s not, it’s a somewhat embarrassing disappointment.

Huh?

Perhaps the best way I can focus this wishy-washy statement (I mean, c’mon – wouldn’t that conclusion apply to every single book you’ve ever read?) is to take it apart.

Killing Lincoln is purposefully written as a fast-paced novel, like a police procedural thrown into a time machine, the historical thriller’s historical thriller. Most of the verbiage is in the present tense to create tension and a “caught-up-in-the-moment” vibe. If you’ve ever watched O’Reilly on teevee, the book reads a lot like Bill bloviates. Or at least that’s the voice I heard in my head as the pages turned. If you can make peace with this style of writing, Killing Lincoln is, hands-down, a great, well-written and well-executed work.

If you’re looking for a seven-hundred scholarly analysis of the societal and political factors that ripped asunder Washington DC in April of 1865 and drove a vain, self-centered and arguably looney actor to assassinate a wildly divisive president, you’ll be disappointed. And embarrassingly so, because Killing Lincoln takes an A Current Affair approach comparatively speaking. Especially since a typical sentence as “Lincoln left for the theater at 8:30 in the evening” becomes “the man with eleven hours left to live leaves for the theater at 8:30 this night.”

While I do like the scholarly approach, my book has to be readable. What surprised me is how much of the latter style O’Reilly and Dugard mix into the former. With every turn of the page, I learned something new, something interesting. Killing Lincoln begins with the final week of the Civil War. Personalities such as Lee and Grant become fully fleshed out. How much of Grant that I thought I knew turned out to be pure caricature! The violence of the conflict really hits home, as does the toll it takes on Lincoln. The second third details the, er, details of the assassination, almost minute-by-minute. But instead of becoming kinda dull and clinical (as I’ve encountered with such JFK timelines), the authors keep it suspenseful and close to home.

The final third of the Killing Lincoln was by far my favorite. John Wilkes Booth truly was a repulsive man beneath an oily and shallow outer persona, and being so has much in common with the worse of the anti-American American celebrities mouthing off out there. So I was interested in his fate, as well as those of his conspirators. (The Lincoln assassination was a conspiracy. Though how far in extent remains debated to this day.) Suffice it to say that Booth suffered, physically and mentally, during his final dozen days on earth. Particularly so since instead of being hailed the conquering hero, he realized, via newspapers brought to him while hiding out in the swamps, that he’d become the most vilified man in America, a hated, hunted and friendless man. It felt that there was some sort of justice in the cosmic scales meted out on this physical plane of existence.

I recommend it. In fact, my stepfather is currently reading it, and when he’s done, I’m give it to the wife. It’s a quick and riveting read. My grade: solid A.