Books Bill O’Reilly – some criticism

Bought Bill O’Reilly’s well-written Killing Kennedy earlier this year in Holland and last week, while on holiday in the US, I bought the ‘successor’, Kennedy’s Last Day’s. I saw the huge billboard on Times Square in New York – this was something I wanted to read! I bought it at Newseum, in Washington, DC – the beautiful museum that has a great exhibition on Kennedy as we speak (go see it!!). 

by PERRY VERMEULEN

After reading the book on the plane back to the Netherlands, I must say I am kinda dissapointed. And a bit surprised too: for the second time in a row he comes up with an imaginary anecdote, a true lie. Question remains – why?

Two points of criticism

1. Kennedy’s Last Days isn’t just about his last days. Its about Kennedy’s whole life: his youth, his carreer, the challenges he faced while in the White House, his legacy. And, while reading, we learn more on other characters, such as Lee Harvey Oswald.
   Yes, off course the assassination in Dallas is well covered in multiple chapters. But to name the booke ‘Last Days’ is in my opinion misleading. My question: what differs this book from the one I bought earlier, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy? I cannot come up with an answer. I hoped this one was solely focussing on the trip in Texas and the aftermath. O’Reilly already wrote on topics as the Bay of Pigs, Berlin and Birmingham, Alabama – why is he rewriting those events? A better title for the second book? Killing Kennedy, But Now In Other Words.
2. The lie. In both books, O’Reilly proudly writes how he knocked on the door of a home in Manalapan, Florida, as a 28-year-old television reporter, on March 29, 1977. Staying in 1780 South Ocean Boulevard was George DeMohrenschildt, the Russian emigre who befriended Oswald in the early sixties. O’Reilly tried to interview him: that year DeMohrenschildt was a target of congressional investigators re-examining the assassination. As he writes in both books, he heard a shotgun immediatly after he knocked on the door. DeMohrenschildt commited suicide and O’Reilly was, in his own words, a close witness.
   Multiple pieces of evidence ánd reliable sources are pointing to a different reading: O’Reilly was in Dallas, Texas, on that faithful day. He would soon learn on the suicide and travelled to Florida as fast as he could. But hearing the shotgun? That simply did not happen. Read more on the lie in this article of JFKfacts. O’Reilly doesn’t need this, one would say…