Bill O’Reilly to write book on Kennedy’s assassination

A corrective to my hope O’Reilly might actually get anything right. Footnotes do slow down a book for people who are not interested in history.

Bill O’Reilly to write book on Kennedy’s assassination
February 16, 2012
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Bill O’Reilly, no stranger to controversies — or the best-seller list — will co-author a book about the assassination of President Kennedy.

After the runaway success of Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, O’Reilly and his co-writer, Martin Dugard, are teaming up again on Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, to be released by Henry Holt in October.

“As with most baby boomers, the murder of JFK was a signature moment in my life,” O’Reilly, the top-rated Fox News talk show host and a former high school history teacher, said in a statement. “Killing Kennedy will answer many questions about the president and why his life was cut short.”

Killing Lincoln, which landed at No. 3 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list in November and is currently No. 23, will also be issued in a new edition for kids for ages 10 and up, Lincoln’s Last Days, to be released in August.

Publisher Holt reports 1.5 million copies in print of Killing Lincoln, which has been criticized by several professional historians.

Rae Emerson, deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated and which is part of the National Park Service, complained about its factual errors and a lack of documentation.

As a result, Killing Lincoln was not sold at the museum bookstore at Ford’s Theatre, but was sold at the theater’s gift shop, which is not run by the Park Service.

O’Reilly shot back, saying that the “minor mistakes” would be corrected in reprinting and blaming what he called “gutter sniping” on “our enemies.”

In an interview with USA TODAY in November, O’Reilly said he wanted Killing Lincoln to “read like a thriller so you’d roar through it. I wanted to make history come alive for people who are not particularly interested in history.”

He said that footnotes “would have slowed it down.”