Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Lincoln’ book banned from Ford’s Theatre because of ‘mistakes’
Of all the places you’d expect to find Bill O’Reilly’s new history “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever,” Ford’s Theatre — the site of the dreadful act — should rank right at the top. But you’d do better to search for the bestseller on Amazon because it has been banned from the theater’s store.
The crime? O’Reilly and his co-author Martin Dugard have displayed a serial disregard for historical fact.
For a purported history of the assassination — an “unsanitized and uncompromising … no spin American story,” as the authors put it, “Killing Lincoln” is sloppy with the facts and slim on documentation, according to a study conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which is a unit of the National Park Service.
Other Lincoln experts also have sounded off. In a review published in the November issue of “North & South — The Official Magazine of the Civil War Society,” historian Edward Steers Jr. cites many instances where the book strays from documented history, then asks, “If the authors made mistakes in names, places, and events, what else did they get wrong? How can the reader rely on anything that appears in ‘Killing Lincoln’”?
