Confronting the Presidents

Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard proposed to examine the 45 men who have served as president and give a no spin assessment on each.  They failed utterly.  The book is 400 pages.  Do the math.  That is less than 10 pages per president and a lot of what is discussed is the daily routine of each.  What hours did they work?  What did they like for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?  What kind of exercise routine did they have, if any?  How'd they meet their wife?  These are so many thumbnail sketches that only scratch the surface of each man.  There is hardly any foundation to make an honest assessment.  The greatest failing is that the authors will condemn the actions of one president that they gloss over when done by another president.  Harding is pummeled for his adulterous affair while FDR and JFK are merely chastised.  The more recent the presidency, the more the authors' politics bleed into the assessment, more Dugard's than O'Reilly's.

The biography of each president is shallow, having to cover entirely too much in a short span.  Generally, the history is correct - maybe a wrong year listed here or the wrong name there - but the assessment follows the standard ratings that you would find among a typical poll of historians.

Though he clearly starts showing some personal opinions, I give O'Reilly credit for not going overboard.  That doesn't hold for his co-author.  The book was completed in 2024 and Dugard still held that Biden was up to a second term.  Seriously?  You call that no spin?  He even called 2020 the most contention election in US history while writing a book which included the 1860 election that led to Civil War!

This is a book for a novice.  It would have been better if the assessments had been left out and just let the reader judge.

Not recommended.

Oil Prices Highest in 7 Years

The price for a barrel of oil has broken $90, the highest it has been since 2014.  A year ago, I paid $2.16 a gallon for gas.  Two years ago, it was $1.87.  Today, it is $2.99.  Of course, Texas has some of the lowest gas prices.  It is around $5 a gallon in California.

Back in the days when I watched Bill O'Reilly, he would declare that some nefarious cabal was setting the gas price to screw 'the folks' to benefit fat cats on Wall Street.  He never got around to explaining why the price would go down.  Having studied economics and having a basic understanding of supply and demand, I had no trouble offering reasons why the price rose; this was shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

If Bill really thought a rising gas price benefited the holders of oil stocks - it does - then he should have bought oil stocks to make what he thought would be an obvious profit.  I forget who suggested that at the time, but I took it to heart.  When I started buying individual stocks, one of the first things I did was buy an oil stock.  When the oil price falls, I celebrate filling my car with cheap gas.  When the price soars, I celebrate that I'm a fat cat.  Right now, I'm a fat cat paying for expensive gas.  In 2020, my oil stocks crashed, but I had cheap gas.

Killing Lincoln

I recently read the Bill O'Reilly book and found it both engaging and informative.  The book is told from the point of view of the central figures of the conspiracy and the end of the Civil War.  At times, the book follows John Wilkes Booth as he plots a kidnapping and then, after Lee surrenders, decides an assassination is the way to go.  Though the bad guy, the book is not unfair to him.  It explains his reasons and what he thought would happen.  Of course, as with most assassinations, it did not turn out as he had hoped; the South did not rise again.  At least not yet.

When following Lincoln, there is this annoying habit of opening with how many days he has to live.  "The man who has only 12 days to live" met with this General or talked to that Secretary.  It was an interesting device the first couple of times but got old quickly.  Lincoln, as one might expect, comes off extremely well.  I did find the numerous premonitions of his death to be hard to swallow.  Sure, he might have had a nightmare of being assassinated (I suspect many Presidents do) but the book has an amazing number of reports that hint at assassination.  Though it is surely in the historical record, I suspect some of this after-the-fact reports were a bit of rewriting by the reporters.

When the book was first published, there was much ado about inaccuracies and its being banned from Ford's Theater.  That's pretty harsh.  That made me curious to read it.  Anyway, I have read several accounts of the conspiracy and the book meshes perfectly with accounts from other 'reputable' historians I have read.  The errors, such as they were, are hardly of note.  For instance, O'Reilly mentions General Grant and Lincoln meeting in the Oval Office.  Well, there was no Oval Office until 1909.  The book is a fraud!  Bad history!  Or then there is the complaint that O'Reilly says the distance from the Presidential box in Ford's Theater to the stage is 9 feet when it is actually 11.5 feet.  Oh, what a travesty!  How dare such tripe be published!  The play that Lincoln was watching had only appeared in Ford's 7 times, not 8 as O'Reilly claims.  Oh, the horror!  Having read a great many history books, I can assure you that such errors are not uncommon.  I read a biography of James Knox Polk that claimed his son was at his death bed; he and his wife were childless.  I read a book on the Mexican War that mistakenly reported Archibald Gillespie's name as Arthur Gillespie.  These were the errors I knew because this is an area where I am well versed.  I suspect I missed the true minutia.

The tiny errors change the narrative not a bit.  The history that O'Reilly and his cowriter reveal is absolutely true.  That he follows the characters makes it read more like a thriller than a history book, a thriller where we know the end.  Or do we?  I suspect that most readers, lacking my enthusiasm for history, will be amazed.  A good read and I recommend it.