O’Reilly says that Reagan administration staff memos validate his theory, but Will said the entire course of speculation was damaging to the former president’s memory.
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The heavyweights squared off Friday on the “O’Reilly Factor”, with O’Reilly claiming Will, a Fox News contributor, libeled him and failed to follow through on a promise to Fox News’ hard news chief Michael Clemente to call O’Reilly before running the article.
If you go after Bill O’Reilly, you better be prepared for a ferocious retaliation – even if you’re a Fox News colleague.
After another exchange over the memo, O’Reilly said, “You are actively misleading the American people”.
“You are lying!” O’Reilly countered, insisting his book was historically accurate.
“Killing Reagan…is supposed to be a book of new scholarship on the Reagan presidency”, they said last month in a Washington Post op-ed. Will writes that Killing Reagan has “two and a half pages of ‘sources, ‘” which “unspecifically and implausibly” refer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA, presidential libraries, and world travels. “You are in with the cabal of the Reagan loyalists who don’t want the truth to be told”. The book’s intimated hypothesis is that the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later.
“This book is nonsensical history and execrable citizenship, and should come with a warning: ‘Caution – you are about to enter a no-facts zone”, he added.
O’REILLY: “And you are a hack!”
However, just as the Republicans in the House no longer seem to be able to get along, and just as the GOP presidential contenders often devolve into name calling and whining about unfairness, Will and O’Reilly demonstrate that American conservatives do not play well with others. O’Reilly shot back that the “Reagan loyalists” “wanted a deification”.
In response to Will’s criticism, O’Reilly hosted him Friday, presumably to set the record straight.
“It is not a laudatory book”, Will replied. O’Reilly said he could prove it wasn’t and called Will a “hack”.
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“That is a lie”, Will said, as the interview approached is crescendo.
