by Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard
Henry Holt & Co., New York, 313 pages, $28
Nevermind what you may think of the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly; this isn't a book about politics. This book is straight-out history. It's a very good retelling of a very compelling story. A very intense period in April of 1865 saw the final battles of the Civil War, the surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's army to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and the plot, only partially successful, to bring down the federal government by assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward.
Abraham Lincoln, and particularly his death, has been a subject of great interest to me since I was a child, and while I don't claim to be an expert, I have read extensively on the topic. So I'm always surprised to read something that tells me something new. Such as that John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's murderer, had a fiance, Miss Lucy Lambert Hale (the daughter of a U.S. Senator) and she spent the afternoon of the assassination with Lincoln's son Robert, studying Spanish. More importantly, I didn't know that Secretary of War Stanton's favorite detective Lafayette Baker (whom Stanton placed in charge of the manhunt), had direct ties to Booth. And I didn't know the Nixonian detail of the 18 pages missing from Booth's diary when Stanton released it to the public, after holding it secretly for two years.
I've long been in the camp of those who suspect that Stanton had a hand in directing the assassination plot, which, if successful, would have left Stanton president, under the succession laws then in effect. O'Reilly and his co-author Dugard do an excellent job of placing in their proper context the links and questions that have lead to suspect Stanton of involvement, while also pointing out exculpatory details, such as that Stanton discouraged Lincoln from going to the theater.
Booth, as told by O'Reilly and Dugard, becomes an even more sinister character than I understood previously, too, as they illustrate alternatives that Booth passed up to pursue his hateful vendetta against Lincoln.
The story is told compellingly, and is fast-paced and interesting.
And yet, I am disappointed in this book, as well. O'Reilly failed to properly set my expectations in his forward, when he promises that the reader would better understand how Lincoln's murder "Changed America Forever" (as it says in bold text on the book's cover). Instead, the generally strong narrative concludes weakly with the notation that Mary Surratt was the only woman ever hanged by the federal government. Very little effort is made to explain how America itself was changed in the long run by this shocking murder.
The advance copy I received includes a number of editing errors which I hope will be cleaned up in the final edition (now available). Some of these errors are passages where the syntax is simply awkward. Others include small factual errors, such a references to Lincoln working in the Oval Office, which was not built until the 20th Century.
But on the whole, I found the book to be a good read, both interesting and informative.
Click here to hear an excerpt from the audiobook.
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