The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly - Hardcover

Kitman, Marvin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312314353 ISBN 13: 9780312314354

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2007

Synopsis

In the wake of the loss of TV's top anchormen, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Ted Koppel, a seismic shift has occurred in broadcast news. A revolution had already been taking place on the Fox News Channel about the way news was being presented on TV. Bill O'Reilly has been the spearhead in that radical movement, masterminded by Roger Ailes, founding father of Fox News.
To some, O'Reilly is a semi-demented cable TV talk show host, who can be an obnoxious, insufferable, opinionated, rude loudmouth whose views, the kinder ones say, are typical right wing drivel.  But there is much more to O'Reilly than what meets eye.  O'Reilly is the paradigm of idosyncrasy in television journalism.

On the rough road to the top, O'Reilly learned how to give the public what it wants and thinks it needs. From his early education at the hands of nuns to an advanced degree in Public Policy from Harvard, from working at local televisions stations and rising through the ranks to network news, O'Reilly spent nearly twenty-five years learning his craft before he became an overnight star at Fox News.
In this very intimate look at the man and what matters to him, veteran media critic Marvin Kitman explores all the experiences that led to the making of Bill O'Reilly--a non-conformist in a business that demands conformity as the price of success and a man who has risen to the top by not playing by the rules of broadcast news. Kitman claims that O'Reilly is not a kneejerk conservative, but an "independent" freethinker with a mind of his own, and he believes what journalism needs is more Bill O'Reillys.  Not screamers, the blowhards like the current O'Reilly clones rushed on the air since his success, but trained journalists, reporting the news and telling us why, in their opinion, the world is a crazy place.   

Supported by twenty-nine interviews with Bill O'Reilly, Marvin Kitman pulls no punches in this powerful and hard-hitting biography that will provoke both "Spinheads" and "Anti-Spinheads."

About this title

About the Author:

Marvin Kitman was the TV/media critic of Newsday for 35 years, and is the author of eight previous books.  He lives in northern New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One In the Beginning Opa-Locka is a small town in Florida, which sounds as if it is located in the deepest, swampiest Everglades but is actually a suburb in the northwest corner of Miami with a Miami zip code (33054). The name Opa-Locka is from the Seminole Indian word "Opa-tisha-woka-locka," meaning "a dry place in the swamp covered with many trees." Obviously this would not readily fit on a letterhead and be rather difficult to pronounce, the official Opa-Locka city guide Web site explains. "Hence it was shortened to Opa-Locka." Opa-Locka was invented by aviation pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss, builder of the famed World War I Curtiss Jennies. Some people still believe Curtiss flew the first airplane successfully, not the Wright Brothers. He designed and built the first flying boat in 1911 and the first car trailer/motor home, "The Aerocar," in his factory in Opa-Locka. He built a flying school and airports including the Opa-Locka Airport, used by the Graf Zeppelin, the second-largest airship, as a regular stop on its Germany-Brazil-United States-Germany run. Amelia Earhart took off from Opa-Locka on her last flight. A millionaire from his aero inventions, Curtiss went on to become a real estate developer founding the cities of Hialeah and Miami Springs, but his crowning glory was inventing Opa-Locka. Founded in 1926, during the Florida land boom, Opa-Locka was Curtiss's dream city, his "magical fantasy," based on the stories from The 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights. Architect Bernhardt E. Muller designed for Curtiss the largest single collection of Moorish revival architecture in the United States. Opa-Locka's skyline is an Islamic motif of old domes, minarets, horseshoe arches, crenellated parapets, building textures that resembled adobe, glazed tiles, stucco crescent moons and stars applied to the face of buildings, distressed brickwork, and faded earth tone colors. The town has street names like Ali Baba Avenue, Caliph Street, Sharazad Boulevard, Sultan Avenue, and the original Sesame Street. It is no wonder that Opa-Locka is called "the Baghdad of Miami-Dade County."     In the summer of 1971, a lanky and pale-faced, twenty-one-year-old man with long hair, sideburns, and a New York accent walked into this 4.2-square-mile Scherezadian Disneyland. It was Bill O'Reilly in Opa-Locka to start what could be the fulfillment of his father's dream by becoming a teacher at Monsignor Edward Pace High School. William James O'Reilly Jr. was born on September 10, 1949, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, the elder of two children of Irish Catholic parents, William and Winifred Angela O'Reilly. William O'Reilly Sr. was a Brooklyn native, tall (six-three), handsome, blond-haired, loquacious, with a keen Irish wit and an anger-management problem. Known as Ann, Mrs. O'Reilly was from Teaneck, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. She graduated as a physical therapist from Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in Boston. After marriage and the birth of her son, she became a homemaker. O'Reilly's father had gone to Lafayette High School in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, then to St. Francis, a workingman's college in downtown Brooklyn. His father and grandfather were cops, and that was his vocational plan. The war changed his career path. Enrolled in the Navy's V-12 program during World War II, Mr. O'Reilly was sent to Holy Cross College. Lieutenant (JG) O'Reilly was on the way to invade Japan when they dropped the atom bomb. During the occupation in Japan, Lieutenant O'Reilly had major responsibilities serving as an adjutant to the admiral in charge of dismantling the Japanese Manchurian army when it came back from China a month after the surrender. When he returned home in 1946 he took a job at an oil company. William O'Reilly Sr. was a low-level accountant in the currency department at Caltex, commuting to a Madison Avenue office in Manhattan, and never moved up or left for another challenge, even though he hated every minute of it. Educated and capable of more, he was frozen in a dead-end job by his fear that he would make a mistake, his son told me. "So he stayed where he was and took the crap that they regularly dished out there. He did not express himself through his work; he was simply unhappy. He was stuck." His fear and frustration also shaped the way he ran his family. A subjugated, unfulfilled man, who thought he could have done big things, he had a deep sense of failure, always feeling he had been shortchanged by life, and he was angry. "He'd get into a fight at the drop of a hat," an elderly neighbor recalled about Mr. O'Reilly Sr.'s mercurial nature. The favorite target of his rage was his son. "Billy," as he was called to differentiate Bill Junior from Bill Senior, spent his first two years in a crowded apartment across the river in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1951, the O'Reillys moved to a small house on Long Island built by William Levitt, one of the 17,447 homes on a thousand lanes originally in the Levittown development on 7.3 square miles of former potato fields, a mass-produced subdivision that was to become a synonym for the New Suburbia that spread like crabgrass in the post-World War II period of American history. All a prospective buyer needed to buy one of the original Levitt "ranch" houses, sales priced at $7,990, was a $90 deposit and payments of $58 a month. Mr. O'Reilly bought the house on Page Lane by himself. His wife didn't even see the house. She was told that was where they were going to live. And that was it. All the decisions in the O'Reilly home were made by Mr. O'Reilly Sr. Mr. O'Reilly ran a tight ship, exercising control over the spartan life in the house on Page Lane. He had his four tailored-by-Robert Hall suits hanging in the small closet of the two-bedroom, one-bathroom, thirty-two-foot-by-twenty-five-foot Levitt house. He believed in the annual two-week vacation, the nightly having a cold one in the living room while reading the paper, and direct communication. "You're having meat loaf and shut up about it, all right?" "My father was an autocrat," O'Reilly wrote in his first best-selling book, The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad and the Completely Ridiculous. Mr. O'Reilly had a mean temper; his mother, O'Reilly thought, was a bit ditzy, but "kind of nice." He saw to the used cars, and she prepared the Yankee-Stadium-style food. Both said, "You will do what I say," but his mother was slower on the trigger finger. "Sometimes she even felt sorry for our mistakes and offenses and tried to hide them from my father. This wasn't license; it was always a reprieve. It was something like the poet Robert Frost once said: "The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother is always a Democrat." Mr. O'Reilly Sr. was a rock-ribbed, knuckle-scraping Republican with William Jr. The O'Reilly house on Page Lane was not a home where children were encouraged to express their opinions. More Mussolini than Montessori, Mr. O'Reilly Sr. believed in the shut-up-you-idiot school of child-rearing: this is the way it is, boyo, don't ask questions. The problem was that young Bill Junior would never shut up. Billy and his friends were, as O'Reilly calls them, fiends. That was considered the normal childhood state growing up on the streets of Levittown. There were fifteen to twenty kids on the block, recalled his sister Jan, younger by two years. They ran around doing things, creating havoc, from the adults' viewpoint. Billy was the fiend-in-chief, being the tallest and most outspoken. "We weren't hoodlums, but little cutups," explained gang member Justin McDevitt, "smashing pumpkins at Halloween. We always kind of went out of our neighborhood to do the pumpkin thing. That way we wouldn't be blamed for what went on in our neighborhood." But Billy got blamed anyway. Mr. O'Reilly Sr. went from zero to sixty in five seconds. "If Bill did something, broke a pencil or something, it would just set him off," Jan remembered. "He was on him twenty-four/seven. He got very red in the face. He had this look, and you knew it was coming." "One more time, and you'll be sorry," Bill O'Reilly told me, was one of his father's favorite sayings. "One more time" was not an empty threat. "He didn't like what you said. Or, say, you were a wiseguy to him, or wising off. You know he would just whack you. He'd just give me a shot in the arm or something. It was like boom, boom, boom, and that was that." "I expected only one thing from my dad," O'Reilly said. "Leave me alive to celebrate my next birthday." O'Reilly admits he was a pain. "If I didn't want to eat my potatoes," he explained, "I wouldn't eat them, you know, that kind of thing. I wasn't Wally Cleaver, okay. I mean, I was annoying, and he didn't want to be annoyed. I didn't go out of my way not to annoy him." O'Reilly still apologizes for his father's bad temper. "He did the same thing to me that his father did to him. My father wised off to my grandfather, a New York City cop who walked a beat in Brooklyn and carried a billy club, he'd get a blast, and that was it. There was, like, no diplomacy. It was like, do this, and shut up." The tiny Levittown house was also occupied by Barney, a big brown bad German shepherd. Barney played an important role in O'Reilly's adolescent years at home. On Fridays, the O'Reillys always had fish for dinner. Because in the fifties and the early sixties you couldn't eat meat on Friday, O'Reilly explained. He could never figure that one out, why Catholics couldn't eat meat. "So we had these horrendous fish sticks. I said, 'Look, if you can show me in the ocean where there is a fish shaped like that, I'll eat it." Mr. O'Reilly Sr. didn't see the humor in it. "Eat the fish sticks." "Fine, fine, I'll eat the fish sticks." Barney loved the fish sticks. Barney would eat anything, including human beings. "Which is why my father liked Barney, because, believe me, nobody would ever come into that house without permission because of Barney. Barney wouldn't bite you unless you made some threatening move, but he was loud, and it looked like he would bite you." A popular movie in Billy's childhood developmental period was The Wild Ones with Marlon Brando. Billy didn't know anything about The Wild Ones, and what they were so wild about, but he had gotten hold of a motorcycle cap he liked. "And I walked into the house with it, and my father just took it and ripped it right in half. [Making a ripping noise.] He goes, 'You're not wearing that.' And I had no idea. I thought it was just like a little sailor cap or something really sharp, you know, a military-type thing, and he just went [making the ripping noise again]--gone!" Life with Dad O'Reilly wasn't like Ozzie and Harriet, a favorite TV show of Billy's.     Since the early eighteenth century, the O'Reillys had lived in County Cavan, equidistant between Belfast and Dublin. O'Reilly was a Kennedy on his mother's side. O'Reilly's father's mother's name was McLaughlin. His mother's maiden name is Drake. The Drakes--his grandfather on his mother's side--are from Northern Ireland. "So I'm one hundred percent Irish, which is very unusual, you know, for an American this day and age," O'Reilly told me. "My bloodline is all Celtic, which is frightening. I mean, you know, you have all of those Irish tendencies, the blarney, which has really served me well, though, I must say." O'Reilly's people began coming to America during the Famine, between 1848 and 1858. At one time, the O'Reillys owned all the land in Cavan. They were very wealthy, fief landholders, until Oliver Cromwell took it all for the crown in the mid-seventeenth century. His grandparents were the newly emerging Catholic lower-middle class, which had been pushed off the tenant farms of their ancestors, many of whom crowded into cities like Dublin before emigrating to the United States. It was a bad time for tenant farmers, working on the vast lands of their new lords of the manor. "There wasn't a history of accomplishment or power in the family after Cromwell," O'Reilly told a reporter for Irish America magazine. "It was a working class [sic] family and it stayed that way for a hundred years." O'Reilly's early people were cops and firemen and laborers and a couple of teachers. One of his grandfathers pounded the pavements as the patrolman in Brooklyn; the other was a train conductor in New Jersey. His mother's mother was a telephone operator, and his uncle was a fireman. His sister became a nurse. He was expected to become a teacher or, if he got lucky, a lawyer. What his mother feared was that her son would become "a nonconformist in the nineteen seventies." "She would not rest until I wore a leisure suit," O'Reilly remembered. "Play it safe. Play it safe, don't make any waves, take what comes, a little fatalistic, little afraid," O'Reilly told Niall O'Dowd of Irish America magazine of his parents' attitudes about life. The upbringing that O'Reilly had in Levittown, Long Island, was like the upbringing an Irish kid would have had in South Boston or Woodside, Queens, or Dublin or Galway. It was very basic, O'Reilly told me. "It was tuna. It was hot dogs and beans. It was steak on Saturday night. It was spaghetti. It was secondhand sports equipment, movies now and then." When his family went out to eat, O'Reilly recalled, it was a rare treat. "We didn't waste money on appetizers, if only because we didn't go to the kind of restaurants that offered appetizers. Typically the pasta dish was spaghetti, and that was it. No linguine, fettuccine, etceterine to confuse the issue." O'Reilly once looked over the menu at the only place his father would go to--Savini's in East Meadow--and told the waiter he would have the veal. His father said, "You'll eat the spaghetti and shut up." The veal was a dollar fifty more. Mr. O'Reilly Sr.'s respect for the dollar was extreme. O'Reilly never received an allowance growing up. It was not considered one of the basic necessities of life. "I never asked him for a nickel," he says of his father. "I always worked, always doing something." He started at age nine, washing cars, mowing lawns. First, with a hand-propelled reel mower. Mr. O'Reilly Sr. did not object to buying a luxury power mower because he had to cut his own lawn when O'Reilly wasn't around. "I remember that sucker. You could never start it, which was the problem with the rope. I use to kick the damn thing. It used to drive me crazy, try and turn it over." At eleven, he was making money shoveling snow. At twelve or thirteen, he started to babysit. He also earned money by selling firecrackers to other kids on the block. His first real job at age sixteen was at Carvel on Old Country Road. He worked there while in high school, making sundaes, earning a dollar an hour and all the ice cream he could swallow. He put a lot of hours into his job at Carvel, sister Jan remembers. "We had a freezer full of Flying Sa...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312314353
• ISBN 13: 9780312314354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336