Book Review | Killing Lincoln

'Thus always to tyrants!' John Wilkes Booth exclaims triumphantly as he stumbles and rises limply from the stage of Washington DC Theatre, the night he fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln that 14 April, 1865, just two weeks after the secessionist confederacy surrendered to the Union.

Now, 50,000 people stand in pouring rain and listen to Lincoln take the presidential Oath of Allegiance for the beginning of his second term just after his new Vice-President Andrew Johnson, ends his inebriated 20-minute ramble vilifying the South, which leaves the embarrassed audience cringing to the vindictive verbal tirade and contrasts sharply to Lincoln's very sober and balanced address appealing for forgiveness and reunification, the more uplifting and edifying, 'with malice towards none, charity for all and to all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations', he intones.

According to co-author Bill O'Reilly, this New York Times best-seller, Killing Lincoln, (History Hardback ISBN 9 78080593 070), Lincoln only held a temporary commission in the army during the Black Hawk war of 1832 and was considered a through and through civilian, yet he passionately invokes that universal axiom that "all men are created equal of race, colour or creed...", which rankles the Confederate Southern States, including one impenitent racist, John Wilkes Booth, whom readers will readily identify as the most notorious of the book's dramatis personae. But inter alia, so will other weird and unpalatable grey areas emerge in between the book's covers, en route.

John Wilkes Booth, thespian and a charismatic ladies' man uncategorically answers to his father's - Julius Brutus Booth's - curriculum vitae, which very much includes the ladies. Further reading shapes the book's content like a pretzel, as it abounds with so many sharp twists and turns - furiously so.

Standing close to young Booth during Lincoln's address is his current innamorata, Lucy Hale, a very sensuous young woman, though not altogether aware of her lover's perfidious and deep-rooted racism in general, and a deeper dislike for Abraham Lincoln in particular. But neither does Booth seem to be unduly worried by Lucy's father's pro-war feelings as a United States Senator and neither to his utter devotion towards his President. Furthermore, the Senator seems to be also somewhat unaware of his daughter's blind infatuation and to Booth's draconian ideas fixe, while Booth gloats over Lincoln's oration and the sight of so many black faces listening ecstatically to the president, fills him with added vile and murderous rage.

O'Reilly - co-authored by a fellow historian and book award winner Martin Dugard - adheres to a strictly no-spin formula. They succeed cum laude to transcend a singularly historical tragedy to lashings worthy of a pulsating thriller and compels the reader to blend real with the surreal and to loads of worthless theories and sundry false speculations which now beggar the unanswerable, viz: how was a totally incompetent irresponsible drunk 'selected' to guard the Ford Theatre's Presidential Box the night of nights, when this idiot took off to a pub below for his customary tipple, leaving the said box totally unguarded.

Why were the Capital's approaches left unsealed following tip-offs and urgent telegrams left undelivered or ignored, and why was no curfew imposed that night as was Booth's peculiar and seemingly erratic behaviour never challenged by either the police or the military well before the president's fateful appointment with the assassin's derringer that April evening?

Killing Lincoln however also scores brownie points for its explosive images of fratricide - at cavalry pace or at close quarters as are depicted by the veritably gothic tableaux at the Fields of Antietam, Manassis, Bull Run, and St Petersburg and that harbinger of the Confederate Army's defeat at Gettysburg, which was to lead to a lonely Virginian Court House atop the Appomattox River where Lee surrenders his sword to his Union counterpart Ulysses S. Grant.

But all grey areas notwithstanding, the reader is assured much will be gleaned through the book's pages and will also enjoy an eloquent departure from its stark authenticity, making this transition from a causus belli epic also smack of the weirdest and lurid of thrillers which evokes that post-war BBC spine-tingling radio feature, An Appointment with Fear, here not narrated by the eponymous Man in Black, Valentyn Dyall, but an American columnist/historian Bill O'Reilly.