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

Kitman, Marvin

 
9780312314354: The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312314353 ISBN 13: 9780312314354
Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A candid portrait of the journalist host of Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" challenges beliefs about his conservatism while identifying his role in the renewal of subjective journalism, discussing his Harvard education, the controversy that has marked his career, and his relationships with top names in establishment media. 40,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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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.

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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,...

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Verlag
St Martins Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312314353
ISBN 13 
9780312314354
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
318
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Verantwortliche Person
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