O'Reilly and Me

The Hundred Years’ War, fought in the late Middle Ages between two royal houses for the French throne, actually lasted 116 years. America’s Culture Wars could last longer.

For readers under fifty who might be unfamiliar, a history of the Culture Wars might go like this: the Beats, as they were called (proto-Hippies in Greenwich Village, LA and San Francisco), challenged the country’s prevailing Ozzie-and-Harriet cultural norms in the mid-1950s. They were succeeded by the Counterculture, which was a grab bag of Hippies and Civil Rights and Vietnam War protesters, in the mid-to-late 1960s. The Counterculture (the Civil Rights movement in particular) then inspired the Women’s Movement and the Gay Rights Movement in the 1970s, and the Civil Rights movement gave way to more radical groups like the Black Panthers.

Those who participated in these various anti-establishment movements were mostly young people who had been born between the end of WWII and 1960, otherwise know as the Baby Boom generation (then the largest demographic cohort in America’s history). But not every Boomer was a Hippie or a demonstrator. A lot of young people supported their parents’ social values and the war, and were skeptical or even threatened by the various rights movements that advanced the interests of blacks, women and homosexuals. Which side of the fence you were on was usually determined by where you grew up, your socio-economic status, and where – or if – you went to college.

Bill O’Reilly and I were on opposite sides of the divide. I grew up in a Republican household in Pennsylvania and became an anti-war protester when I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Bill grew up on Long Island and kept his distance from the Counterculture during his years at Marist College in Poughkeepsie.

Our paths crossed when we enrolled in the Broadcast Journalism master’s degree program at Boston University in the fall of 1973. There were only about two-dozen students in the two-year program, so Bill and I got to know each other fairly well. And even though I’d marched on Washington and celebrated the Age of Aquarius at Woodstock, and Bill had played college sports and kept his nose clean, we had a friendly relationship. I was an amateur photographer and Bill occasionally asked me to shoot pictures for him to accompany articles he was writing for the school newspaper. I remember taking a photo of Bill interviewing Eli Wallach; another time Bill and I took pictures of each other with the porn star Linda Lovelace when she won Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Award.

If you had asked anyone in our program what they thought Bill O’Reilly would do with his career, I think most of us would have said that he would end up as a TV sports or entertainment reporter. Bill was fascinated by Hollywood celebrities, and he loved the New York Knicks. But though he’d studied history in college, he seemed to have almost no interest in the burning issues of the day. The Senate Watergate hearings, which had riveted the nation and exposed the duplicity and criminality of the Nixon White House, had taken place the summer before we arrived in Boston. The Vietnam War was still raging, and racial tensions in Boston and other northern cities were high. Bill seemed untouched by any of it.

But O’Reilly fooled us all. He managed to build a successful broadcasting career by tapping into the anger and resentment that all of those jocks and straights felt toward the Hippies and the demonstrators, and in the process became a spokesman for the sons and daughters of Nixon’s “silent majority.” The rest of us took our places in the much-maligned Mainstream Media, serving witness to history-in-the-making and searching for the next government conspiracy or social injustice.

I recently came across a quote I copied from a New Yorker profile of the late Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, who was a significant figure in the anti-war movement. Coffin said, “Not to share in the activity and passion of your time is to count as not having lived.” As a young man, I shared in the activity and the passions of my time. Now, as I look at the Tea Party movement and the demonstrations on the right, I suppose Bill is sharing in the activity and passions of his.