The point Bill O’Reilly misses about slavery

Editor’s Note: Tim Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, was the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration. A biographer of George H.W. Bush, Naftali, who directed the Nixon Library from 2007 to 2011, currently teaches history and public service at NYU. The views expressed in this commentary are his.

When I was the director at the Federal Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, we had a group of dedicated volunteers from Orange County who cared deeply about their country and history. After we released another set of Nixon White Tapes, which included among other things some outrageous anti-Semitic and otherwise prejudiced mutterings, one of these volunteers asked me whether the rumors were true; had I personally falsified these tapes in Washington to make “the President” look bad? (The volunteers usually referred to Richard Nixon as the President even four decades after his leaving the White House). Were they kidding? No.

I thought about this encounter again this week after Bill O’Reilly’s commentary on Michelle Obama’s seemingly uncontroversial reference to the White House having been built by slaves. After confirming the truth of the first lady’s statement, he then digressed into a weird description of slavery that seemed to undermine the larger point the first lady was making. His remarks are a reminder of the wisdom deficit disorder that we are facing in this country.

O’Reilly felt compelled to tell us that the slaves working on the White House “were well fed and had decent lodgings.” First of all there is no historical evidence for this claim. But even if there were, does it matter whether a slave driver gave a black man the occasional apple or two? In a country that reveres freedom and which broadcasts that love of freedom throughout the world, it is the fact that some, perhaps most, of the men working on the White House in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not free to decide what to do with their labor that matters.

And by the way, as a congressional task force appointed in 2005 determined, it wasn’t just the White House that slaves helped build. Slaves worked on the Capitol between 1795 and 1801.

On top of the inaccurate details that O’Reilly felt the need to peddle, his comments reveal a failure to realize that the test of the strength of a democracy is how we deal with uncomfortable facts. In the U.S. Constitution, our Founders sought to form a “more perfect union” which, by definition, means that it was not yet perfect to begin with. It’s OK to admit that our country is a work in progress. Slavery, the shackles of the past, need not shackle us now. Telling us that slavery wasn’t all bad, even by implication, distracts from Michelle Obama’s point that only in a country of immense promise and self-confidence could the descendants of those people who were forced to cut and drag the granite of the Early Republic now inhabit their handiwork as the first family. That defines a great country, doesn’t it?

O’Reilly is a writer who believes in narrative history. Although historians (and in the case of his Reagan book, veterans of that administration) quibble with his books on Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan, the fact is that he and his co-author, Martin Dugard, understand how to write a good yarn and a good line. It’s not surprising, necessarily, that he offered the historically indefensible counternarrative of the well-treated slave to make some noise. But shouldn’t some subjects, like the awfulness of slavery, be too serious for literary gamesmanship?

The issue is not political correctness. It is wisdom at a fragile moment in our history. For months, we have seen race, religion and ethnic origin used to defend violence, weaken civil liberties and to challenge existing institutions. Why try to make a cheap point off the first lady, of all people, by diminishing the collective experience of suffering by so many Americans of the same race?

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If this was a misinterpreted throwaway line by O’Reilly, he has a chance to correct his history Wednesday night. If he was somehow suggesting a larger argument about the reality of slavery, then he is guilty of the same obfuscating as those who are responding to the Russian hack on the DNC by suggesting maybe the Russians should be hacking Hillary Clinton’s server to find her missing emails. Talk about missing the point!

To put it in terms O’Reilly should especially appreciate: Imagine someone saying after Dallas in 1963, “Too bad about Kennedy but wasn’t the weather beautiful and didn’t he look happy at the end.” C’mon, Bill. [Full disclosure: About a decade ago I appeared on O’Reilly’s show and enjoyed the discussion.] This is a time when the country desperately needs smart people of the left and the right to act like adults, to highlight the profound over the superficial, the real over the spin.