Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

In the Afterword of Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly claims to have been present outside the home of George de Mohrenschildt’s daughter in Palm Beach, Florida, when, on May 29, 1977, de Mohrenschildt died by suicide: O’Reilly claims to have “heard the shotgun blast” that ended de Mohrenschildt’s life (300). Since the publication of Killing Kennedy, however, new evidence has come to light and cast doubt on O’Reilly’s assertion.

As a young boy, George de Mohrenschildt escaped the Soviet Union with his father and later emigrated to the United States, where he earned a master’s degree and worked as a petroleum geologist. Due to his Russian origins and international travels, de Mohrenschildt had multiple contacts with the CIA, including several debriefings upon returning to the United States. Most significant of all, de Mohrenschildt became acquainted with the Oswalds in the summer of 1962. For these reasons, de Mohrenschildt gave lengthy testimony in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. Years later, in an interview conducted on the day of his death, de Mohrenschildt stated that a CIA operative had put him in touch with the Oswalds. In short, for more than 13 years after the Kennedy assassination de Mohrenschildt remained a significant figure whose role in, and knowledge of, the events that led to the president’s murder continued to raise questions.

In March 1977, O’Reilly worked as a reporter for a Dallas TV station, WFAA. Thanks to renewed public interest in the Kennedy murder, the US House of Representatives established the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Gaeton Fonzi, one of the committee’s researchers, informed O’Reilly that de Mohrenschildt had resurfaced as a person of interest, so O’Reilly flew to Palm Beach in hopes of interviewing the former Oswald associate. De Mohrenschildt’s death, according to O’Reilly, ended that quest.

In 2015, however, CNN published an audio recording of a phone conversation in which Fonzi informs O’Reilly of de Mohrenschildt’s death, and in response O’Reilly promises to travel to Florida the next day (Bleier, Evan. “CNN Publishes Audio of Bill O'Reilly Proving He Lied in Killing Kennedy.” Daily Mail Online, Mar. 3, 2015). If the recording is authentic, then O’Reilly either lied to Fonzi about his location and intentions, or he could not have been present in Palm Beach when de Mohrenschildt died. This recording was the second in a series of reports made public in early 2015, all of which cast doubt on O’Reilly’s characterizations of different episodes in his media career (Naureckas, Jim. “Bill O’Reilly Lies—But Some Lies Matter More Than Others.” FAIR, April 18, 2019).

Killing Kennedy’s publisher, Henry Holt, dismissed the CNN report as irrelevant, citing corroborating evidence (De Moraes, Lisa. “Bill O’Reilly’s Publisher Jumps in as Oswald Biographer Blasts JFK Report.” Deadline, March 9, 2015). Bob Sirkin, a colleague of O’Reilly’s from WFAA in Dallas in the 1970s, claimed to have been present with O’Reilly in Palm Beach on March 29, 1977. Sirkin further claimed that he accompanied O’Reilly to the hotel room in which de Mohrenschildt gave his final interview, that he and O’Reilly tried to force their way into the room, and that they saw de Mohrenschildt in person. Sirkin also claimed, however, that he and O’Reilly parted ways afterward, and that O’Reilly went alone to de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home. Sirkin therefore could not confirm O’Reilly’s account of de Mohrenschildt’s death.

In light of conflicting reports, the O’Reilly-de Mohrenschildt controversy amounts to one more unsolved mystery in a story replete with them.