A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity

  AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

  Life is not fair.

  —UNIVERSAL PARENTAL MANTRA

  So, we’ve come this far, and I appreciate your patience with my ramblings. Because the Pew Research organization and others have stated that my viewers, listeners, and readers are generally well informed and educated, by now you have undoubtedly picked up a central theme in this book: I do not like to see people treated unfairly (including me). And I will use my power to right what I perceive as wrongs. Of course, many people do not see the wrongs that I see because they don’t see the world the way that I do. All of us should feel very sorry for them.

  At some time, every kid in the world feels his or her parents are being unfair. That usually happens after the parent prevents the kid from putting the cat in the microwave. The kid, of course, means no harm, but at four years old, little Ashley may not completely understand the consequences of her actions.

  Like me, I’m sure you occasionally whined to your folks about the unfairness factor. Actually, I didn’t do it all that much, because in my house, it was a road to nowhere. My father was proud of being unfair. If I felt his regulations were not in my best interest, he wasn’t bothered in the least.

  In fact, he often wouldn’t even have the conversation. When I approached him with some complaint, he’d listen for about twenty seconds and then either leave the room without comment or simply say, “Can’t help you.”

  Okay.

  But once in a rare while, when I actually had put together a cogent argument, my father would revise family policy. I can’t exactly recall an incident when that actually happened, but my mother swears it did.

  School was another story. There, fairness was constantly debated, and the nuns, like President Bush, were the “deciders” of justice. This was not good.

  Take my big fight with Tommy M. in the sixth grade. I can’t remember exactly what sparked the fracas, but it had been brewing. Tommy was a teacher’s pet, and I was a miniature John Dillinger. I did not like Tommy’s coziness with our teacher, Mrs. Boyle, and he objected to my objection. A bad moon was definitely rising.

  When it came, the fight was fierce. Real punches were thrown, shirts were ripped, blood was drawn. This was shocking at St. Brigid’s School, since most playground confrontations were foolish exercises in pushing and name-calling.

  “You’re a clod!”

  “I know you are, but what am I?”

  With material like that, most combatants quickly drifted into a deflated state, and the conflict harmlessly petered out. But this dustup with Tommy was a far different story. It was nasty.

  Mrs. Boyle, an elderly woman whose heavily made-up face resembled that of Phyllis Diller, was appalled and angered upon seeing me and Tommy stumble into the classroom after round ten. She immediately sent us to the principal’s office, where we were to be judged by a feared nun named Sister Thomasine (no relation to Sister Thomas), whom I mentioned in chapter five.

  But the good sister had a problem: Tommy’s father, a doctor, was a big-time donor to the church. Punishing his kid, a straight-A student, would not be easy. I, the bold, fresh guy, could be sent to Devil’s Island without much consequence, but Sister Thomasine had to be cautious with Tommy.

  After hearing both our “sides,” the sister announced the verdict: banishment to the convent (the place the nuns actually lived), where piles of busywork would be heaped upon us. But there was one thing further: Tommy got just one day of convent hell, while I received two days. For previous violations, the sister stated.

  Outrage gripped me. I had already been punished for those “previous” violations. After watching Perry Mason, I knew this was double jeopardy or something. But, above all, IT WASN’T FAIR!

  Upon hearing the verdict, Clement rose to my defense and, in no uncertain terms, publicly condemned the sentence, throwing in something about Jesus not liking it as well. That outburst got Clem sent to the convent along with Tommy and me. Thinking back, I believe that’s what Clement had in mind all along.

  Now, you have to picture this: the nuns who taught at St. Brigid’s School lived in an old stone convent on Post Avenue in Westbury. The building is still there. To a dopey sixth grader, it looked big and spooky. When I drive by it today, it looks small and quaint.

  An ancient nun named Sister Gerardo guarded the convent. She was too old to teach, so she stayed in the stone building all day and, I assume, prayed diligently for bad boys like me. When Tommy, Clem, and I showed up for detention, the old sister just stared and mumbled something about behaving.

  Sure.

  Sister Gerardo quickly assigned us to our punishment desks, which were sensibly located in separate rooms. There, mountains of math problems and composition stuff lay awaiting our attention. This was bad. Real bad.

  The first day passed slowly and painfully. At three in the afternoon we were released, with Tommy smirking at Clem and me. He was finished with his sanction, but we had another day of solitary confinement. No matter, Clem and I agreed that Tommy would get his down the road.

  The next day Sister Gerardo repeated the drill. However, about an hour into the imprisonment, I heard a sharp “pssst.” There in the convent hallway stood Clem.

  “Billy, she’s asleep. The nun. She’s out.”

  I got up and peeked into a side room down the hall. It was true. Sister Gerardo sat there motionless, head drooping, mind off someplace in the Land of Nod.

  “Let’s check this place out,” Clem whispered.

  Check this place out? This was the convent where the nuns ate and slept. Nobody checked that out.

  “They’ll kill us if we get caught,” I said quietly.

  Clem just laughed. “Come on.”

  Creeping along the creepy corridor, Clem and I looked in every room. There was nothing too unusual about the place: a big kitchen, dining room, a couple of parlors, one of which was occupied by the sleepy sister.

  Then Clem went insane.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “What? Upstairs to where they sleep?”

  “Yeah, come on.”

  Now, once again you have to picture this. Above all, Catholic schoolkids were taught strict boundaries. The places where priests and nuns lived were waaaaaaay out of bounds. If what Clem was suggesting wasn’t a mortal sin, then nothing was.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Billy, come on; nobody will ever find out. Chicken?”

  There it was…the C-word. For boys in my circumstance, trial by fire. Chicken. Awful. With grave doubts, I followed Clem up the stairs.

  Sweating heavily, I remember walking down the narrow hallway and peering into the tiny rooms on both sides. All the doors were open. Inside each one I saw a small bed, like my sister’s, a tall chest of drawers, and a closet. The rooms were pretty much identical. Crucifixes hung over the beds. Jesus was looking directly at me.

  “Okay, we did it. Let’s get out of here,” I said to Clem. I believe I was pleading.

  To this day, I have not forgotten the demented gleam that appeared in his eyes. He shook his head no and entered one of the rooms. Let me repeat: HE ENTERED ONE OF THE ROOMS WHERE A NUN SLEPT! My God.

  Terrified, I split. I simply spun on my heel and walked quickly but quietly down the stairs and back to my jail desk. Sister Gerardo was still out. A few minutes later, Clement looked into my room, wearing a crazed smile. I did not want to know.

  A few hours later, Clem and I were released from captivity by Sister Thomasine, who threatened further pain if we continued to be “disruptive.”

  Walking out of the building, Clem began laughing.

  “I saw their underwear.”

  Shocked, I just stared at him.

  “Yeah, it’s white. I took some of it out of a drawer and hid it under one of the beds.”

  For one of the few times in my life, I was speechless. What could any eleven-year-old kid say? Clement had removed a nun’s under-garments from her drawer and hid them under a bed. I believe this was the first ti
me in Catholic school history that a sacrilege like that had ever happened.

  Slowly, my thought processes, such as they were, returned.

  “Look, Clem. Don’t tell anybody you did that, okay? We’ll get expelled, and that’s just the beginning.”

  My father’s face popped into my mind and was quickly replaced by hellfire.

  Clem did not answer right away. Terror grew inside me. But then he said the sweetest words in the world: “Okay, Billy, I won’t tell anybody.”

  And he didn’t, as far as I know.

  But for weeks afterward, every time my mother or father called my name, I jumped. Every time I saw Sister Thomasine, I dived for cover. Paranoia does not even begin to cover this.

  The great convent caper never came back to bite me. It was one of the few times in my life that I did something untoward and didn’t get hammered for it. I never heard anything about any nun’s clothing. Maybe Clement made the whole thing up. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

  Eventually, I came to realize that some of the unfairness that I experienced at St. Brigid’s was actually fair in a roundabout way. Since all the teachers knew that Clem and I were constantly causing trouble, they obviously felt payback on their part was logical and, mostly, proportionate. On balance, we did get away with a lot of petty stuff.

  Think about your own life in this regard. I bet you remember some times when you were treated unfairly. Everybody does. But it’s how you handle the unfairness in life that may dictate your success or failure. Dealing effectively with inevitable unfair play is not taught in any classroom, as far as I know, and it should be.

  Here’s my take. It took me years to figure out that there are essentially three ways to handle unfair situations. You can ignore them, as my mother usually did. You can confront them directly, as I often do. Or you can deal with them after the fact, using well-thought-out strategy.

  Unfortunately, most people take the first route. Even though it may anger them, they accept an unfair situation as inevitable. They hold things inside them. Of course, that breeds resentment and bitterness. But some folks can absorb a lot of punishment, as we all know. But it’s not physically or mentally healthy to do that.

  Deciding to confront unfairness head-on usually leads to a “situation,” and if you don’t have the power to win the fight, you could wind up in the convent, so to speak. That was my signature move. I’d take on martinets who had far more power than I did and I’d lose. Often, I didn’t care. I looked at myself as a crusader for justice and that was that. To my credit, I was willing to take the hits, since it was my decision to confront that provoked many of them. If I was treated unfairly at my job, I found another job. If somebody was giving me a hard time, they got the hard time right back.

  Do I regret that strategy? Yes and no. Some conflicts have made me stronger, no question. But had I taken a more patient approach to righting a wrong, I could have won a lot more of those confrontations and saved myself considerable pain.

  Scores of books, like The Art of War, will teach you conflict strategy, but for me the issue of fairness swings both ways. If you want to be treated righteously, then you must be righteous to others. That’s true, even when it’s a pain in the rear to do that. Nobody is perfect, but I strive to be fair for one very compelling reason: I know how it feels to be treated unfairly.

  If you Google my name, you will find millions of items. Some are as vile as anything ever said about anybody. I usually ignore them, except when they originate from institutions that actually have power. Then I deal with the situation. See, I know if those people are unfairly attacking me, they’ll do the same thing to others who are more vulnerable. And my job is to hold the powerful accountable for their actions. So I do my job.

  Sometimes, however, there is wisdom in fighting unfairness and injustice with patience, biding your time so that all your options become clear. For example, in the spring of 1985, I was anchoring the news at KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon. The situation was interesting. I had signed a short, one-year contract to replace a longtime Oregon anchorman who was retiring. Hoping to attract younger viewers, station management brought in a hotshot from the East Coast and paid him big money.

  That hotshot was the bold, fresh guy.

  Predictably, some in the newsroom were not fond of hotshots, and so a kind of station culture war erupted. The younger folks liked my freewheeling style; the old guard detested everything about me. As usual, I didn’t try real hard to win anyone over.

  Then in late spring a call came from my sister, who was living in San Diego. My sixty-two-year-old father had been diagnosed with malignant melanoma, and things looked bad back on Long Island. My sister, a nurse, was pregnant with her first child, so there was no way she could get back home for an extended stay. My mother was lost.

  I met with the station boss, Tom Dargan, to tell him I had to break the contract and go back home. Really, what else could I do? There was no question that, alone, my mother was not going to be able to handle my father’s last days.

  When the announcement of my departure was made, I was stunned by some of the vicious comments. Idiots in the Oregonian newspaper printed anonymous quotes from a few KATU people who claimed that I had been fired. In those accounts, my father’s illness was being portrayed as a ruse to cover the mistake of hiring O’Reilly. Of course, nobody would say that with their name attached, because they would definitely have been paid a visit by me. And they knew it.

  Rage does not even begin to describe how I felt. But there was nothing I could do: you can’t confront phantoms. So I worked out my final weeks, swallowing the unfairness. It did not go down well.

  A few weeks after I got back to New York, my father died at home. At the end, my mother, sister, and I were at his side. The funeral was three days later. The ordeal was brutal on my mom; in fact, she never fully recovered. I hung around home that summer, making sure chaos was kept to a minimum so that my mother could deal with her grief without distraction. I took care of the financial stuff and tried in other ways to make her transition as soft as possible.

  Along the way, things began to happen. Good things. The brass at WCVB-TV in Boston, Jim Coppersmith and Phil Balboni, offered me a challenging job at Channel 5. Also, I had been accepted into Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government across the Charles River in Cambridge. So I decided to take a few courses there and work at the same time. Boston is just two hundred miles from New York, so getting home on a regular basis wasn’t a problem.

  In addition, my agent, Carole Cooper, had received a letter from KATU. It went as follows:

  Dear Carole:

  For the record, I wish to note that we are releasing Bill O’Reilly from his commitment to us due to the grave illness of his father; we had hoped Bill could have been with us longer.

  You should know that in my opinion (based on thirty-five years’ experience) O’Reilly is the most talented on-the-air anchor with whom I have worked.

  He is also intelligent, energetic, conscientious and dedicated to high standards of conduct, both personal and professional.

  Sincerely,

  Thomas R. Dargan

  That letter humbled me and tempered every bitter thought I had over the unfairness in Portland. You see, sometimes life is like that. When they kick you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, a white knight rides in. Tom Dargan passed away a few years ago, but his kindness will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  Life is indeed unfair, and nothing is going to change that. But if we ourselves strive to be fair, things will balance out. I really believe that. It all goes back to Moses and Jesus, doesn’t it? Love your neighbor as you love yourself. When people ask me what drives my fierce work ethic, why I work so hard when I don’t have to anymore, I simply tell them that I’m still on a quest to make sure others get treated fairly.

  In a world that increasingly celebrates selfishness and excessive materialism, I don’t do that. I’m with the guys on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m with the nuns
and priests attending to the poor in Haiti. I’m for the moms and dads working sixty hours a week trying to improve the lives of their children. While I have my forum in the media, those people will be celebrated and get a fair hearing every day.

  In your life, when the bastards pound you, fight back. But fight back smart. Remember where you came from and figure out where you want to go. Along the way, help everyone you can help. If you do that, a knight like Tom Dargan will ride in when you really need one. I guarantee it.

  END OF STORY

  Say good night, Gracie.

  —GEORGE BURNS

  He’s a work in progress.” How many times have you heard someone spout that bad cliché? What a copout. What it really means is, “He’s a jerk and might be one forever.” So never say that about anyone. We are all flawed; no person on this earth will ever be a completed “work.” Just had to get that off my chest.

  Writing this book was difficult for me. As you may know, I don’t like to get into a lot of personal stuff. When People magazine interviewed me a few years ago, I pretty much stonewalled on the nonwork stuff and wouldn’t even let them photograph my daughter’s face.

  That’s because, as Boz Scaggs sang, “puttin’ your business in the street” is low-down. Personal stuff should stay personal. Splattering your life all over the place never works out well. In this book, I tried to stay focused on how my life experiences have shaped my thinking on issues and the pursuit of justice. I hope I’ve succeeded in that.

  At the end of my books, I like to thank the reader. After all, it’s a great compliment that you would invest your money, time, and energy reading my story. Truly, I hope some of my adventures clicked with you—I hope you can use some of what’s in this book to make things better in your life. Every one of us is on the planet for a purpose. I was lucky enough to find mine fairly young in life, but understanding the full of extent of my purpose took much longer.