Ray Locker

USA TODAY

Please, Bill O'Reilly, stop the killing.

It worked the first couple of times. Killing Lincoln, O'Reilly's book about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, was an engaging piece of history. Arguments could be made for his next two books, Killing Kennedy and Killing Jesus, because, by definition, President John Kennedy and Jesus were murdered.

But not Gen. George Patton and President Ronald Reagan, the topics of his most recent "Killing" books. Patton died after a car accident in Germany. (O’Reilly’s book posits that Patton was poisoned in the hospital after the crash by the Russian secret service.) Reagan, while shot in an assassination attempt in 1981, served two full, eventful terms as president and died in 2004. O'Reilly's thesis, that the shooting caused Reagan's eventual Alzheimer's disease, was roundly criticized by members of the president's inner circle.

Now O'Reilly's killing spree, abetted by co-writer Martin Dugard, has moved beyond people to entire nations. Killing the Rising Sun (Henry Holt, 323 pp., ** out of four stars) is their account of the eventual surrender of Japan in World War II.

O'Reilly's TV shtick as a lonely, brave truth teller gets an ample workout here. He gleefully busts reputations and myths, starting with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and moving on to President Franklin Roosevelt.

MacArthur, O'Reilly writes, was a raging publicity hound whose desire to retake the Philippines after he had to flee in 1942 turned into a violent debacle in which Japanese soldiers killed innocent Filipinos. "Douglas MacArthur's rationale for not allowing aerial bombardment of Manila is that the lives of innocent civilians will be endangered, yet the horrors being inflicted upon the Filipino people defy description," he writes. "Instant death from a bomb might be preferable to the agonizing murders being perpetrated by the Japanese."

Roosevelt, who led the United States through the war and started the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, is quickly painted as a full-blown human rights offender. O'Reilly blames the ailing Roosevelt for getting rolled at the February 1945 Yalta conference by Joseph Stalin and thus consigning Eastern Europe to decades of Soviet domination. He then links that with Roosevelt's decision to incarcerate 127,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps in the hysteria following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "Yet, as the people of Eastern Europe will soon learn, they have no choice but to endure the hardships," O'Reilly writes.

The Japanese-American incarceration remains a blot on America's human rights record, but it was a sin with many fathers, including the Republican attorney general and then-governor of California, Earl Warren, who enthusiastically called for his state's Japanese-American citizens to be rounded up.

As he moves toward the fiery conclusion of the war against Japan — the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki — O'Reilly bounces through the conflict like a frenetic teenager. He tosses vignettes of battlefield bravery on Pacific hellholes like Peleliu and Iwo Jima into the same narrative stew with the effort to build the atomic bomb.

None of this is new. Readers of history will have learned the same lessons from John Dower's Embracing Defeat or Richard Frank's Downfall, two of many rich accounts of the war against Japan.

But that's not O'Reilly's way; he views history as another lens through which he can view himself. It's time for the killing to stop.