Liberals are so good at shameless sleaze........
<font size=4>Meow!
<font size=3>From the September 27, 2004 issue: <font size=4>Kitty Kelley claws the Bushes.
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by Andrew Ferguson
- Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
The Family
The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
by Kitty Kelley
Doubleday, 705 pp., $29.95
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"SHE WANTS RESPECTABILITY more than anything else,"<font color=black> a friend of Kitty Kelley once told the Washington Post, but if that's true she sure has a funny way of going about it. With each of her celebrity biographies--first there was one on Jackie Kennedy, followed by Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, and the British Royal Family--respectability recedes further from Kitty's chubby little paws.<font size=3> The newsmagazines will no longer serialize her books, and reviewers for the New York Times regularly trash them, most recently in Michiko Kakutani's review last week of her latest, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Even the insouciant Matt Lauer, balding host of the Today show, seems to be losing patience.
His producers had booked Kitty for promotional appearances last week on three successive mornings, but instead of encouraging the author in a purring recitation of her new book's many charms, Matt sandbagged her. The face-to-face debunking required more nerve than skill--poking holes in a Kitty Kelley book isn't hard--but it did underscore the rude fact of Kitty's professional status: When respectable pressfolk deal with her, they prefer to use surgeon's gloves and a pair of long-nosed pliers.
It was not always so. There was a brief window in Kitty Kelley's career when respectability hovered within her grasp. His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra (1986), which among much else described Sinatra's mother as an abortionist and depicted Ol' Blue Eyes himself bellying up, so to speak, to a steak-and-egg breakfast served off the bosom of a Las Vegas prostitute, had been praised in most establishment circles. Then, in 1987, she announced that her next subject would be Nancy Reagan. Within months the Washington Post, whose proprietress Katharine Graham was close to Mrs. Reagan, ordered up the definitive profile of Kitty Kelley. Exhaustively reported and cheekily written by Gerri Hirshey, the story appeared in three installments in October 1988. It ran to over 25,000 words, a sordid tale of personal betrayals and professional malfeasance, and <font size=4>it established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that its subject was a bit of a head case.
The best source on that was Hirshey herself. <font color=blue>"Shortly after I'd begun my research,"<font color=black> Hirshey wrote in the article's first installment, <font color=blue>"anonymous mail began to arrive."<font color=black> There were anonymous phone calls, too, including one from an unnamed woman who shouted, <font color=blue>"Do you DARE tell the truth about one of Washington's most esteemed citizens?"<font color=black> But the letters were more frequent and more interesting. They <font color=blue>"followed my investigations from Spokane [where Kitty grew up] to Georgetown to New York."<font color=black> They carried various return addresses, some of them nonexistent, and <font color=blue>"praised Kitty Kelley, limned her accomplishments, her kindnesses to small and crippled children."<font color=black> Not all the notes were anonymous--some were signed by fabricated names--and not all were flattering; at least one contained a sinister tip about Kelley's personal life, which, bizarrely, proved false.
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And most of the notes, according to a forensic analysis
undertaken by the Post, were typed on typewriters known to
have been used by Kitty Kelley for other business
correspondence.<font color=black>
OF COURSE, Kitty had never been "one of Washington's most esteemed citizens," and now she never would be; respectability slipped forever from her grasp with the publication of the Post profile. The Reagan book, completed in 1991, might have provided some consolation--that, and the $4 million advance she received for it. Her next book, on the Windsors, was much less successful, failing even to find a British publisher willing to risk England's libel laws. This new book on the Bushes, dropped squarely on a president universally disliked by the respectable press and in the midst of a difficult reelection, may be her one last play for respectability--which must make the garroting at the Today show and the Times even more painful. So it goes. As Kitty herself once explained, when people criticize her taste or her reporting or her prose, <font color=blue>"I say, 'I'm sorry, I'm on my way to the bank.'"<font color=black> Exactly. How many tummy tucks will respectability buy you?
It's too bad for Kitty that her reputation is now beyond salvage, because The Family shows a writer working at full throttle, in complete command of her gifts. I don't mean this ironically. She is a pathographer: a writer of biographies whose sole editorial principle is to include every unflattering bit of information about a subject she can, while leaving to one side anything that might appear exculpatory or complicating. (The pathographer's motto: If it's a sin, put it in.) Her theme is as ancient as it is implausible--that the rich and celebrated, the successful and well-endowed, lead lives as squalid and pathetic as the lives of the readers who buy her books. She knows that in the popular culture the mere fact of celebrity is vastly more important than its cause. Whether someone becomes famous for singing good songs, like Frank, or marrying well, like Jackie and Nancy, or marrying often, like Liz, or getting elected president, like the two Bushes--it really doesn't matter. Celebrity itself is enough to bring the chumps into the tent. Celebrity itself justifies a pathography.
That's one reason her books all end up resembling one another, regardless of the particulars of the lives she examines. Character types recur. In The Family, veteran Kitty readers will see that Barbara Bush is Dolly Sinatra, minus the abortions--cold, ambitious, calculating, steeped in ethnic resentments--and both resemble Mrs. Reagan's mother, too, who's a lot like Liz Taylor's stage-door mom. The pre-presidential George W. has much in common with poor Frank Sinatra Jr.: feckless, fun-loving, driven by the neglect of a distant dad to drunkenness and worse, while clawing the apron strings of a monstrous mom. Ronald Reagan is George H.W. Bush: amiable, a bit clueless, uxorious. Prescott Bush, the patriarch, is Lloyd Davis, Mrs. Reagan's stepfather, who (if I'm not mistaken) is the same as Liz's Conrad Hilton: austere and honorable and aloof and rich, presiding over a clan torn apart by dark secrets that even they themselves dare not reveal! And around them orbit the minor characters, the walk-ons drawn from melodrama, caught in their stock storylines: the shady businessman, the mousy virginal daughter, the well-meaning boob--the black sheep and the sacrificial lamb, the tragedy and dysfunction, the heartbreak and sorrow. And tons of sex.
In The Family, Kitty runs this repertoire with great confidence and skill. Yet as a pathographer she understands that many tasks required of the conventional biographer are beyond her talents, so she doesn't even try to pull them off. She may be nuts, but she's not stupid. Like her other books, The Family is haphazardly organized; she starts telling a straightforward chronological tale, and maintains it with failing strength for nearly two-thirds of the book, until at last she says the hell with it and begins tossing in stuff almost at random--whatever pops out of her card file: In the middle of a discussion about George H.W. Bush and taxes, we get an unexpected story about a California congressman who once saw the elder Bush in the shower and describes the president's <font color=blue>"little stick"<font color=black>; in a discussion of the Lewinsky scandal, Kitty suddenly lets drop that Laura Bush, in college, was a dope dealer. As a narrative strategy it's chaos, but it does keep a reader on his toes. Doze off reading a Kitty Kelley book, and you're bound to miss something.
IN THE SAME WAY, she makes no more than a cursory gesture at placing her story in a larger context: historical, social, political, all that jazz. She's not a big-picture gal, and of course she doesn't need to be. When she feels forced to stand back and summarize, for the sake of her readers, some larger political current or historical epoch--<font color=blue>"The class of 1964 had watched a dizzying swirl of history: Roger Maris hitting his sixty-first home run on October 1, 1961; John Glenn's three-orbit space mission in Mercury Friendship on February 20, 1962; the Cuban missile crisis eight months later; Martin Luther King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' in April 1963; and the U.S. arrival of the mop-top Beatles in February 1964"<font color=black>--you can't help but think, <font color=green>"Oh no! Kitty's been watching the History Channel again!"<font color=black> It's as if in such passages she's winking at her reader: I've got to toss in this high-brow jive for Michiko Kakutani, she's saying, but you and I both know why we're here, so hang on, there's something good coming up soon. (You also think, if you're like me, Did she say <font color=blue>"mop-top"<font color=black>?)
And there is something good coming up soon, always. The good stuff isn't necessarily what Kitty thinks it is, however. I particularly enjoyed discovering untypical signs of fanciness in her prose; in The Family Kitty litters her text with far-fetched similes and metaphors as never before. <font color=blue>"George was as smooth as an eel slithering through oil."<font color=black> Bill Clinton, during the 2000 presidential campaign, <font color=blue>"was the dog's mess in the living room."<font color=black> When George H.W. Bush learned of the Supreme Court's <font color=blue>"one man, one vote"<font color=black> decision in 1964, <font color=blue>"their ruling fell back in his lap like a bowl of rich cream."<font color=black> Is it surprising that a writer so often accused of sleaziness has become obsessed with dry-cleaning?
THE WORLD by now has learned of the other <font color=blue>"good stuff,"<font color=black> what Kitty herself calls her book's <font color=blue>"major revelations"<font color=black>--and if the world hasn't, it's because her sources are so transparently feeble that the respectable press has declined to transmit them. <font color=red>Kitty's use of unnamed sources is a marker of all her books, but of the sources that are identified in The Family, some are surprising even for her. <font color=black>
Her account of George W. Bush procuring an abortion for a girlfriend in the 1970s comes from, believe it or not, Larry Flynt. Other sources, while named, are insufficiently identified. Evidence for Barbara Bush's <font color=blue>"anti-Semitism"--"'There'll be no Jews in our family,' she said"<font color=black>--comes from the testimony of Cody Shearer, whom Kitty calls a <font color=blue>"former journalist."<font color=black> Yes, indeed: Shearer's previous journalistic coup was the discovery of Brett Kimberlin, the convicted bomber and pathological liar who became briefly famous for saying he'd sold pot to Dan Quayle.
Another frequently used source, surfacing here and there to make snippy remarks about George W.'s boorishness in college and after <font color=blue>("It was just like talking to a Sears repairman")<font color=black> is a man named Mark Soler, identified as a member of Bush's Yale class of '68. Kitty declines to tell her readers that Soler has grown up to be an avowed political enemy of Bush's, as president of a <font color=blue>"public-interest"<font color=black> law firm funded in part by George Soros, who's not crazy about Bush either. For her account of Bush's tour in the National Guard she relies on Bill Burkett, identified last week as the possible source of the forged documents used by Dan Rather and CBS News.
Some readers might conclude from Kitty's promiscuous use of such sources--and from the far-fetched, unsubstantiated stories she tells from other sources she doesn't name--that this particular pathographer, perky though she is, has no standards.
Not true! In one amazing passage, in the middle of the book, after the unverifiable tales of adultery and drunkenness and deceit, Kitty suddenly assumes the role of hard-headed fact-checker. She repeats a revealing story frequently told about George W. Bush's college years, and then, her ethical antennae quivering with outrage, she sets about to debunk it. For those of us who have followed Kitty's career, this is a rare privilege--seeing her take the trouble to marshal evidence and weigh probabilities in full view of the reader, rather than just asserting a casual slander, attributing it to an anonymous source, and moving on.
Unfortunately, the story that rouses Kitty's unusual skepticism is told by George W. Bush, and the person slandered by it, so Kitty thinks, isn't Bush but the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a once-famous antiwar activist who was chaplain during W.'s years at Yale. Bush's story goes like this: In 1964, following his father's loss to a liberal Democrat, Ralph Yarborough, in the Texas Senate race, W. had a brief chat with Coffin on the Yale campus. <font color=blue>"Oh, yes,"<font color=black> Coffin said, <font color=blue>"I know your father. Frankly he was beaten by a better man."<font color=black>
Bush has told this story often as an illustration of Yalie elitism and left-wing self-satisfaction, but Kitty--well, frankly, she's not buying it. She grabs her big magnifying glass, she tugs on her Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, and she gets to work. <font color=blue>"The first time George mentioned the incident with Coffin to anyone was when he was being interviewed by Texas Monthly in 1994,"<font color=black> she writes. <font color=green>This isn't true, as it happens, since Bush had mentioned it to both his parents at the time, as Barbara Bush has made clear elsewhere, but anyway, Kitty's busy theorizing: <font color=blue>"Running for governor of Texas, George may have felt he needed to country-boy his Ivy League credentials"<font color=black> by making up such a story.
In 1999, when Bush's mother confirmed the story to the Washington Post, Coffin denied it. Bush, now governor, wrote Coffin a note: <font color=purple>"I believe my recollection is correct. But I also know time passes, and I bear no ill will."<font color=black>
Maybe that sounds kindly to you, maybe it sounds gracious. Not to Kitty--to Kitty it sounds mighty defensive. So she continues to gather evidence. Even though she has said elsewhere that many of them declined to be interviewed by her, she announces that none of W.'s dorm mates--<font color=blue>"not one"<font color=black>!--has a contemporaneous recollection, thirty years later, of the young Bush relating the Coffin story in 1964. She quotes <font color=blue>"one Yale man in George's class" <font color=black>(Mark Soler?) who doubts the incident took place. She notes that Mrs. Bush didn't mention the story in her own memoir. And finally comes the QED, the final nail in the coffin of this lie: <font color=blue>"To those who know William Sloane Coffin, an avowed human rights activist, the story seems preposterous."<font color=green>
Actually, this isn't true either.<font color=black> To those who know William Sloane Coffin, a preening and vainglorious blowhard, the story is perfectly plausible. But it is a wonderful thing, in all the thousands of pages of all the pathographies that Kitty has written, to discover her, at last, applying rules of evidence and standards of proof. Yes, the standards are low and the rules are rigged, but still. This odd method is, to her, revealing: <font color=blue>"By the time George W. Bush told his Reverend Coffin story in 1994, he had entered the political arena in which truth was frequently the first casualty."<font color=black>
She's repulsed.<font size=3>
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