(johnmac -- I saw Kelley on Hardball tonight. While he answers eventually made sense about the reluctance of sources to come forth and have names used, I thought she came across as a lightweight under continuted badgering by Matthews. Her fallback was that 4 sets of attorneys looked at the book (which really means that it's law suit proof but not necessarily accurate) and that nothing in her previous books on Sinatra, Liz Taylor, etc. has ever been disproven (bears more weight).The following New York Times review is not kind to Kelley's effort, which apparantly goes back to the beginnings of the Bush family in the US in its chronicle.
Seymour Hersh was on after Kelley and, IMNSHO, came across much more forcefully (and intelligently) in discussing his new book, "Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib ") >From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/books/14kaku.html BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE FAMILY' A Bush Biography for the Age of Innuendo By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Kitty Kelley's catty new book about the Bush family is a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban. It is also a perfect artifact of a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet; more and more biographies of artists and public figures dwell, speculatively, on familial dysfunction and disorder; and buzz - be it based on verified facts or sheer rumor-mongering - is regarded as a be-all and end-all. "The Family" is seeded with some spicy allegations about drugs and sex, but has little to say about national security, the Florida election standoff or the Bush family's ties with the Saudis. Far more space is devoted to early family history and the career of George Herbert Walker Bush than to the current president. And far more attention is lavished on the contentious relationship between Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan, say, than on George W. Bush's collegial relationship with the neoconservatives and religious right. The current Iraq war receives less than 7 pages of full discussion in a 705-page book. Of course, the reader might well ask: what else could be expected from the author of earlier books like "Jackie Oh!" and "Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star"? Ms. Kelley has always been better at dishing dirt than making sense of a subject's overall life (her 1986 biography of Frank Sinatra, for instance, never shed any real light on how such a swaggering tough guy could produce such emotionally honest, achingly vulnerable music). And while she seems to have realized with her 1991 book on Nancy Reagan that our tabloid culture made it possible for her to turn her Hollywood scandal-sheet-like exposs on the world of politics, her books have been hobbled by an unwillingness to grapple seriously with the central fact of her subjects' lives, the thing that makes us interested in them in the first place - in the case of Sinatra, his musical artistry; in the case of Bush family members, their political record and its implications. Much of the basic biographical material in this volume will be overwhelmingly familiar to readers of newspapers and magazines, the numerous memoirs and letters published by members of the Bush family, and such earlier Bush books as Bill Minutaglio's 1999 "First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty." Allegations about business cronyism tinnily echo assertions made by Kevin Phillips in "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush" (Viking) while observations about intramural family rivalries piggyback on ones made by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer in their 2004 book "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" (Doubleday). In fact, most of this book's psychological insights about Bush family dynamics have been reiterated many times before by biographers and reporters: that George W. Bush possesses his mother's sharp tongue and unforgiving memory, not his father's more genial persona; that Jeb Bush was regarded for many years as the family's political comer, while George W. was seen as the black sheep; that the current President Bush has long been obsessed with avoiding what he sees as mistakes made by his father, resulting in his failure to win re-election. Ms. Kelley's conclusion that the Bush family is a political dynasty that's used its connections here and abroad to promote itself will hardly come as a surprise to anyone. Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as "a master investigative biographer," she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving. Certainly family members (particularly George W. Bush, running in the aftermath of the Bill Clinton scandals) have to some degree invited this sort of scrutiny by selling themselves as a close, wholesome, all-American clan, but Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative. Ms. Kelley contends that Senator Prescott Bush (the first President Bush's father) went on "alcoholic binges," portentously adding that "the genetic predisposition to alcoholism would wreak havoc with all of his children in years to come." She prattles on at length about an alleged affair between George H. W. Bush and his longtime aide Jennifer Fitzgerald (rumors of which appeared in 1992 in The New York Post). She asserts that Laura Bush, as a student at Southern Methodist University in the 60's, "had been known in her college days as a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana," citing a public relations executive named Robert Nash, identified as "an Austin friend of many in Laura's SMU class." And she writes that Sharon Bush, the former wife of the president's brother Neil, "alleged that W. had snorted cocaine with one of his brothers at Camp David during the time their father was president of the United States." Sharon Bush has since denied saying this to the author; Doubleday has issued a statement saying it stands by Ms. Kelley's reporting. Some of the more titillating material in this book falls into the realm of old unsubstantiated rumors. Ms. Kelley repeats allegations floated by Larry Flynt in 2000 that George W. Bush had impregnated a woman in the 1970's and then arranged an abortion, even though the mainstream press at the time did not go with the story, and even though a National Enquirer reporter said that when he had interviewed the woman she denied having had an abortion. Other allegations in this book seem to be based on hearsay or a single (sometimes anonymous) source. Ms. Kelley suggests, for instance, that George H. W. Bush had an affair in the early 1960's with "an Italian beauty named Rosemarie," based on the recollections of an unnamed New York lawyer, who said the woman approached him for legal counsel in 1964. Later, talking about possible infidelities on the part of his son, George W. Bush, she serves up this mishmash of insinuation: "Even as a married man, George had a whispered past, which almost surfaced during the campaign. A woman appeared in Austin, claiming to have been a call girl from Midland with an intimate knowledge of him during his days in the oil patch. 'Supposedly she was 'the other woman' in his life, or one of them,' said Peck Young, an Austin political consultant." In the course of this book Ms. Kelley also accuses George W. Bush of being mean, foul-mouthed and careless. Her most vociferous attacks, however, are reserved for his father, whom she depicts as opportunistic, secretive, duplicitous, elitist and often just plain nasty. Some of her descriptions are based on political decisions like the Willie Horton ads used in the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, but others simply read like ad hominem attacks, fueled by remarks from disaffected relatives or political enemies. Although Ms. Kelley halfheartedly tries to maintain a judicious tone in the earlier portions of the book, her prose grows increasingly vitriolic as her narrative progresses. She writes that as president and vice president, the elder Bush "allowed his family to take full financial advantage of his high political position": "In that sense," she quips, "he threw open the barnyard door and yelled, 'Suey Suey Suey,' while his brothers and his sons snuffled up to the trough." She adds that these relatives make "the errant relatives of other high-office holders look like hummingbirds alongside vultures." Of Barbara Bush, Ms. Kelley writes: "Behind her grandmotherly faade was a pearl-wearing mugger the equal of Ma Barker." And of the elder Bushes' post-White House years, she smirks that they "went into retirement like Salvation Army bell ringers, eager to rake in as much money as fast as they possibly could." Clearly this book - along with the timing of its publication - is intended to have an impact on the coming election. The book's flap copy reads: "at a crucial point in American history, Kitty Kelley is the one person to finally tell all about the family that has, perhaps more than any other, defined our role in the modern world. This is the book the Bushes don't want you to read." But the author's undisguised contempt for many of the Bushes, combined with her failure to come to terms with politics and policy, and her tireless focus on sex, drugs and alcohol, will likely play into family members' penchant for assailing the media. It will likely give them an opening to shrug off this book as a snarky exercise in gossip, instead of forcing them to deal with substantive questions about their political record. Then again, in an election season willfully focused on the past and the personal and the unproven, this book may provide yet another distraction from issues here and now. FAMILY The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty By Kitty Kelley Illustrated. 705 pages. 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