Dishing the dirt on Bush dynasty

By GRAHAM REID

Maybe you didn't know this, but former First Lady Nancy Reagan had an affair with Frank Sinatra. Or maybe she didn't.

The source of the story is Kitty Kelley, notorious author of the "unauthorised biography" whose subjects - some might say victims - have been Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, Jackie Onassis in Jackie Oh!, actress Liz Taylor and the British royal family.

Now Kelley - a feisty 62-year-old described as coy, coquettish and with the eyelash-flashing capability of getting a stone to talk - has turned her attention to the lives of the Bush dynasty: former United States president George H.W. Bush and his son, the current president George W. Bush.

The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty is a hefty but readable 700 pages which opens with the life of the current president's grandfather and two-time Senator, Prescott Bush. This week it landed in American bookstores with an initial print run of 750,00 copies, and already accusations are flying over Kelley's research methods and assertions, and the gossip she repeats.

Kelley's populist books are devoured for their titillation and wildly swinging accusations, and their anecdotal, novelistic style. When Kelley writes, many people read - although it might be wise not to take some of what she says too seriously.

After her hatchet job on Nancy Reagan, whom she portrayed as a calculating, reinvented, heartless bitch, Time noted: "For Kelley all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating third-hand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses, and sometimes more weight. This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have axes to grind."

Her subjects have been livid, and often litigious. We can only imagine what Frank Sinatra said about her unflattering account of his troublesome times.

Newsweek was given an advance copy of The Family but editor Mark Whitaker declined to run a story about it.

"We weren't comfortable with a lot of the reporting," he said. "We will write about it if it becomes a phenomenon and looks like it will have some impact on the campaign debate, not to further publicise the reporting in it."

Time said it would take too much fact-checking for the magazine to be bothered.

"Kitty Kelley is a discredited purveyor of trash," said Bush-Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt this week. "She smeared the Reagan family and now she is peddling garbage about the current First Family."

Yet, as Bob Wietrak, vice-president of merchandising for the chainstore Barnes & Noble, noted: "She wouldn't be such a bestseller if her books didn't deliver something. People know she spends a lot of time on her books, does a lot of homework, does a lot of digging and she writes a good story."

The Family took almost four years of research and, controversial accusations aside, is a well-paced and important story about a singular family in American politics.

While the Kennedy clan has towered over American political consciousness, it has been three generations of the Bush family which has been the more powerful. Grandfather Prescott was a confidante of President Dwight Eisenhower, father George was head of the CIA and then president, and the wayward George W., who boozed his young life away, is the nation's 43rd president, for which he may have brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, to thank.

Kelley has trawled oral histories, newspaper records and CIA reports, and conducted almost 1000 interviews to bring to life the Bushes, a powerful family with a compelling story of unhappy marriages, drug use and generational alcoholism, sibling jealousy, and the relentless pursuit of power and wealth.

Rather more Dallas than dynasty in Kelley's hands, perhaps, but the result of scrupulously annotated research nonetheless.

The controversial allegations aside - that George snr had a mistress, further assertions about George jnr's national service record - it is a conventional and illuminating biography of political lives with plenty of peppery anecdotes and insights.

It can be unflattering, and Kelley deals the dirt where she can to subvert the popular notion that they are just ordinary folks as they portray themselves. It is often enlightening about the family's nepotism and is occasionally amusing.

Grandfather Prescott's "heroism" in 1917 - when he was alleged to have saved the lives of Allied leaders Foch, Haig and Pershing while they were inspecting American positions on the frontline - was immediately ridiculed by the local midwest press but showed his early capacity for mischievous invention.

It became a family trait: son George later had to concede his involvement with the United Negro College Fund in the early 60s was considerably less heroic than he would have others believe.

After the war, Prescott married well, became a travelling salesman and used his wife's family and college connections (the notoriously secretive Skull and Bones club) to join an investment banking organisation.

Kelley plots Prescott's remarkable career with anecdote and historical accuracy, and draws on political cartoons and contemporary reportage to create a feel for the period.

She may deal the dirt in other books but this account feels like genuine, and somewhat dogged, investigation.

Prescott was also, in the words of one who knew him, "a major-league alcoholic" as was his brother James who was forced to resign as vice-president of the First National Bank of St Louis for missing work.

Binge-drinking would slip a generation - although George snr enjoyed heavy martinis and reappear with the current president until his 40th birthday when he quit.

Both grandfather and grandson would see alcohol dependency as a moral failing and their genetic disposition to it a destruction of dignity. It also led to the family's obsessive need for secrecy and mistrust of personal analysis.

But there is also heroism in Kelley's pages: George snr's distinguished record in World War II was later doubted but is here treated fairly.

After the war, Prescott's business and political connections gave George snr an entree into public life and the young man, forgivably, perhaps, after the uncertainty of the war years, came to believe money was crucial for security. From there on, however, it was the ruthless pursuit of power and influence.

Kelley humanises this story: the death of George snr and Barbara's daughter Robin at age 3 is given the space it deserves. George W. was 6 and wasn't told until later.

This was a close and complex family. At 22, Jeb Bush married a Mexican woman who didn't speak English, and George W. battled alcoholism, intellectual indolence and apparently flirted with cocaine (the sources for this story are unnamed).

In retrospect, George W. sounds feckless in 1967 - while his dad was defending the right to bomb Vietnam, he defended the right of his frat-buddies to "brand" their pledges with a hot coathanger.

Later, when the New York Times trumpeted against the practice he, perhaps better than anyone, put it in perspective: "It's insignificant, totally insignificant." He was 20 at the time.

It is bizarre that much of the current presidential campaign has centred on Kerry's military service and President Bush's lack of it, for there would be few parents who, if they could possibly avoid it, would have willingly let their children serve in that most appalling war. Kelley editorialises here with the advantage of emotional distance as she questions the privileges of status.

Yet she is mostly even-handed - other than when she stoops to unattributed gossip - and offers a more thorough dynastic account than her critics and naysayers might concede.

Shelves of bookstores in America are stacked with Bush biographies and anti-Bush polemics. While little of what she says is new, Kelley brings the cachet of controversy her previous books have established, and she can fire back that although they have been criticised for their accuracy she has never lost a lawsuit.

This book denies the standard line about her work, as expressed by Vanity Fair writer Bob Colacello a few years ago: "The story of Kitty Kelley is not about accuracy but of attitude. She starts off hating the people she writes about and hates them all the way though."

Colacello had his own authorised biography of Nancy Reagan in the pipeline at the time.

Kelley has her critics, but The Family has been carefully fact-checked and "lawyered". It is more accurate than many would concede. It is also - sometimes unintentionally - humorously ironic.

In 1975, George snr noted in his diary about his wastrel son: "If he gets his teeth into something semi-permanent or permanent, he will do just fine."

At a Thanksgiving dinner some time after the 2000 election in which he became president with a controversial victory, thanks to disputed chad votes in the state helmed by his brother Jeb, George W. Bush turned to a friend and said, "I wonder what my old man would say if he could see his little boy now."