Americans have always enjoyed speculating about the dirty dealings of their political figures. Bill Clinton wasn't the first public official to be disgraced by a sex scandal; Alexander Hamilton holds that honor. In 1792, the nation's first secretary of the treasury was nearly blackmailed from office over an affair with a married woman.
Each election cycle, however, the public flagellates itself over new lows reached. Such talk has already begun with the much ballyhooed release of The Family, Kitty Kelley's new book about the Bushes. Newsweek magazine sniffed that Kelley's research does not meet their standards. Then the president's ex sister-law, Sharon Bush, appeared on The Today Show, disavowing the book's most sensational claim: that George W. Bush and his brothers snorted cocaine at Camp David while their father was president. Kelley's publishers have shot back that Sharon Bush told this story to Kelley in the presence of a third party, her ex-publicist.
Such salacious material aside—none of which is hard to imagine—what's surprising about The Family is how little of it is actually news. In tracing the rise of America's reigning political family, Kelley tells a familiar tale of an obsessively competitive and secretive family that has, with each subsequent generation, moved further to the right because that is what it takes to win in American politics. Like many liberal critics before her, Kelley takes the Bushes to task for promoting the idea that they are a self-reliant clan.
Nearly half of the book details the rise to power of Prescott S. Bush, the current president's grandfather, a star athlete at Yale University who met his wife in St. Louis, made his money on Wall Street, and became a Connecticut senator back in the day when it was OK for Republicans to advocate for Medicare and civil rights. Prescott's rise in the finance world began when his father-in-law tapped him for an important job, Kelley points out, and continued thanks to the patronage of Yale classmates.
Kelley says this same pattern of behind-the-scenes help occurred in the life of George H.W. Bush. The day he entered class at Yale, Prescott arranged lunch with the university's president. When Bush went out on his own to the Texas oil fields, it was with several hundred thousand dollars from his uncle, Herbert Walker. And when he entered politics, Bush called upon his father's good friend, President Eisenhower, for an endorsement.
Nepotism in politics is as startling as incense at the Vatican, but what really seems to irk Kelley is how much the public has bought the idea that Bushes are regular folk. In response, she includes salacious details meant, it seems, to undercut the Bushes' squeaky clean image. She describes Prescott as a binge-drinker and repeats allegations that the president used cocaine while at Yale (backed up by two unnamed sources, one of whom told his story to author Erica Jong). Kelley also repeats the claim of an unnamed New York attorney that Bush Sr. kept an Italian girlfriend named Rosemarie in New York, and later a mistress in Washington, an open secret, according to some. She even dredges up the old claim, suggested by pornographer Larry Flynt, that George W. Bush pressured a girlfriend to have an abortion in the '70s.
Many of these claims are not new, and Kelley actually undercuts her case by including them for it squeezes out serious matters such as the Bush-Saudi connection, the war in Iraq and the Florida recount, to name just a few. Besides, if she wanted readers to come away with the idea that the Bushes would get ahead at all costs, she drowns out a quote from the horse's mouth, a statement which could have been this book's epigram. "I like to win," President George H. Bush once told an AP reporter. "Like to succeed. I feel goaded on by competition."