WP: Kitty Kelley Book Review/All the Way to the White House

[kskiska]

Hatchet job

In July 1991, George Herbert Walker Bush wrote in his diary, "The President of Paramount . . . called in to say that Kitty Kelley wants to write a book either about the Bushes or the Royals and he turned it down." Bush expressed relief. "I can't see her ever writing anything nice."

How prescient of our 41st chief executive to anticipate anxiously The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.

Kelley, the indefatigable author of exposés of Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and other celebrities, is dauntingly ambitious in the scope of her latest venture. She begins her saga early in the 20th century with descriptions of Samuel Prescott Bush, an Ohio steel magnate, and George Herbert Walker, a Missouri speculator and railroad tycoon, and then proceeds to the marriage of their children, Yale alumnus Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker, a graduate of Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. The book ends 600 pages later, with the grandson of this union, President George Walker Bush, theatrically landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations in the 2003 Iraq war.

(snip)

All this being said, Kelley's account of the rise and rise of the Bush family is both inspirational and cautionary. She convincingly shows that good looks, energy, athleticism, ambition, felicitous marriages and social networking can compensate for intellectual ordinariness. George H.W. used to boast about not reading books, and George W. is not often seen at the Washington Opera. Indeed, the family's cultural shortcomings may have sped its public advancement. As Clare Boothe Luce once said, after a few weeks in Congress, "Politics is the refuge of second-class minds."

A common sense of destiny does not, apparently, make the Bushes careful on the climb. According to Kelley, they are risk-takers in finance, sex and illicit- drug use. George H.W., for instance, lived from 1955 to 1966 in Texas houses with racially restrictive covenants, contrary to state law, at a time when his father was in Congress fighting for civil rights.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45728-2004Sep23.html

[watercolors]

1. just finished the book

mediocre to say the least, don't waste your money, we all know most of what is in it. I found no great surprises!!Rather boring read.