The Bush Bookshelf: "The Fart Book" | Salon Interview with Kelley

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Tue Sep-14-04 08:38 AM
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The Bush Bookshelf: "The Fart Book" | Salon Interview with Kelley

Don't mess with the Bushes
In her new book, Kitty Kelley shows how the first family intimidates those who've tried to expose the clan's dark secrets of drugs, drinking, womanizing and nepotism. Now they're coming after her.

<snip>

But, as one of W.'s Yalie frat brothers tells Kelley, it's not the substance abuse in Bush's past that's disturbing, it's the "lack of substance ... Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn't interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn't travel; he didn't read the newspapers; he didn't watch the news; he didn't even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me." New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read -- the only title he could find was "The Fart Book."

According to Kelley, the Bushes aggressively maintain their all-American family image by scrubbing government files of embarrassing facts, stonewalling journalists, and terrorizing critics. "Some people felt that George's past did not seep out and embarrass him and his family," she writes of the White House's current Bush, "because he was protected by a coterie of former CIA men with an allegiance to his father." An Austin, Texas, political consultant named Peck Young told Kelley that when a woman claiming to have been a call girl from Midland showed up in Austin with "intimate knowledge" of W. during his oil wildcatting days, she was approached by what she described as "intelligence types" and left town abruptly. According to Young, the men "made her realize that it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing."

George H.W. Bush and wife Barbara dismissed Bill Clinton as a pathetic hillbilly when he challenged the incumbent in 1992. But, Kelley writes, Clinton was one of the few Bush opponents who knew how to back them down. As colorful stories from Clinton's sexual past in Arkansas began to surface during the campaign, a Clinton aide began digging into the senior Bush's own robust adultery. This included, writes Kelley, two long affairs -- one with Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush's White House deputy chief of protocol, who, as the Washington Post once slyly put it, "has served President-elect George Bush in a variety of positions," and one with an Italian woman with whom he set up house in a New York apartment in the 1960s. The Clinton aide told Kelley, "I took my list of Bush women, including one whom he had made an ambassador, to his campaign operatives. I said I knew we were vulnerable on women, but I wanted to make damn sure they knew they were vulnerable too." After the eruption over Clinton's mistress Gennifer Flowers died down, sexual infidelity did in fact become a moot issue in the campaign.

<snip>

You write that the Bushes are particularly good at cleansing anything in government files that will besmirch the family reputation. How does that work?

Well, you see it on all sorts of levels, from the trivial on up. For instance, I got a copy of the Bush family tree from the Bush presidential library. And at first we just thought a couple things were left off, but it was a number of things. Mentally retarded children from one branch of the family erased. Too many divorces in one family -- that doesn't fit with the family-values image, so some ex-wives simply disappear. You could say that's just an oversight or mistake here and there. But when you see a pattern as I've seen over the past years of files redacted, too many mysterious fires that destroy records, State Department files simply missing, gone, National Guard files.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2004/09/14/kelley/index.html

LOTS more goodies. sorry if this is a dupe, did a search....