At a time when journalists are under attack for political bias and factual inaccuracy, local celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley isn?t backing down a bit from criticism of her controversial biography of the Bush family, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.
In the afterword of a just-issued paperback edition of the hardcover edition published last year — which sold some 715,000 copies — Kelley takes on those who accuse her of portraying the Bushes as a spoiled, dysfunctional family… But she’s especially hard on the mainstream media. “I had broken the personal code of poodles on the Potomac,” she writes. “Do not speak ill of the powerful.”
She notes that CNN’s Larry King refused to interview her after admitting he wanted to keep his friendship with the president’s father, who called her “a liar and smear artist.”
She adds that President Bush “has doghoused the White House press corps so that they are almost totally dependent on scraps tossed over the fence by presidential spokesmen,” who, she said, called TV executives to keep her off the air.
Even though Matt Lauer of NBC agreed to interview her, she said made it clear he didn’t like doing so, while a New York Times reporter asked her if she ever had an abortion or did cocaine, charges she levels against members of the Bush family.
“I was sermonized by Lauer, patronized by CNN’s Aaron Brown, and chastised by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews,” she writes.
Kelley said that writing this book was “the most daunting, probably because I was writing about a sitting president and his quite secretive family in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign. The book is political, but it is not meant to be partisan.”
