Book Unflattering to Bush Draws His Campaign's Fire
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
 
Anticipating a barrage of unflattering accusations and innuendo about
President Bush's personal life in a soon-to-be-published book by the
celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, the Bush campaign has opened a wave
of advance counterstrikes intended to undermine her credibility.
 
A representative of the White House recently called Neal Shapiro,
president of NBC News, to discourage that network from broadcasting
interviews with Ms. Kelley about the book on its "Today'' program and on
its MSNBC cable program "Hardball With Chris Matthews,'' a network
executive said.
 
The Republican Party distributed a memorandum this week to conservative
radio talk show hosts listing tawdry, unproved assertions in Ms.
Kelley's previous books, especially her biography of Nancy Reagan. And
Ed Gillespie, the party chairman, sent a letter to supporters portraying
her book as a tool of the Democrats' campaign.
 
"This book is fiction and deserves to be treated as such,'' said
Christine Iverson, a Republican spokeswoman.
 
The book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty," is not
scheduled for publication until next week, but it has already become a
subject of intense interest in Washington as word seeped out that it
could contain salacious disclosures about Mr. Bush and his father, less
than two months before the election.
 
In a back and forth yesterday, Sharon Bush, the former wife of the
president's brother Neil and a central source for the book, issued a
pre-emptive retraction after a British newspaper printed an article on
the book, quoting Ms. Bush as saying that Mr. Bush used cocaine at Camp
David while his father was in office.
 
"I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush
used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp
David," Ms. Bush said in an unsworn statement distributed by her lawyer,
David Berg. "Although there have been tensions between me and various
members of the Bush family, I cannot allow this falsehood to go
unchallenged."
 
Doubleday, the book's publisher and part of the Random House division of
Bertelsmann, said it stood by Ms. Kelley's reporting. The publisher said
in a statement that Ms. Kelly met with Ms. Bush for a four-hour lunch on
April 1, 2003, where an unnamed third party heard the conversation, and
that Ms. Kelley's editor, Peter Gethers, discussed the same material
with Ms. Bush over the phone.
 
Lou Colasuonno, a former publicist for Ms. Bush, confirmed that he was
the third party at the lunch and contradicted her denial. "I have not
seen the book, I have only seen news reports," Mr. Colasuonno said.
"According to what I have seen, what has been reported, I would not
dispute that."
 
A copy of the book was obtained by The New York Times. Ms. Kelley writes
that she spent four years and interviewed nearly a thousand people in
researching the book, which spans three generations of Bushes. Little,
if any, of its content is flattering to the family. Ms. Kelley treats
subjects as far-flung as the pranks the younger George Bush played at
boarding school at Andover and his jocular use of obscene language in
the years before taking office. But she also discusses questions about
how he avoided serving in Vietnam, about excessive drinking and whether
he used illegal drugs and about his business career. It is a fast-paced,
gossipy narrative that relies on second-hand or unnamed sources for much
of its new and most vivid details.
 
Asked about the book, Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the White House,
said yesterday: "It is a book filled with garbage, garbage that was
discredited, disavowed and dismissed years ago. This is not the first
time we have seen such baseless and trashy fabrications from the
author."
 
Through a spokeswoman, Stephen Rubin, the publisher of Doubleday, called
Ms. Kelley "a dogged journalist who is unafraid to take on some of the
most powerful personalities of our time."
 
"Kitty has never had to retract anything published in any of her books
nor has she ever lost a lawsuit," Mr. Rubin added. "She is a brave,
insightful and persistent investigative reporter."
 
Yesterday, a Bush-Cheney campaign official confirmed that "we called NBC
and expressed our concern." The Republican Party sent conservative radio
shows an e-mail message headlined, "New Kelley Book, Same Old Kelley
Slime," listing articles questioning aspects of her previous
biographies.
 
Mr. Gillespie's memorandum also cited some of the unseemly,
hard-to-prove assertions in Ms. Kelley's biographies of Mrs. Reagan and
Frank Sinatra. Mr. Gillespie said the description of Mr. Bush's using
drugs at Camp David was "as credible as her story that then-Governor and
Nancy Reagan smoked marijuana with Jack Benny and George and Gracie
Burns."
 
Jim Rutenberg and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting from
Washington for this article.