The Family; The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

New York: Doubleday, 2004. First Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Greg Smith (Jacket photograph). xxvii, [3], 703, [1] pages. Family Tree. Author's Note. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the fep. Inscription reads To Elliott---Thank you for everything. You were such a help on this book My best. Kitty Kelley. [This is believed to have been inscribed to Elliott Richardson!]. Also signed in red by the author on the title page. Katherine Kelley (born April 4, 1942) is an American journalist and author of best-selling unauthorized biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British Royal Family, the Bush family, and Oprah Winfrey. For the Sinatra biography, Kelley won praise for the quality of her research and willingness to risk a lawsuit. Kelley won the 2005 PEN Oakland Censorship Award[36] and the Outstanding Author Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors[37] for her "courageous writing on popular culture." She received the Medal of Merit from the Lotos Club of New York City. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty is an unauthorized biography of the Bush family by the American investigative journalist Kitty Kelley. It was published on September 14, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 US Presidential election. Reviews of the book were mixed, with some of the "accusations," according to The New York Times, "[standing] up better than others." They have wielded enormous financial power and dominated world politics for more than half a century. They have been appointed to positions of great power and have been elected as governors, congressmen, senators and presidents. They have shaped our past and, with our country at war under the leadership of their number one son, they are, more critically than ever, shaping our future. As the Bush family has risen to dominance, so too they have been master orchestrators of their own public image, acting and operating under the shield of privacy their money and status have always afforded them. Until now. Number One bestselling author and investigative biographer Kitty Kelley has closely examined the lives of Jacqueline Onassis, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and the British Royal family. Now the First Lady of unauthorized biography reckons with the first family of the United States—and the result is at once a rich and shocking history and a very human portrait of the world's most powerful dynasty. An important work on wealth, power, and class in America, The Family is rich in texture, probing in its psychological insight, revealing in its political and financial detail, and stunning in the patterns that emerge and expose the Bush dynasty as it has never before been exposed. Ms. Kelley takes us back to the origins of the family fortune in the Ohio steel industry at the turn of the last century, through the oil deals and international business associations that have maintained and increased their wealth over the past hundred years. The book leads us through Prescott Bush's first entrée into government at the state level in 1950s' Connecticut, to George Herbert Walker Bush's long and winding road to the White House, to his son's quick sweep into the same office. Along the way, we see the complex relationships the Bushes have had with the giants of the century—Eisenhower, Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, Kissinger, Reagan, Clinton—as well as the often ruthless methods used to realize their goals. Perhaps most impressive—and surprising—is the way the book delves behind the obsessively protected public image into the family's intimate private lives: the matriarchs, the mistresses, the marriages, the divorces, the jealousies, the hypocrisies, the golden children, and the black sheep. At a crucial point in American history, Kitty Kelley is the one person to finally tell all about the family that has, perhaps more than any other, defined our role in the modern world. This is the book the Bushes don't want you to read. This is The Family.