NOT only was George Bush snorting cocaine at Camp David during his father’s presidency, but his prim wife Laura turns out to have been a college drug pusher.
Those are the sensationalist claims of Kitty Kelley’s election-season blockbuster on the Bush dynasty that went on sale in America yesterday.
Even before its release, The Family provoked a furious reaction from the White House to its damaging allegation that Mr Bush had done drugs after he stopped drinking on his 40th birthday in 1986, three years before his father became president.
“This gossip writer’s allegations are false and so trashy that even the tabloids should cringe,” Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said.
In its most explosive moment, the book quotes Sharon Bush, ex-wife of the President’s brother Neil, as saying that George Bush and another brother, Marvin, “did coke at Camp David when their father was President and not just once, either.”
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Sharon Bush, who was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce when she met the author, has denied in a statement and a television appearance that she said any such thing.
But Ms Kelley’s account has been supported by a publicist who was present at their lunch. Ms Kelley, the author of controversial biographies of Nancy Reagan and the Royal Family, conducted nearly 1,000 interviews over four years, though many of her sources are unnamed. She quotes one of Mr Bush’s classmates at Yale claiming that he had sold cocaine to the future president at university.
Another man, a Yale graduate who is now independently wealthy and living on the West Coast, recalled “doing coke” with him.
But the charges seem unlikely to do substantial political harm to Mr Bush, who has always admitted that “when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible”.
Ms Kelley is unable to shed much new light on why George W. skipped his annual physical examination and was suspended from flying while in the National Guard, saying: “There is no indication that George Bush was institutionalised for substance abuse.”
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She even helps to quash a rumour peddled by Hustler pornographer Larry Flynt that Mr Bush once made a woman pregnant and she then had an abortion. The book says Richard Gooding of the tabloid National Enquirer interviewed the woman and she denied having had an abortion. “She admitted they dated exclusively for six months, but said they never had the kind of sex that would get her pregnant, ” Mr Gooding said.
Perhaps more surprising than the claims about Mr Bush is Ms Kelley’s assertion that his seemingly wholesome wife Laura was known as “a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana” during her time at Southern Methodist University in the 1960s.
“She not only smoked dope, but she sold dope,” Robert Nash, a Texas friend of many in her college class, told the author.
Ms Kelley says that as a young married couple the pair’s friends were “all hard-drinking — and drugging” and Laura spent many nights worrying when or even whether her husband would come home.
The marriage survived its “ups and downs”, she writes, but the first couple display little public affection, rarely even holding hands. “In fact, they were more demonstrative towards their dogs than toward each other,” Ms Kelley writes. Even since moving to the White House, Laura has continued to take her annual women-only hiking holidays.
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Barbara Bush, the President’s much-beloved mother, also sees her reputation tarnished by Ms Kelley’s exertions. “Behind her grandmotherly façade was a pearl-wearing mugger,” she writes of the former First Lady.