Biography: There's lots of gossipy material here, as one would expect from a celebrity biographer who has made a reputation peddling salacious detail about Nancy Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and the British Royal family, writes Conor O'Clery.
Much of it has appeared before. It is no surprise to find former first lady Barbara Bush depicted as rude and domineering, and with so little sense of decorum that she once dressed to visit Jerusalem's Holocaust museum in a flowered housedress and sandals.
We are told again that Nancy Reagan despised the Bushes so much she never once invited them to dinner when her husband was president and George H.W. Bush was vice president. We are also given a dose of harmless family trivia such as the story of the house guest at Kennybunkport looking for a book to read who could find only The Fart Book, and how at prep school young George Bush called his stickball team "Nads" so supporters could shout "Go-Nads!"
Then there's the heavier stuff. President George H.W. Bush had a long-standing affair with his secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald, we are informed. Marvin Bush was caught doing drugs at school, but his father got him off. Neil Bush used prostitutes in Asia. Jeb Bush, now governor of Florida, had extra-marital affairs. The current president, George W. Bush, snorted cocaine at Camp David during the time his father was president. And Laura Bush "not only smoked dope, but she sold dope" while at Southern Methodist University.
These are very serious charges. But are they true? Kitty Kelley claims she did 1,000 interviews for the book and that many of the sources could not be named for fear of what the family would do to them. Getting people to speak on the record is, indeed, always a problem for biographers of the living. She provides long lists of people interviewed, and of books and articles consulted, that fill 35 pages of tiny print in the appendix. But it doesn't take long to realise that this is an illusion, created to give the impression of scholarship. The information on the pages is never cross-referenced to the appendix. We are left to guess which interviewee, if any, dished particular morsels of dirt.
Quotations are thrown into the text without any indication of whether they were spoken to the author or to someone else, or extrapolated from written material. Anonymous sources get heavy play. Words are used to convey impressions masquerading as facts.
Take the charge of George H.W. Bush's affair. One of the main sources is an unnamed White House "assistant" who says nobody could imagine the "goofy" vice president sleeping with his secretary Jennifer, "but there is no denying the connection". Jennifer became "his other wife", according to another source (or is it the same one?) described as "someone close to the situation". Reports of the affair were investigated over the years by regular news organisations and never substantiated. The book takes the story no further.
There has always been public speculation that George W. did drugs - and he has refused to state explicitly that he didn't. Kelley's new and specific allegation that he snorted coke at Camp David while his father was president is attributed to Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil Bush, who said he did it "not once, but many times". But no sooner was the book published in the US than Sharon publicly disowned the claim (though Kelley has produced a witness to her interview), and said she never saw any actual coke-sniffing.
The charge that Laura Bush not only smoked dope, but also sold it at university is attributed to public relations executive Robert Nash. But Nash evidently did not know Laura - he is described only as a "friend of many" in Laura's class - and he also went public last week to protest that he spoke to Kitty Kelley off the record and was only retailing an old rumour for the author to follow up.
A further claim that Laura was known as "a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana" is not sourced.
The worst example in the book of this kind of gossip is the insinuation that George W. Bush abused Laura. The author writes: "One friend even worried about spousal abuse, but there was no official police report to document the allegation." This is typical of Kelley's style: a serious charge is put out, then half-withdrawn as if the author is concerned about fairness.
For all the inside dope on America's most powerful political family, long stretches of this tome are quite boring. Who cares about family patriarch Prescott Bush's political and financial dealings, which fill page after page? And Kelley totally ignores what was possibly the most serious financial scandal in the life of the current president: his 1990 dumping of $848,560 worth of stock in Harken Energy, when he was a director with inside knowledge of impending losses. Bush failed to report the sale in time to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was headed by a buddy of his father, and no action was taken against him.
There are some interesting replays of old stories, which show that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. In 1988, when George H.W. Bush tried to burnish his combat record in the second World War for campaign purposes, he was slammed by other veterans, just as John Kerry is being crucified over Vietnam in the current election campaign. And when Dan Rather took on George H.W. Bush in a pre-election CBS interview in 1988, it was Bush who came out the winner, just as his son George W. has triumphed from the screw-up over Rather's recent attempt to question his National Guard service with unauthenticated documents.
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty By Kitty Kelley Bantam, 705pp. £20
Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times