Random House Lawyers Stand Behind Kitty Kelley Book

Posted on September 8, 2004

According to The Washington Post, Random House's attorneys went over Kitty Kelley's incendiary new book, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, with a fine-toothed comb before allowing it to go to print. The book's bombshell allegations about President and Mrs. Bush's alleged youthful indiscretions with drugs made the publisher act even more cautiously from a legal perspective.

Peter Gethers, Vice President of Random House and Kitty Kelley's editor said: "It was as extensive a legal read as a publisher could give." "Some things didn't make it, and we're 100 percent confident of the things that made it in. We erred on the side of caution because we knew how hard she was going to be hit."

Some portions of the book were apparently nixed by the legal team. In an email statement to Bush supporters issued this afternoon, Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee Chairman, stated: "A recent story says Kelly's [sic] book alleges President Bush used cocaine at Camp David while his father was President, which is as credible as her story that then Governor and Nancy Reagan smoked marijuana with Jack Benny and George and Gracie Burns."

Gillespie also said that the Kelley book throws "unsubstantiated gossip at President Bush in the same way she [Kelley] falsely maligned the late President Reagan as a date rapist who paid for a girlfriend's abortion and wrongly castigated Nancy Reagan as an adulterer who had an affair with Frank Sinatra."