Laura, the only child of a Midland builder, is remembered by some former students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for not being as conservative as most. She had smoked marijuana and backpacked through Europe after graduation. A Democrat, she had also supported the anti-war candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for the presidency in 1968.

In the early years of their marriage Laura joined her husband in his revels. “George and Laura ran in a much faster and fancier crowd than we did �?their friends were all hard-drinking and drugging. That was part of the oil business scene then,�?said Robert Whitt, a Midland lawyer.

But after a hard struggle to conceive and a fragile pregnancy with twins, Laura pulled back from the hellraising while he charged on, leaving her behind.

“I suppose there were strains in her marriage, just because he’s so difficult and high-energy and . . . she isn’t, but she never talked about it . . . Just read paperbacks and smoked cigarettes,�?said Sharon Bush.

The couple kept their distance from the Bush family for several years in the 1980s, staying in Midland and even skipping the big surprise party that George Sr �?by then vice-president of the United States �?threw for his wife on their 41st wedding anniversary. “It’s a long way,�?Barbara said, “and too expensive.�?But family members confirmed that she had stopped speaking to her son, whose drunken outbursts had become a source of unending embarrassment to his wife and parents. The last eruption at a family gathering had been a tactless crack to the wife of one of his parents�?friends at her 50th birthday party: “So, what’s sex like after 50, anyway?�?

He was 40 by the time he gave up tobacco, alcohol and drugs in 1986 and became a born-again Christian. In his memoir, A Charge to Keep, W credited his family’s good friend, the Reverend Billy Graham, with planting “a mustard seed in my soul�? He did not mention that he actually came to Jesus in a coffee house conversion with a much more flamboyant evangelist, Arthur Blessitt, who was known among born-agains as the man who had wheeled a 96lb cross of Jesus into 60 countries on six continents, winning a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

W figured, perhaps, that Graham was more palatable to churchgoing voters than Blessitt, who came to Midland after the bottom dropped out of the oil boom and fortunes crashed overnight. In a desperate effort to rescue lives and restore morale, some church elders invited the evangelist to stage a revival in the town.

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Kitty Kelley, author of exhaustive and highly unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Onassis, and the British royal family, among others, has never received much cooperation from her subjects. Likewise, none was given for The First Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, and it's not hard to understand why. In the book, the family that has produced two presidents as well as an assortment of other politicians, businesspeople, and a number of lesser-known black sheep is portrayed as a powerful empire that leverages wealth and influence to grow ever stronger while stringently covering up numerous instances of drug abuse, infidelity, poor judgment, and scandal.

 

While charges about George W. Bush, including that he snorted cocaine at Camp David while his father was president, garnered the most attention upon the book's release, Kelley's history goes back several generations, detailing the rise to power of Senator Prescott Bush and his son, the first President Bush.

 

Those seeking a salacious peek at the inner sanctum of a wealthy and powerful family will not be disappointed by The First Family--Kelley always delivers on that count--and will likely devour allegations of Barbara Bush's sour temperament, George H.W. Bush's long-standing affair with aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, and George W. Bush's obnoxious drunken frat boy days that stretched, according to Kelley, well into adulthood.