Word: kelleyism
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...gravestone, even though no one else in the family could afford one. In the White House Nancy was such a perfectionist that she could spend "an entire day deliberating on the amount of nutmeg to be shaved into a chicken veloute sauce." Her much vaunted anti- drug crusade, Kelley suggests, was little more than a public relations ploy...
...that's not all. Or maybe it's quite enough. The portrait of Nancy Reagan in Kelley's book is so lavishly, unrelentingly negative that it has set off a pair of fierce debates. The first centers on the former First Lady herself. Criticizing Nancy Reagan -- a First Lady America never really warmed to -- has become something of a cottage industry, and many of Kelley's charges merely reinforce and embellish those in earlier memoirs such as For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington by former White House chief of staff Donald Regan. "Had people liked Nancy Reagan...
...growing part of the debate has focused on Kelley and her research tactics. A former Washington Post researcher who has written titillating bios of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Sinatra, Kelley claims more than 1,000 people were interviewed for the book, and she flaunts a monstrous list of "acknowledgments" of people she alleges helped her (many of whom say they never spoke with her). But as readers inside and outside the Washington Beltway pored over the book last week, Kelley's journalistic methods were coming under sharp scrutiny. Did she write a responsible work of journalism or a sleazy...
Four years in the making, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography burst onto the scene after a deftly orchestrated public relations buildup. Unlike most major books, which are released to reviewers weeks or months in advance of publication, Kelley's manuscript was carefully withheld from the press. During editing, only five copies of the manuscript were printed; each was numbered and kept track of at all times. Simon & Schuster staff members even took copies home at night to guard against leaks. One special reader got the book a month in advance: cartoonist Garry Trudeau was allowed an early peek...
...reaction from the book's subjects has been just as hot. Nancy Reagan has thus far refused any comment, though friends described her as "profoundly upset" at Kelley's attack. Ronald Reagan put out a statement seething with outrage: "The flagrant and absurd falsehoods . . . clearly exceed the bounds of decency." A phalanx of Reagan friends and former advisers lashed out at the book, both in whole and in parts. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, charged that there are 20 factual errors in the passages involving her alone. She described the purported Nancy Reagan-Frank Sinatra tryst...