Sarah Palin snorted cocaine off an oil drum, cheated on her husband Todd with his business partner, and had a one-night stand with an NBA star before she wed Todd Palin, according to Palin’s next door neighbor, author  Joe McGinniss, in his new book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin.
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The New York Times Caucus blog calls the book, “part biography, part diary of Mr. McGinniss’s days in Alaska and the media frenzy that surrounded the frosty neighbor relations. Its more salacious details began to leak out Wednesday as the book reached media outlets, but many episodes cited in the book relied on unnamed sources or second- or third-hand accounts.
Mr. McGinniss won wide acclaim for writing about politics with his first book, “The Selling of the President 1968.†But his later career as an author of mostly true-crime books has featured a series of controversies. Jeffrey MacDonald, an army doctor accused of murder who had cooperated with Mr. McGinniss for a book about the trial, accused him of dishonestly coercing him and later betraying him in the book. He was accused of plagiarism after his 1993 book about Senator Edward M. Kennedy, “The Last Brother.â€
And in “She Could See This Guy From Her House,” New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin writes,
Although most of “The Rogue†is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident†and “a friend.â€
And these stories need not be consistent. “The Rogue†suggests that Todd Palin and the young Sarah Heath took drugs. It also says that she lacked boyfriends and was a racist. And it includes this: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’ †Mr. McGinniss did in 2011 make a phone call to the former N.B.A. basketball player Glen Rice, who is black, and prompted him to acknowledge having fond memories of Sarah Heath. While Mr. Rice avoids specifics and uses the words “respectful†and “a sweetheart,†Mr. McGinniss eggs him on with the kind of flagrantly leading question he seems to have habitually asked. In Mr. Rice’s case: “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?â€
…
“The Rogue†reopens many knotty arguments about Ms. Palin’s public record, mostly the same ones that were hashed over when she became part of the 2008 presidential campaign. It cites the investigation that became known as Troopergate, the questions about her involvement with the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (Mr. McGinniss covered this in a 2009 Portfolio article) and her possible commitment to such extreme theological ideas as dominionism, although here too “The Rogue†is too busy being nasty to be lucid. Mr. McGinniss suggests both that Ms. Palin is committed to stealth religious control of government, and that she is not sufficiently devout.
With the same imprecise aim he cites conspiracy theories that Ms. Palin may not be the mother of her youngest son, Trig, and questions the circumstances under which he was born. Mr. McGinniss puts forth a provocative case for doubting Ms. Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, which involved a round trip between Alaska and Texas while she was supposedly in labor. But then he comes to an indefensibly reckless conclusion: “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing.â€
The Times also offers an excerpt, for those interested.
Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, I think it’s pretty safe to say that while this book did not need to be written, she certainly has played enough games with the American people to not be able to complain about it. And if she’s smart, not complain is exactly what she’ll do.