Dead men can’t talk, let alone sue, so they make particularly inviting targets for historical speculation. Still, at least Kelley and McGinniss focused on the living, who were around to deny the charges. These claims were as widely circulated as they were thinly sourced and denied by Palin. Trailing behind is author Joe McGinniss, who wrote that Sarah Palin had a one-night stand with future NBA star Glen Rice and had an extramarital affair in the mid-1990s, and that she snorted cocaine off an oil drum during a snowmobile outing in Alaska. “Its scenes are sensational, wallowing in squalor and foolishness its dominant images are physical and deflating.”Īmerica’s uncontested queen of pathography is Kitty Kelley, the best-selling muckraker of celebrities and political figures (or both, as when she implied, but failed to prove, that first lady Nancy Reagan had a sexual liaison with Frank Sinatra in the White House, a claim the Reagans denied). Pathography’s “motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illness and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct,” Oates noted in 1988. It’s the literary opposite of hagiography, which glorifies and celebrates its subject. Nixon is just the latest target of what writer Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography” - a biographical genre devoted to digging up dirt. This is not, in short, the kind of documentation that would survive vetting in any top-tier newsroom, let alone pass scholarly muster in a serious history journal. When I asked Fulsom about the media reaction, he said that accounts describing his “explosive revelations” that Nixon “carried on a sizzling gay love affair” exaggerated his findings, and he admitted that, without any photos showing Nixon and Rebozo in flagrante delicto, there is “no evidence it actually happened.”īut he defended his sourcing: “As a reporter, it was my duty to convey everything I learned,” including “another layer, if it’s true, of a very complicated guy who was into duplicity like no one else.” Still, the flimsy report of Nixon’s “gay affair” went viral on the Internet last month after galleys were leaked ahead of the book’s release.
Others, evidently, are too good to check.
Fulsom provides no independent verification of the sketchy assertion. But this claim is secondhand, based on another controversial Nixon book, by author Anthony Summers, that was widely criticized for relying on second- or third-hand sources of dubious credibility. The book attempts to buttress the homosexual allegation by repeating rumors that the twice-divorced Rebozo, known as a ladies’ man, was gay. “Well, he isn’t still called ‘Tricky Dick’ for nothing.” “Was Nixon’s tough-guy attitude toward gays just a cover for his own homosexuality, bisexuality or asexuality?” Fulsom writes. That’s pretty thin gruel - but not so thin that it keeps the author from enthusiastic speculation. Just a recollection from retired journalist Bonnie Angelo, who, in an interview with me, confirmed the story she told Fulsom: In 1972, she saw a tipsy Nixon pull Rebozo into a group photo at a Florida restaurant and hold his hand for “upwards of a minute.” No recently declassified government documents. No love letters, incriminating pictures or diary entries. But gay?Īccording to a book to be released Tuesday, “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets,” the former president and his best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, had a relationship of a “possibly homosexual nature.” But author Don Fulsom, a former radio reporter who covered the White House from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to Bill Clinton’s, provides scant evidence for this claim. Richard Nixon was many things - crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid.