The Rogue

FYI: my CONDE NAST PORTFOLIO piece about Sarah and failed gas pipeline

I’ve gotten some queries about this, so for those of you who haven’t found it elsewhere on my website or on the internet, this is my March, 2009, cover story about Sarah and her failed attempt (which at the GOP convention in 2008 she claimed as a success) to create an Alaskan natural gas pipeline:

I think I recall that Sarah called it “yellow journalism,” or something equally felicitous.

I know I recall that when Todd and I had our face-to-face encounter in my back yard on Lake Lucille, on Monday, May 24, 2010, he called the story a “bunch of crap,” “a bunch of lies,” and “a bunch of bullshit.”

Those Palins sure have a way with words, don’t they?

By the way, Sarah, how’s that AGIA stuff workin’ for you now?

THE ROGUE is Embargoed: Due to Explosive Content, No Galleys Sent

 

 

 

Crown Publishing, currently the strongest division of Random House, Inc., has made yet another decision with which I agree.

They have decided not to send out pre-publication galleys of  THE ROGUE to review outlets and mass media.

They’ve printed only seventy-five galleys and are keeping them locked in a safe in their offices in New York.

I myself have received only one copy.

A very few magazine editors and executive producers of national TV shows will be shown a redacted version,  but only after they sign stringent, legally binding, non-disclosure agreements.

Very seldom does a publisher decide to embargo a book in this fashion.

Crown has chosen to do so because THE ROGUE contains revelations about Sarah Palin that neither they nor I want to have leaked before the September 20 publication.

As interest builds, a lot of people in national media are clamoring for an advance look.

Crown has weighed the ups and downs of a total embargo and has decided that in this case–given that some of the content will make headlines as soon as it’s revealed–it’s the only way to go.

I agree completely.

There’s some stuff we just don’t want to see online a month before THE ROGUE reaches bookstores around the country.

My wife and editor, Nancy Doherty, has read the book (Nancy having helped enormously to make it better than it would have been without her.)  My lawyer, Dennis Holahan, and my agent Dave Larabell, of the David Black Agency, have also read it.  As have, of course, the chosen few at Crown Publishing who are responsible for the book’s successful publication.

Normally, an author wants to see his book disseminated as widely as possible before publication, to build interest.

But in this case, some of the content is simply too sensitive to risk premature disclosure.

I’ve given only one other writer an advance look. I chose her because I admire her and trust her and because she’s never had anything to do with Sarah Palin, so she read it with an outsider’s perspective.

First, she tweeted:

…just finished your book. Holy shit. Must collect thoughts & write longer email. Suffice to say haven’t stopped thinking about it.

I wrote her to say that I hoped she meant “Holy shit” in a good way.

She replied by email:

Yes that Holy Shit was a good one.

Great one in fact.
It was is so compelling- I just devoured it. Woke up thinking of it, went to bed thinking of it.
It makes everything clear about her…The deconstruction of her religious beliefs is terrifying and shocking. I had no idea there was a fringe element called dominionists, nor did I know about this business about demon-controlled cities, and the need to destroy them…It’s a very frightening mass delusion.

I love how you grounded the whole story with your own experiences in Alaska- past and present. It was the perfect refresher, in all the right spots, to the lightless persona of SP.

This is a real tour de force and I imagine will set off a lot of depth charges. I hope you are prepared for the onslaught from her camp.

You’ve done a great service, apart from writing a great biography.
If people wake up to the insidious nature of these fringe fundamentalists then maybe her power and those like her will start to dissipate.

And apart from all that, it was just a great read.

 


And so Crown and I move forward to Sept. 20.  Without Crown’s approval, I can’t share any details about the shows I’ll be appearing on, but suffice it that I won’t be hard to find on either network or cable TV, nor on radio, nor in the press, nor at online sites via interviews in late September and October.

The people at Crown–including publisher Molly Stern, editorial director Charlie Conrad, senior executive director of publicity David Drake, publicity director Annsley Rosner, marketing director Patty Berg, associate director of online sales and marketing Jacob Bronstein (who, for you FATAL VISION fans, is the son of Dr. Merrill Bronstein, who treated Jeffrey MacDonald in the emergency room at Fort Bragg’s Womack Hospital on Feb. 17, 1970, and testified at MacDonald’s 1979 trial), and, far from least, Matthew Martin, vice president and associate general counsel, Random House–are by far the best I’ve ever worked with over my twelve-book, forty-plus year career as an author.

Together, we’ll bring you the truth about Sarah Palin.

“The Oft-Defeated” may be the stake Sarah drove into her own heart

No, I haven’t seen it, and now that I’m not going to use a viewing in Phoenix as the kickoff to the e-single that would have been Sarah Palin’s Arizona, I don’t intend to.

But it’s the same as reading Bristol’s “book,” or Levi’s upcoming “book”:  I don’t have to view or read to know how appalling these products are.

Many years ago, when I contacted the late William Safire to try to arrange an interview about his impressions of Teddy Kennedy, he courteously declined, saying, “I don’t kick ’em when they’re down.”

I’d feel the same way about Sarah, Bristol and Levi–The Unholy Trinity–except that they refuse to admit that they’re down yet, and mass media, as personified most recently by the revolting Jay Leno, keep them propped up, trying to squeeze the last dollar out of pretending to take them seriously, even as these unholy three try to squeeze the last dollar out of their Wasilla Hillbilly act.

See Leno disgracing himself here, and also enjoy Gryphen’s commentary. For once, the squalid Don Rickles was in his element.

Talk about marriages made in hell.

We can, however, cut the kids some slack. After all, Bristol learned only from her mother (certainly never at school,) and Levi (who still doesn’t have a high school degree) woke up one day to find he’d won the Impregnation Lottery, and why shouldn’t he try to make an easy buck, since he has no skills that would enable him to earn an honest one?

But Sarah is different.

In THE ROGUE, I write about Sarah’s close association with a Christian Dominionist leader named C. Peter Wagner, who founded an organization called Global Harvest Ministries.

Wagner’s goal–and the goal of Sarah Palin–is to end the separation of church and state in America, and to turn our country into a Christian Dominionist theocracy.

Before Global Harvest Ministries, Wagner co-founded, with Ted Haggard–later disgraced when it was learned he’d used crystal meth during homosexual trysts–an outfit called
the World Prayer Center, in Colorado Springs, CO.

As I write in THE ROGUE:

The center has been described in Charisma magazine as “a spiritual version of the Pentagon”—the command center for Wagner’s worldwide campaign against demons.

Trust me, you’ve never heard lunacy like this.

I lay it all out in THE ROGUE, but I can offer one brief excerpt here:

Members of Wagner’s Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation are convinced that their prayers can literally destroy individuals whom they’ve identified as demonic. Among those for whose deaths they claim credit are Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.
Wagner taught his followers that a female mega-demon whom he called…“The Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon” lurked near the summit of Mount Everest…One of Wagner’s leading apostles in Mexico was a woman named Ana Mendez, a former witch in a Haitian voodoo cult…she led a team of twenty-six intercessors to Mount Everest in an assault she called, “Operation Ice Castle.” She and her elite force launched highly targeted intercessory prayers directly at the Great Harlot…Apparently, the prayers found their mark, killing the Harlot Queen.

This is the stuff Sarah believes and acts upon. But you won’t see it in the new movie about her.

Even so, the new movie is so awful as to be laughed off the screen by professional reviewers of all political persuasions.

See this from Politico (not exactly a left-wing site.)

Sarah encouraged this poor sap Bannon to spend his millions in an attempt to save her from her own banality, ugliness, and freaky Christian Dominionism.

That he fell flat on his face  has now become painfully apparent.

Not that there was any way he could have succeeded.

After all, when your subject is a sow’s ear (aka “The Great Harlot of Wasilla”), it’s tough to make a silk purse.

Sarah would have been better off keeping her distance from this farce. But by showing up in Iowa for its very first public showing, she tied her future to its credibility and its success.

As is now evident, it has neither.

Hoping for even more silk for her purse, she’s managed only to drive a stake–if not through her heart–at least through her own sow’s ear.

Yet one more defeat for “The Oft-Defeated.”

 

The Problem Sarah Can’t Solve: Sarah Palin


She speaks with forked tongue.

And she can’t keep herself from stepping on both forks.

Consider just recently:

–her comments after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was almost assassinated in Arizona.

–her idiotic bus tour, which culminated in her astonishingly ignorant remarks about Paul Revere.

–her insistence that she had been right about Paul Revere: yes, really, he was shooting his gun and ringing his bell to warn the British that the Americans were coming!

–her embarrassing cancellation of the rest of the bus tour.

–her insistence that she had not cancelled the bus tour.

–her cancellation of her trip to Sudan because of nonexistent “jury duty.”

–her support for the hugely embarrassing movie about herself. “The Undefeated” could be the worst movie ever made about a politician, which is fitting, because she could be the worst political figure ever to etch her way into the national consciousness. Only fitting that it was made by a guy who made his money at Goldman Sachs, ripping off real Americans while he enriched himself. And they have the gall to call themselves populists!

The list could go on, and Sarah herself will assure that it does.

It also goes way back in time. Trust me, Sarah’s history of stepping all over her forked tongue all her life is documented in THE ROGUE.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard her voice. I was considering a new book about Alaska, a sequel to GOING TO EXTREMES. I heard that Alaska had a woman governor. That intrigued me. I googled her. Then I youtubed her. Fifteen seconds after first hearing her voice, I knew she wasn’t somebody I wanted to write about.

Then McCain chose her as his running mate. Which meant that this blithering idiot came close to holding a national office that could have been the Presidency.

And so I felt I had to write about her.

I still tremble when I think about that. Do any of you realize how close we came to the destruction of the United States of America, and its replacement by the Christian States of America? For those of you who believe in him, thank God for Barack Obama. May we never have to learn what he saved us from.

Every day for the rest of our lives every one of us should let John McCain know what a traitor he was to the country he once served so bravely.

Meanwhile, Sarah lives on as a national political figure, enabled by the very mainstream media that ridicules her.

Breathlessly, the Beltway Bunch awaits her decision…

Sarah has already laughed all the way to the bank.

Now she may swoop in again and try to steal our country and present it to her cult–the Christian Dominionists, whose top priority is to destroy separation of church and state.

Sarah tried that in Wasilla. It didn’t work. That doesn’t mean she’s not planning to try it again, on a much larger scale.

With every word her forked tongue allows her to utter, she tries to play down her ties to Evangelistic Extremism, but in her heart she knows they’re right.

Actually, God is getting the last laugh here.

Because with every word she utters in live time (and this excludes her ghost-written Facebook posts), she trips all over the tongue God gave her but forgot to tell her how to use.

In THE ROGUE, I write about my visit to John Stein, the man Sarah unseated as mayor of Wasilla in 1996.
You can read about Stein’s integrity and honesty and self-effacing sense of humor in the book, but I’ll include this brief exchange with him here to give you a sense:

“My question about Sarah,” he says, “is if God wants her to be president, why didn’t God equip her with education enough to have at least basic knowledge of geography, science and social systems?”


“You mean so she wouldn’t say she could see Russia from her house?”


“She never said that,” he says, smiling. “She said she could see rush hour.”

“The Oft-Defeated” a Box Office Bomb & Zero-rated at Rotten Tomatoes


Oh, well, they tried.   But it looks like Stephen Bannon is out the million bucks he spent translating his worship of Sarah Palin into film.

Bannon’s balderdash, in fact, achieved an unprecedented “Double Zero”: 0 percent favorable ratings at Rotten Tomatoes and 0 members of the public sitting through the whole thing as it debuted in the city of Orange, in the county of Orange, California, at 12:01 a.m. today, PDT.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf unselfishly interrupted his vacation–and stayed up past his bedtime, too–to bear solitary witness to the fiasco in Orange County. We should all be grateful to him for his front-line report.

Even though the theater was only ten miles from the Richard Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda, not a single Palinite was willing to stay up past midnight to view the premiere.

Wasn’t so long ago that thousands queued through the night to get Sarah’s autograph.

But last night’s score: Harry Potter 5,000–Sarah Palin 0.
Can’t say I’m sorry about not being in Phoenix for the 5 p.m. showing today.

Is Bristol as bonkers as her Mom? With God on Their Side…

In an interview just published by Christianity Today, Bristol says folks don’t respect Sarah because, “She’s got a good family, she’s got a good husband, she’s got awesome support, she’s got God on her side, and I think people are envious of that.”

Hell, I know I am.

If I had God on my side, I wouldn’t have Levi’s publisher rushing the date of his ghost-written tripe to bring it out the same day as THE ROGUE in an attempt to hitch a ride on my coat tails.

But wait a minute: does this mean God is on Levi’s side?

And if he or she is, how can he/she also be on Sarah’s side–and Bristol’s?

Surely, God is not the sort to hedge bets.

If you really can bear to see how brainwashed Bristol has been by her mother and the Christian Dominionists who control her mother’s thinking–as I explain in great detail in THE ROGUE— you have to read the whole interview here.

By the end of it, you start think that God must be a member of Al Qaeda: otherwise, why would he or she have loosed such a blight as the Palins upon our land?

No, we’re not invited…

Even so, we can all wish Sarah’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, a Happy 50th Anniversary on July 30.

Catching Up


It’s been a busy few days, what with the ThrillerFest award and all the discussions about heading for Arizona to write an e-single called Sarah Palin’s Arizona. The bottom line on that was that at this point in my career I’m not going to start writing without getting paid for it (except for this blog, which I’m doing, yes, to increase awareness of THE ROGUE in advance of its September publication, but also because I enjoy interacting online with all of you: or most of you, anyway.)

The way electronic publishing is evolving for magazine-length original pieces, the writer gets no fee or advance up front but is guaranteed a share in sales revenue down the line. If I did a Kindle Single directly for amazon, I’d get 70 percent of eventual revenues, but then Barnes & Noble would be unhappy because they want people to buy Nooks, not Kindles. And if you have a potentially big book scheduled for fall publication you don’t want to make Barnes & Noble–the country’s largest retailer of actual physical books–unhappy in the summer.

So you write an e-article that is not a Kindle Single exclusive and can also be downloaded on the Nook, the iPad, and across all other electronic platforms. But who pays you to do that? The answer, in this case, turned out to be no one. I was offered a deal whereby an e-partner would electronically “publish” Sarah Palin’s Arizona, but in return would take half of my 70 percent share of sales revenue. And would not pay me any sort of fee or advance for doing the three to four weeks of work involved in reporting and writing, but would only agree to pay a nominal sum to offset my expenses.

No thanks. This arrangement was described to me as a partnership, but I said, “Yeah, it’s like a partnership between a lion and a lamb.”

The further into the 21st century we progress, it seems that more people are devising more ways to not pay writers for their work. See Huffington Post as the most offensive and egregious example. And, believe me, even Daily Beast fees are–to be generous about it–minimal.

Not that it broke my heart not to spend up to two weeks in Arizona at the height of summer. The fact is that it will feel good not to have to write anything more about Sarah Palin. I’ve even spent days at a time recently not even thinking about Sarah Palin. Not thinking about her was accompanied by a strange feeling I recognized from my distant past. I asked Nancy, who’s been with me since 1970, what she thought it might be. She said, “Happiness?”

Bingo! There will come a day late this fall when I’ll be able to throw up my arms, jump in the air, and shout out, “Free at last!”

That, of course, leads to the question of what to do next.

When I met Rosanne Cash recently at her concert at Bard College, alma mater of my son James the Agent , I told her I’d like to write next about someone I admired and respected, whose life and work had inspired me throughout my own life, as did Rosanne’s father, Johnny.

Thinking more about this in recent days I’ve found myself thinking about Bruce Springsteen. I first heard his music in the mid-1970’s, when Philly radio stations started playing it and Nancy and I were living in New Jersey. (We think of the 1970s as either “Joe and Nancy: the Jersey Years,” or, more simply, “The Lost Decade.”)

But I’ve watched and listened as Bruce grew, both as musical talent and man, over the many years since. He’s become, even more than Bob Dylan (whom I consider a demigod), our Walt Whitman: poet of the common man, lover of democracy, personification of what we as a nation can be at our best.

I’ve read Dave Marsh’s excellent Two Hearts, but, especially in light of the recent passing of Clarence Clemons, I think it might be time for me to do my own celebration of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEEN: AMERICAN.

It’s sure more fun to think about than it is to think about Sarah.

And listen here to Rosanne’s great duet with Bruce on “Sea of Heartbreak.”2-17 Sea of Heartbreak (feat. Bruce Springsteen)

HOWEVER: I can’t put Sarah behind me just yet. She got that Newsweek puff cover, she’s got Greta Van Susteren saying she’s running, and the GOP field continues to display its inadequacy. At some point, she has to figure, “Why not?” If she doesn’t, Bachmann takes her mojo away. If she does, she becomes the white hot center of U.S. politics once again. I’ll have more to say about this in days to come, but for tonight I’m going to listen to Springsteen and feel happy that I don’t have to board a flight to Phoenix tomorrow morning.

I’ll know about the Arizona trip tomorrow

Perhaps the least-mentioned aspect of the nonfiction book author’s life is the amount of time spent sitting around waiting for other people to make decisions. Primarily, this is a function of the costs involved in journalism (the same reason why you see less and less of it these days.) Opinions are cheap and plentiful. Journalism, which involves at the least travel & lodging, can be expensive.

Tomorrow, the powers that be–of whom I’m not one–will either make it possible for me to write “Sarah Palin’s Arizona” as a Kindle Single, or not.

I’ll let you know asap and I apologize to those whose plans are dependent on waiting for me to say it’s definite.

THRILLERFEST 2011


I’m just back from a weekend in New York City, where I received the “True Thriller” award at the sixth annual ThrillerFest, sponsored by the International Thriller Writers.

The photos are of Peter James about to present me the award and of my–very very brief–acceptance remarks.

I paid tribute to Brian Murtagh, the just-retired US Department of Justice attorney who for 41 years stayed on the case of Jeffrey MacDonald. If it weren’t for Brian, MacDonald never would have been brought to trial, much less convicted, and since that 1979 conviction Brian has been the man who’s thrown up the roadblocks every time new lawyers tried to find a way to help MacDonald weasel out of paying the life-sentence price for having murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters at Fort Bragg in 1970.

I also paid tribute to my wife, Nancy Doherty.

Nancy, for forty years, has been my best editor, and my worldwide traveling companion, but she has been so much more. Not least, the mother of two of my children. As for everything else, it’s too personal to get into here, but I can say with certainty that wherever I am today, without Nancy I’d be in a much worse place.

I’m told that a video of my interview with Kathleen Sharp and Q&A session, as well as my acceptance remarks will soon be posted at the Thrillerfest website.

It was a wonderful event, with eight hundred people in attendance. I made many new friends, including John Lescroat, whose work I’ve enjoyed and admired for years, and Douglas Preston, who, in addition to his many splendid thrillers, wrote a true crime book called The Monster of Florence, which caused him to be arrested in Italy and interrogated by the same crazed prosecutor who won a conviction against Amanda Knox (and I must give you all an advance tip on the book that finally gets to the heart of that bizarre story: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh.)

I myself am a fugitive from the Italian criminal justice system, having been convicted in absentia on charges filed against me by Gabriele Gravina, president of the minor league soccer team that was the subject of The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. That story is too long to go into here, but Gravina filed criminal charges against me as part of a (largely, but not entirely) successful attempt to prevent publication of Miracle in Italy.

The actor Anthony LaPaglia, who now has his own production company, optioned The Miracle of Castel di Sangro and hired me to write the screenplay, which I did. Anthony then went to Italy to make sure there would be no, shall we say “problems” with filming there. He met personally with Gravina in Rome. Gravina told him, “Under no circumstances will this movie be filmed in Italy.”

Anthony was made to understand the amount of sabotage that could occur to all the expensive equipment on location in Castel di Sangro. Gravina explained to him that it would be a very serious mistake for him to attempt to make the movie at all. Anthony, a wonderful man who was a joy to work with and who taught me a lot about screenwriting, decided to focus on other projects and let his option on Miracle lapse.

So, yes, “those people” are alive and all too well in Italy today. They also caused my original Italian publisher, Garzanti, to cancel its contract to publish an Italian edition of Miracle.

Anyway, Doug Preston and I had a lot to talk about. I also reconnected with some very dear old friends.

OFF TOPIC: My Arizona trip is still pending. It’s amazing how complicated things can get in July when a publisher has such big plans for a book to be released on Sept. 20. All I can say is that there’s a lot of inside baseball being played right now and my goal is the same as that of Crown: to have the biggest and best possible rollout of THE ROGUE in September. Whatever helps that, I’ll do. Whatever doesn’t, I won’t. I’ll say more about Arizona in the next couple of days as questions are resolved.