While the Camp David coke party is getting the headlines, Kelley's book is filled with many other tawdry stories about the Bush dynasty. Here is a family that looks 'like "The Donna Reed Show," and then you see it's "The Sopranos,'' Kelley tells Salon in the interview below. As Kelley tells it, the dynasty had respectable origins -- in the form of family patriarch Prescott Bush, the distinguished, moderate Republican senator from Connecticut -- but rapidly slid into cynical opportunism, skulduggery, and a mean-spirited sense of entitlement. The first President Bush is presented as a weak yes man, driven not by political vision but a savage preppy spirit of competition instilled in him by his whirlwind of a mother.

But it is his wife, Barbara (whom the ex-wife of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray calls "bull-dyke tough"), and their eldest son, George, who are the true pieces of work in Kelley's book, a mother and son team brimming with such spite and ambition they would give the ruthless duo in "The Manchurian Candidate" the shivers. In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotaling "Chosen One," while he keeps pleading to skip the cocktails and put on the feed bag, and his elderly father "drools over [TV newswoman] Paula Zahn's legs."