Kelley's 'pathographies' strive to accent the negative.

NANCY Sinatra, the famed chanteuse who brought us "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" those many years ago, had this to say about Kitty Kelley: "I hope she gets run over by a truck."

Even getting stomped all over by neon-colored thigh boots would be too good for her, in Nancy Sinatra's view. And that view is widely shared--nearly universal, from what I can tell, among those unlucky celebrities whom Kelley has written about, including Elizabeth Taylor, the British royal family, and Nancy's late father Frank.

The circle of Kelley's victims has now expanded to include President Bush and his family, going back four generations. The Bushes don't seem too pleased about it either, judging by the campaign launched last week by the White House and other Republican operatives to discredit her and her book.

It's not terribly hard to do. As proof that there are no lengths to which I won't go in furtherance of my craft, I began reading "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" the moment a copy dropped in my sweaty palms. And I read it all--choking down 700 pages of Kelley's glutinous prose.

Remember me the next time you say you hate your job.

In 1988, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates coined the perfect term to describe what Kelley does--pathography, a biography that "overemphasizes the negative aspects of a person's life and work, such as failure, unhappiness, illness and tragedy." (The word is so useful nowadays that it's already made the American Heritage Dictionary, from which I cribbed this definition.)

Thus Kelley depicts the Bush family--like the Sinatras, Kennedys, Windsors, and other clans that have received the Kelley treatment--in a delirium of dysfunction, drunkenness, depression, dishonesty and (I've run out of "d" words) serial adultery.

Pathographies sell, for obvious reasons--who doesn't like to be reassured that the lives of the rich and beautiful are, in reality, just as pathetic as our own?--but the pathographer herself faces unavoidable difficulties.

Chief among these is the very implausibility of the task she sets for herself. Very few people live the lives of unredeemed squalor that the pathographer hopes to portray. So she is forced to fudge.

Testimony from sources who have something unflattering to say, no matter how distant or unreliable they may be, is credulously repealed, sometimes in direct quotes that run for pages. More often than not these sources are unnamed. Yet even when they are identified, problems remain.

Kelley's source for one particularly scurrilous allegation is, amazingly, the pornographer Larry Flynt. When Kelley writes about Bush's National Guard service, she relies on a Texan named Bill Burkett. CBS News and Dan Rather relied on him for that, too, and now say he deliberately misled them.

Positive information, on the other hand, is included rarely and grudgingly. The pathographer will always skirt her subjects' substantial accomplishments in favor of an unseemly fascination for the private and unprovable.

Just as she wrote a 600-page book about Sinatra and scarcely mentioned his singing--the only reason, after all, anyone would be interested in him--so she manages to chronicle the Bushes with almost no understanding of the political currents that shaped them.

To take one example: Prescott Bush, the current president's grandfather, was a large and consequential figure in the liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower era. You'd never know it by Kelley, who tries to prove instead that he was an imperious drunk.

Occasionally you come across anecdotes that a lawyer would call an "admission against interest"--charming stories running counter to Kelley's theme of unrelieved Bush depravity and which can therefore, by the rules of evidence, be presumed true.

One example: Though he's disdained Yale since his graduation in 1968, George W. Bush agreed to host a 35th class reunion.

One classmate, Petra Leilani Akwai, had undergone a sex change since graduation, and partygoers waited to see the reaction of Bush--understood by all correct-thinking liberals to be a crude and backward boor.

Akwai greeted the president in the receiving line.

"You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale,'" she said.

"And now you've come back as yourself," Bush said.

These and other stories from the best reason yet lot President Bush's re-election. All thanks go to Kitty Kelley.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.