The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by Joe McGinniss

  But every once in a while a yak goes rogue. Such was the case with Herman, an eight-hundred-pounder, last fall. I was staying at Fireweed Station when Burleson announced (over a dinner of roadkill black bear tacos expertly prepared by Tom and his longtime companion, Hobbs) that Herman’s days were numbered. The number, in fact, was one. He’d be killing Herman in the morning. Then he and Tom would spend the day butchering, wrapping, and freezing the meat.

  (illustration credit 5.1)

  I’d already been back to Fireweed Station this spring and enjoyed a hearty meal of yak loaf, with an H for “Herman” written in chili sauce on top. Now all that was left of Herman were the dozen or so burgers that Tom brought. The Traeger cooked them to perfection. Earthier than moose, slightly hairier than caribou was the consensus.

  Of the nine people at the party, only four bring handguns to loan me. We wrap things up in the early evening when APX Alarms arrives to install the new home security system that Catherine Taylor has insisted on. It’s an excellent system, although I’m slightly concerned that the interior motion detector will go off when I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  Sunday, May 30, 2010

  SUNDAY BREAKFAST at the Mat-Su Family Restaurant, which the old-timers still call the Country Kitchen, is one of the few non-religious experiences that offers a glimpse of the essence of Wasilla. The Mat-Su is the place in town to see and be seen, at least between 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM. After that, the Mug-Shot Saloon and the Sportsman’s Bar vie for the honor. Sunday morning is when most of Wasilla is there, either before or after church services.

  The Mat-Su does the basic diner breakfast as well as it can be done. The service is never less than competent, and the portions are Alaska-size. A storm may be raging all around me, but at the Mat-Su I’m just another customer, entitled to good food, good service, and the opportunity to eat in peace.

  I’m enjoying breakfast until I turn to the editorial page of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman. An editorial begins, “We don’t really care if the Palins want some privacy from what they worry might be prying eyes.” It ends by saying, “Finally, those who are fond of Joe McGinniss might remind him (if he doesn’t already know) that Alaska has a law that allows the use of deadly force in protection of life and property.”

  Satchel Paige once warned, “Don’t eat fried food, it angries up the blood.” A Frontiersman editorial that all but puts me in the crazies’ crosshairs does the same.

  I BUY two armchairs at a garage sale, but I need to get them delivered. A friend of a friend, a Mat-Su Borough assemblyman named Mark Ewing, calls to say he can pick them up and bring them over. Then he calls back: “I just can’t take the chance. Todd or Sarah might recognize my truck.”

  Then someone named Dewey Taylor calls. “I’ll get your chairs for you, and I don’t give a damn if Todd or Sarah recognize my truck. I don’t know how people can walk around living in fear of the Palins.”

  Dewey, a retired schoolteacher and principal who’s now a Democratic Party activist, delivers the chairs in midafternoon. A couple of friends come with him. One of them brings a freshly baked homemade blueberry pie. She says, “I figure Sarah might not have got around to it yet.”

  The chairs are perfect: now I can watch the World Cup in comfort. The pie is perfect, too.

  Monday, May 31, 2010

  NANCY CALLS TO tell me our new home phone number. We had to change it after she started getting threats. My son, Joe McGinniss, Jr., the novelist, is receiving threats against his wife and two-year-old son. People in my agent’s office and at Random House report hate mail and threats. Then I hear that at about four o’clock this morning somebody shot out the driver’s-side window of Dewey Taylor’s truck, which was parked in his driveway.

  The smaller house, on the left, is mine. (illustration credit 5.2)

  I call him and offer to pay for a new window. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, “it was probably just a coincidence.”

  “How long have you lived there?”

  “About twenty years.”

  “Ever had a problem with a vehicle parked in your driveway before?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t think it was a coincidence.”

  “Maybe not, but screw ’em. I’m already on my way to get it replaced.”

  That’s an Alaskan.

  THE REST of the day is dominated by the Today show crew, which arrives in force. The cameramen and soundmen were here last fall, when they did a Thanksgiving special with Sarah in the kitchen of the house next door. I do some “B”-roll footage for them. When they leave at 8:00 PM I go to bed, because they’ll return at 1:00 AM to prep for the show.

  When I can’t fall asleep, I go out for a Dairy Queen chocolate sundae at 11:00 PM. During this, the last hour of May, even on the Parks Highway, the chain-store clutter recedes and the glory of the mountains presses close. From somewhere long ago and far away, lines from an e.e. cummings poem spring to mind. I can’t remember the poem’s title (I later find that it’s “when faces called flowers float out of the ground”) but the lines are as clear as when I first memorized them in high school fifty years ago:

  —it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o, it’s spring!

  all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky

  all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea

  (all the mountains are dancing; are dancing)

  Tuesday, June 1, 2010

  NBC’S BIG TRUCKS roll in at 1:00 AM and light up the neighborhood like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. We do the four-minute interview at 3:45 AM, 7:45 in New York.

  Afterward, I decide that the Today interview will be my last about living next door to Sarah until I’m ready to leave. I came out here to ask questions, not answer them. As with blogging, nothing anybody says at this point is going to change anyone else’s mind. It might not be the end of the story, but it’s the end of my participation in it.

  Chris Matthews says, “Palin has issued a fatwa against McGinniss.”

  New York magazine asks, “Will Sarah Palin Kill Joe McGinniss?”

  A Huffington Post story based on the Frontiersman editorial—headlined “Newspaper Reminds Journalist: Palins Can Shoot to Protect Property”—leads their home page, just beneath a banner headline about the BP oil spill. Even more incredibly, the story has received more than ten thousand comments in twenty-four hours. I’ve written whole books that sold fewer copies than that.

  The worst of the filth is coming from commenters on the website of Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing digital media entrepreneur deemed so significant in these times that the May 24 New Yorker devoted a full-length profile to him. Here are some typical remarks:

  “This is one psychotic liberal. I hope someone mistakes him for a moose and puts an end to his publicity stunt. It would be nice if he ends up at the bottom of Lake Lucille.”

  “If trapped in a house and not able to get out for food, does anyone know how long a freaky marxist fanatic can survive on a diet of KY Jelly?”

  “I hope someone knocks his teeth down his throat.”

  “What a spineless creepy bordering on sex-predator freak. I hope he tries to break into the Palin’s yard and gets a gut full of shotgun shell.”

  Those are just about me. They get worse:

  “hey, Joe, sleep with one eye open, you POS. can’t wait for your grandkids to show up and play in the woods and water.”

  And, after publishing my home address:

  “Joe’s lonely wife needs mail, phone calls and other assurances of concern and good will in Joe’s absence.”

  I can’t help but wish that my friend the late William F. Buckley were around to witness this spectacle. He would have reduced it to size in a hurry. Even more, I wish Bill were still with us and able to skewer the Palinista phenomenon, as he surely and adroitly would have done.

  At least Nancy is arriving the day after tomorrow. Maybe together, despite everything, we can enjoy what’s left of this resplendent Alas
kan spring. As cummings wrote,

  sweet spring is your

  time is my time is our

  time for springtime is lovetime

  and viva sweet love

  Wednesday, June 2, 2010

  SARAH CAN’T BEAR not to have the last word. She turned down an invitation from the Today show to appear in the same segment as me—sharing a screen as we were interviewed on opposite sides of the fence. Instead, she had her PR people prepare a statement that she wanted NBC to read. NBC didn’t. Sarah quickly twittered her displeasure:

  Any wonder why public can’t trust mainstream media? I’ll facebook our latest incident w/NBC unbalanced/sensational “reporting”;Don’t trust’em

  Facebook it she did, painting herself, as usual, in the black and blue of victimhood, as well as in red, white, and blue:

  It’s a shame that Todd and I had another disappointing encounter with the media on Memorial Day of all days. It was time that we could have spent with our kids and on a day when we honor those who have died in defense of our Constitution, including our freedom of the press.

  Colleen Cottle tells me Todd wasn’t even in Wasilla on Memorial Day. He and Track were in Texas, visiting Colleen’s son, John.

  NBC broadcast her statement this morning, but even that isn’t last word enough. Todd calls Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post to say my presence next door has ruined their summer.

  Like Glenn Beck, Parker thinks Todd deserves high praise for “trying to keep his cool.” She quotes him as saying, “Coming from me, people twist and turn [what I say] and before I know it, I’ve threatened someone. The media would love for me to go out and hit somebody.” Guess who?

  FOR ME, it’s back to work. I drive to Palmer, fifteen miles across the Valley, for a 3:00 PM meeting with Zane Henning, a Christian conservative and former North Slope oil worker who filed an ethics complaint against Sarah in November 2008, charging that she was using state property to promote her national political career.

  He based that complaint mostly on an interview Sarah did with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News on November 11, 2008, from her governor’s office in Anchorage. When asked about her plans for 2012, Sarah said, “Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands—this is what I always do. I’m like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in ’12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.”

  Henning later filed a second complaint, charging that Sarah had improperly billed the state per diem costs for days when she worked out of her Wasilla home.

  A stocky man who’s obviously spent a lot of time outdoors, Henning meets me at Vagabond Blues, the downtown coffee and sandwich shop where just about everybody meets everybody in Palmer. He’s known Sarah since childhood. Chuck Heath was his sixth-grade teacher. He remembers Chuck coming in the first day and telling the students to forget the curriculum for the year: they weren’t going to waste time on stuff like English and history and math. They were going to study the only subject that really mattered—the great Alaskan outdoors.

  “If you were an outdoorsy kid, he was the greatest teacher you could have,” Henning says. “But if you were any kind of bookworm, it must have been a very long year. He didn’t hesitate to make fun of boys he didn’t think were manly enough, and the only girls he paid attention to were the pretty ones.”

  Henning was friends with Sarah’s younger sister, Molly, but as for Sarah herself, he says, “She gave me the willies from the get-go. She was always standoffish, and if she didn’t get her way she was a bully.”

  Moving back to Wasilla in 1989, after several years in southwestern Alaska, Henning found the adult Sarah not much different from the child. “Todd and I hit it off okay—we were both fishermen and we could talk about snow machines—but Sarah still had this clique-y high-schoolish thing going, and my wife didn’t like her, so we never really socialized.”

  Even so, Henning voted for her for mayor. “I had joined the Last Frontier Foundation, which was all about more conservative, smaller government, and I was a Christian and I knew she was, too, so it was a pretty easy choice.”

  It was also one he soon regretted. “She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know the first thing. She had to hire a business manager to run the city because she didn’t know how. And then she spent fifty thousand dollars remodeling her office without getting city council approval.”

  Henning approached her one night at a social gathering. “It was at Harry and Whitney’s house—they live in Utah now—and I asked her about the remodeling. She said how dare I ever question her! Just like that. Boom. From that point forward the door was closed for conversation.”

  With increasing dismay, Henning watched Sarah spend $15 million to build a new sports center on land the city didn’t own. “She wanted to prove she was a hockey mom, but to me that wasn’t being conservative.”

  Once she became governor, Henning turned into an outright gadfly, requesting copies of state e-mails that, he said, showed Sarah was doing state business on private accounts to avoid public scrutiny.

  “She’d promised open and transparent, but that was just another of her lies. And Todd was copied on everything. He was supposed to be working for BP, a company with which the state is doing business. But she’s copying him on confidential documents regarding oil and gas. How can you say that’s ethical?

  “Listen, I used to see Todd up on the slope. Even after I filed my ethics complaints, he never pointed a finger at me. He’s a wimp. He makes me sick. People say he’s a man’s man? I’d love to grab him by the neck and beat the shit out of him.”

  “That doesn’t sound very Christian,” I say.

  Henning laughs. “I know. Todd and Sarah bring out the worst in me. I’ve got to be careful to not let myself grow too spiteful. But she’s the one who gets the Christian perspective all wrong. Look at this hatred for Obama. Is that being a true Christian? I’m a conservative and I oppose his big-government policies, but I don’t try to incite hate. And her so-called family values? After the way she’s neglected her own kids? She’s too narcissistic to care about her kids. It’s always ‘me, me, me,’ and everybody else is always wrong. She’s so narcissistic she couldn’t even care for a pet. And that’s true. Linda Menard gave her a puppy named Agia. She got rid of it because she couldn’t be bothered to care for it.

  “Name one thing she’s done—just one—that reflects a truly caring, Christian heart. She’s never volunteered for charity. Habitat for Humanity? The United Way? Even Christian-sponsored charities. Take a look at her tax returns. Do you see any donations? Do you see even a dime? No, what you see is them trying to get out of paying property tax on that cabin they built on Safari Lake.”

  These are strong words to be uttered in a venue as mellow as Vagabond Blues on such a spirit-lifting spring afternoon.

  “It’s time for strong speech,” Henning says. “She’s running for president. And I need to find a way to make the religious-right hard core understand that she’s not what she says she is. I used to go to Assembly of God. When I was a kid, I watched them speak in tongues. I don’t know what Sarah has taken away from her experiences there, but it’s twisted. She’s twisted. And you’ve managed to show that already, without having written a word.”

  Henning has to leave. He’s heading for the Gulf of Mexico to work on cleaning up the BP oil spill. I walk him out to his truck. He unlocks it and takes two guns off the front seat. One is a Glock. I don’t recognize the other one.

  “Take your choice,” Henning says. “Or take them both, if you want.”

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I walk
in peace.”

  “So do I,” he says, “but you’re living next door to the Palins.”

  Thursday, June 3, 2010

  I’M AWAKENED by an unfamiliar sound. Rain on the roof. First rain in the twelve days I’ve been here. In other ways, the climate seems to be improving.

  A woman I don’t know, who got my e-mail address from a friend, writes to say that I am welcome to stay at her house on Knik-Goose Bay Road. “You can see the neighbors’ porch lights in the distance at night and hear a bunch of howling dogs, but otherwise it’s pretty quiet and my house is down a long driveway so nobody would know you are even here. Got an extra house key ready for you. If anyone asked, I’d just tell them you’re my cousin Joe from New Jersey.”

  It’s not the first such invitation I’ve received, though it is the first from someone I’ve never met. It’s not long before the second arrives.

  In preparation for Nancy’s arrival, I’m washing the dishes at 11:00 AM when I see a big black truck pull up to the chain and stop. A large man gets out and starts walking toward the house. I cannot tell if he’s armed.