The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  “How long are you going to be here?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure yet. Probably four months, maybe five.”

  “What for?”

  “Hold on. Let me come down and talk to you.” I don’t see any point in carrying on a Romeo-and-Juliet balcony scene. I walk down the steps from the deck to the yard. First Dude meets me at the bottom.

  “I’m Joe McGinniss,” I say, extending my hand. He shakes it briefly and says, “Todd Palin.”

  Then he says, “Wait a minute. You’re that guy that wrote that bunch of crap in that magazine about AGIA.”

  He is referring to the cover story I did for the April 2009 edition of Portfolio that pointed out that, contrary to what she’d claimed at the 2008 Republican convention, Sarah’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) had not brought about “the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history,” and that construction had not begun on “a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.”

  “That story was a bunch of lies,” he says. “It was a bunch of bullshit. And you were wrong. AGIA is working. That pipeline is going to get built.”

  “I think reasonable people still disagree about that.”

  “Bullshit. What are you doing here now?”

  “I’m writing a book about your wife.”

  “What for?”

  “Because she’s a phenomenon. Whether you agree with her politically or not, she’s unlike anything seen before in American political history. She’s probably the most famous woman in the world. And a lot of people think she’s going to run for president in 2012. I’ve been writing about politics since 1968. I’m fascinated by what’s happening now. Why wouldn’t I want to write about her?”

  Todd considers this. Then he says, “So what can we expect? Telescopic lenses hidden in the trees and secret microphones stuck under the fence?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what won’t happen as long as I’m here. That’s not my style, Todd, as anyone who knows my work can tell you.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t like this,” he says.

  “Listen, I’m a good neighbor. Ask anybody. Ask Roger Ailes at Fox News. Your wife is working for him now. Roger and I disagree about everything political that it’s possible to disagree about, but we’ve been friends for more than forty years. Have Sarah call him and ask what kind of a neighbor Joe McGinniss is going to be. He’ll tell you that you’re lucky it’s me renting this house and not somebody who would do the kind of stuff you’re afraid of.”

  But the more I talk, the angrier he looks. Finally, he waves a finger toward my face and says, “We’ll just see how long you stay here.” Then he stalks back across my yard and around the bottom of his fence.

  I return to the deck. Standing at the end farthest from the Palin house and facing away from it, looking at the woods on the other side, I call Nancy.

  “I just met Todd.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Not real well. He remembers my Portfolio piece and he seems to think I’m here to snoop on Sarah.”

  “And you told him you weren’t.”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you think he’s going to do?”

  “What can he do? I’m here. I told him if he was worried about me, he should have Sarah call Roger Ailes. Roger can put her mind at ease. Obviously I don’t want any fuss. I hope they don’t either.”

  In retrospect, it’s amazing that at the age of sixty-seven, having been a professional author and journalist for more than forty-five years, I could have been so naïve.

  I’m heading for bed at 11:00 PM when my phone rings. It’s one of my Anchorage friends.

  “You’d better check out Sarah’s Facebook page.”

  “How come?”

  “You’ll see. And if you smell smoke tonight, it’s probably your house on fire.”

  At 10:17 PM, Sarah posted this on Facebook:

  Just When Ya Think It Can’t Get Any More “Interesting”—Welcome, Neighbor!

  Spring has sprung in Alaska, and with this beautiful season comes the news today that the Palins have a new neighbor! Welcome, Joe McGinniss!

  Yes, that Joe McGinniss. Here he is—about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window. Maybe we’ll welcome him with a homemade blueberry pie tomorrow so he’ll know how friendly Alaskans are.

  We found out the good news today. Upon my family’s return this morning from endorsement rallies and speeches in the Lower 48 states, I finally got the chance to tackle my garden and lawn this evening! So, putting on the shorts and tank top to catch that too-brief northern summer sun and placing a giddy Trig in his toddler backpack for a lawn-mowing adventure, I looked up in surprise to see a “new neighbor” overlooking my property just a stone’s throw away. Needless to say, our outdoor adventure ended quickly after Todd went to introduce himself to the stranger who was peering in …

  Joe announced to Todd that he’s moved in right next door to us. He’s rented the place for the next five months or so. He moved up all the way from Massachusetts to live right next to us—while he writes a book about me. Knowing of his many other scathing pieces of “journalism” (including the bizarre anti-Palin administration oil development pieces that resulted in my Department of Natural Resources announcing that his work is the most twisted energy-related yellow journalism they’d ever encountered), we’re sure to have a doozey to look forward to with this treasure he’s penning. Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole?

  Welcome, Joe! It’ll be a great summer—come borrow a cup of sugar if ever you need some sweetener. And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow, and I’ll try to keep Trig’s squeals down to a quiet giggle so we don’t disturb your peaceful summer. Enjoy!

  —Sarah Palin

  Along with her post is a photograph, taken from her yard, showing me at the far end of my deck, looking into the woods while talking to Nancy on my cell phone.

  Beneath the picture, she wrote, “Hi, Neighbor! May I Call You ‘Joe’?”

  “Todd went to introduce himself to the stranger who was peering in …”?

  Peering in?

  “Overlooking Piper’s bedroom …”?

  Assuming Piper’s bedroom is one of the second-floor rooms that looks down upon my house, it would be she who was overlooking me.

  “My little garden and the family’s swimming hole”?

  What garden? What swimming hole? Does she mean Lake Lucille?

  Fortunately, I have enough Splenda so that I won’t have to borrow a cup of sugar anytime soon. But whatever tomorrow brings, I don’t think it will include Sarah’s “homemade blueberry pie.”

  Tuesday, May 25, 2010

  THE STRING of impeccable spring days continues. Daylight arrives before 4:00 AM, so I’m up early. It’s four hours later in the East, and I discover that the media carnival triggered by Sarah’s Facebook post has begun. By the time I’m back from breakfast at the Mat-Su Family Restaurant at 9:00, I’m being called everything from a pedophile to a spy secretly employed by Barack Obama.

  Politico writes that Sarah has suggested I’m “really there to peep at her young daughters, noting that his property overlooks Piper’s bedroom.”

  It doesn’t, of course, but it’s clear that facts are not going to matter for a while. After posting on Facebook last night, Sarah wrote to her Fox News colleague Glenn Beck, who read her e-mail on his morning radio program: “Unbelievable continued harassment. The reporter/writer who continually writes hit pieces from the east coast just moved in next door. He’s twelve feet away from me right now. Todd approached him on the deck of the neighbor’s house as he announced he’d just moved in. He’s our new neighbor. He’s also here to write a book about me. I spotted him while I started mowi
ng the lawn with Trig in my backpack. Things like that now are not going to happen until the guy moves out. This is a nightmare for my family.”

  Beck called me “creepy” and “a stalker” and said Todd “should receive a medal for restraint.” He continued, “If your wife was treated the way she is being treated—if your wife was under constant attack like this … what would you be feeling? I think a guy who wrestles bears … with his bare hands, in a territory that is unlike anything in the Lower Forty-Eight—these are real people. I got news for you. In Alaska, you hassle my wife, you do these things, you just keep hounding my wife, you get your ass kicked. And I think you should.” He went on to say that until Random House “reined” me in and got me “under control,” he’d never again plug a Random House title on his show.

  Anonymous commenters on various websites are urging violence against me, imploring someone to burn down my house and using Beck’s words creepy and stalker over and over again.

  What I find remarkable is how Sarah’s overreaction and false statement (that I am “overlooking Piper’s bedroom”) and blatant sexualization (“shorts and tank top”) of a distinctly nonerotic event (my renting the house next door) has played into the fantasy lives of those who idolize her, triggering torrents of filthy comments and accusations.

  Lunacy reigns. The photograph that Sarah posted clearly shows me at the end of my deck farthest from the Palin property, facing in the opposite direction as I talk on my cell phone. Yet some commenters claim I’m looking into bedroom windows with binoculars.

  All day I hear hammering and sawing. Todd has about twelve guys throwing up a new fence that’s roughly twice the height of the old one. I’m all in favor of the fence. Maybe once it’s up, Sarah will chill and we can both get on with our business.

  I VISIT Levi’s mother in the afternoon. I have to go to her home because she’s under house arrest, having pleaded guilty to selling Oxycontin in the parking lots of Fred Meyer and Target during the 2008 presidential campaign.

  Her story is simple and sad. For years she’d been disabled by pain resulting from a botched hysterectomy and several subsequent surgeries. She couldn’t work. Then her husband left her. Then she got into a snarl with her insurance company, and coverage of the Oxycontin she received by prescription was suspended. By the fall of 2008 she was running out of money for food and electricity. On three occasions she sold ten Oxycontin pills to an old family friend named Junior Latocha, who had become an undercover police informant in return for a reduced sentence on his own drug-dealing conviction. She served several months in prison and was now a few months into a three-year term of house arrest.

  Levi’s sister, Mercede, is at the house. She has to stay there in case Sherry is called for a random drug test. The testing facility is sixteen miles away, and Sherry must get there within an hour of being called. She can’t drive herself because of the pain medications in her bloodstream.

  “It kind of sucks,” Mercede tells me. “I graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t even think about going away to college. I can hardly even go out on a date. Sometimes they call my mom for testing three or four times a week.”

  “Doesn’t Levi help?”

  “Levi? Forget it. He’s too busy being a star. I don’t even speak to him anymore. He’ll come to the house and I’ll be in my room and he won’t even bother to say hi. The Palins—especially Bristol—have ruined our relationship. Bristol tells him not to talk to me, so he won’t. He has to do what she says, or she won’t let him see his son.”

  Mercede is a stunningly attractive young woman, all blond hair and white teeth and tanning-salon skin. And Sherry, for all her problems, has kind eyes, a genuine smile, and the sort of resigned tranquility that can come from living with chronic pain.

  Neither has anything very helpful to tell me, but I find them utterly without guile. I like them and I’m sorry about their circumstances. I leave, after two hours of conversation, wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget about his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.

  This is what happens in Alaska. People are so open and giving and trusting, and eager to help you in any possible way, that you quickly come to care about them and to want to help them in return.

  Sherry Johnston will be confined to her home for three years for selling thirty Oxycontin pills for $800, after having been set up by a police informant. But in January, Todd Palin’s thirty-six-year-old half sister, Diana, received a suspended sentence and was released into a residential rehab program after pleading guilty to multiple break-ins at a Wasilla residence from which she stole more than $2,600. And she’d brought her four-year-old daughter along for the crimes.

  Diana Palin used the child as part of her MO. As the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reported in January 2010, “Investigators found that Palin had been doing similar things before in her own neighborhood, sometimes using her daughter as cover. For instance, the girl would ask to use a person’s bathroom, which would give Palin a pretext to get into the house and find prescription medications and other things to steal.”

  It looks like there may be two standards in the Valley: Johnston justice and Palin justice.

  Prior to her sentencing, Diana Palin had been in court twice, both times as a victim of domestic abuse. In addition, she’d first sought treatment for her methamphetamine addiction in 2007. In January 2010 her husband (who was not accused of domestic abuse) filed for divorce, seeking custody of the four-year-old child who’d been used in the burglaries.

  “I really love dysfunctional families,” Diana wrote on her MySpace page in 2009. “Especially mine.”

  Sarah certainly seems to have married into one. Before his current marriage to Faye, Todd’s father, Jim, was married to Todd’s mother, Blanche Kallstrom, and, before that, to Diana’s mother, Elayne Ingram. Kallstrom and Ingram, both part-Native, were from Dillingham, the largely Native town in western Alaska where Todd grew up.

  Elayne Ingram was married three times. In a 2001 interview with the Center for Alaska Native Health Research, she said, “I got married at age nineteen and had my first daughter at age twenty … I still don’t feel like I was an alcoholic at that point in time, but I was definitely a battered wife. The beatings were so bad that I weighed ninety-six pounds, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, my mind was racing. We finally divorced after three kids.”

  Then she married Jim Palin. “He could provide better financially and I was looking for security. And I found it. Then I worked on the pipeline. When I became financially secure, I left him. By then, it was alcoholic drinking for both me and him.” It was during her alcoholic marriage to Jim Palin that Elayne gave birth to Todd’s half sister, Diana.

  Jim later married Todd’s mother, Blanche. He divorced her and married Faye, who was not a Native. Blanche wound up in court after accidentally serving a child a lye-based detergent that she said she thought was fruit juice. Meanwhile, Todd’s full brother, J.D., was involved in a hit-and-run accident after a drinking binge.

  “Crazy thing is,” Diana Palin wrote on MySpace, “the more you go through—the better it gets.”

  And Todd and Sarah are worried about having me for a neighbor?

  Wednesday, May 26, 2010

  THERE’S A POUNDING at my door. I sit up in bed. Seven thirty AM. The pounding continues. I walk through the living room, into the kitchen. I see somebody filming through my window with a television camera. It’s ABC News. I tell them to leave or I’ll call the police.

  I check my e-mail and the Internet. The world has gone mad. Sarah called Glenn Beck’s radio show at 6:00 AM Alaska time.

  “He’s stalking you,” Beck says.

  “He’s an odd character, yeah, if you look at his history and the things that he’s written and the things that he’s been engaged in.”

  Beck asks why the owner of the house rented it to me. “Todd was trying to get ahold of her all winter long,” Sarah says, “becau
se the house was vacant and we were going to rent it and even ask if we could purchase it, for fear of something like this happening, and couldn’t get ahold of the neighbor, and next thing you know there are new tenants in it—a new tenant.”

  “Shame on Random House,” says Beck. “Do you feel, as a woman, do you feel violated?”

  “I feel more protective than ever in terms of my kids. Any mom would. Just wantin’ to bring your family even closer and wrap your arms around ’em and not let the infringement on their rights and privacy be so overwhelming as to make us not enjoy our life up here.”

  In a warning tone, she adds, as if speaking to me, “You better leave my kids alone.”

  Beck is starting to choke on his outrage. “Here’s a guy doing a book on your family who is now able to look into Piper’s bedroom! He’s a voyeur! The only reason why he moved there is to be either a Peeping Tom and watch your family over the fence or (b) watch the comings and goings of your family. This is harassment! This is stalking and harassment! Leave my family, leave people’s families alone!”

  “A very classless thing that Random House is doing,” Palin says, “and if I find out that Random House is the one actually renting this place for their author to be able to sit here over our shoulder for the next five or six months, that would be pretty disturbing, too.

  “Let me tell you something practical that happens in Alaska. We don’t have air-conditioning, so you leave your windows open all summer long, it’s the only way to keep cool under the midnight sun, because the sun essentially doesn’t set for many of the days in the summer. Leaving the windows wide open—well, now that’s gotta change, because the guy’s sittin’ right there; we’re not going to let him overhear our children’s conversation or anything else, so, practically speaking, a real pain in the butt, a real inconvenience and disturbing thing, but—”