The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  That kind of talk didn’t go over well at the Assembly of God or Wasilla Bible Church or, in fact, at any other church in the Valley. Homosexuality was a perversion and gays were evil, seeking to undermine the moral fabric that—along with military might—made America such an exceptional nation.

  For seven years Bess wrote a weekly column for the Frontiersman. When the book was published, in 1995, they fired him. In addition, they printed a cartoon of a church with a sign in front that said: WASILLA CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, HOWARD BESS, PASTOR. ALL SINNERS WELCOME. BIBLE INTERPRETATIONS TO SUIT YOUR “LIFESTYLE.” Standing next to the sign was a grotesquely ugly, drooling man holding a little girl’s doll in his hand, saying to himself, “Hmmm … They welcome gays—how about pedophiles?” Perhaps embarrassed by it today, the Frontiersman was not willing to make a priority of my request for permission to reprint the cartoon.

  Waldenbooks, the only full-service bookstore in Wasilla, refused to stock Pastor, I Am Gay. One Saturday, Bess rented space in the mall corridor outside their doors and sold more than a hundred copies.

  Although Sarah never mentioned by name any of the titles she wanted banned from the Wasilla library, Emmons and many others knew that Pastor, I Am Gay was at the top of her hit list. In a mid-December interview with the Frontiersman, Emmons said it didn’t matter what books Sarah had in mind. “The free exchange of information is my main job and I’ll fight anyone who tries to interfere with that,” she said.

  It would soon become apparent that Sarah wanted to rid herself of Emmons almost as much as she wanted to dispose of Stambaugh.

  SHE STARTED in on Stambaugh again the week before Christmas. She sent him a memo saying his officers were not friendly enough while on patrol. “Most businesses would enjoy having them stop in, visit with patrons, drink a cup of coffee, eat a meal, in general spread some sense of belonging and real down-home community,” she wrote. The fact that she put this in writing suggested that, despite what she told him to his face, she was laying the groundwork for his dismissal.

  She sent another note to all department heads on December 26. “What a wonderful time of year! As we enter 1997, let’s take this opportunity to start the new year off on a positive note.” Henceforth, she wrote, she expected weekly reports from each department head, with “at least two positive examples of work that was started, how we helped the public, how we saved the City money, how we helped the state, how we helped Uncle Sam, how we made operations run smoother, or safer, or more efficient. Please use numbers when appropriate.”

  She made it clear she wanted only good news. “I believe if we look for the positive, that is what we will ultimately find,” she wrote. “Wasilla has tremendous assets and opportunities and we can all choose to be a part of contributing to the improvement of our community … or not. I encourage you to choose the prior because the train is a’moving forward!”

  Stambaugh tried to comply with Sarah’s demand for “good news” bulletins. His first weekly report, delivered in January, said that his officers had “assisted 14 individuals by giving them rides or helping them with their vehicles during the cold spell we experienced,” and that “Officer Sonerholm was able to return to full duty—even though he is still having some problems with his knee.”

  This was apparently not cheery enough. Stambaugh was at his desk on the afternoon of January 30, 1997, when John Cramer handed him an envelope. Inside was Palin’s notification that he was fired, effective in two weeks.

  Cramer dropped a similar letter on the desk of librarian Emmons. She was shocked. Both she and Stambaugh had supported Stein’s reelection bid, but, as she told the Frontiersman, “After the initial roller coaster, we were ready to work for Mayor Palin. I think we were both fired for politics.”

  At first Sarah denied that politics had any part in the firings, but declined to go into detail. “I’m going to get myself in trouble if I keep talking about it,” she said to the Frontiersman. Then she denied that she’d even fired them. “There’s been no meeting, no actual terminations,” she said.

  Stambaugh pointed out that his letter said, “Although I appreciate your service as police chief, I’ve decided it’s time for a change. I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla. Therefore I intend to terminate your employment.…”

  “If that’s not a letter of termination, I don’t know what is,” Stambaugh said.

  After meeting with Stambaugh and Emmons the next day, Sarah announced that she’d changed her mind about Emmons, saying that the librarian supported Sarah’s intention to merge the library and museums into a single operation. She didn’t mention the issue of banning books. As for Stambaugh, Sarah said only, “You know in your heart when someone is supportive of you.”

  Nick Carney had had enough. After receiving calls at home from irate constituents, he said there might be no alternative to a recall petition. “I’ve been telling people to hold off,” he said to the Frontiersman, “but now all bets are off.”

  On February 7, Concerned Citizens for Wasilla, a group headed by Carney, met to discuss a recall motion. About seventy people showed up. The meeting was typical Wasilla. As the Anchorage Daily News reported, there were “two hours of sometimes raucous debate, which was occasionally interrupted by an incoherent man in his socks threatening to sue Carr’s [supermarket] and the local fire marshal.” In the end, the group decided to wait on a recall until after Sarah had had the chance to respond directly to their concerns. They developed a list of twenty-five questions and asked the mayor to meet with them within two weeks.

  She had no intention of doing so. She said her critics were “the same few disgruntled citizens” who had always opposed her, and added, “I don’t remember any past mayors having to face a firing squad.”

  By now the Frontiersman was in high dudgeon. “Palin seems to have assumed her election was instead a coronation,” one editorial read,

  Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.… Wasilla residents have been subjected to attempts to unlawfully appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently untrue, unrepentant backpedaling, and incessant whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of Mayor Stein.… Palin promised to change the status quo, but at every turn we find hints of cronyism and political maneuvering. We see a woman who has long since surrendered her ideals to a political machine.… The mayor’s administration has been one of contradiction, controversy and discord. While she will blame everyone but herself, we see mostly Sarah at the center of the problem.… [and] we still don’t understand how someone can be claiming to keep her campaign promises when she pooh-poohed the complexities of city government, then hired a deputy city administrator to help her.

  The deputy administrator, John Cramer, advised the Concerned Citizens that they could fax their questions to city hall. The Frontiersman noted that Sarah “doesn’t intend to face the hostile group,” adding that “Palin continues to lose public faith sticking by her philosophy that either we are with her or against her.” An editorial said, “Wasilla is led by a woman who will tolerate no one who questions her actions or her authority.”

  It also said, “Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth.”

  Recalling those days, a former city employee told me in 2010, “Sarah Palin ruined the lives of many dedicated, hardworking people who loved the city of Wasilla. There were … houses lost and families separated as wage earners had to leave Wasilla to make a living. She had no sympathy for those families; there was no Christian charity on her part.”

  IN JANUARY 2011 I spoke to someone who offered a different perspective on Sarah’s early days as mayor. Soon after her election, Sarah approached a woman named Catherine Mormile in Carrs supermarket. Mormile was a forty-three-year-old physical therapist who lived about fifteen miles west of Wasilla, beyond Settlers Bay on Knik-Goose Bay Road.

  In 1991, Mormile had finished fifty-eighth in the Iditarod, Al
aska’s most famous sporting event. Competing again three years later, she almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning when she and three other mushers were stricken by exposure to toxic fumes from a propane heater installed inside an airtight tent used as a rest stop along the trail. Mormile suffered significant brain damage, from which she was still recovering in 1996. She’d angered members of Alaska’s close-knit dog-mushing community by filing suit against the Iditarod in 1995. As her suit proceeded through the legal system, Mormile found herself shunned and reviled in Wasilla. It was during this darkest period of her life that she met Sarah.

  “I felt this little hand on my shoulder,” Mormile told me, “and I turned around and there was a woman smiling at me. ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘but you’re my hero. You’re the strongest, bravest person I know. Your courage is an inspiration to me. I wish I could be like you.’ Then she walked away and said, kind of over her shoulder, ‘By the way, I’m Sarah Palin.’

  “I was hooked. I went home and told my husband, ‘I’ve just met the most wonderful woman: Sarah Palin, the new mayor.’ ”

  Sarah approached Mormile several more times over the next few months. “She’d say, ‘Remember me? I’m Sarah. Is there anything I can do for you? I want to help. Just know that I’m here for you, whatever you need. You’re my hero and my role model. I wish I could do what you’ve done.’ ”

  Mormile was a Republican, like Sarah. The two women began to attend meetings of the Mat-Su Women’s Republican Club together. Almost everywhere else in Wasilla, Mormile remained an outcast, so Sarah’s support was something she cherished and felt strengthened by at the time.

  Later, in retrospect, she would view it in a very different light.

  SEVEN

  NANCY CAME to Alaska with me in the winter of 1975—when Sarah Palin was twelve years old—and became an award-winning reporter for the Anchorage Daily News while I researched Going to Extremes throughout the following year.

  On her twenty-ninth birthday, September 8, 1976, we awakened in our tent near Wonder Lake, in Denali National Park, to find our drinking water frozen and our butane cooking stove needing to warm in the sun before it would ignite.

  A couple of hours later, hiking in open country on a bright, clear day, and having walked past several piles of still-steaming, berry-rich bear skat, Nancy saw what looked like a boulder rolling downhill in our direction.

  I looked through my pocket monocular, a lighter, more compact alternative to binoculars.

  “Looks pretty hairy for a boulder,” I said.

  “Let me see,” Nancy said.

  It was still coming downhill, toward us.

  “It’s not a boulder,” she said, “it’s a bear.”

  “What color?”

  “It’s not black.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “And it’s not rolling, it’s running.”

  “Oh, fuck!”

  There was nowhere to hide. There were no trees to climb. And neither of us had a weapon.

  A few years earlier, in Vietnam, where she’d been taking pictures to illustrate the columns I was writing for a national newspaper syndicate, Nancy and I had come under mortar and rocket fire. But this was peacetime, it was her birthday, and there wasn’t even a bunker to dive into.

  The month before, while on a two-week hike through the Brooks Range, also undertaken without firearms, I’d seen twelve grizzlies, including—in a surprise encounter at alarmingly close range (about twenty yards)—a mother and two cubs. I’d also slept through a grizzly sniffing my tent, which I discovered the next morning when I saw its paw prints.

  Seasoned by these experiences, I took command of the situation. “Back downhill slowly,” I said in my most authoritative voice, “but do not break eye contact with the bear.”

  “What did you say?” Nancy asked. “I couldn’t hear you over your shoulder because you were running.”

  Oh. I was apparently not as seasoned as I thought.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not up to us, it’s up to him.”

  “Or her.”

  Having closed the distance from perhaps two hundred to less than fifty yards from us, the bear slowed, stood to sniff the air, then veered ninety degrees to its left.

  Once again, I came face-to-face with the fact that in the Alaskan wilderness it’s the bear, not the man, who makes the choice.

  Now Nancy is back, almost thirty-four years later, with me living next door to a self-proclaimed mama grizzly.

  “Whatever you do,” I say, “don’t come between her and her cubs.”

  “Please. Just for tonight, let’s not talk about Sarah Palin.”

  Later, she asks, “Do the grebes ever shut up?”

  “Only in the presence of true love.”

  It was the quietest night since my arrival.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, Nancy and I make social calls on a bipartisan group of Valley luminaries. We have coffee with Lyda Green and her husband. Green, a conservative Republican from Wasilla, was president of the Alaska state senate when she chose not to run for reelection in 2008. A major factor in her decision was knowing how far Sarah would go to see her unseated.

  Ideologically, Sarah and Lyda were Siamese twins: it was Green who’d introduced the bill that would have permitted the carrying of concealed weapons in banks, bars, and schools that Sarah championed in 1996. But ten years later Green declined to endorse Sarah in the Republican gubernatorial primary against incumbent governor Frank Murkowski. She knew Sarah would never forgive her for that.

  Sarah revealed the depth of her continued antipathy toward Green in a radio interview with Anchorage broadcasters Bob Lester and Mark Colavecchio in January 2008. As governor, Sarah called in to their show.

  Speaking of Green, Lester said, “Governor, you can’t say this, but we can. She is a cancer.” Alaskans were well aware that Green was a cancer survivor, having undergone a radical mastectomy ten years earlier. Three minutes later, Lester, a particularly noxious specimen of the shock-jock species, said it again: “I’m going to say what I wish you could say: Lyda Green is a bitch, and she needs to go away because she is a cancer on the progress of the state of Alaska.”

  Sarah laughed delightedly at the comment. She laughed equally loudly on two other occasions when Lester insulted Green. As Green related to the New Yorker after John McCain chose Sarah as his running mate, “Sarah can be heard in the background tittering, hee-heeing, never saying, ‘That’s not appropriate, let’s not talk like that, let’s change the subject.’ Sarah certainly knew I had breast cancer, because she sent me flowers when I was ill.”

  A friend of Green’s tells me that not long after the radio program, Chuck Heath approached her at the Fred Meyer store in Wasilla. He said, “Why don’t you resign now, you fat old cow?”

  Green leaves no doubt about her feelings: “Sarah becoming governor was an insult to educated women,” she says. “Sarah was a know-nothing idiot who hadn’t paid her dues. I think she’s utterly without morals, as well as being paranoid and narcissistic.”

  NANCY AND I have tea with Katie Hurley at her home on Wasilla Lake. At eighty-nine, Katie is as focused and vigorous as she was more than fifty years ago, when she served as secretary to territorial governor Ernest Gruening and chief clerk to the Alaska Constitutional Convention. She later served in the Alaska legislature, as president of the state board of education, and as chairwoman of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights.

  She has a life-size cardboard cutout of Barack Obama in her living room. You look at pictures on the wall that show her as a young woman and it’s easy to see why John F. Kennedy, visiting Alaska as a U.S. senator in 1959, made a pass at her. She laughs out loud at the thought of Sarah in national office.

  We have dinner at the Palmer home of recently retired superior court judge Beverly Cutler and her husband, a former state trooper who now farms potatoes. She’s the daughter of the late Lloyd Cutler, the Washington, D.C., attorney who served as White House counsel to b
oth presidents Carter and Clinton and who also chaired a commission for Ronald Reagan. As a judge last year, she granted Levi’s mother, Sherry Johnston, the right to a public defender. In her on-the-record comments about Sarah, Beverly exercises judicial restraint, but it’s not hard to sense the feelings that she is too prudent to express.

  JOHN WOODEN has died and Sarah commemorates the passing of the former UCLA basketball coach on Twitter: “You shall be missed dearly, and we shall remember your lessons.”

  This brings to mind Sarah’s paean to Wooden’s wisdom as recounted in Going Rogue. “Ever since we were kids, Todd and I have looked at Coach John Wooden as a true hero. His quotes plastered our bulletin boards, school notebooks, and locker doors.” She gives an example: “Our land is everything to us … I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.”

  It’s not clear where Sarah had that particular quote “plastered,” but it is clear that John Wooden never uttered those words. They come from a 1960 essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” written by Native American activist John Wooden Legs and reprinted in 2003 in We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History. This can happen when your ghostwriter gets careless while Googling inspirational quotes.

  NANCY AND I have dinner at the home of J.C. and Brenda McCavit on Wasilla Lake. J.C. was the Palins’ high school classmate. He’s now an oil services executive, a world-class water skier, and one of the finest amateur chefs in Alaska, but back in the day he was best known for throwing parties at his bachelor pad on Melanie Avenue in Wasilla.