I admired Eugene McCarthy's courage and although I left his Senate staff after four years to accept a job as the researcher on the editorial page of the 'Washington Post,' I remained an admirer.
When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 as her father's rightful heir, she laid upon him the mantle of Camelot and the enduring mystique of John F. Kennedy, who, according to polls, continues to be America's most beloved president.
The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.
I don't give you editorial control. I want to meet you. I want to interview everybody who's ever known you. I want to see your correspondence. I want to see your bank statements. But you will have no control over what I write. That's why I really believe in the unauthorized biography.
I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).
Barack Obama and Michelle Obama don't go to Georgetown... The Clintons did, indeed. And the Clintons go out and about in Washington now. They go to neighborhood restaurants.
I am what is known as a benched Catholic and disillusioned by the church doctrine. I believe in things the Catholic Church does not believe in: divorce being one, and a women's right to choose being another.
Shortly after Senator Eugene J. McCarthy died in 2005 the age of 89, I became an honorary member of the committee starting a fellowship in McCarthy's name at his alma mater, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
