The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (14 page)

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 both 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.

“Dan Fleckenstein and I rented the apartment,” he says. “We shared it with all our friends. We were like the first guys to have their own apartment. We had lots of parties. Todd visited frequently and even Sarah once or twice during the holidays.”

After dinner he takes out an old photo album and starts to flip through it: standard-issue stuff of guys in their early twenties acting silly, often with alcohol involved. What you might see on MySpace or Facebook today.

He turns to a new page. I get a quick glimpse of unclothed bodies. “Oops!” he says. “I didn’t think these were still in there. Sorry, there are a few I can’t let you see.”

“Which ones are those, Dad?” asks J.C. and Brenda’s son, Chase, who is eighteen and has just graduated from high school.

“Never mind,” J.C. says, clearly embarrassed. “Why don’t we talk about something else?”

So we talk about how J.C. gradually grew disaffected with Todd and Sarah. He didn’t like her Assembly of God–driven, right-wing political agenda, and he didn’t like who she was becoming personally as she grew more consumed by ambition. He also lost respect for Todd for selling out his own values in the service of Sarah’s career. “I was surprised he wanted to be a player in politics,” J.C. says, “but I guess that power trip can be seductive.”

An open rupture occurred in 2007 when Sarah fired her legislative director, John Bitney, another close friend of J.C.’s from the Wasilla High class of ’82.

Bitney had separated from his wife and was dating Debbie Richter, the estranged wife of Scott Richter, a building contractor who was Todd’s best friend at the time. Richter had built a cabin for the Palins on twenty acres of land they owned on Safari Lake, about twenty-five miles northwest of Talkeetna and accessible only by floatplane or snow machine. The structure was so inordinately lavish for its rustic surroundings that it was commonly referred to as the Todd Mahal.

John Bitney served as de facto manager of Sarah’s gubernatorial campaign; Debbie Richter was treasurer. After Sarah won, Debbie became head of the Permanent Fund Dividend Division at the State Department of Revenue, which each year sends a check for thousands
of dollars to every man, woman, and child in Alaska as a reward simply for living in the state. Sarah named Bitney her legislative director.

But postelection, Scott Richter complained to Todd about Bitney’s ongoing relationship with his soon-to-be ex-wife. “By now Todd was the king,” J.C. tells me, “so he had to do something.” He promised Richter that he’d have Sarah fire Bitney. And she did, in the most graceless and humiliating way possible, waiting until he was out of the office, then turning off his state BlackBerry and shutting down his state e-mail account, leaving him unable to communicate with the governor’s office. Neither Todd nor Sarah ever spoke directly to Bitney about his dismissal.

The Palins didn’t stop there. When Speaker of the House John Harris hired Bitney for his staff, both Todd and Sarah pressured him to rescind the appointment. Harris stood firm, Bitney married Debbie, life went on. The lasting casualty was J.C.’s friendship with Todd.

In
Going Rogue
, Sarah shows how vicious she could be toward a lifelong friend with whom she’d fallen out. She writes that as she and her staff prepared her first budget for presentation to the legislature, Bitney “would wander in and out, plop down in the chair at the end of the table, nibble cookies, and absently thumb his BlackBerry.” She accused him of playing video games when he should have been working.

Later in the book, she describes Bitney “slouching against the wall,” and writes, “The fact that his shirt was buttoned one button off and his shirttail was poking through his open fly didn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

And then one more twist of the knife: “Later we learned the legislative director had been too busy with his personal affairs to attend to much state business.”

“The way they treated Bitney was obscene,” J.C. says. “And Todd was behind it; he was the moving force. He wanted to punish Bitney for having an affair with Debbie Richter. Not because Todd doesn’t approve of affairs—let’s not even get into his private life—but because
Bitney had the gall to have an affair with the wife of one of Todd’s buddies. It was purely personal, it was vindictive, and it was a betrayal of a thirty-year friendship. I have no use for either Todd or Sarah anymore and, unlike a lot of people you’re going to run into, I’m not afraid to say that on the record. I don’t know how anyone can walk around Wasilla afraid to say what they think of Todd and Sarah. Life’s too short to live it in fear of schoolyard bullies like them.”

J.C. invites us back for a boat ride around the lake.

THE MORNING AFTER dinner at the McCavits’, I read that a Wasilla soldier, Jeremy Morlock, has been charged with murder in the deaths of three Afghan civilians. This must come as a terrible shock to my neighbors. Jeremy and Track were hockey-playing friends throughout high school, and Palin ties to the Morlock family go back years.

Acquaintances I’ve made in Wasilla explain the connections. Jeremy’s mother, Audrey, played high school basketball with Sarah. Even before that, in Dillingham, Todd was close to Audrey’s twin sister, April. A generation later, not only did Track and Jeremy play hockey together, but Jeremy’s sister, also named April, became—and remains—one of Bristol’s best friends, even joining her in Los Angeles when Bristol competed on
Dancing with the Stars
. In addition, Jeremy’s older brother, Alex, was coached by former Palin in-law Mike Wooten when he played Pop Warner football in Wasilla.

Jeremy first got in trouble with the law at age fifteen, when he was charged with “leaving the scene of an accident involving an injury or death.” He received a deferred prosecution. He was known in high school for his violent temper. A former hockey coach recounted one incident to the
Anchorage Daily News
. “Booted off the ice for bad behavior … Morlock went into a locker room and assaulted a younger player. Morlock punched, squeezed the player’s jugular and slammed the younger boy’s body against the wall, narrowly missing a
coat hook,” the newspaper reported. Morlock’s assault on the younger boy was so violent that Wasilla police were called to the scene.

Morlock graduated from high school in 2006 and enlisted in the army soon afterward. While in the army, he got married. In 2008, when he was twenty, his wife sought a domestic violence protective order against him. The
Anchorage Daily News
reported that he “was charged … with fourth-degree assault for allegedly throwing a beer glass at his wife and pressing a lighted cigarette against her chest.” A year later he was again charged with assault.

During the winter of 2010, Audrey Morlock moved out of her home on Joes Drive in Meadow Lakes, just west of Wasilla. Fifteen-year-old Willow Palin and two dozen friends got together at the vacant house for a vodka-fueled party that degenerated into vandalism that caused at least $20,000 worth of damage. The incident was reported by the
National Enquirer
. In the end, only the boys involved were charged with vandalism. The girls were cited as witnesses. Many in Wasilla believe that it was only Sarah’s intervention that spared Willow from criminal charges.