"People ask me how a boy who was raised by a mobster grew to become press secretary to the president of the United States. The answer is, when reporters started hammering me with questions about my pedigree, I did something sly that caught the Washington press corps off guard: I admitted everything….
As Henry Kissinger once said (but did not abide), 'What will come out eventually must come out immediately.' People were stunned by my answers. Sure, I was using candor as a spin device, but Washington found it 'refreshing.' Washington likes to think it finds candor refreshing, but honesty in this town is a novelty mint, not sustenance.
Nevertheless, the same frankness and irreverence that had been the 'Jonah Eastman brand' for the last two years of the Truitt administration had finally become my undoing. I was fired this morning.
Before I took my job as the president's spokesman, I had been a Republican pollster. I specialized in handling difficult elections, ones that needed an unconventional boost. And, yes, my grandfather was the late Moses 'Mickey' Price, the Atlantic City gangster known as 'the Wizard of Odds.'
Despite its Nixonian whiff, let me be perfectly clear about something: I am not a gangster. My Edie wouldn't have married a gangster, but she wouldn't have married a choirboy either." --excerpted from the book
