About two years ago, on the South Lawn of the White House, Bush and Scott McClellan appeared together to announce the press secretary’s departure. After thanking him for his service, the president said, “One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the Press Secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, job well done.”
After hearing about McClellan’s new book, Bush might reconsider saving a rocking chair for his ol’ buddy.
Last November, McClellan’s publisher released a six-sentence excerpt from his book, which drew all kinds of attention and raised speculation that the former White House press secretary, liberated from the president, might burn a few bridges with his former colleagues as a civilian. It looks like he’s done just that — and then some.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
* McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
* He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
* He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
* The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
* McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
A couple of years ago, McClellan’s predecessor, Ari Fleischer, wrote a book about how everyone in the Bush White House was great, and the entire team could do no wrong. It was obviously silly and hackish, and as a result, no one bought or cared about Fleisher’s book.
McClellan has obviously chosen a more provocative route.
Indeed, the former press secretary apparently didn’t hold much back.
The eagerly awaited book, while recounting many fond memories of Bush and describing him as “authentic” and “sincere,” is harsher than reporters and White House officials had expected.
McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.
Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh.
“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war…. In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”
We’ve had a few Bush administration officials break with the president and his team in fairly high-profile ways. Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio, David Kuo, Richard Clarke, and Matthew Dowd come to mind.
But this is clearly different. McClellan wasn’t just a White House official, he was part of the president’s inner circle, and part of the team that followed Bush to Washington from Texas. And now he’s trashing his old team in a surprisingly high-profile way. One can’t help but wonder, of course, if this is McClellan’s way of trying to save his own skin — as the Bush gang is condemned by history, McClellan doesn’t want to be associated with failure.
Of course, if he’d thought to speak up when it mattered, instead of after the fact, McClellan’s ability to make a difference might have had an effect. Now, it’ll sell books, but it’s a little late in the game.
Post Script: By the way, one part of McClellan’s book was left out of the WaPo and NYT reports, but bears repeating:
McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise…. In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Well, this is a pleasant surprise.