What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception
by Scott McClellan
PublicAffairs, £16.99
MY DEAR friend and much-missed colleague, the great James Cameron, once offered a characteristically Cameronian description of those designated to the role of press secretary at the service of various world leaders; he described them as “exponents in a cottage industry in the service of sycophancy”. I cannot possibly improve on such a withering label, whether the exponent sits in the White House, the Kremlin, the Elysée Palace or, for that matter, Downing Street. It is, of course, an utterly thankless role and no memoir emanating from this genre has exposed the misery of the job more sharply than Scott McClellan’s sad account of his disillusioning experience as press secretary to President George W Bush. Indeed, the more I read of his plight in the service of Bush and his hangers-on, the greater became my pity for such a victim.
Scott McClellan was a young Texan, son of an active Republican mother who was Mayor of Austin when Scott was in his 20s. In 1999, at the age of 30, he was appointed as press secretary to the Governor of Texas – George W Bush. When Governor Bush interviewed him for the job he asked: “Why do you want to work for me?” to which young McClellan shot back: “Because I believe in you.” Bush snapped back: “It’s not about me; it’s about the agenda.” Undismayed, McClellan responded: “Yes, sir, you’re right. I believe in your agenda and I believe in your leadership.” So is sycophancy born.
Now a very different, damaged and disillusioned McClellan has written a memoir that is reverberating around the Washington political establishment. Hardly surprisingly, it hasn’t yet been given the international publicity it deserves – not least because McClellan found all the top American publishers resistant to handling the book. It was finally left to a small publisher to get it into the bookshops and, with limited launch publicity, it has been slow to take off. But when the impact of the McClellan story eventually surfaces in a big way, as it surely must, my guess is that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party machine will ensure it plays a role against the McCain campaign in November. For, above all, the McClellan story blows another huge hole in the Bush presidency which must rank as one of the worst, if not the worst, in American history.
What then is this White House memoir, written in a ploddingly dull style without any of the drama it warrants, all about? The story goes back to early 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war when McClellan was number two to Bush’s then press secretary Ari Fleischer before taking over the top job. The White House was already frantically trying to build the claim that Saddam Hussein was about to use “weapons of mass destruction” – that debased cliché, and lie, at the centre of Washington’s (and Tony Blair’s) case for war. In the process Bush went public with a claim that Saddam was buying up “significant quantities of uraniaum” from Africa to help produce WMDs. He also claimed that British intelligence sources had passed on this information to their American counterparts and he ordered the CIA to check this out by sending a US ambassador in Africa, Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a mission to verify the claim.
Alas, to Washington’s fury, Wilson said the report was false and the documents had been faked. This, of course, threatened to undermine the White House case against Saddam so the Bush mafia set to work to destroy Ambassador Wilson’s credibility and his honest reporting. It happened that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a senior CIA intelligence officer who was also involved in the Niger story. So she, too, was undermined by Bush’s inner circle. Her name was deliberately leaked by one or more members of the Presidential mafia in a ruthless bid to discredit and humiliate both Wilson and his wife.
When McClellan took over as Bush’s press secretary this scandal was just beginning to seep into the media. It meant that McClellan’s first real task was to deal with a White House press corps which, despite its general timidity and almost slavish deference to the office of the president, had begun to sniff a story. It was McClellan’s job to refute any White House involvement in the leak. Day after day he denied any White House hand in the story – denials based on personal assurances he received from every member of Bush’s top team including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Lewis “Scooter” Libby and, above all, Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff. In fact it was later disclosed that it was Rove, with Cheney’s approval, who leaked the story to destroy Wilson and his wife. Of course Bush knew what was happening – but agreed that McClellan should be kept in the dark. Bush recognised that his man was “too honest” for the mafia loop. So Scott McClellan became the president’s fall guy.
Much later, when McClellan finally resigned, his honesty was applauded by most of the White House press corps – but that came too late to rescue the marooned former press secretary. In fact McClellan had been in the job for two years before he finally realised the truth and was then forced to acknowledge – even then, reluctantly – that he had been shafted, lied to and deceived by the very man to whom he had sworn eternal loyalty – George W Bush. That is the essence of McClellan’s sad account of life inside the Bush White House – a story of betrayal and moral corruption at the very top of the American political system.
The honesty and, frankly, the naivete of Scott McClellan is demonstrated again in spades in the final chapter of the book when the author, after proposing sweeping changes in the way the White House political establishment should be run, then tries to offer apologies for his one-time hero. He first argues that the entire show must be made more transparent so that wars such as the Iraq debacle can never happen again. But he then weakens, and almost undermines, his own plea by declaring: “I still like and admire George W Bush. I consider him a fundamentally decent person and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”
I can only say that my reaction to that judgement can be simply and brutally stated: if you really believe that, Mr McClellan, why the hell did you write this book in the first place? Even so, don’t let me put you off reading this devastating exposure of political corruption at the top of American political life.
Geoffrey Goodman
