| WHAT HAPPENED Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception Scott McClellan New York: PublicAffairs, 2008 |
Rating: 3.5 Fair |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-58648-556-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-58648-556-3 | 341p. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
Scott McClellan was an honest and idealistic young man caught up in a culture where honesty is not valued and may even become a handicap. It is the savagely adversarial political culture of Washington, DC, where winning means not just triumphing over your opponents, but utterly destroying their reputations. He came to Washington trusting, with some justification, that Bush would change that culture.
"To me, leadership means uniting people around a common purpose rather than dividing them along ideological lines, and I found Governor Bush's leadership inspiring. He adroitly joined forces with [Lieutenant Governor] Bullock and [Speaker of the Legislature] Laney to build and maintain a strongly bipartisan, collegial approach to governing." – Page 19 |
There is a tension in McClellan's memoir: the conflict between his original unquestioned loyalty to Bush, a man he thought would bring the integrity and civility he promised to the White House, and his growing realization that his faith in the president and many senior administration officials was misplaced.
This title is an intentional double entendre. The acrimonious disputes called flame wars, that arise in on-line media, can go on for years. But far more passion was ignited, and vast volumes of ink were spilled, over the improper disclosure of the fact that Valerie Plame had been a covert agent on NOC status1 with the CIA.
No other event so baldly shows forth the harmful effect of the permanent campaign Scott McClellan warns about. Plame should never have been outed, for seeking to discredit a man by going after his wife should have been beyond the pale — especially for the gentlemanly2 Texans who inhabited the White House then. Further, the disclosure was felonious and threatened the safety of those she worked with. And finally, it was counterproductive: it not only disadvantaged the Bush administration politically, but set back the strategic effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
McClellan calls it a felony on page 173: "Intentionally disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer (which Plame was, despite some later controversy over that point in the press) to an individual not authorized to know it, such as a reporter, is a felony." Yet, in Chapter 17, he concludes no crime has been committed.
The first chapter summarizes that growth of understanding, showing us the contretemps that caused McClellan to leave the post of White House Press Secretary — a job he could no longer perform without compromising either his honor or his functional responsibility. The reason was the disclosure of classified national security information: the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. He deals with this up front in the book, then gives a running account as the Justice Department investigation and related press inquiries unfold.
In the end, McClellan recognizes that the state of permanent campaign is the spring from which flow all the failures he decries. He's honest in describing them, and often fairly astute in discerning their causes. But, in my opinion, he falls short in his final chapter. There he proposes a structural change in the organization of the White House staff, and recommends practical measures that staff, the media, and we the public should undertake to abolish what he comes to call "the culture of deception." These recommendations are nothing more than common sense, and regularly are given lip service in campaigns.
I respect Scott McClellan for his dedication to his job and to his principles.3 His book is well-intentioned and may do some good. But, clearly, much more is needed. This culture of deception is a problem vast in scope; changing it calls for decades of effort in schools of education, corporate boardrooms, and the sanctums of organized religion as well as in the hallowed halls of government. My judgement therefore is that while this book is worth reading, it will do little to advance that goal.
Here's what he has to say about the early 2000 Republican primary campaign in South Carolina: "Senator John McCain won a surprising victory in New Hampshire, followed by a Bush comeback in a hotly contested South Carolina race. Charges of smear tactics, dirty tricks, and other below-the-belt negative attacks flew back and forth beginning in the South Carolina contest and continued through the remainder of the primary battle, creating bitterness that I imagine continues to this day." (page 44)
He imagines correctly. Through push polls, the Bush campaign accused McCain of having a black daughter out of wedlock. (She was actually adopted from Bangladesh.) Other materials implied that Senator McCain was a homosexual, that the former POW was a traitor, and that his wife was a drug addict. Bush had plausible deniability on all of this, of course. Follow the link for the full story. The 2000 Republican Primary: McCain, Bush, and the Nadir of American Politics (now at the Wayback Machine)
Further, I am not convinced McClellan has fully resolved his crisis of conscience. In large part, this is because of the things he does not mention. Some of this might be due to limits on length of the book, to publishing deadlines, or to decisions that some events did not fit his narrative purpose. But I feel not mentioning the alleged trashing of the White House by departing "Clintonistas" was a mistake. This easily debunked accusation is just the sort of political ploy McClellan professes to deplore. Since he worked in the White House at the time, it should have been a part of his account. So too should have been the report by Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, that Bush put Iraq on the agenda at the beginning of his term.
McClellan also omits important details from the central events he describes. He discusses the Florida election controversy, but says nothing about Katherine Harris's conflict of interest or the "disruption squads" interfering with Democratic recounts. The controversy over the selective firings of U.S. attorneys gets barely a mention. The scandal of Abu Ghraib gets one paragraph of 36 words. The long-running battle over treatment of detainees at Guantánamo gets none. (Treatment of detainees is mentioned in three places, but not with any tone of disapproval.) The legalistic memos that sought to justify that treatment are not mentioned, nor are the names of their authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee.
And then there's the infamous primary contest in South Carolina. (See sidebar.)
These omissions and lukewarm condemnations (some of which I haven't listed) ultimately fail to convince me that Scott McClellan has come all the way back to the state of mind he had when he entered politics. That's regrettable, for he is a man of talent and his heart is in the right place. Perhaps he merely needs more time to sort things out. But until he does that, and makes a stronger public repudiation of the sort of politics he justly though half-heartedly condemns in this book, I cannot see him getting much respect for having reformed.
So I'll give this book a rating of 3.5, in the fair category. I hope and expect that we will see more from Scott Mc Clellan, in the form of another book or another run at politics, perhaps in Texas.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.