Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan Rips Bush in New Memoirs

May 27, 2008

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Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan holds no punches in his soon to be released memoirs which chronicle his time within the Bush administration. With it’s release date set for next week, McClellan recounts the way both Bush and his highest administration officials acted in a negligible manner through their incompetent dealings with the Iraq war and their “permanent campaign approach” to running the federal government all at the expense of candor, competence and the American people.

Bush and companies complete and utter failure is covered in great detail throughout McClellan’s 341-page book, which is appropriately titled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” Politico.com highlights some of the most explosive tales McClellan reveals throughout the pages:

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.

Early copies were provided to “choice” members of the media, who were quite surprised at what they read. Those who received an early copy pointed out that harsher than they had initially expected. The former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take it easy on his former boss, writing of him almost in affectionate terms, not the harsh critique and accusatory tale which subsequently makes up a large portion of the soon to be released set of memoirs:

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.

But he writes that he later was told that Karl was convinced we needed to do it and the president agreed.”

McClellan continues throughout the piece recanting various blunders, which in hindsight are as severe as could be in terms of Presidential decision making. McClellan touches on Hurricane Katrina and the incompetent handling of the situation:

One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClellan’s “calling out” of the President as seen in the instance above serves as the underlying tone throughout the books 341 pages. As far as Scott McClellan (who turned 40 in February) and his time spent as part of the current administration goes, he was press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006. Prior to that McClellan served as the traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and was chief deputy to then Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, throughout the early years of Bush’s first term.

So how exactly does McClellan feel about George W. Bush in general (as if it wasn’t already apparent in the early look at his memoirs) as a person, and politician?

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.”

And while this has caused some of McClellan’s “closest” friends and co-workers to distance themselves completely, McClellan felt as though it was more important to get the truth off his chest, then the probable shallow, beltway, social scene.

Will the release of McClellan’s scathing review on the Bush presidency position himself as a “good guy” in the history books? I don’t know, nor do I think anyone does, for that is something that we will only figure out as time goes by and the dust this administration kicked up is allowed to settle. That said, I think McClellan should be given some credit, this was undoubtedly no easy task, and as I referred to earlier has in fact cost him some friends and acquaintances. If for nothing else I hope people will at least realize this and respect McClellan regardless of their political alignment or opinion on Bush.