It was impossible for me to approach Scott McClellan's
What Happened with a completely open mind, as it will be, I think, for many readers. But, if writing is a catharsis, the book must have seemed like the equivalent of five years of intensive therapy to its author.
Despite my initial respect for McClellan's courage in writing the memoir, I couldn't help feeling, as this detailed chronicle of the disintegration of George W. Bush's presidency unfolded, that the book is as much a self serving expiation as it is a revelatory examination of power run amuck. There is nothing particularly new to be learned here, only sad reaffirmations of what most of us have known for a long time. Oddly enough, What Happened is, by turns, appalling, preachy, and tedious. Its only genuinely startling aspect is the fact that Mr. McClellan was one of the hardcore loyalists, whose relationship with Bush stretches back to his time as governor of Texas.
Scott was the youngest of four sons born to Barr McClellan, an attorney, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a colorful, three-term mayor of Austin. The couple divorced when Scott was ten-years-old. He began his career working on his mother's campaigns. The young man's dedication was brought to the attention of Governor Bush, whom McClellan admired for his non-partisan approach to politics, his accessibility, and his wit (prompting me to wonder if the word "wit" means something different in Texas). McClellan was hired as the governor's deputy press secretary. Like many in Bush's Texas entourage, he went to Washington in 2000 with the newly elected president.
Bush was determined not to repeat what he regarded as a grievous fault of the Clinton years; the non-stop political campaigning that influenced nearly every decision emanating from the White House. To help effect his storybook transformation of government, the president brought along Karl Rove, an acclaimed guru of Texas Republican politics. Unencumbered with scruples, Rove had a reputation for ruthlessness that gave even the gentle-hearted McClellan pause, although not to the extent that he seriously questioned Mr. Bush's unwavering devotion to such a polarizing figure.
McClellan eventually served as White House Press Secretary from July 2003 until April 2006. Three momentous events shaped his tenure. Each, as it played out, had an impact upon his eventual disillusionment with the people for whom he worked: The failure to find any credible evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the federal government's disgracefully inept response to Hurricane Katrina, and, most damaging to McClellan personally, the divulging of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative in retribution for her husband's comments about the lack of evidence to support the urgency of invading Iraq.
My opinion of McClellan remained steadfastly ambivalent. He seems a curious mixture of idealistic Boy Scout, GOP team player, and master of self-deception. If he accuses Mr. Bush of hearing only what he wants to hear, the same might be said of McClellan, whose judgment of character seems roughly on a par with Elizabeth Taylor's instinct for good husband material.
McClellan may finally perceive George W. Bush as a deeply flawed man, but he can never quite bring himself to hold Bush fully responsible for his disastrous decisions (despite a few nods to the adage about where the buck stops), like an indulgent parent who refuses to acknowledge serious faults in his child. History, McClellan cautions, will be the final arbiter the Bush presidency. Sound familiar?
His early experiences working with Bush are so contrary to what we have come to know about the personality of the man as to make the reader wonder if Bush underwent some horrific Jekyll/Hyde transformation on the way to Washington from which he has never recovered.
The president emerges as his own cardboard ideal of what a great leader should be; a tireless dispenser of grade school civics platitudes in tandem with a fatal lack of concern for how they are implemented or any long-term impacts. "Freedom" is Bush's operative word, with very little substantive regard to its cost or, for that matter, if the people he is trying to foist it upon are even particularly interested. What matters is that he thinks that they should want it.
Even the barbs, aimed at those for whom McClellan clearly has little regard, seem cautiously blunted, except for Rove and for Condoleezza Rice, whom he believes bears a particular responsibility for the most catastrophic mistakes of the Bush administration -- coupled with a genius for shifting that responsibility onto someone else's shoulders. Cheney is mostly relegated to the status of the White House's resident spook -- elusive, deceptive, and pathologically secretive.
I waited for one line that never came in What Happened, at least not verbatim: "I was only doing what I was told to do." A lot of people used that excuse at Nuremberg. Mr. McClellan may not deserve the hangman's rope, but his belated mea culpa is still scant comfort to over 4,000 American dead and a country teetering on the edge of the abyss.
