WASHINGTON — Scott McClellan was the ultimate Bush loyalist. He went to work for George W. Bush when he was Texas governor in 1999, helped Bush gain the White House in 2000, and then came to Washington to defend the president for the next six years on such issues as the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.
But McClellan’s explosive new book, which alleges that the Bush administration waged a “political propaganda campaign” in favor of the Iraq war and bungled the response to the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast, prompted a counterattack Wednesday from some of his political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility.
“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”
Former Bush political adviser Karl Rove compared McClellan to a “left-wing blogger,” and former White House counselor Dan Bartlett told CNN it was “misguided for him to make these kind of broad accusations and draw these big conclusions about the president.”
McClellan’s criticisms
In his book — “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” — McClellan says he was led by the Vice President Dick Cheney and others to deliver false denials in connection with the criminal investigation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, and about just who was involved in leaking classified information about the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson.
“There was only one problem” with the assurances he provided, McClellan wrote. “What I’d said was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, and the president himself.”
The former spokesman said he did not learn that his statements were untrue for almost two years; nor, he said, did he think Bush knew they were untrue, having been deceived by others.
The heart of the book concerns Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 — at least a full year before the invasion — if not even earlier.
“He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest,” McClellan wrote.
During the “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” Bush and his team tried to make the “WMD (weapons of mass destruction) threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.”
In Bush’s second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was “insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin.”
McClellan ticks off a long list of Bush’s weaknesses: someone with a penchant for self-deception if it “suits his needs at the moment,” “an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader” who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a man with a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he’s been wrong.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the administration went on autopilot “rather than seizing the initiative and getting in front of what was happening on the ground.”
And Bush’s drive to remake the Social Security program after his 2004 re-election failed in large part because the White House focused almost exclusively on “selling our sketchily designed plan” instead of doing behind-the-scenes work with lawmakers.
‘Dancing on his political grave’
Several former Bush administration officials have written tell-all accounts. But none was as close to Bush or his inner circle as McClellan, 40, an amiable Texas native who was widely known for his cautious demeanor. He started out in politics by managing several state election campaigns in the 1990s for his mother, who became Texas comptroller, and was recruited to the governor’s mansion by Bush confidante Karen Hughes.
Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary before McClellan took over in 2003, said he first met McClellan in Austin in 1999 when the two worked on the Bush presidential campaign.
“That’s one of the reasons this book comes as such a shock,” Fleischer said. “It comes from the last person that anyone would have thought would have said these things or written these things. … All you can do is scratch your head when you see how far he’s turned.”
Trent Duffy, who worked as McClellan’s deputy for more than two years, said of the avid University of Texas sports fan: “Tomorrow maybe we’re going to learn he’s rooting for the Oklahoma Sooners.”
“Here’s a man who owes his whole career to George W. Bush, and here he’s stabbing him in the back and no one knows why,” Duffy said. “He appears to be dancing on his political grave for cash.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
