‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked on the presidential campaign and then moved to the White House where he rose to become White House press secretary, the public face of the administration. But with the publication of his memoirs he has broken spectacularly with his old boss.
The title of Scott McClellan’s book tells you where he is coming from: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Back in 2006 when he left the White House, you would have got very long odds on McClellan writing a book like this. Although he was rather bundled out of his job — the new White House chief of staff had decided that McClellan was not a good enough communicator for the role — his leaving ceremony was emotional, full of heartfelt promises by Bush that the two men would pick things up back in Texas.
So, Washington is asking what happened to McClellan. The only one of Bush’s Texas praetorians to have previously broken ranks was Matt Dowd, the chief strategist of Bush’s re-election campaign. But in Dowd’s case there appeared to be a simple explanation, one of his children had died, he had got divorced and his son was soon to deploy to Iraq: enough to make anyone rethink his life. In McClellan’s case there is no such obvious spur. Money can be ruled out as a motivation; McClellan received a modest advance for the book and went with a rather niche publisher — he certainly could have got far more if cash had been his incentive.
And McClellan is clearly not yet comfortable in his new role as a Bush critic. When I met him in London this week at the offices of APCO, a PR and consulting firm where he now sits on the advisory council, he sounded at times like a deprogrammed cult member. He makes frequent references to those still ‘on the inside’ and was also visibly nervous, staring down at his fidgeting hands as we talked.
At first blush, McClellan’s critique of the Bush administration sounds bizarre, especially coming from someone who served in it at a senior level. He admonishes it for fighting a war that didn’t have to be fought, for not being straight with the American public, and for operating as a political campaign not a government. McClellan sounds rather like an American Captain Renault: ‘I am shocked, shocked to find politics going on in the White House.’ But McClellan is in earnest. He has, as they say in the world of personal development, gone on a journey. As he puts it, ‘The core question I began with is how did this popular bipartisan governor of Texas become one of the most controversial and polarising presidents in modern history, why did that happen? Initially I wanted to put the responsibility elsewhere but the responsibility rests with this President.’
McClellan’s change of heart began ten months before he left the White House when he, and everyone else, discovered that Karl Rove, the ‘architect’ of Bush’s re-election, and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had lied to him and had him lie to the press about their involvement in the Plame affair. (Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, was outed after her husband Joe Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed claiming that the administration had knowingly misled the public about Saddam Hussein’s attempts to procure uranium from Niger. After a protracted investigation by an independent counsel, Scooter Libby was prosecuted and convicted of perjury.) That neither Rove nor Libby was disciplined internally for this demonstrated where McClellan came in the White House pecking order: he was not some Alastair Campbell-style powerful press officer, but the man sent out to bear the brunt of the press’s attacks.
These revelations made McClellan’s job, which — to be frank — he was not much good at to begin with, virtually impossible. At press briefing after press briefing in the White House McClellan received beatings so severe that a boxing referee would have stopped the bout after only a couple of questions.
McClellan admits that this left him ‘very disillusioned’. This feeling was exacerbated by the way he was forced to leave his job, which he was planning to do in the near future anyway. In the book McClellan writes about the moment when the new chief of staff told him he had decided he needed to be replaced: ‘My emotional response was strong and immediate. I thought to myself: He’s ready to throw me to the wolves. I thought about how long I had worked for the President, about how loyal I had been to him, about how I threw myself in front of the bus during the controversy over the Valerie Plame leak — how I sacrificed my own credibility for the sake of the administration. And now he doesn’t even care to let the current storm blow over. Thanks for everything Scott — and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’
Today, what rankles with McClellan is his feeling that he was made to walk the plank for others’ errors. ‘The first people to turn to for blame or responsibility are the communicators, that’s the nature of the way things work, when in reality I think it is more the policies that were the problem,’ he says. However, McClellan’s spin here is rather self-serving. At the time his departure was seen as proof that the new chief of staff wanted to move away from the reliance on loyal Texans and instead hire more competent people. When I try to put this to McClellan, he shies away from the question: there are obviously limits to his willingness to indulge in self-examination.
For McClellan, what happened was that the Bush administration became corrupted by ‘Washington’. McClellan dots his speech with negative references to Washington, bemoaning that ‘you get to Washington and a lot of good people on both sides get caught up in the whole Washington game’. But there is a chronological problem with this argument: the most vicious politicking the Bush team engaged in occurred before it arrived in Washington. During the South Carolina primary in 2000 rumours were spread that John McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually the product of a liaison between McCain and a black prostitute, and there were whispers that McCain, far from being a brave POW, was actually some kind of Manchurian candidate. It would have made even the most hardened political operative queasy. It makes everyone’s conduct during the Plame affair appear innocuous. McClellan, though, draws a rather Jesuitical distinction: ‘I’ve no illusions about how hard-knuckle, bare-knuckle politics can be in the campaign but my concern is when that transfers over into the governance.’
Perhaps the strangest thing about McClellan is how much he sounds like an ordinary disgruntled voter rather than a former senior member of the President’s staff. On Iraq, he says that he ‘was concerned that we were moving very quickly into this war, a lot of Americans were; but, at the same time, like a lot of those Americans I was willing to give the President and his foreign policy team the benefit of the doubt.’ McClellan’s explanation for all this is that ‘you are so inside that bubble it is hard to step back and look at the larger perspective on things, so I wasn’t seeing clearly the larger perspective of it all’. Even so, it’s just plain odd that he didn’t ask more questions from the inside or even talk with his colleagues about what t he administration was doing.
McClellan’s change of mind since leaving the White House — he now considers this a failed presidency — shows just how little time political partisans have to reflect in today’s 24/7 media environment. Amid the daily battles, McClellan had lost sight of what he was fighting for. Equally, his experience shows just how much loyalty to the President causes aides to suppress their doubts. Indeed, even now McClellan isn’t yet ready for a total break with Bush. He hints to me that Laura Bush will have read the book and says that he hopes that once the President leaves office he’ll read it and come to understand what McClellan means.
But perhaps what McClellan demonstrates most vividly is how few people in any administration are truly in the know. Tellingly, his advice to his successors is to ‘get an assurance from the President that you can be in any meeting, at any time, any place in the White House that you so choose’. But then again, seeing how the sausage is made might, if you’re of a sensitive disposition, put you off it altogether.