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'Disillusioned' McClellan Defends Memoir
By Dan Eggen and Debbi Wilgoren
Updated: 05/29/2008
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan today strongly defended his critical new book on the Bush administration, saying he became "disillusioned" as he realized he was a pawn in a larger political game.
McClellan, who has been harshly condemned as a turncoat by some of his closest friends and former colleagues, said in an interview on NBC's "Today" show that the book was intended to illustrate how a presidential candidate who vowed to change the culture of Washington failed to do so once he was elected.
Instead, McClellan says, President Bush stayed in a "permanent campaign culture" and allowed his staff to use misleading and incomplete information to "sell" the Iraq war to the American people.
McClellan told "Today" he hoped his message would resonate during the current presidential campaign season, when the major candidates are again emphasizing their desire to change the way Washington operates.
"The White House would prefer I not speak out openly and honestly about my experiences, but I believe there is a larger purpose," McClellan said in his first interview since the book's contents were reported earlier this week. "I had all this great hope that we were going to come to Washington and change it. Then we got to Washington, and I think we got caught up in playing the Washington game the way it is being played today."
McClellan, 40, was the ultimate Bush loyalist. He first 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 the explosive book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," 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. The accusations are prompting a counterattack from some of his oldest political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility.
Dan Bartlett, former counselor to the president, appeared on the "Today" show as well, and said many of McClellan's allegations don't ring true. "He talks about wanting to change the tone in Washington, and yet uses inflammatory terms like 'propaganda machine' and 'shading the truth,' " Bartlett said.
He said McClellan was only a deputy press secretary during the buildup to the Iraq war and did not have access to all the high-level discussions at that time. Bartlett also said McClellan offers little proof in his book to back up some of his charges and asked why McClellan did not question the actions of Bush and his top aides while he was still employed by the White House.
McClellan, in turn, said it took him some time after leaving the White House to come to terms with his experience there. When the Iraq war started, "my beliefs were different," he told "Today." "I trusted the president's foreign policy team and I believed the president when he talked about the great and gathering danger from Iraq. I believe the president believed it too. He had convinced himself.
"I don't think this is a book that I could have written two years ago," McClellan added. "[I] struggled as I went through this book process. I struggled to come to grips with how things went so badly off course."
Dana Perino, the current White House press secretary, said the president was "surprised" by McClellan's assertions. "He is puzzled, and he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years," Perino said yesterday, adding that Bush was "disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff."
Former Bush political adviser Karl Rove compared McClellan to a "left-wing blogger." Several former Bush administration officials have written tell-all accounts. In one book published this month, retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez accuses Bush and his top advisers of "gross incompetence and dereliction of duty" for their handling of the Iraq war.
But none was as close to Bush or his inner circle as McClellan, 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."
McClellan suggests in his preface that he expected a negative reaction. "My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still living and working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here," he wrote.
In the book, McClellan says he retains great admiration for Bush but portrays the president as stubborn and isolated. Calling the Iraq war "unnecessary" and a "strategic blunder," McClellan alleges that senior administration officials began a campaign in 2002 to "aggressively sell the war," even as he and other officials insisted that all options were on the table.
He also accuses Rove of misleading him about the leak of a CIA officer's name, and he suggests that Rove and former vice presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby may have improperly met to discuss the case. Perino and other officials sharply criticized that assertion yesterday.
When he was press secretary, McClellan made some of the same arguments against other ex-officials that he now faces. In 2004, for example, former counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke published a book sharply critical of Bush's anti-terrorism policies.
"Why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?" McClellan said. "This is 1 1/2 years after he left the administration. . . . He is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book, and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."
Staff writers Michael Abramowitz in Colorado Springs and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington and staff researcher Madonna Lebling in Washington contributed to this report.
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