What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception
By Scott McClellan
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Product Description

Scott McClellan was one of a few Bush loyalists from Texas who became part of his inner circle of trusted advisers, and remained so during one of the most challenging and contentious periods of recent history. Drawn to Bush by his commitment to compassionate conservatism and strong bipartisan leadership, McClellan served the president for more than seven years, and witnessed day-to-day exactly how the presidency veered off course.
In this refreshingly clear-eyed book, written with no agenda other than to record his experiences and insights for the benefit of history, McClellan provides unique perspective on what happened and why it happened the way it did, including the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, Washington's bitter partisanship, and two hotly contested presidential campaigns. He gives readers a candid look into who George W. Bush is and what he believes, and into the personalities, strengths, and liabilities of his top aides. Finally, McClellan looks to the future, exploring the lessons this presidency offers the American people as we prepare to elect a new leader.



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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #591 in Books
Published on: 2008-05-28
Released on: 2008-05-28
Original language: English
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
368 pages

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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Some listeners may get to the end of this audiobook and still be asking "What happened?" for even in his own words, McClellan's book appears either woefully naïve to the point of negligence or a continuance of spin and lying (or has he says, "shading"). As he traces his early years working with Bush in the Texas government through his tenure as White House press secretary, McClellan continues to applaud Bush with only a mild dash of criticism while laying much of the blame for Bush's poor decisions upon the "permanent campaign" political culture of Washington. Hailing from the party of "personal responsibility," this approach seems awkward at best. Even when he identifies the administration as a group of "well intentioned but flawed people," he still shies away from making strong and definitive statements. Predominantly hovering around his experience and problems as press secretary at the height of the Valerie Plame incident, McClellan's analysis and reporting of the Bush administration doesn't forge any new ground. As narrator, he manages well enough in a matter of fact tone with moderate inflection, minimally hindered with background noises and some stumbling or mispronunciations. However, on occasion, he does execute a good Bush impersonation. A Public Affairs hardcover.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post


Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley


"I still like and admire George W. Bush," writes Scott McClellan, who served Bush for two years and nine months as White House press secretary. "I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people." Yet the entire brunt of McClellan's book is precisely the opposite: that Bush and "his top advisers," by whom he was "terribly ill-served," systematically deceived the American public about their reasons for going to war in Iraq and about the effort to discredit a critic of the war, Joseph Wilson, by making public his wife's position at the Central Intelligence Agency.


McClellan says the "defining moment in my time working for the president, and one of the most painful experiences of my life," occurred in July 2005, when he discovered that what he had told the press two years earlier -- that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby were not involved in "the leaking of classified information" about Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife -- was untrue. "I had unknowingly passed along false information," he writes. "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." Upon learning this, he felt "constrained by my duties and loyalty to the president and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew."


What Happened is the result. "I've written it not to settle scores or enhance my own role," McClellan says, "but simply to record what I know and what I learned," and on the whole this seems to be the case. As a deputy in the White House press office and then as press secretary, McClellan did not participate in high-level decision-making, especially with regard to foreign policy, but attempted to explain presidential decisions to the public -- as those decisions had been explained to him -- through the various conduits provided by the press. It is the fate of the presidential press secretary to be among an administration's most visible public faces yet to be comparatively impotent within the circles of real power. McClellan struggled with this as did all press secretaries before him, but it was his misfortune to be the spokesman for an administration in which deceit and prevarication were commonplace.


If McClellan feels betrayed, he doesn't say so. Instead, in the self-effacing manner that characterizes his book (and renders it somewhat limp), he merely says, "I blame myself. I allowed myself to be deceived," and then blandly adds, "But the behavior of the president and his key advisers was even more disappointing." Well, yes. The top people in the offices of the president and vice president looked the press secretary in the eye and told him they hadn't done what in fact they had -- leaked Joseph Wilson's CIA connection to selected members of the press -- and then instructed him to tell that to the American people. It may be gentlemanly of McClellan to blame himself for the deception, but this is either disingenuous or false humility. He believed in the good faith of the people whose activities he sought to explain to the public, and they abused his loyalty. It's as simple, and as damning, as that.


In light of this betrayal of trust, it is not surprising that McClellan's portrait of the president is rather more negative than he probably meant it to be. At the outset he describes Bush as "a man of personal charm, wit, and enormous political skill," and he repeats that characterization several times, but darker colors soon are painted in. He tells us about Bush's claim during the 2000 presidential campaign that "I honestly don't remember" whether he'd used cocaine as a young man. At the time McClellan wondered: "How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine?" It was, he says, "the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true and that, deep down, he knew was not true. . . . In the years to come, as I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment."


Thus, of course, most famously, the war in Iraq and the misinformation about weapons of mass destruction that was so central to the argument for waging it. McClellan tells about Bush being asked by Tim Russert of NBC in February 2004: "In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?" Bush replied that it was the latter, but "seemed puzzled" by the question. McClellan writes:


"This, in turn, puzzled me. Surely this distinction between a necessary, unavoidable war and a war that the United States could have avoided but chose to wage was an obvious one that Bush must have thought about in the months before the invasion. Evidently it wasn't obvious to the president, nor did his national security team make sure it was. He set the policy early on and then his team focused his attention on how to sell it. It strikes me today as an indication of his lack of inquisitiveness and his detrimental resistance to reflection, something his advisers needed to compensate for better than they did."


A few pages later, McClellan puts it far more bluntly and damagingly. Bush was "a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistake -- too stubborn to change and grow." McClellan explains this in several ways. "One was his fear of appearing weak," he says. "A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure." Another "was the personal pain he would have suffered if he'd had to acknowledge that the war against Saddam may have been unnecessary." Bush "was not one to look back once a decision was made. Rather than suffer any sense of guilt and anguish, Bush chose not to go down the road of self-doubt or take on the difficult task of honest evaluation and reassessment." Yet "another motive for Bush to avoid acknowledging mistakes was his determination to win the political game at virtually any cost." Finally, "there was Bush's insistence on remaining true to his base. . . . As far as Bush and his advisers (especially Karl Rove) were concerned, being open and forthright in such circumstances was a recipe for trouble."


Exactly what McClellan's opinion was while all this was going on, as opposed to where he is now, is a bit difficult to figure. He was a loyalist with ties going back to Bush's years as governor of Texas. He had admired the bipartisanship of Bush's gubernatorial leadership and expected him to continue it as president; it seems to have taken him a while to realize that in Washington, as opposed to Austin, Bush had surrounded himself with advisers to whom "bipartisan" was an invective. Having at the time no reason to believe otherwise, he accepted the WMD claim on its face and participated in the "spin and evasion" with which the case for the war was presented, though whether he knew at the time it was spin and evasion is, again, unclear.


By and large, though, McClellan is, or appears to be, honest in claiming that his views changed over time and that the process gave him little pleasure. Again and again he says in so many words that if he'd known then what he knows now, he wouldn't have done what he did, and he is quick to blame himself rather than others for things he said that eventually proved misleading or unfounded. In his own self-portrait he comes across as a decent, principled, loyal and rather irresolute man for whom a resignation on principle would have been an unthinkably bold act of self-assertion. Instead, he went quietly, pushed out two years ago by the new presidential chief of staff, Josh Bolten. He was loyal to the end, telling the president publicly that "it has been an extraordinary honor and privilege to have served you."


At last, though, he seems to have decided to be loyal to himself and the principles in which he insists he believes. This means that in what must now be a tiny circle of diehard Bushies he will be excoriated as a traitor, but mostly these complaints are likely to fall on deaf ears. George W. Bush, as the direct consequence of his own character and actions, is the most unpopular president in American history, and the campaign now beginning in earnest will in great measure be a referendum on him and his record. What McClellan reports in this book is part of that record, and doubtless we will hear more about it as the campaign progresses.


The Washington in which the next president will hold sway is depicted herein as "broken and dominated by partisan warfare and the culture of deception it spawns." McClellan is right about this, and in his final chapter he offers some sensible suggestions for changing the atmosphere. Since the candidates have sought to minimize negative campaigning in the coming five months, perhaps the winner will be more open to bipartisanship, cooperation and compromise than were his predecessors, Bush and Bill Clinton alike. But the poison here built up over a long time, and it's not going to vanish overnight.



Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
When it comes to lying, tone of voice is the best way we can tell. It was the exact right choice to have President Bush's former White House press secretary read his own book. He's got an strong, even baritone, with just a fringe of his Texas background. McClellan's a professional and speaks clearly and with conviction. We believe him. On the other hand, he is a professional and sounds as if he might be reading about somebody else. He sounds an even-tempered, likable guy. But that's how he sounded when he was living the life he now so regrets. Is he a great actor, or no actor at all? I wouldn't know how to bet. But the drama of that question makes this timely book a thrilling piece of audio. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


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Customer Reviews
Good look into the underbelly of an administration
"What Happened" is more of an intimate look into an American presidential administration, with an honest assessment of the political problems within and without. It wasn't a smoking gun or a book full of any particular damning revelations against the Bush administration (just about everything in this book hyped as such was already known), but was rightfully critical of how certain things were handled by the administration. Most notably, the war in Iraq (including the selling of the war to the public, and the Plame-affair); and the communications response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The overlying theme of the book is that there is something seriously wrong with Washington, and has been for a while. After the ugly political atmosphere between Clinton-Democrats and Gingrich Republicans, Bush promised to change things, but then quickly fell right in line with the status quo by the 2002 mid-term elections. Needlessly politicizing serious matters (such as a war) serves to kill intelligent discourse on all sides, and ends up leading to grave consequences, not only for national security, but in damaging the people's faith in their government, faith that is seriously needed in times of crisis and danger. That is something with which a vast majority of the people in this country agrees, no matter what their political affiliation or leanings. In addition, it is something that politicians often embrace during campaigns, but rarely have the courage to embrace once in office.

As a registered Republican, this book did not make me want to suddenly join the Democratic party. But I appreciated the honest assessment of the problems plaguing American politics on both sides, and by pointing out the failure of the Bush administration to stand up against it, I hope that future administrations of either side might learn from it and finally do so.

What Happened
The book is much better than any of the political commentaries made when it was first released. Strongly suggest reading it -- whether one is a confirmed Democrat (as I am) or a devoted Republican.

Another "smoking gun" from the Bush failure
The author spends a lot of time writing about his early life and the years leading up to the subject of the book. It's understandable, but the readers are primarily interested in how, in his opinion, the Bush White House got us into a needless war.