Books

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception
By Scott McClellan, New York: Public Affairs, 2008

If what Scott McClellan says in this political memoir is all true, then there is no longer any difference between campaigning and governing. McClellan, who served as press secretary until 2006, says that after the elections of 2000 and 2004 the Bush administration brought its campaign team into the White House and, by "shaping and manipulating sources of public opinion," proceeded to have its way with just about everything.

It was this "culture of deception," as McClellan calls it, that allowed the January 2003 State of the Union address to contain the following, now infamous, sixteen words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In its attempt to sell the war, the White House was so eager to use this information that it ignored a report by Joseph Wilson, who a year earlier had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the claim and found it to be false. What happened afterward is well known. Dick Cheney, with the help of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, led a secret campaign, says McClellan, to discredit Wilson. Part of this campaign involved revealing a state secret: the identity of Valery Plame, a CIA operative who had helped to plan Wilson's trip to Niger. She was also Wilson's wife.

Normally, anyone who knowingly reveals the identity of a covert CIA official would be guilty

of a felony offense. McClellan publicly defended Rove and Libby, who had assured him that they had not been involved in the leak. By the spring of 2006, however, the truth was out. McClellan had been betrayed and his credibility undermined. He had no choice but to resign.

Such are the risks, we are told, of working inside the "bubble" of Bush's White House, where loyalty routinely obscures the truth, and where people in high positions, including the president himself, are deliberately — for their own legal protection — kept ignorant of matters that would incriminate them.

McClellan claims that only now, from outside the "bubble," can he see clearly. And he seems to think that repeatedly calling his mother, the first woman to become mayor of Austin, "mom" will make us warm up to him. But one does not have to believe, or even to like, Scott McClellan, in order to appreciate his portrait of the current president: he is "intuitive," not at all reflective, incapable of remorse, "too stubborn to change and grow," and moved by a crude, puerile vision of a Middle East transformed through "coercive democracy."

Carmine Di Biase is an English professor at Jacksonville State University.