What Happened
Scott McClellan
PublicAffairs
As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White Housft®iefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to corner to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured....
History appears poisedl to confirm|what most Americans today have decided—. that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, arid the Iraq War was not. Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I’ve come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made—a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed...
Scott Mcclellan served as White House Press Secretary from 2003 to 2006. Before that he served as the Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary and as traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. Earlier in his career, McClellan served as deputy communications director in the Texas governor’s office, a top legislative aide, and campaign manager for three successful statewide campaigns. Born in Austin, Texas, he graduated from the University of Texas and now lives near Washington, D.C. with his wife, Jill.
PRESENTATION
In 1999, at the age of thirty, Scott K. McClellan accepted what he considered the job of a lifetime: working as press spokesman for Texas governor George W Bush, just as Bush was beginning his campaign for the presidency of the United States. Drawn to Bush’s strong, successful record of bipartisan leadership and commitment to compassionate conservatism, and later inspired by his promise to restore dignity to a White House sullied by scandal and partisan warfare, McClellan would serve the president for more than seven years, becoming part of his inner circle of trusted advisers and attaining the job of White House Press Secretary.
From that position, during what would become one of the most challenging and contentious periods in recent American history, McClellan witnessed day to day and year to year exactly what happened to take the presidency he served disastrously and irretrievably off course. In this bracingly candid and provocative book, he shares that story with the American people.
What Happened provides a unique perspective on the events, policies, and personalities of the Bush administration, including 9/11, the Iraq War and the marketing campaign to sell it to the public, the Valerie Plame leak scandal, and Hurricane Katrina. McClellan shares his personal experience of who George W. Bush is and what he believes, explains how the White House operated and how its goals and priorities were shaped, and offers insights into the roles and personalities of top aides including Karl Rove, Andy Card, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney.
Just as important, McClellan shares his keen understanding of exactly how our national political culture has become so toxic. He compellingly makes the case against playing “politics as usual”—whether in campaigning, governing, or covering politics for the media—and for making institutional changes to reform the Washington culture of deception that poisoned the Bush administration from within. Finally, McClellan looks to the future, exploring the warnings this presidency offers the American people as we prepare to elect a new leader.
The Bush administration has been notoriously tight-lipped about its inner workings, but Scott McClellan came to believe that, in their reliance on secrecy and manipulation, they were ultimately fooling themselves. In this book he acknowledges the often painful truth of what happened, and holds himself accountable for his role in it.
Preface
The University of Texas has always been special to my family and me. My grandfather, the late Page Keeton, was the legendary dean who led its law school to national prominence. I was born and reared in Austin, Texas, where it is located, and earned an undergraduate degree from the university.
I am very familiar with the UT Tower, the main building in the center of campus, with words from the Gospel of John carved in stone above its south entrance: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
Those powerful words have always piqued my curiosity, as a person of faith and as an ordinary human being keenly interested in the larger meaning of life. But not until the past few years have I come to truly appreciate their message.
Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us in life is the ability to learn from our experiences, especially our mistakes, and grow into better people. That uniquely human quality is rooted in free will and blossoms in our capacity for knowledge, based on understanding the truth—not as we might imagine or wish it to be, but as it is. And that includes recognizing our faults and accepting responsibility for them. Through contrition we find the truth and the freedom that comes with it, even as we improve ourselves and grow closer to the image that God our Creator has in mind for us to become.
My mother, who began her career in public service as a high school civics and history teacher, likes to say, “It is people, not events, that shape history.” She couldn’t be more right. History is rooted in the choices made by people— flawed, fallible people.
This is a book about the slice of history I witnessed during my years in the White House and about the well-intentioned but flawed human beings—myself included—who shaped that history. I’ve written it not to settle scores or enhance my own role but simply to record what I know and what I learned in hopes that my account will deepen our understanding of contemporary history, particularly the events that followed the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001.
I began the process of writing this book by putting myself under the microscope. In my efforts on behalf of the presidential administration of George W. Bush I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be. Having accepted the post of White House press secretary at age thirty-five and possessing scant experience of the Washington power game, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. Today, I understand it much better. This book records the often painful process by which I gained that understanding.
I frequently stumbled along the way and failed in my duty to myself, to the president I served, and to the American people. I tried to play the Washington game according to the current rules and, at times, didn’t play it very well. Because I didn’t stay true to myself, I couldn’t stay true to others. The mistakes were mine, and I’ve suffered the consequences.
My own story, however, is of small importance in the broad historical picture. More significant is the larger story in which I played a minor role—the story of how the presidency of George W. Bush veered terribly off course.
As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.
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. Many of them, I’m sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved. Only time will tell. But I’ve become genuinely convinced otherwise.
The episode that became the jumping-off point for this book was the scandal over the leaking of classified national security information—the so-called Plame affair. It originated in a controversy over the intelligence the Bush administration used to make the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq represented a “grave and gathering danger” that needed to be eliminated. When a covert CIA officer’s identity was disclosed during the ensuing partisan warfare, turning the controversy into the latest Washington scandal, I was caught up in the deception that followed. It was the defining moment in my time working for the president, and one of the most painful experiences of my life.
When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was 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. After leaving the White House, I realized that the story was meaningless without an appreciation of the personal, political, and institutional context in which it took place. So the story grew into a book.
Writing it wasn’t easy. Some of the best advice I received as I began came from a senior editor at a publishing house that expressed interest in my book. He said the hardest challenge for me would be to keep questioning my own beliefs and perceptions throughout the writing process.
His advice was prescient. I’ve found myself constantly questioning my own thinking, my assumptions, my interpretations of events. Many of the conclusions I’ve reached are quite different from those I would have embraced at the start of the process. The quest for truth has been a struggle for me, but a rewarding one. I don’t claim a monopoly on truth. But after wrestling with my experiences over the past several months, I’ve come much closer to my truth than ever before.
Many readers will have come to this book out of curiosity about the man who is a leading character in my story, President George W. Bush. You’ll learn about my relationship with him and my experiences as part of his team as you read these pages. For now, let me observe that much of what the general public knows about Bush is true. He is a man of personal charm, wit, and enormous political skill. Like many other people, I was inspired to follow him by his disarming personality and by his record as a popular, bipartisan governor who set a constructive tone and got things done for the people. We all hoped and believed he could do the same for the nation.
Certainly the seeds of greatness seemed to be present in the Bush administration. Although Bush attained the White House only after an extended legal battle over the outcome of the 2000 election, he began his presidency with considerable goodwill. He commanded a rare, extended period of national unity following the unimaginable national tragedy that struck our nation in September 2001.
On paper, the team Bush assembled was impressive. Vice President Dick Cheney was a serious, vastly experienced hand in the top levels of government. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already enjoyed one successful run at the Pentagon and boasted a resume listing a string of business and government achievements. Secretary of State Colin Powell, an able and widely respected military leader, was easily the most popular public figure in the country and could well have been the first African American president of the United States had he been interested in the job. Even Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had a powerful reputation as a brilliant strategic thinker who was helping to make the Republican party the nation’s greatest political force.
I believed in George W. Bush’s leadership and agenda for America, and had confidence in his authenticity, integrity, and judgment. But today the high hopes that accompanied the early days of his presidency have fallen back to earth.
Rumsfeld and Powell are gone, their tenures controversial and disappointing. Vice President Cheney’s role is widely viewed as sinister and destructive of the president’s legacy. And Rove’s reputation for political genius is now matched by his reputation as an operative who places political gain ahead of the national interest.
Through it all, President Bush remains very much the same. He is self-confident, quick-witted, down-to-earth, and stubborn, as leaders sometimes need to be. His manner is authentic, his beliefs sincere. I never knew Lyndon Johnson (another Texan with a stubborn streak whose domestic accomplishments were overshadowed by a controversial war) or Richard Nixon (a president whose historically low poll ratings following Watergate have been rivaled only by Bush’s). But according to historians, both men were consumed with defensiveness, anger, and ultimately anguish as their presidencies unraveled under the pressure of war and scandal, respectively. George W. Bush is different. He is very much the man he always was—though not quite the leader I once imagined him to be.
It was the decision to go to war in Iraq that pushed Bush’s presidency off course. It was a fateful misstep based on a confluence of events (the shock of 9/11 and our surprisingly—and deceptively—quick initial military success in Afghanistan), human nature (ambition, certitude, and self-deceit), and a divinely inspired passion (President Bush’s deeply held belief that all people have a God-given right to live in freedom). For Bush, removing the “grave and gathering danger” that Iraq supposedly posed was primarily a means for achieving the far more grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies.
History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided—that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.
Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I’ve come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made—a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.
Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good and decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it. Most of it is not willful or conscious. Rather it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.
As I explain in this book, Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin. Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success. That means shaping the narrative before it shapes you. Candor and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle.
Of course, deception in politics is nothing new. What’s new is the degree to which it now permeates our national political discourse.
Much of it is barely noticeable and seemingly harmless, accepted as par for the course. Most of it is done unconsciously or subconsciously with no malicious intent other than to prevail in the increasingly destructive game of power and influence.
Some of it is self-deceit. Those engaging in it convince themselves to believe what they are saying, though deep down they know candor and honesty are lacking. Instead of checking their political maneuvering at the door when the campaign ends, they retain it as part of the way Washington works. The deception it spawns becomes the cancer on our political discourse, gready damaging the ability of our elected leaders to govern effectively and do what is best for America.
Too many politicians and their followers have become passionately committed to a preconceived, partisan view of reality that allows little room for compromise or cooperation with the other side. The gray nuances of truth are lost in the black-and-white ideologies both parties embrace. Permanent division, gridlock, and a general inability to constructively address the big challenges we all face inevitably follow.
President Bush, I believe, did not consciously set out to engage in these destructive practices. But like others before him, he chose to play the Washington game the way he found it, rather than changing the culture as he vowed to do at the outset of his campaign for the presidency. And like others before him, he has engaged in a degree of self-deception that may be psychologically necessary to justify the tactics needed to win the political game.
The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complied: enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy, and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics—who’s winning, who’s losing, and why.
In exploring this syndrome and the way it helped damage at least one administration, I’ve tried to contribute to our understanding of Washington’s culture of deception and how we, the American people, can change it.
Although my time in the Bush White House did not work out as I once hoped, my optimism regarding America has been strengthened. I’ve met many, many people who are eager for positive change and are ready to devote their lives and energies to the future of our country. I still believe, in the words of then-Governor Bush, that it’s possible to show “that politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better.” I’m convinced that, if we take a clear-eyed look at how our system has gone awry and think seriously about how to fix it, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
This book, I hope, will contribute to that national conversation.
Scott McClellan
April 2008
What Happened
A Made-For-Washington Scandal
Throughout American history, presidential administrations have undergone tumultuous periods of war and scandal. I happened to become White House press secretary at a time when the administration of George W. Bush was going through both, and they were intimately related to each other.
In late May 2003, when the president asked me to begin serving as his chief spokesman in July, I did not fully appreciate just how contentious and venomous the atmosphere in Washington was—and how controversial and polarizing the presidency of George W. Bush was about to become.
By October, less than three months after starting the new job, I was on the front lines defending a White House that was becoming engulfed in a growing scandal on the eve of a reelection campaign that had an increasingly hostile media clamoring and our partisan critics pouncing. For the American public, which had grown weary of the endless investigations and scandals connected with the Clinton presidency, the situation typified the worst of what they saw in Washington.
The emerging narrative in the Washington press was that the White House had deliberately blown the cover of Valerie Planie, a covert CIA official. Administration officials had anonymously leaked her identity to reporters in …
Scott McClellan
What Happened
PublicAffairs
PublicAffairs
What Happened
Inside the Bush White House and
Washington’s Culture of Deception
Scott McClellan
Copyright © 2008 by Scott McClellan
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ISBN-13: 978-1-58648-556-6
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