J. TODD FOSTER: McClellan Set Free By The Truth About His Former Boss

By J. Todd Foster
Editor / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 1, 2008

Just how bad has the Bush presidency been? Bad enough to shame even a longtime Bush loyalist.
Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a tell-all book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” with confessions that drove virtually every news cycle last week.
The book’s conclusions are not surprising and only confirm what many Americans have suspected for years: that the Bush administration could be the most incompetent, secretive and corrupt in the nation’s history.
BUT WHAT is stunning is the messenger: McClellan is arguably the first former press secretary to criticize his sitting president, and himself. And far from vengeful, McClellan comes off in television interviews pained at his own failure to see through the administration’s veneer of deceit and obfuscation. To his later regret, he constantly gave George W. Bush and his inner circle the benefit of the doubt.
Critics are dissecting McClellan’s motives and his message, but history likely will confirm some of his conclusions.
“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency,” McClellan wrote, according to published excerpts from his book. “Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”
SOME OF McClellan’s criticism is leveled at the national press corps, which deserves it for failing to question more thoroughly the lines they were fed in the run-up to the Iraq war.
“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq,” McClellan wrote.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
THE ONLY label the news media hate worse than “liberal” is “unpatriotic.” That explains the national press corps’ kid-gloves treatment of the Bush White House as it lobbied for war with one rationale after another.
Still dazed by the 9/11 tragedy, the media rightly jumped on the Afghanistan bandwagon for payback. But the Bush administration sent far fewer troops to Afghanistan than were needed to rout the Taliban and al-Qaida and to capture 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. The White House, it now is obvious, was holding back troops for an invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden eluded capture and the United States was left without a visible, high-profile villain, so the White House focused on Saddam Hussein. The former Iraqi dictator will go down in the annals of history on a par with Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot. But he had nothing to do with 9/11, al-Qaida or any threat to America.
THE BUSH administration cast its intelligence lot with a handful of Iraqi dissidents, later proven to be liars. And the national press corps, led by The New York Times, dutifully played along and allowed the White House to beat the drums of war. Bob Woodward, who made his career by holding an administration accountable, traded his skepticism for access to President Bush to write the first of several fawning books. Then a White House full of neoconservative ideologues – chickenhawks whose closest brush with combat would be hunting trips with Vice President Dick Cheney – marched us to war.
And the rest, as they say, is history. But unlike the immensely unpopular presidencies of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, history will not be kind to the Bush presidency. It will take decades to unravel the assault on the U.S. Constitution and our civil liberties, and determine the full extent of damage inflicted upon our nation.
A neighbor of mine cornered me in my yard a few weeks ago. “Jan. 20, 2009,” he said. “You’re invited.”
“TO WHAT?” I asked.
“To a George-Bush’s-last-day-in-office party,” he said. “Is there any doubt he’s the worst president in American history?”
The significance of my neighbor’s rant then dawned on me: This man is a lifelong Republican.
I SUSPECT he’s one of many who in the last seven and a half years has seen through the fog of ideology and glimpsed the truth: how an arguably well-meaning, earthy man (Bush) could encase himself inside a bubble with extremists and, through a lack of inquisitiveness and backbone, fall victim to groupthink.
McClellan was not a good press secretary; in fact, he was one of the worst. His hemming and hawing over simple questions posed during press briefings, he now admits as a late lesson learned, was born out of the misleading information he was given to spout.
McClellan might get rich off this book.
But his motives aside, a book seen as the ultimate act of betrayal by the Bush White House also could be the ultimate act of contrition for a political loyalist whose life would have been far more peaceful and filled with friends had he kept silent.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.