Product Description: 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 a 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.
Alternate Title: Not Much Happened-Not in This Book Scott McClellan spends the first 100 pages of this 200 odd page book telling us about childhood, his powerful mom and his early political education. He assumes that he is an important enough historical figure that we really care know about his collegiate tennis career, etc, etc. These revelations are not why I read this book and I doubt it is why many others have chosen to either. He spends the next 100 pages saying virtually nothing that we don't already know if we have been following the news for the last eight years. From his key insider postion in a rermarkable White House in extraordinarilly remarkable times, Mr. McClellan has produced an totally unremarkable book. Upon completing it I could only recall one phrase that describes my overall level of dissatisfaction with Mr. McClellan's effort, "where's the beef". Sadly it is not in this book.
What Happened: A Story About Scott McClellan This book is more about Scott McClellan than George Bush. It is not a tell-all book, almost everything in this book was in the news and the wrong facts are told about. This book suffers from a great lack of brevity. For example when Bush hired him he tells how they ate a sandwich and talked for 20 minutes without saying what they talked about. I would rather know what was said; I don't care about them eating a sandwich. On 9-11 it is mostly about him and how he had to ride back from Florida in car with 4 people who shared driving to get back sooner. What Bush did after leaving that classroom is not discussed. I did not actually read the second half of this book.
He Seems Sincere I got interested in this book when I saw Scott McClellan on "Meet the Press" one morning. It was either Tim Russert's last or next-to-last show before he died suddenly.
I didn't know what to expect from Mr. McClellan, so I watched. I was amazed to see a guy that seemed to be expressing genuine regret to the American people for letting them down. It wasn't exactly his fault, but he does seem to blame himself to some degree. Anyway, I was intrigued by his sincerity--and not only that, but his apparent forthrightness and honesty.
So when I saw the book at the library, I picked it up, and got very interested after just a few pages--you know, the way you do when you read a thriller-type novel. I enjoyed the book for the following reasons:
-It's well written. Good writing is always enjoyable (to me, at least).
-It had "insider information." It was like having a window into the inner workings of the Bush administration.
-It was even-handed. It was not a Bush-bash, just an honest reckoning of what happened (thus the title). When Bush failed, he points that out. When Bush did something right, he points that out, too. That gave the book a sense of genuineness that I thought was one of the book's major strengths.
As for the subject matter, it seemed the main points of the book were these (among others):
-That Bush is not an intellectual leader (i.e. someone who thinks things through to the end) but someone who leads by conviction and gut instinct. McClellan says that Bush is plenty smart, but that's not the way he operates. He leads on a decision-making level, leaving his cabinet and advisers to actualize those conviction-based decisions--to make them work in the real world. One of McClellan's major criticisms of the Bush's top people (e.g. Rice and Powell) is that they didn't challenge Bush enough on some policy decisions. McClellan describes Bush's top echelon for the most part as a group of yes men (and yes women? yes people?).
-Bush was not forthright about the motives for starting the Iraq War. Bush was interested in Iraq long before 9/11. He holds a deep belief that everyone should be allowed to live in freedom, free from repressive regimes. McClellan quotes Bush talking about his desire to spread democracy in the world. But when the time came to invade Iraq, Bush connected it to WMDs, not his desire to spread democracy. On the surface, it looked like Bush wanted to invade Iraq because of WMDs, but deep down he really just wanted to spread democracy. McClellan faults Bush for this, because when Bush was running for office he said he would restore honor and dignity to the office, and change the way Washington worked. In McClellan's view, this lack of forthrightness on Bush's part went against what Bush had promised to do earlier, and so Bush failed to keep his word.
-McClellan, in his role as press secretary, was used by those above him to deceive the press. Bush had promised to fire whoever was involved, but did not. Again, McClellan faults Bush for not keeping his word to do so...but this is somewhat of a complicated, convoluted issue, so you are on you own on this one.
There are other points, but these seemed to me to be the main ones.
One thing occasionally bothered me: McClellan seems to psychoanalyze Bush to excess sometimes. It's good to try to provide a portrait of Bush's thinking and leadership style, but sometimes the psychoanalysis went a little far (seems to me, at least). However, I got the feeling that McClellan was doing this not only to explain it to the reader, but to try to figure it out for himself, and make sense of it all, so he could sleep at night.
This Book Is Mistitled This book should have been titled "What Happened?" A question mark in the title would have been much more apropos. Scott McClellan, in his haste to publish a book, seems to have spent little or no time contemplating what did happen during his time in the White House.
Like his idol, George W. Bush, McClellan is a product of the "unexamined life" that Socrates warned about centuries ago. After reading the book, which is not recommended here, one can easily draw the conclusion that no amount of time would have been sufficient for McClellan to understand the extent of the failure and the damage caused by the administration for which he was press secretary from mid-2003 until his firing in 2006.
Every author needs a theme and I guess his publisher gave him the idea of reading a book called the "Permanent Campaign." He uses that book and the book "Shadow: The Legacy of Watergate" by Bob Woodward (though he does not indicate that he read it) to come up with his facile thesis. The conduct of the presidency was too politicized by the Bush administration as part of a permanent campaign. It is also harder to get away with a lie since Watergate. Incompetence is never posited as a possibility.
To McClellan, President Bush was not unqualified for the presidency. He merely let it veer off under the evil influence of Karl Rove and the installation of a permanent campaign in the White House. He accuses the Clinton administration of inventing the approach. He presents Karl Rove as the evil architect who took it to a new level. Bush's only weakness according to McClellan is a penchant for self-deception. His later revelations show that Bush also has quite a penchant for the deception of others.
The most disturbing part of McClellan's book is the more correct, though unconscious, theme that he repeats throughout the book. Politics to McClellan and others in the Bush administration is about selling political policies rather than persuading the public and Congress of their merits. There is one conscious admission that McClellan makes that rings true. Bush, Cheney and many others in the administration believe that the ends justify the means.
McClellan still does not seem to understand that such a view of life almost inevitably leads to lying and misrepresentation. How could he understand? Permanent campaign? The Legacy of Watergate? Hooey. The only redeeming value for McClellan in this book is that one does get a sense that he was naïve enough to believe anything he was told without question; not so redeeming, that he still is naive today because he did not learn a thing from his experience.
McClellan claims that he was stunned and shocked that Rove and Scooter Libby lied to him about their involvement of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame. By that point in the book a reader is justified in exclaiming "Why?" He also seems more put out that their lies ruined his image with the press and the public rather than that the Plame leak was unethical and potentially life-threatening for a covert CIA operative.
It is clear from this book that President Bush declassified a selected portion of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in October 2002 (before McClellan became press secretary) so that Vice President Cheney, Rove and Libby could leak about Plame without being subject to prosecution for revealing classified secrets. Yet it does not seem to dawn on McClellan that Bush was a co-conspirator in the Plame leak through the declassification of the NIE. Bush lied to McClellan and saved the truth for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. That is not self-deceit, Scott. That is just plain deceit. And McClellan thinks this was the result of a "permanent campaign?"
McClellan also seems more interested in paying back Rove and Libby for making him look like a fool than he does about the number of American soldiers who have died for the sake of a poorly "sold" war. All one can say is that Rove, Libby, and Bush knew a fool when they saw one. That he still claims to admire George W. Bush even today is Exhibit No. 1 that he has no idea of what really happened in the Plame affair or the nature of the real George Bush that everyone else does.
If McClellan really wants to know what happened, and the frightful consequences of "selling" an unnecessary war, I have a book he should read; not for profit but for self-examination. "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell" by John Crawford is a harrowing autobiographical account of an Army National Guardsman yanked off his honeymoon and sent to Iraq for over two years. There he experienced the Kafkaesque experience of serving on the ground in Iraq at the height of the insurgency. Catch-22-like Crawford continued to have his tours extended indefinitely.
The juxtaposition of McClellan's self-pity about his treatment while basking in the luxuries of political office and his new marriage, and Crawford's straight-forward account of his experience in Iraq that cost him his new marriage is almost enough to make one want to bring back the draft. And to make sure that guys like McClellan serve. His dedication of the book "To those who serve" is galling, self-serving and unseemly in the greatest sense.
His prescriptions for changing "the culture of deception" at the end of the book are as banal as all of the other lessons he supposedly learned in the White House. McClellan is a professional follower, not a political philosopher. So much for getting out of the White House "bubble" in order to get a proper perspective on "what happened" as McClellan claims he did.
McClellan has no idea what happened. He lacks the intellectual capacity, the introspective nature, and the inner moral compass necessary to ever know or understand what happened. Take a pass on this one.
A Great Overview of the Permanent Campaign I think Scott does a brilliant job of adequately covering his time in the Bush White house, and creating a good timeline of events to illustrate his opinion of life "inside the bubble." From the constant campaign to the collection of agreement, McClellan seeks to clarify the secretive world that existed while he was press secretary. I think the author goes to great lengths to specifically NOT bash or degrade anyone in this book. I found it an honest view that if anything, restated its point perhaps a bit too much. Overall, it was refreshing to have an honest look at the culture inside, something we as the public had wanted since day one. Well worth the read and quite interesting. You may not agree with Scott's opinions, but they are genuine and not malicious.
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