I finished reading Scott McClellan’s memoir: What Happened: Inside the Bush White and Washington’s Culture of Deception. This is my first political memoir of a recent event. Normally, I’d pick up a book written many years after the fact, letting distance provide some context. But, I just had to have this book as McClellan worked the media and blog circuit. As you may know, he was a loyal Bush supporter and fellow Texan who served as White House Press Secretary from July 2003 until April 2006.

The memoir focuses primarily on the selling and secrecy around the Iraq War and the outing of a CIA agent as payback for challenging the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) claim for the war. It touches ever so briefly on the political effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Bush presidency.

There are a few tidbits that McClellan confirms. Bush decided to go to war with Iraq by November 2001 (p. 127). However, McClellan says that the war was right, but that it was marketed wrong, emphasizing WMD instead of spreading freedom. This revisionism is expected from loyal Bush folks, but it seems weird coming from a person who is persona non grata these days in Republican circles. He said Bush’s primary failing was not admitting that WMD’s weren’t the real reason for Iraq War. With respect to Katrina, he blames state and local officials, and Karl Rove, for any failings in the government’s reaction to one of its worst natural disasters. Also, Karl Rove is definitely fingered as someone who exposed Valerie Plame’s CIA cover, in an attempt to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson.

The main points I took away from this book are:

  • McClellan portrays himself as a do-gooder who can do no wrong. He's smitten with the President and never stabs him in the back, or front, during his tenure or in this book.
  • It's never McClellan's fault. It's always someone else's fault. He is always doing the best he can. For anything bad that happened, he says that he was deceived, lied to, kept in the dark, or manipulated by dark foes (pp. 124, 138, 146, 153, 155, 163, 259, 297).
  • Republicans are portrayed as being misunderstood, while Democrats are often wrong from the get-go. He blames the "system" constantly, but never blames individuals for making the system into what it is today. My personal thoughts are that the partisanship of the Republican leaders of the House during the 1990s led to the extreme partisanship we see in the White House today.
  • McClellan says that while Bush won in 2004, the narrowness of the win "supplied no real mandate" (p. 252). Bush and Cheney would never say this, claiming they had a mandate to do whatever they wanted, especially after November 2004.
  • His blame summation: Rove was bad. Libby was bad. Cheney was secretive. Bush was misled. Scott McClellan was lied to (p. 306).
McClellan also appears to have some serious masculinity hang-ups. He constantly uses parenthetical asides to assert that he truly is a manly-man. Talking to his mom, discussing stuff with his wife and being beaten up by his older brothers are addressed with unnecessary machismo (pp. 103, 112, 26). Additionally, when offering up his thinly-sketched fix for partisanship, he says that "for the rest of this chapter, I'll refer to the hypothetical leaders of tomorrow simply as 'he,' to avoid the awkwardness of saying 'he or she' repeatedly. No disrespect is intended to any current or future national leaders of the female gender" (p. 314) What the heck is that? He then spends the next 9 1/3 pages saying he over and over again. Why not alternate? Why choose he over she? I'm sorry, it's much more awkward to erase the contributions (past, current or future) of women in the leadership ranks of our government.

Clocking in at 323 pages, this book went on way to long. It could have been cut down to 100-150 pages and still gotten across its points. Was it a good read? Not necessarily. It certainly didn’t fit the bill as something that would alienate Republicans and rally Democrats.