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| Scott McClellan quotes from "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House |
| "I think he should have stood by his word,"
McClellan said. "I think the president should have stood by the
word that we said, which was that if you were involved in this in any
way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was...
"I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be," Mr. Mr. McClellan writes. The Bush White House made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed" — a time when the nation was on the brink of war, McClellan writes in the book entitled "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House... "History appears to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote. "War should only be waged when necessary and the Iraq war was not necessary." "President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan concludes, noting, "The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president's... Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings - "I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be" - and calls the news media "complicit enablers" in the White House's "carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and... COLMES: He also says that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House, he quote, "spent most of the first week in a state of denial," and blames you for suggesting a photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover... The White House says Bush was surprised, saddened and disappointed about the book, which is titled, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." "I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left," McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush's leadership. Mr. Bush "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment," Mr. McClellan writes. McClellan says Bush's main reason for war always was "an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom." "The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine," McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." McClellan said he grew "increasingly dismayed and disillusioned" during his final year as White House press secretary, and pinpointed the unfolding of the CIA leak case — and what it revealed about Bush's role in releasing classified information... "The Iraq war was not necessary," McClellan concludes. "You're in a bubble atmosphere," McClellan told AP Television News on Thursday. "And sometimes because of your affection for the person you're working for and your belief in that person, you sometimes lose perspective on some of the larger truths out... In it, McClellan, who was press secretary from 2003 to 2006, bluntly accuses Bush of misleading the nation into war, though he says the biggest mistake the White House made was "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were... Mr. McClellan called the Iraq war a "serious strategic blunder," a surprisingly harsh assessment from the man who was at that time the loyal public voice of the White House who had followed Mr. Bush to Washington from Texas. The New York Times reports McClellan says in his book that Bush "'convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,' and has engaged in 'self-deception' to justify his political ends." McClellan writes "the decision to invade Iraq was a... "I blame myself for putting myself in the position of going to the podium and passing along information I didn't know was false, but later learned that it was," McClellan said. In Bush's second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was "insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin." Rice "was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview," McClellan says, but he predicts that "history will likely judge her harshly." McClellan calls Vice President Dick Cheney "the magic man" who "always seemed to get his way" and sometimes "simply could not contain his deep-seated certitude, even arrogance, to the detriment of the president." "And he said, 'Yeah, I did.' And I was kind of taken aback," McClellan said. "For me I came to the decision that at that point I needed to look for a way to move on, because it had undermined, I think, a lot of what we had said." But, Mr. McClellan said, Mr. Bush's unwillingness to admit mistakes and belief in his own spin contributed to turning the president into "not quite the leader I once imagined him to be." "I still like and admire George W. Bush," writes Scott McClellan, who served Bush for two years and nine months as White House press secretary. "I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or... Mr. McClellan has stated that "[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out there and exonerate Scooter Libby." He has also asserted that "the top White House officials who knew the truth - including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President... "My beliefs were different then. I believed the president when he talked about the grave and gathering danger from Iraq," McClellan told NBC's "Today" show. "He came to convince himself of that," McClellan, who was deputy press secretary during the lead-up to the war, said of Bush. "I very much gave the benefit of the doubt to the president and his foreign policy team," McClellan said. "I now look back on that and reflect and realize my confidence and trust in them was wrong on that particular issue." Bush's presidency "wandered and remained so far off course by excessively embracing the permanent campaign and its tactics," McClellan writes. But "war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary. Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake," McClellan, Bush's second of four press secretaries to date, says in the 341-page work. "I'm disappointed that things didn't turn out the way we all hoped they would turn out," McClellan said. "We all had high hopes coming in." Overall McClellan describes Bush as a president obsessed with winning a second term, which "meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating." McClellan says if people read his book they'll understand his dramatic shift, especially his conclusion that invading Iraq knocked the administration "terribly off course". McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush's "leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate." But, he said in his book, "I have no idea what you and Libby discussed, but it was suspicious for these two, who I'd never noticed spending any one-on-one time together." McClellan writes that Bush and his team sold the Iraq war by means of a "political propaganda campaign" in which contradictory evidence was ignored or discarded, caveats or qualifications to arguments were downplayed or dropped and "a dubious al-Qaida... McClellan called Bush "a man of personal charm, wit, and enormous political skill," and "plenty smart enough to be president," while sprinkling criticism of him throughout the 341-page book. "Lindsey had violated the first rule of the disciplined, on-message Bush White House: don't make news unless you're authorized to do so," McClellan wrote. "Over that summer of 2002," he writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war...... In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the... McClellan said he isn't accusing administration officials of "deliberate or conscious" lies to the American people, but said they were so wrapped up in trying to shape the story to their advantage that they ignored facts that didn't fit the views they... McClellan, who worked for Bush when he was Texas governor and then followed him to Washington, says the president is "plenty smart enough" but faults him for a "lack of inquisitiveness," "self deception" and an unwillingness to admit mistakes. "Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled US on Iraq" (Michael Shear, Washington Post) - Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda... "Many within the administration were in denial about the administration's responsibility for Katrina," and allowed the "institutional response to go on autopilot," McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of... McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped, but that he later was told that "Karl was convinced we needed to do it - and the president agreed." "One of the worst disasters in our nation's history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush's presidency," McClellan wrote in the excerpts released to Politico. "The perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush... Bush "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment," McClellan writes, and the way the president managed the Iraq issue "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option." McClellan writes that Rice, who was national security adviser earlier in Bush's presidency, "was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand all... In his new kiss-and-tell about the administration, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes that Bush "was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security." "He isn't the kind of person to flat-out lie," McClellan said, but added, "I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true." McClellan, who had argued strenuously from the White House podium on why the war was justified, wrote that Bush and his top aides conducted a "political propaganda campaign" that misled Americans and that Bush led the crisis in a way that "almost... But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions... So, Mc McClellan concludes, "I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine ...... I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for... "No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean," Mr. McClellan writes, adding that "she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star." But where his account and mine really come together is this part about the culture war: "I think the concern about liberal bias helps to explain the tendency of the Bush team to build walls against the media," McClellan writes. In an e-mail to The Washington Post yesterday, he wrote: "Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off... On September 28, 2003, McClellan told reporters, "the President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." "Condi Rice," McClellan writes, "is hard to get to know. She plays her cards close to the vest, usually saving her views for private discussions with Bush. Over time, however, I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation. No matter what... "His charm was on full display, but it was hard to know if it was sincere or just an attempt to make me feel better," Mr. McClellan writes. "But as he continued, something I had never seen before happened: tears were streaming down both his cheeks." But Bush's unwillingness to admit mistakes and belief in his own spin contributed to turning the president into "not quite the leader I once imagined him to be," McClellan writes. McClellan describes his preparation for briefing reporters during the Plame frenzy: "I could feel the adrenaline flowing as I gave the go-ahead for Josh Deckard, one of my hard-working, underpaid press office staff, : to give the two-minute warning so... Nevertheless, McClellan calls the leak "wrong and harmful to national security" -- ignoring questions of whether Plame really was engaged in undercover operations and whether her cover long ago had been blown. "She and the president are very like-minded in their foreign policy views," McClellan told NBC television Thursday in his first interview since the release of his book. "A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure," McClellan writes in published excerpts from his memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." McClellan writes that Bush never used "out-and-out deception" to sell Americans on the war, but that he "managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed the use of force would become the only feasible option." "Rove likes to have his hands in just about everything, relishing policy shaping as much as political strategizing...... He occupied a key seat at the center of both in Bush's White House. Karl also has a reputation as a ruthtless, perhaps unscrupulous... "No," Fleischer told me that McClellan replied, "but my editor tweaked it." The offer "was rejected almost out of hand by others present," McClellan writes. "The vice president and Libby were quietly stepping up their efforts to counter the allegations of the anonymous envoy to Niger, and Pincus's story was one opportunity for them to do just that," McClellan wrote. Recalling a campaign-trail conversation that Bush had with him early in the 2000 campaign, when reporters were questioning Bush about possible cocaine use as a young man, McClellan quoted Bush as saying: "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember... "I could feel something fall out of me into the abyss as each reporter took a turn whacking me," he writes of the withering criticism he received as the story played out. "It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit." His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was "as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score." "As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq," ... "I know the President pretty well," Mr McClellan writes. "If he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the cost of war, more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, he would... According to the report, McClellan says former top Bush advisor Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby "had at best misled" him about their role in the scandal. "President Bush has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader," McClellan writes. "He is not one to delve into all the possible policy options -- including sitting around engaging in extended debate about them -- before making a... "I could feel something fall out of me into the abyss as each reporter took a turn whacking me," he writes. "It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit. And my affection for the job eventually followed it." In the book - subtitled "Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" - McClellan writes that Bush's top advisers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "played right into his thinking, doing little to question it or cause... "Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn't have the strength to keep going," he said. On C-SPAN, after watching a tape of himself attacking Clarke, the new McClellan described his old self as "caught up in the bubble" of "the permanent campaign" where "you lose perspective" and strategy becomes more important than uncomfortable facts or... "Clearly," McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, "I had allowed myself to be deceived." "It's a message that is very similar to the one that Gov. Bush ran on in 2000," McClellan told CBS News. "I had all this great hope that we were going to come to Washington and change it," he said. "Then we got to Washington, and I think we got caught up in playing the Washington game the way it is being played today." But he calls the news media "complicit enablers" in the White House's "carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval" in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. McClellan calls him "an operative who places political gain ahead of national interest," which is a damning indictment of anyone who serves in a high position in the White House.) "I had unknowingly passed along false information," he writes. "And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president's chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president... "I gave them the benefit of the doubt, like a lot of Americans," he said. "There was only one problem" with the assurances he provided, McClellan wrote. "What I'd said was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so:... THE US President, George Bush, "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment" and has engaged in "self-deception" to justify his political ends, a former White House press secretary has said in a memoir about his years in the West Wing. McClellan calls Rice "sometimes too accommodating" as national security adviser. "Questions were also raised about whether the president's action had set in motion the unauthorized disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity," McClellan wrote. McClellan calls the Iraq war a, quote, "serious strategic blunder" and says President Bush was given bad advice from the beginning. In Iraq, McClellan adds that Bush saw "his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness" -- something which Bush views as only obtainable by wartime presidents. "I have a higher loyalty than my loyalty necessary to my past work. That's a loyalty to the truth and it's a loyalty to the values I was raised on," he said on the show. McClellan says the "defining moment in my time working for the president, and one of the most painful experiences of my life," occurred in July 2005, when he discovered that what he had told the press two years earlier -- that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby ... McClellan said, "My hope is that my writing this book and sharing openly and honestly what I learned is that is some small way it might help us move beyond the partisan warfare of the past 15 years. There is a larger purpose to this book. It's about... McClellan said Americans were subjected to a "permanent campaign" which was all about "manipulating sources of public opinion the president's advantage." "When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so," writes McClellan,... "It strikes me today as an indication of his lack of inquisitiveness and his detrimental resistance to reflection," McClellan wrote, "something his advisers needed to compensate for better than they did." But like Scott said (and, yes, we have the same publisher), "The White House would prefer I not speak out openly and honestly about my experiences, but I believe there is a larger purpose." McClellan says if people read his book they'll understand his dramatic shift, especially his conclusion that invading Iraq knocked the administration "terribly off course." Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan wrote that President George W. Bush was not "open and forthright" on Iraq and relied on propaganda to sell what he called an unnecessary war. "His leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate," McClellan writes. "A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people's ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and... "We were engaged in essentially a political propaganda campaign," McClellan told Rather when discussing how the war in Iraq was reported to the American people. "It's the same as marketing, in my view." "I've written it not to settle scores or enhance my own role," McClellan says, "but simply to record what I know and what I learned," and on the whole this seems to be the case. When asked if his testimony next week might prompt any invoking of executive privilege - a power which can allow the president to block testimony- McClellan said, "I don't have anything incriminating to say here if that's what you're looking for." "Well I... "He chose not to do so," McClellan writes, adding: "Instead, his own White House became embroiled in political maneuvering that was equally unsavory, if not worse" than that of the Bill Clinton White House. In a book to be published on Monday, Mr McClellan says Mr Bush "veered terribly off course". "It was very troubling to me," said McClellan. "I had to essentially come to the conclusion in my head that -- you know, I -- I think it's time for me to move on personally." "Dan Rather Reports: Scott McClellan will premiere live on HDNet on Tuesday,... "Over time, as you leave the White House and leave the bubble, you're able to take off your partisan hat and take a clear-eyed look at things," McClellan tells The Washington Post, adding: "From the beginning, the focus was what had happened to take... But he also believes that in the run-up to the Iraq war, "the campaign mentality at times led the president and his chief advisers to spin, hide, shade and exaggerate the truth, obscuring nuances and ignoring the caveats that should have accompanied their... "I trusted the president's foreign policy team and I believed the president when he talked about the grave and gathering danger from Iraq," McClellan said. "I believe he believed it was a grave danger, too. He convinced himself of that. When the... In the memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" McClellan says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was deft at deflecting blame and calls Vice President Dick Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy... When Mr. Abramoff pleaded guilty, the White House spokesman responded that he had "checked" into Mr. Abramoff's contacts with the President and White House staff and discovered that there "only a couple of holiday receptions that he attended, and then a... "I had concerns, like a lot of people," McClellan told ABC News, "that we're rushing into this. But, uh, that wasn't my focus area, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt because I have great affection for the President, I trusted in his judgment. And in... McClellan said he hoped writing the book would "help move us beyond the destruction partisan warfare of the past 15 ye |
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