Ex-Bush spokesman blasts president in shock book

The White House press secretary most known for defending President George Bush on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and a host of other controversies has produced a shock memoir damning his old boss on nearly every level.

In the first major insider account of the Bush White House, one-time spokesman Scott McClellan lets fly, accusing Mr Bush of too much secrecy, a less-than-honest selling of the Iraq war, to a lack of personal candour and an unwillingness to admit mistakes.

In his book, 'What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception', Mr McClellan calls the White House operation “insular, secretive and combative” and says those characteristics made it veer irretrievably off-course.

The White House responded angrily, saying the book was self-serving sour grapes.

“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to Mr McClellan. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”

Ms Perino said Mr Bush was “surprised” by the book but would have nothing to say about it. “He has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers,” she said.

Mr McClellan was White House press secretary from May 2003 to April 2006, the second of four so far in Mr Bush’s presidency.

He excludes himself from major involvement in some of what he calls the administration’s biggest blunders, but says: “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.”

In the book, Mr McClellan also criticises the media as “complicit enablers” for focusing more on “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war”.

Mr McClellan issues this disclaimer about Bush: “I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”

Nearly everything else he writes comes very close to making just that assertion, all the more stunning coming from someone who had been among the longest-serving of the band of loyalists who accompanied Mr Bush to Washington from Texas.

'The Iraq war was not necessary'

The heart of the book concerns Mr Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, which Mr McClellan says the president had made by early 2002, at least a full year before the invasion, if not even earlier.

“He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest,” Mr McClellan writes.

Mr McClellan says Mr 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”.

During the “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people”, Mr Bush and his team tried to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable, than they were”.

In Mr Bush’s second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, Mr 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”, or manufactured version of events.

All of this was a “serious strategic blunder” that sent Mr Bush’s presidency “terribly off course.”

“The Iraq war was not necessary,” Mr McClellan concludes.

Mr McClellan draws a portrait of Bush as possessing “personal charm, wit and enormous political skill”. He says early on, Mr Bush’s administration possessed “seeds of greatness”.

He also ticks off a long list of Mr Bush’s weaknesses: a penchant for self-deception if it “suits his needs at the moment”, “an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader” who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he has erred.

Mr McClellan also writes extensively about what he says is the Bush White House’s excessive focus on “the permanent campaign”.

“The Bush team imitated some of the worst qualities of the Clinton White House and even took them to new depths,” he writes.

Mr McClellan is most scathing on the topic of the administration’s embrace of secrecy.

“The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine,” he writes.

Three top Bush advisers come in for particularly harsh criticism.

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”.

Secretary of state Condoleezza 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 the considerations and potential consequences” of war.

And former Bush political guru Karl Rove “always struck me as the kind of person who would be willing, in the heat of battle, to push the envelope to the limit of what is permissible ethically or legally”.

McClellan explains his dramatic shift from defender to critic as a difficult act of personal contrition, in a way, to learn from his mistakes, be true to his Christian faith and become a better person.