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Saturday 22 November 2008

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

And McClellan is clearly not yet comfortable in his new role as a Bush critic. When I met him in London this week at the offices of APCO, a PR and consulting firm where he now sits on the advisory council, he sounded at times like a deprogrammed cult member. He makes frequent references to those still ‘on the inside’ and was also visibly nervous, staring down at his fidgeting hands as we talked.

At first blush, McClellan’s critique of the Bush administration sounds bizarre, especially coming from someone who served in it at a senior level. He admonishes it for fighting a war that didn’t have to be fought, for not being straight with the American public, and for operating as a political campaign not a government. McClellan sounds rather like an American Captain Renault: ‘I am shocked, shocked to find politics going on in the White House.’ But McClellan is in earnest. He has, as they say in the world of personal development, gone on a journey. As he puts it, ‘The core question I began with is how did this popular bipartisan governor of Texas become one of the most controversial and polarising presidents in modern history, why did that happen? Initially I wanted to put the responsibility elsewhere but the responsibility rests with this President.’

McClellan’s change of heart began ten months before he left the White House when he, and everyone else, discovered that Karl Rove, the ‘architect’ of Bush’s re-election, and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had lied to him and had him lie to the press about their involvement in the Plame affair. (Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, was outed after her husband Joe Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed claiming that the administration had knowingly misled the public about Saddam Hussein’s attempts to procure uranium from Niger. After a protracted investigation by an independent counsel, Scooter Libby was prosecuted and convicted of perjury.) That neither Rove nor Libby was disciplined internally for this demonstrated where McClellan came in the White House pecking order: he was not some Alastair Campbell-style powerful press officer, but the man sent out to bear the brunt of the press’s attacks.

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