WSJ has a good summary on the McClellan book too:
McClellan Book Blasts White House
By LOUISE RADNOFSKY
May 28, 2008; Page A12
WASHINGTON -- The White House took part in an "endless effort to manipulate public opinion to their advantage" in promoting the invasion of Iraq, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan declares in a new book.
Mr. McClellan says that he "unknowingly passed along false information" in his press briefings, including strong denials from Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby that they had no role in the outing of Central Intelligence Agency spy Valerie Plame.
He also claims that Messrs. Rove and Libby, who rarely spent time together, held a secret meeting behind closed doors as speculation mounted that they had conspired to reveal Ms. Plame's identity.
"People who worked with him and who defended him will be surprised to read this," said a Republican close to the White House. "He never raised any concerns when he worked at the White House. It looks like a desperate attempt to salvage his reputation by junking the one positive attribute people saw in him -- loyalty."
Mr. McClellan's autobiography, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," will be released next week, published by PublicAffairs. The Wall Street Journal obtained a copy on sale in a Washington book store Tuesday.
The former press secretary said he wanted to resign after three years of service in 2006 because he was so disappointed by the president's admission that he had authorized the leak of part of the National Intelligence Estimate, which described Iraq's efforts to secure uranium in Niger. He says that when he approached the president's new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, to discuss a departure, he was pushed to leave fast and felt Bolten was "ready to throw me to the wolves."
Mr. McClellan also says that he believes that if the president could have foreseen the cost of the Iraq war, "he would never have made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly today."
The president "had been deceived, and therefore unwittingly became involved in deceiving me" about the Plame scandal, Mr. McClellan writes. "But the top White House officials who knew the truth -- including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney -- allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie."
The White House "chose not to be open and forthright … but rather to buy time and sometimes even stonewall" to protect the president's re-election bid in 2004, Mr. McClellan says.
He describes the Republican administration as joining in Washington's "practice of shunning truth" and the press corps as "complicit enablers" in the run-up to the war.
Of Mr. Bush, Mr. McClellan writes, "sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment," adding that "to this day, the president seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for war and the driving motivation behind it." |
