I’ve just gotten Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened, and my most powerful impression is, McClellan is a good man. Humility, honesty and simple moral understanding radiate from every page. The defining moment for a reader is the episode in the late 80s at the University of Texas when young McClellan resigns the presidency of his fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon, of which his two older brothers were members, because of the hazing culture. It wasn’t a one-stepper. McClellan tried to uproot hazing. He took responsibility for a fraternity brother’s partial blinding in an incident under his watch. He tried to eliminate “hell week.” He challenged his alumni board to back him up. They said they were behind him, but they weren’t all the way. The hazing went on. Faced with a “social evil,” McClellan resigned. That’s all you need to know about him. That foreshadows his nobility in the Iraq war aftermath.
I don’t think I’ve ever read such a clear and simple analysis of the major players. George W. Bush is a smart guy but an instinctual leader, not a deep thinker. Cheney and Bush were very close, but Bush was the decider. Yet Bush was captive to other men’s ideas. We will never know Cheney’s whole agenda. Cheney may well have seen the war as an “opportunity to give America more influence over Iraq’s oil reserves.” It was Condi Rice’s job to protect Bush from the forcefulness of his “advisers.” She failed. Rice will do anything to maintain access, compromise any principle, never stand up for anything.
Advisers is the key word in McClellan’s book. The advisers who wanted to remake the Middle East as a democratic utopia got to Bush. McClellan describes the philosophy of “coercive democracy” that the neoconservatives in Wolfowitz’s train brought to the White House. He describes the refusal of the advisers to deal with the Israel/Palestine issue–in favor of knocking off Saddam. He uses the word “neoconservative” once or twice, but mostly the advisers are nameless. It is the great flaw of the book, and it exists for a simple reason: McClellan wasn’t privy to those advisers’ discussions. He doesn’t know just “what happened” there, who the players were. Scooter Libby pops up here and there, but he remains true to character: a cipher, in all the scary richness of that word.
Another achievement of McClellan’s book is his description of the compliant press. They should have been asking the tough and “liberal” questions of the Iraq war plans. They failed their job. I will quote specific passages later; though I think those comments have already been in the press. McClellan is pitiless and calm and clear. And he’s a man on the street. We’d all walk by him with no sense of his goodness. It’s amazing what a humble and unassuming package this man’s mental and moral gifts are wrapped in. He’s a Frank Capra character. When the time came to choose between his loyalty to a boss (let alone all the Texas connections) and his loyalty to his country, it was a no-brainer for McClellan. How many others would do what he has done? About zero.
McClellan was aided in putting this book out by the best of New York: the team at Public Affairs Books, Susan Weinberg and Peter Osnos. Osnos has written one of the most incisive analyses of Barack Obama to appear anywhere (I’m biased: Weinberg stood by me throughout the production of a book on a coverup of a murder by the Peace Corps). Osnos knows how our politics are corrupted. I think the next book he and McClellan should work on is obvious. They should expose who those advisers were and how their ideas came into the Bush Administration, in the non-eggheaded manner that McClellan perfects here. McClellan says that when a controversy breaks out in Washington, “the hungry media beast” doesn’t stop feeding till all the facts are out. Well, this has not happened in the life of the neoconservatives, notwithstanding McClellan’s book, or Jacob Heilbrunn’s, or Walt and Mearsheimer’s. Where is the investigative reporting? Where is the outrage? Where is the angry feast?
Again I raise the question that I raised the other day. In the 3 years before George Bush took office, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the third-richest man in America, gave the Republican National State Elections Committee $300,000, the last tranche of it, $100,000, the very day after Al Gore conceded and George Bush declared victory in December 2000. At that same time, the untransparent Doug Feith tells us, feelers went out to him, a true nobody, to become Under Secretary of Defense. Well, as Connie Bruck reported, Adelson was behind the group One Jerusalem, which was founded in the runup to Camp David in 2000–to make sure that Jerusalem stays under Israeli rule. Wikipedia says that Feith was one of the founders of One Jerusalem. The next thing you know he’s got a big job in the Bush Administration, and his feverish ideas become George Bush’s. What is going on here? Scott McClellan is the guy who can root this out and speak about this honestly.
