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What Happened:
Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception
by Scott McClellan
PublicAffairs Books
Hardcover, $27.95
358 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58648-556-6
Book Review by Kam Williams
“How did we screw up so badly? The problem wasn’t lack
of information. The potential seriousness of the storm had been clearly
conveyed to us in advance by Max Mayfield, the director of the National
Hurricane Center… The President appeared detached and powerless, unable
even to comprehend how he might use the government to help his own
people...
It was a failure of imagination and initiative. And when the storm hit
and the damage proved worse than anyone expected, our inability to
adjust bespoke a failure of responsibility…
Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to
define Bush’s second term… The incompetence and blindness exhibited in
the response to Katrina would soon become the lens through which many
Americans… would come to view Bush and his administration’s management
of post-Saddam Iraq.”
Excerpted from Chapter 15, “Out of Touch” (pages 279-291)
 Scott
McClellan served under George Bush for seven years, starting out as his
Traveling Press Secretary in 1999 until he was appointed Deputy Press
Secretary soon after the 2000 presidential election. In 2003, he was
promoted to White House Press Secretary, a position which made him part
of the inner circle comprised of infamous characters like Karl Rove,
Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Andy Card, Scooter Libby and Condoleezza
Rice, and thus privy to the shady and deceitful shenanigans going on
inside the Administration.
And as Bush’s primary mouthpiece, it fell to McClellan to address the
media daily and to put the best possible spin on the series of scandals,
cover-ups and failings which would unfold, events including but not
limited to the War in Iraq, the outing of CIA Agent Valerie Plame and
the government’s woeful response to Hurricane Katrina. But because he
had come to politics more as an idealistic, compassionate Conservative
than a power-hungry neo-con, it was not long before he found himself at
odds with superiors who expected him to manipulate the public with
bald-faced lies.
To this casual observer, McClellan never really looked comfortable up at
the podium while being besieged with prodding questions from the White
House press corps. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised when he resigned from
the job prematurely in the Spring of 2006.
What is amazing is that he would be so consumed with guilt about the
pivotal role he played in advancing the Administration’s toxic, top
secret agenda that he would come clean in a tell-all book even before
his former boss had a chance to leave office. What Happened is a
revealing memoir which names names and indicts a plethora of Republican
insiders with impunity, pretty much confirming all the worst suspicions
that the most rabid left-wingers have long been speculating about but
without any proof.
Now we know definitively. Yes, the White House deliberately lied about
why we were going to war in Iraq, blew Valerie Plame’s cover and simply
sat on its hands in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While most political
pundits have been quick to label Scott McClellan a traitor for
publishing such a damning expose’, history will undoubtedly deem him a
patriot who in the wake of a crisis of conscience rightly opted to put
his country ahead of partisan politics.
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Lloyd Kam Williams
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 Lloyd
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who
writes for 100+ publications around the U.S. and Canada. He is a member of
the African-American Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics
Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee, and Rotten Tomatoes. In
addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from
Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam
lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
IMDiversity.com is committed to presenting diverse points of view.
However, the viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of
the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or
employees at IMD.
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