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

‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked on the presidential campaign and then moved to the White House where he rose to become White House press secretary, the public face of the administration. But with the publication of his memoirs he has broken spectacularly with his old boss.

The title of Scott McClellan’s book tells you where he is coming from: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Back in 2006 when he left the White House, you would have got very long odds on McClellan writing a book like this. Although he was rather bundled out of his job — the new White House chief of staff had decided that McClellan was not a good enough communicator for the role — his leaving ceremony was emotional, full of heartfelt promises by Bush that the two men would pick things up back in Texas.

So, Washington is asking what happened to McClellan. The only one of Bush’s Texas praetorians to have previously broken ranks was Matt Dowd, the chief strategist of Bush’s re-election campaign. But in Dowd’s case there appeared to be a simple explanation, one of his children had died, he had got divorced and his son was soon to deploy to Iraq: enough to make anyone rethink his life. In McClellan’s case there is no such obvious spur. Money can be ruled out as a motivation; McClellan received a modest advance for the book and went with a rather niche publisher — he certainly could have got far more if cash had been his incentive.