McClellan book moves beyond typical tell-all (AP)

"What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" (PublicAffairs, 323 pages, $27.95), by Scott McClellan: The authorized spokespeople for George W. Bush who have written books generally put on paper what they had said endlessly from the lectern. These books stuck militantly to talking points about what a judicious, strong, honest leader Bush was.

When Ari Fleischer, Bush's first White House press secretary, wrote his memoir in 2005, one reviewer yawned: "Ari Fleischer: Still saying nothing after all these years." Now comes Scott McClellan's book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

McClellan has burned the talking points -- and his bridges -- in writing this book, and the results are a more sophisticated assessment than most anything his former colleagues turned out.

"What Happened" provides a telling and unflattering glimpse of Bush and his White House, also makes an important commentary on Washington's poisonous political climate -- one that Bush promised to change, but did not, McClellan writes.

In the days after the release of this book, attention focused on incendiary charges leveled by a consummate Bush insider: Bush has a penchant for self-deception if it "suits his needs at the moment"; the Bush administration orchestrated a "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people," trying to make the "WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were"; Bush's "credibility, with Americans and people around the world, has been damaged by his refusal to talk honestly about his war and its costs."

Not surprisingly, Bush's defenders hit back, calling McClellan disgruntled, whispering that he had hired a ghostwriter (he denied it) or that he had otherwise come under the spell of some ... liberal. How else could he betray the president who had made him? The counterassault raised doubts about the veracity of the charges against the president. Bush's opponents, meanwhile, asked why he didn't speak out while he had sway inside the White House.

I covered the Bush White House for four years, working closely with McClellan, and was thunderstruck to read such charges coming from this company man. Yet I could also relate to how his views evolved, and while I can't get inside his head, my personal experience tells me such changes of heart are plausible.

It would be impossible for a reader to block out questions of authenticity and motive, for they go to McClellan's credibility -- but only up to a point. The broader observations about Washington still represent opinion, but would seem to fall outside suspicions of petty vindictiveness. These observations also give the book a heft that moves it beyond the typical tell-all.

Washington, he writes, "has become a breeding ground for deception and a killing field for truth."

Stitched together with McClellan's astonishing critique of a sitting president, it is an ambitious undertaking, and it works, even as McClellan swaps perspectives within the narrative. At times, he is the insider, drilling a peephole into a famously secretive White House. At times, he plays the journalist, offering evenhanded criticism of both political parties. At times, he is the political scientist, diagnosing the capital's ills and prescribing tough medicine to fix them.

These ills are not new, and wizened Washingtonians are apt to call McClellan naive for thinking Bush and his team could clean the town up.

But McClellan's very journey from wide-eyed Texan to embittered political casualty is what makes it so accessible to regular readers.

Journalist Sydney Blumenthal wrote "The Permanent Campaign" in 1980, and McClellan makes liberal use of the term (even giving a chapter that name) and the concept. He credits a 2000 book called "The Permanent Campaign and Its Future," which warned of "a nonstop process of seeking to manipulate sources of public approval to engage in the act of governing itself."

No one in the Bush White House, including McClellan, read the book, he writes.

If the syndrome that McClellan describes infects the next administration, there will be approximately one hour between the time when the new staff unpacks its boxes and when it begins plotting its re-election campaign.

One hopes that someone, somewhere in that incoming government reads this book.

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Editors note: Scott Lindlaw covered the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency for The Associated Press.