Ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is not only interesting in its own right, but because of a footnote it sparked when new author McClellan was interviewed by Meredith Viera on Today. What McClellan told Viera amounted to this: that President Bush authorized the leak of information about CIA covert operative Valerie Plame to the press. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is a federal crime.
McClellan recalled boarding Air Force One early in 2006, as a reporter screamed a question to the president: had the president authorized the Plame leak? "And I told the president that that's what the reporter was asking," McClellan told Viera. "And he said, 'Yeah, I did.' And I was kind of taken aback."
"Kind of taken aback" is an understatement compared to the language McClellan used in the book as he recalled his public claims that key administration officials had had nothing to do with the leak. "The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he wrote. "So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
"There was one problem. It was not true.
"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself." This week McClellan testifies before Congress about whether the vice president directed him to make "misleading public statements" about the Plame leak.
There's plenty of fault to find with McClellan; anyone who heard his stubborn evasions of press questions at that juncture knows it. But his book is important because he is a witness to the lying that held together the deep structure of the Bush presidency, lying that steered close to delusion; a Bush aide once told reporter Ron Suskind, 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' McClellan finally, if belatedly, jumped over that wall, and he adds his increment to the growing body of testimony about the "reality" behind it.
