Culture of Deception

A few pages later, McClellan puts it far more bluntly and damagingly. Bush was "a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistake -- too stubborn to change and grow." McClellan explains this in several ways. "One was his fear of appearing weak," he says. "A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure." Another "was the personal pain he would have suffered if he'd had to acknowledge that the war against Saddam may have been unnecessary." Bush "was not one to look back once a decision was made. Rather than suffer any sense of guilt and anguish, Bush chose not to go down the road of self-doubt or take on the difficult task of honest evaluation and reassessment." Yet "another motive for Bush to avoid acknowledging mistakes was his determination to win the political game at virtually any cost." Finally, "there was Bush's insistence on remaining true to his base. . . . As far as Bush and his advisers (especially Karl Rove) were concerned, being open and forthright in such circumstances was a recipe for trouble."

Exactly what McClellan's opinion was while all this was going on, as opposed to where he is now, is a bit difficult to figure. He was a loyalist with ties going back to Bush's years as governor of Texas. He had admired the bipartisanship of Bush's gubernatorial leadership and expected him to continue it as president; it seems to have taken him a while to realize that in Washington, as opposed to Austin, Bush had surrounded himself with advisers to whom "bipartisan" was an invective. Having at the time no reason to believe otherwise, he accepted the WMD claim on its face and participated in the "spin and evasion" with which the case for the war was presented, though whether he knew at the time it was spin and evasion is, again, unclear.

By and large, though, McClellan is, or appears to be, honest in claiming that his views changed over time and that the process gave him little pleasure. Again and again he says in so many words that if he'd known then what he knows now, he wouldn't have done what he did, and he is quick to blame himself rather than others for things he said that eventually proved misleading or unfounded. In his own self-portrait he comes across as a decent, principled, loyal and rather irresolute man for whom a resignation on principle would have been an unthinkably bold act of self-assertion.

Instead, he went quietly, pushed out two years ago by the new presidential chief of staff, Josh Bolten. He was loyal to the end, telling the president publicly that "it has been an extraordinary honor and privilege to have served you."

At last, though, he seems to have decided to be loyal to himself and the principles in which he insists he believes. This means that in what must now be a tiny circle of diehard Bushies he will be excoriated as a traitor, but mostly these complaints are likely to fall on deaf ears. George W. Bush, as the direct consequence of his own character and actions, is the most unpopular president in American history, and the campaign now beginning in earnest will in great measure be a referendum on him and his record. What McClellan reports in this book is part of that record, and doubtless we will hear more about it as the campaign progresses.

The Washington in which the next president will hold sway is depicted herein as "broken and dominated by partisan warfare and the culture of deception it spawns." McClellan is right about this, and in his final chapter he offers some sensible suggestions for changing the atmosphere.

Since the candidates have sought to minimize negative campaigning in the coming five months, perhaps the winner will be more open to bipartisanship, cooperation and compromise than were his predecessors, Bush and Bill Clinton alike. But the poison here built up over a long time, and it's not going to vanish overnight.

(Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.)