How Scott Got Hot

In an interview three years ago, when he was waging daily warfare against the White House press corps, Scott McClellan told me: "The media's trying to get under our skin and get us off-message."

Now it's McClellan who's gone way off-message -- and been embraced by some of his liberal media detractors, even as he is denigrated by his onetime conservative allies.

In writing a book that castigates the man he so loyally served, the former presidential press secretary is following a well-worn tell-all path, made surprising mainly because of his reputation as an unyielding George W. Bush loyalist. The media love turncoats, if only to chronicle the teeth-gnashing among the defector's old pals.

Indeed, the White House called McClellan "disgruntled," Matt Drudge branded him a "snitch," and National Review Online ran six pieces on Friday trashing him as "pasty," "maladroit," "plodding" and "shameful." Liberal pundits aren't exactly kind -- "Where's the apology?" demanded David Corn of Mother Jones -- but many have welcomed McClellan as a belated truth-teller. After all, McClellan's portrait of Bush as an inflexible, isolated leader who misled the nation into an unnecessary war matches what the left has been saying all along.

McClellan granted his first cable news interview last week to Bush-bashing MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, while Bill O'Reilly accused the ex-spokesman of initially blowing off his Fox program in favor of "far-left venues." Olbermann hailed the book, "What Happened," as "a primary document of American history" that contained "poetry." Talk about role reversal: It was Olbermann who said in 2005 that "whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about 'media credibility,' I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times." (Gannon, a conservative blogger with an X-rated past, now says "Scott McClellan's credibility is zero.")

McClellan wrote the book, says historian Michael Beschloss, knowing that "the president's opponents will pick it up and use it very zealously." And that is a tradition as old as the republic.

After George Washington fired his second secretary of state, Edmund Randolph, Beschloss says, Randolph published an anti-Washington pamphlet, but the president "was so popular that it made Randolph even more of a pariah." FDR speechwriter Raymond Moley quit and published a book attacking the New Deal.

More recently, David Stockman and Donald Regan wrote critical books about Ronald Reagan, and George Stephanopoulos and Robert Reich did so about Bill Clinton, while the presidents were still in office.

Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official who published "War and Decision" in April, says his book, while acknowledging serious problems with the Iraq planning, is "very analytical" and basically supportive of Bush. He says he has been "punished" by having major book review publications ignore the work. "It seems journalists are more interested in vitriol than substance," Feith says.

In "What Happened," McClellan is walking away not just from the president but from his own words. Asked days after Hurricane Katrina about the charge that Bush was in denial about the rescue effort, McClellan said: "You all are well aware of how engaged this president is in the response efforts and making sure that we're meeting the immediate needs."

In his book, McClellan says that after Katrina the White House "spent most of the first week in a state of denial."

What changed? McClellan says his views evolved during the writing process. Did he have a sudden attack of conscience over having been a fount of misleading information? Or did he conclude that a book defending his longtime political patron would not sell?