Scott McClellan, Live and Off the Reservation

It is a fact of political life: People are going to leave the Bush Administration, and some of them will write books. From the crew of rascals brought into the fold over the last few years, you might even expect them to put a human face on Bush and his pals, as they hadn't been around since Day One and maybe weren't so tightly knit and sworn to loyalty as the original gang was. That's why I was totally surprised to see that Scott McClellan throws Bush, Cheney, and Rove under the bus in his newest book, essentially blaming them for wrongdoing during the Valerie Plame debacle. That isn't usually how this works, is it?

McClellan's book is called WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington, and I have no doubt that McClellan can tell that story. The section in question involves a telling of the tale of Valerie Plame's status as a covert operative and McClellan's repeated denials of White House involves, his repeated assertions that Scooter Libby or Karl Rove had done nothing wrong. He says he now knows that this wasn't true, but that a cabal of Bush administration officials colluded to have him pass along the misinformation. But who were they?

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote. “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."

So it was everyone!

I suppose it is possible that everyone kept the truth from the kid, and that maybe he got the raw end of the deal. The Politico article suggests as much. Besides, being White House Press Secretary must seem like a pretty big job on a pretty big stage where, it is hoped, you can trust your superiors:

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: "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.”

But who knows? We may never know the whole truth, but books like this — in which tales we all probably thought we'd never hear are told — are likely to get more popular as people attempt to delineate what their own roles were in the administration for posterity.