Review of McClennon's Book

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html

By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Published: June 22, 2008
Although secrecy and loyalty have been bywords of the Bush White House, its officials have been improbably loose-lipped upon leaving office, particularly in the memoirs they have written. So far, there have been exposés from Paul O’Neill (Bush’s former Treasury secretary), Richard Clarke (his onetime counterterrorism czar), David Kuo (deputy director of the White House’s faith-based initiative), L. Paul Bremer III (the former top civilian in Iraq) and the foreign-policy hands John Bolton and Douglas J. Feith. Each of these books has been a record, to some extent, of disillusionment, and all have excited a good deal of attention. But perhaps none have had the force of “What Happened,” the new memoir by Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, which has zoomed to the top of the best-seller lists (including the Book Review’s) and brought fresh scrutiny to an administration that had been all but invisible during this election season.
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The book’s impact is all the more remarkable given how familiar its revelations are, whether it’s McClellan’s crushingly obvious remarks about the administration’s selling of the Iraq war, Bush’s contempt for the press or Vice President Dick Cheney’s penchant for secrecy. As Joshua Green wrote in The New York Observer, “For all the hype on cable news shows and blogs, ‘What Happened’ adds almost nothing of value to the historical record.”
What may, in fact, be most revealing about McClellan’s book is not what it discloses about the head of state, but what it says about the continuing devaluation of the political memoir as a literary form. Paradoxical though it may seem, even as these books have become more accusatory, they have also become less illuminating. While they were once useful and sometimes absorbing accounts of the inner workings of government at its highest levels, these books now tend to be exercises in apostasy, and their primary purpose seems to be to confer intellectual and moral independence, if not heroism, on their authors. “Forty years ago, publishers had a pretty high standard for who should write books,” the historian Michael Beschloss, who is based in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “There were fewer books published. You had better possess some literary ability.”
He has a point. The eulogistic memoirs of an earlier time were consequential, partly because their authors drew on their own notes and diaries, which very few officials dare to keep in the scandal- and subpoena-driven Washington of our time. Raw material of this kind enabled officials to wait before telling stories that still arrived with a sense of immediacy. Henry L. Stimson’s 1948 doorstop, “On Active Service in Peace and War,” published several years after he ended his tenure as secretary of war, drew copiously on Stimson’s personal papers. “A Thousand Days,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s retrospective account of the Kennedy White House, relied heavily on Schlesinger’s diaries. Dean Acheson’s masterly “Present at the Creation” was published in 1969, almost two decades after he left office. And the first volume of Henry Kissinger’s invaluable memoirs, “The White House Years,” did not appear until 1979, when he was well out of government.
How did we go from these cigar-and-brandy tomes — often intended to burnish the reputations of their authors and also those of the presidents they served — to sensationalistic trifles like “What Happened”?
One answer lies in a less well-known but equally important countertradition, the dyslogistic school of memoir written by former officials who present themselves as disillusioned innocents. A classic instance is Raymond Moley’s “After Seven Years,” published in 1939. Moley had been a charter member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust but grew disenchanted with what he saw as the president’s sharp turn to the left. Presaging Scott McClellan, Moley brooded histrionically about his employer’s failings: “To say that I was sick at heart over what was happening would be the epitome of understatement. I was also completely baffled. Was Roosevelt really ignorant of the implications of what he was doing?”
A later memoir of this kind is “The Ordeal of Power,” an insider account of the Eisenhower administration written by Emmet John Hughes, a presidential aide and top speechwriter. Hughes depicted his boss as a passive leader who had left the Republican Party in shambles. Like Moley’s memoir, Hughes’s was elegiac in tone and dealt solely in high politics, with no hint of personal innuendo. But Eisenhower was incensed, and the specter of the memoirist as turncoat worried his successor. John F. Kennedy “wondered who in his entourage was going to become the Emmet John Hughes,” Beschloss said.
The Reagan era brought something new, a flurry of score-settling memoirs published while the president was still in office. Alexander M. Haig Jr., forced out as secretary of state in 1982, led the way with “Caveat,” which blamed a clique led by the White House chief of staff, James Baker, for his downfall; labeled the White House as a “ghost ship”; and lamented that Reagan hadn’t hewed more closely to — what else? — Haig’s own advice. A more inflammatory memoir was “For the Record.” Its author, Donald Regan, the chief of staff in Reagan’s second term, described Nancy Reagan’s concern with her husband’s image and reported that she was in thrall to a San Francisco astrologer.
Most revealing of all was the budget director David Stockman’s book, “The Triumph of Politics,” with its complaint that Reagan “had no concrete plan to dislocate and traumatize the here-and-now of American society.” Bill Clinton’s presidency also yielded memoirs that cataloged their authors’ disappointments, most notably George Stephanopoulos’s “All Too Human.” Like Stockman, Stephanopoulos suggested that his boss was the flawed instrument of grand ideals: “I came to see how Clinton’s shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength.”
With the Bush administration, however, the memoir of aggrievement has emerged as a crowded genre. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Isaacson, the author of a biography of Kissinger and the president of the Aspen Institute, told me, the Bush team took office “trying to create complete control of the message as opposed to serving the truth. In the end, that message discipline exploded on them. Now everyone’s expressing their pent-up desire to go off message.”
Enter Scott McClellan, who was a small player, after all. He issued no orders, formulated no policy. He wasn’t even in the room when the big shots assembled, though he does report that after winning re-election in 2004, Bush declared at a staff celebration: “I especially want to thank Scott. I want to thank you for saying — nothing.”
In other words, McClellan wasn’t supposed to function as a press secretary, but to impersonate one. Still smarting, he has avenged himself by exercising the power of the powerless. He has gained the spotlight, if only for a few days, and at the same time has distanced himself from his former brethren. “What Happened” is the latest product of what Isaacson calls the “it-wasn’t-my-fault industry.” And that industry is unlikely to halt operations anytime soon: the former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is currently working on his memoirs.
Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”