| WHAT HAPPENED Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception Scott McClellan New York: PublicAffairs, 2008 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-58648-556-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 ? | 341p. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
| Page 33: | "Texas had been a one-party state for more than one hundred years, since the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War." |
| What does this mean, exactly? No Republican Party in Texas all that time, because Lincoln was a Republican? |
| Page 65: | Listing a series of scandals in previous administrations, McClellan writes: "...and the elder Bush's involvement in Iran-Contra (in the loop or out of the loop)..." |
| It seems absurd to call Bush 41 involved if he was out of the loop, since he was not president at the time: not the man on whose desk the buck stops. |
| Page 68: | "But conservatives were left fuming and would not forget the underhanded way the liberals brought Bork down, even coining a new verb for the vicious attack strategy, 'borking'." |
| Wrong punctuation mark: S/B "strategy: 'borking' ". |
| Page 69: | "...all fueled by two factors: the White House's lack of candor and honesty and the partisan determination to destroy political enemies, no matter what the cost!" |
| The exclamation point is wrong here: S/B "no matter what the cost." |
| Page 78: | "The Office of Public Liaison worked closely with key constituencies and public interest groups, from trade associations like the chamber of commerce to groups like national Right to Life to African American leaders and organizations." |
| Capitalization: S/B "the Chamber of Commerce". (I assume this means the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.) Also, S/B "African-American". |
| Page 78: | "Sometimes its job was to neutralize a group, attempting to dissuade an influential organization from openly opposing an initiative that might cause consternation to its members." |
| Wait, what? The White House Office of Public Liaison was supposed to stop organizations from helping their members? |
| Page 80: | "If he did, they knew, his base would see him as weak and begin to fracture. Under this base strategy, compromising on an acceptable outcome that Democratic and Republican leaders could support was essentially out of the question and never seriously contemplated." |
| I wonder if Scott is aware of the pun in this pair of sentences. |
| Page 101: | "I joined the other staff in the hold. Moments later, the president entered and saw the burning towers on the television set." |
| How many moments later, Scott? |
| Page 115: | "To us, the disingenuous way Democratic leaders rushed to create a damning story line about the president and his administration crossed a line." |
| Much like the bogus story about Clintonistas trashing the White House, isn't it? With one difference: The president's national security staff really were given a memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike within U.S." and they did refuse to act on this and similar warnings before 9/11. |
| Page 125: | "And the public is generally inclined to believe what the White House says, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt until the watchdog media proves it is unreliable." |
| Number error: S/B "media prove". |
| Page 133: | "And that is the spirit in which the Bush administration approached the campaign for war. The goal was to win the debate..." |
| This compares the president to an attorney in a criminal trial. But the president is not a prosecutor or a defense attorney; his role is to balance competing priorities, taking all the facts into account. |
| Page 134: | "Over that summer of 2002, Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. As far as I know, no one objected to the plan; it had consensus support from the president's foreign policy team and senior advisors." |
| Perhaps Paul O'Neill was gone by this time. |
| Pages 157-8: | "In today's information-based society, if a media outlet or journalist goes overboard they will pay the price. I witnessed close up just how that can happen when some within CBS News let their preconceived biases infect their coverage..." |
| And, um, Fox News? |
| Page 168: | "But the Wilson article, coupled with persistent questioning from the press that morning, would cause the White House to admit a serious mistake—something rare in any administration, and possibly more so under President Bush." |
| Possibly, Hans? "I'd say quite possibly, Franz." |
| Page 203: | "Risk averse by nature, the president hesitated to call on reporters he did not recognize..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "Risk-averse by nature". |
| Page 222: | "I remember one email I'd handed over from a friend of my personal assistant, Carmen Ingwell. Carmen's friend had attended a class or lecture event at a California university a few years earlier featuring Joe Wilson, during which, she said, Wilson had mentioned that his wife worked for the CIA. I had no idea if the story was true or not." |
| If true, it should have been trumpeted by Wilson's detractors. But it still wouldn't nullify the blame due the leakers. |
| Page 233: | "The grim diagnosis left all of us in the upper echelons of Bush World feeling anxious." |
| This is the first and only mention of the term "Bush World." Since the previous sentence mentions Matthew Dowd, could this be an inadvertent reference to the title of Maureen Dowd's 2004 book Bushworld? (I have no idea if they're even related. But the last-name match could be enough to trigger the association.) |
| Page 237: | "The conversation turned to Iraq. 'Iraq is foremost in our mind,' Secretary Powell said of the State Department." |
| Did Powell say "our mind" or "our minds"? |
| Page 243: | "As for me, I think he [Powell] exemplified what it means to be a team player. He looked out for the interests of the man he served, as well as the country to whom both had sworn allegiance, with great care and wisdom. It was a mistake not to find a way to keep him around." |
| But this was impossible given the presence of Cheney and Rumsfeld — as McClellan should have known at the time. And... the country "to whom" they swore allegiance? |
| Page 243: | "Few performed better under the spotlight, glossing over mistakes with her effortless eloquence and understated flair." |
| Add this to the list of oxymorons like "jumbo shrimp." |
| Page 251: | "But it didn't jibe with the self-image of an administration supposedly focused on accountability results..." |
| Missing word: S/B "accountability and results" or "accountability for results". |
| Page 271: | "The sheer size of Hurricane Katrina's reach and destructive power, covering more than 90,000 square miles, was difficult to imagine." |
| Number error: S/B "were difficult to imagine". |
| Page 307: | "Neither man ever sought to correct the record when he could have. Instead he let my words stand for two years." |
| Number error: S/B "they let my words" |
| Pages 327-341: | The index has some holes in it. |
| Two names not listed are General Jay Garner, original head of occupied Iraq, and Paul O'Neill, first treasury secretary of the Bush 43 administration. But Viet Dinh is listed, solely because (with Michael Chertoff) he wrote the Patriot Act. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.