McClellan stands by barnburner book

OLBERMANN:  That is what I found so useful at the beginning of the book was this context of why it was, not that just you all believed in this man, but why you believed in him.  What it was—you just explained it—that background, from seeing him in that sort of idealized, bipartisan role in Texas which he had not recreated—or certainly—there's a little time left in administration, but I'm not expecting some sort of great conversion, where he is going to be bipartisan president in the last few months.

But did you hold onto that belief to the very end?  IN that famous good bye scene, were you still thinking maybe he is suddenly going to turn into what he was in Texas, maybe my faith in him will be restored? 

Is that—was that the kind of rationalization that was at work there?

MCCLELLAN:  Well I don't think I held on to it until the end.  When we came in, we got some bipartisan achievements accomplished on tax cuts and on education reform, education reforms that I really believed in as part of his agenda. But by the time the Iraq war started to—well, I think it's critical that in a time of war, that you not only build bipartisan support going into it, but that you also maintain that support.

And to do that, you really have to embrace a high level of openness and forthrightness from the beginning.  Because when expectations turned out to be unmet or improperly set, it came back to haunt us.  And the president is not someone to willingly go and change course in terms of his thinking when it comes to, oh, we made a mistake on this front.

And so, I think that at the time I was there, I started realizing or started thinking that, well, maybe Washington can't be changed.  Maybe this is just the way it is and both parties share all the responsibility.

But no one shares more responsibility than the president of the United States to set the right tone and to change things, and no one has more of a bully pulpit to be able to do that.  But it requires embracing candor and honesty to a high degree, particularly in this transparent society that we live in.

And this White House was too secretive or has been too secretive, too compartmentalized, and you know, too willing to embrace the unsavory political tactics that are at the heart of the excesses of the permanent campaign.

OLBERMANN:  We'll continue with Scott McClellan on that issue, in part the great disillusion and the great question, why wasn't what was in this book written or spoken or shouted from the rooftops in, say, 2004?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OLBERMANN:  We continue with Scott McClellan's first primetime interview about his revelatory book, “What Happened.”  First, as preface more reaction today.  The former e-campaign director for President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, Mike Turk, e-mailed TheHuffingtonPost.com to say Scott McClellan is, quote, “getting savaged for saying what everyone knows to be true.”  Adding, “People had high hopes for President Bush to bring America together after his election and after the attacks on 9/11.  They felt disillusioned by the administration's adoption of the ‘win at all costs' partisan mentality in this town.  I think the bigger point of Scott's book comes from the lessons he learned while playing a part in the permanent campaign.  It's an exploration of how that mind-set can lead to some really bad choices.”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Turk appears to be the only former Bush appointee sticking up for Mr. McClellan.  Secretary of State Rice, while technically refusing to talk about the book itself, went on to take on its major premise, telling reporters in Sweden today, “You can't now transplant yourself into the present and say we should have known things that we in fact did not know in 2001, 2002, 2003.  The record on weapons of mass destruction was one that appeared to be very clear.”

Speaking of clear, the reaction from Mr. McClellan's former colleagues in the White House could not be more so.  His former boss, Ari Fleischer, initially slightly sympathetic,   saying today, quote, “Poor Scott.  Scott is about to borrow some friends for 24 hours on the political left, who will throw him out as soon as they are done with them, and he's burnt an awful lot of bridges to people who really always thought fondly and highly of him.”

As promised, Scott McClellan is back with me here in New York.

Those reactions.  Have there been worse?  Are you at risk?  Has it been worse than just nasty words?

MCCLELLAN:  Well, I think it's to be expected.  It certainly is a little surprising how personal some of the words have been, but the White House would prefer that I'm not out there talking openly and honestly about these very issues.

I felt it was very important to go back and reflect on this and openly address these issues, my time and experience at the White House and what I learned from it.  So that we hopefully can move beyond these partisan excesses that have existed over the last 15 years because of the permanent campaign mentality that exists in Washington, D.C.

OLBERMANN:  Have you been surprised that most of the criticism has been personal, as opposed to say, refuting facts that perhaps you got right and nobody wants to talk about that?

MCCLELLAN:  I have noticed that.  There are two things I would say with that.  One, some of the people that are making those comments are almost trying to judge the content of the book, judge me and my motivations for writing the book, and they haven't even read the book.

And the second, which you bring up, is that I haven't seen people refuting specific parts within the book.  Dan Bartlett earlier today, when he was doing an interview right after me or in between segments with me, said, well, we need to set the leak episode to the side.  And the other day, he said, well, I'm not going to talk about the Katrina part, because that's internal deliberations.  So I did find that very interesting.

OLBERMANN:  Crossing off 9/11 and Iraq, and that's pretty much the entire presidency, is it not?

MCCLELLAN:  There you go.

OLBERMANN:  Everybody else has reacted to this book.  Here's your chance.  You had rapped Richard Clarke when he came out just before the 2004 election for criticizing the president, and the question to him was, “why wait so long?”

Why didn't this epiphany, this kind of public version of the epiphany, as a book, as an admission, as testimony somewhere, why did it wait until now?  Why didn't it happen in some way in, you know, 2004, 2005?

MCCLELLAN:  Sure.  Well, some of the—you mentioned earlier, in one of those—one of those e-mail responses, the ones at the HuffingtonPost.  But I went into this very much believing that the president was somewhat committed to being a bipartisan leader and that he was going to reach across the aisle and that he was going to change the way things worked in Washington, D.C.  And I had hopes that he would be able to do that.

I was deputy press secretary during the buildup to the war.  Like a lot of Americans, I wasn't certain about the rush to war, that it was the right thing to do.  From a moral standpoint, I believe we should not be going to war unless it is absolutely necessary.  And we now know that it was not absolutely necessary with regards to Iraq.  It was not the grave and gathering danger that we portrayed it as.

But I also, like a lot of Americans, was in that post-9/11 mind-set and gave the president and his foreign policy team the benefit of the doubt.  They had been widely applauded for what we had accomplished in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in terms of going into Afghanistan and removing the Taliban, and some of the other steps that were taken.

So, you know, at that point in time, I was very much putting my trust in the president and his team, and what was being said.

As I left the White House, my last 10 months became a period of disillusionment, beginning with the Rove revelations that he had been involved in the leak episode, and ending with the revelation that the president authorized the secret leaking of the National Intelligence Estimate, or at least parts of it.  And so, I was becoming more disillusioned.

And then when I left the White House, I think I needed time to step back and take off that partisan hat and really reflect on this.  I wanted to think through, why did things get so badly off track?

And I did that.  I spent a good bit of time thinking about this, writing the book.  The book was actually supposed to be out a little bit sooner, but I wanted to make sure I got this right and that it reflected my views very clearly, and that they were accurately reflected throughout the book.

This book does.  These are very much the views that I hold today after looking back and reflecting on things and learning from it.

OLBERMANN:  All right.  But Karl Rove says and Dana Perino says and quotes the president as saying, oh, we never heard you express any of that stuff while you were here.  Dan Abrams made a pretty good point here on his show last night: Whistle-blowers or people who are not happy in an environment and see something wrong with it, may make an internal attempt to correct things, or maybe they won't.  But they don't usually stand there for 10 months batting their heads against the wall, saying I can make this better if I complain enough.

What would have happened to you if you had gone to somebody above you and said, “we are misleading the American public about,” you know, just fill in the blank—Iraq, Valerie Plame, even 9/11?  We're misleading—what would have happened to you and to the government?

MCCLELLAN:  Well, you know, it would have been interesting.  I don't know, since that didn't happen.  But there was not a lot—well, let me step back, I guess, a little bit, because—go back through some of that period again.

Again, I continued to believe in this president as we were going into war and the immediate aftermath, and when I took over as White House press secretary.  But if you go back and read one of chapters in the book, I talk about becoming White House press secretary, and I had some qualms.  I delayed the announcement, because I was concerned about whether or not I could do the job the way I wanted to do it.

I was coming in, in the middle of—or as we were gearing up for an election year—and I knew that no one wanted to change the way things were being done, that they wanted to continue—that position to continue basically operating the way it had been operating, and not getting too out front of the president and not making a lot of news and so forth.

So you know, I did have those qualms, but I made the decision that this was a unique opportunity and made the decision to go forward with it.

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