Book tells White House secrets
If there were a Golden Rule of Washington politics, it would have to be phrased differently from the Biblical injunction. The prevailing ethos of our nation’s capital appears to be: “Do unto others before they get a chance to do unto you.”
Most Americans say they’re sickened by excess partisanship, but it’s not clear they really mean it. Many appear unwilling or unable to perform the simplest thought experiment: To wit, turn a political scandal inside-out. What would you be saying if the opposite party got caught playing the same dirty tricks? It’s the only way I know to see around partisan blinders.
Consider the Valerie Plame affair. What if the Clinton White House had deliberately blown a covert CIA agent’s cover to punish her husband for exposing a presidential falsehood that helped drive the nation to war? What if Vice President Gore’s chief of staff had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice? Would Clinton have survived to commute his sentence before being impeached, convicted and removed from office? Would Gore have escaped indictment?
That’s what made it so remarkable when former White House press secretary Scott McClellan briefly appeared to have spilled the beans about the Plame affair in his forthcoming book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”
Infamous for stonewalling and evasiveness, McClellan came clean: “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,” he wrote. “So I stood at the White House briefing room podium … for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. 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.”
For about 24 hours, Washington held its breath. Would McClellan actually tell us, in the classic Watergate formulation, what President Bush knew and when he knew it? Would he implicate Bush in the cover-up?
Back in the day, Bush had vowed this would never happen. “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” he declared on Sept. 30, 2003.
McClellan told reporters that anybody involved in leaking Plame’s covert identity would be fired. “There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention,” he insisted, “to suggest any White House involvement.”
At the time, White House apparatchiks, trusting Attorney General John Ashcroft to stifle the investigation, blithely lied. Ashcroft, however, proved more loyal to the law than his political party. He recused, leading to Fitzgerald’s appointment and setting the cat among the pigeons. Had President Bush not shamefully commuted Libby’s sentence, there’s no telling where evidence might have taken him.
But never mind. The day after Scottie’s bombshell, his publisher took it all back. “(Bush) told him something that wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true,” the man said. “The president told him what he thought to be the case.”
So here’s my question: How does Scottie know what Bush knew?
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.