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Almost nobody in the US has a good word to say for Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary turned critic. The right condemned the disloyalty of his memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs). The left complained that McClellan’s change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shook their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR’s and Eisenhower’s men took their secrets to their graves—why can’t today’s whippersnappers do the same?
Yet there is something sad and sympathetic about McClellan and his bitter, accusatory memoir. If you ever watched McClellan’s televised confrontations with the savage White House press corps, you probably thought: this is terrible! The man has no business being up there. He looks like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a gang of bullies.
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