» What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Best President EVER! I want him re-elected as VP with Palin!
Comment: George W Bush is by far the best president the United States has ever had. Yes, he even tops the accomplishments that his dad achieved in the few years he served. I love what Bush has done for the people of the USA, Iraq, and the world. Bush has helped the world out in so many ways. People are ungrateful to Bush's kindness and generosity.

Some reasons why President Bush is the best:

a. Our Economy is in the best shape its ever been!
b. Lower gas prices than we had 8 years ago
c. better health care system
d. more jobs/less unemployment
e. stabilizing peace in the Middle East


Twenty years from now he'll be hailed as one of the greatest presidents in history for sparking freedom in the middle east.

Thank you Bush!.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Repetitive, not really an insider's look at anything
Comment: I am pretty negative on the Bush administration, so I was interested to read an insider's perspective. "What Happened" was quite disappointing, however. While the book is billed as a look inside the Bush White House, it's really just an account of Scott's realization that Washington is a dirty place filled with people who play a dirty game. While that's true, it's hardly a red-line, front-page revelation worth spending a couple hundred pages developing.

It's also not particularly revelatory: you can tell that Scott wasn't really an insider, since little he speaks of hasn't been known publicly for a long, long time.

Finally, because Scott is really making only 2 or 3 main points (Washington is dirty; politics is often a zero-sum game; truth yields to selling an opinion), the book is VERY repetitive. Plain, uninteresting language doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read.

I commend his book inasmuch as it relieves his conscience, but I wouldn't ever read it again or recommend it to a friend.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Alternate Title: Not Much Happened-Not in This Book
Comment: Scott McClellan spends the first 100 pages of this 200 odd page book telling us about childhood, his powerful mom and his early political education. He assumes that he is an important enough historical figure that we really care know about his collegiate tennis career, etc, etc. These revelations are not why I read this book and I doubt it is why many others have chosen to either. He spends the next 100 pages saying virtually nothing that we don't already know if we have been following the news for the last eight years. From his key insider postion in a rermarkable White House in extraordinarilly remarkable times, Mr. McClellan has produced an totally unremarkable book. Upon completing it I could only recall one phrase that describes my overall level of dissatisfaction with Mr. McClellan's effort, "where's the beef". Sadly it is not in this book.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: What Happened: A Story About Scott McClellan
Comment: This book is more about Scott McClellan than George Bush. It is not a tell-all book, almost everything in this book was in the news and the wrong facts are told about. This book suffers from a great lack of brevity.
For example when Bush hired him he tells how they ate a sandwich and talked for 20 minutes without saying what they talked about. I would rather know what was said; I don't care about them eating a sandwich. On 9-11 it is mostly about him and how he had to ride back from Florida in car with 4 people who shared driving to get back sooner. What Bush did after leaving that classroom is not discussed.
I did not actually read the second half of this book.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: He Seems Sincere
Comment: I got interested in this book when I saw Scott McClellan on "Meet the Press" one morning. It was either Tim Russert's last or next-to-last show before he died suddenly.

I didn't know what to expect from Mr. McClellan, so I watched. I was amazed to see a guy that seemed to be expressing genuine regret to the American people for letting them down. It wasn't exactly his fault, but he does seem to blame himself to some degree. Anyway, I was intrigued by his sincerity--and not only that, but his apparent forthrightness and honesty.

So when I saw the book at the library, I picked it up, and got very interested after just a few pages--you know, the way you do when you read a thriller-type novel. I enjoyed the book for the following reasons:

-It's well written. Good writing is always enjoyable (to me, at least).

-It had "insider information." It was like having a window into the inner workings of the Bush administration.

-It was even-handed. It was not a Bush-bash, just an honest reckoning of what happened (thus the title). When Bush failed, he points that out. When Bush did something right, he points that out, too. That gave the book a sense of genuineness that I thought was one of the book's major strengths.

As for the subject matter, it seemed the main points of the book were these (among others):

-That Bush is not an intellectual leader (i.e. someone who thinks things through to the end) but someone who leads by conviction and gut instinct. McClellan says that Bush is plenty smart, but that's not the way he operates. He leads on a decision-making level, leaving his cabinet and advisers to actualize those conviction-based decisions--to make them work in the real world. One of McClellan's major criticisms of the Bush's top people (e.g. Rice and Powell) is that they didn't challenge Bush enough on some policy decisions. McClellan describes Bush's top echelon for the most part as a group of yes men (and yes women? yes people?).

-Bush was not forthright about the motives for starting the Iraq War. Bush was interested in Iraq long before 9/11. He holds a deep belief that everyone should be allowed to live in freedom, free from repressive regimes. McClellan quotes Bush talking about his desire to spread democracy in the world. But when the time came to invade Iraq, Bush connected it to WMDs, not his desire to spread democracy. On the surface, it looked like Bush wanted to invade Iraq because of WMDs, but deep down he really just wanted to spread democracy. McClellan faults Bush for this, because when Bush was running for office he said he would restore honor and dignity to the office, and change the way Washington worked. In McClellan's view, this lack of forthrightness on Bush's part went against what Bush had promised to do earlier, and so Bush failed to keep his word.

-McClellan, in his role as press secretary, was used by those above him to deceive the press. Bush had promised to fire whoever was involved, but did not. Again, McClellan faults Bush for not keeping his word to do so...but this is somewhat of a complicated, convoluted issue, so you are on you own on this one.

There are other points, but these seemed to me to be the main ones.

One thing occasionally bothered me: McClellan seems to psychoanalyze Bush to excess sometimes. It's good to try to provide a portrait of Bush's thinking and leadership style, but sometimes the psychoanalysis went a little far (seems to me, at least). However, I got the feeling that McClellan was doing this not only to explain it to the reader, but to try to figure it out for himself, and make sense of it all, so he could sleep at night.

---

More Reviews for What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception