once trusted and admired. McClellan became an eleventh-
hour convert to candor, with all the convert’s zealous commit-
ment to his new faith. He didn’t just praise candor and
transparency. In his book he argued that the White House
needed a new post, a deputy chief of staff in charge of candor
whose job would be to “make sure the president is open, forth-
right and working to transcend partisanship and achieve unity.”
In McClellan’s plan the new deputy chief would have three as-
sistants, including one whose sole mission was to promote and
protect transparency. His or her responsibilities would include
ensuring that information was classified for reasons that served
the national interest, not simply “to protect the administration
from revelations that are merely embarrassing or politically
inconvenient.”
Volumes will eventually be written on why and how the
Bush presidency failed. But even now, it is important to scruti-
nize the former president, not to demonize him, but to learn
from his negative example—to extract key lessons in how not
to lead. One of Bush’s major failings, I believe, was his over-
riding commitment to an ideology rather than to principled
pragmatism. In foreign affairs, for example, Bush acted in the
fervently held belief that democracy is universally desired and
desirable and will ultimately triumph. That ideology proved
particularly ill-adapted to the realities of the Middle East. Elec-
tions in Iraq resulted in a Shia government at odds with the
country’s once-powerful Sunni minority and our Sunni allies in
the Middle East. Free elections in Gaza empowered Hamas, an
anti-Western terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of
Israel, our closest Middle Eastern ally. And, because of the
administration’s ideological disdain for government itself, one
of the most destructive forces at work during the Bush years
Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition