As has been widely noted, critics of Scott McClellan’s new memoir, “What Happened,” are trashing the book’s author, not his writing, because they can’t dispute his accuracy. Karl Rove hurled a particularly nasty epithet at Scott. He compared him to a “liberal blogger.” Harsh.
After his book was released, Stephanopoulos was called “turncoat,” “backstabber,” “ingrate,” “a self-absorbed opportunist” and even “shorty.”
This was predictable. Bush supporters can’t refute McClellan’s claims about the propaganda campaign before the Iraq invasion, the conspiracy to leak information about a covert CIA anti-WMD program and the rest, so all they’ve got left is killing the messenger.

There is a deja vu aspect to this story. In 1999, a former senior White House official was lambasted for publishing a tell-all while his former boss was still in office.The book was “All Too Human: A Political Education,” and the official was George Stephanopoulos, a former campaign adviser, spokesman and aide to Bill Clinton, and who is now the host of ABC News’ Sunday political hour. The external circumstances are so similar the names of the writers and their bosses are practically interchangeable.
Writing then for Time Magazine, Margaret Carlson (now at Bloomberg) described the criticism Stephanopoulos was encountering:

In a nonstop round of interviews, George has been hit with scathing criticism. On NBC, Katie Couric asked him how it felt to be called a “turncoat” whose take on the President was “kind of creepy.” Over at CBS, Mark McEwen said the author was being called a “backstabber” and an “ingrate.” On CNN former Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald noted that if the President hadn’t given George the “opportunity of a lifetime,” George might still be a Capitol Hill aide, not a “multimillion-dollar book writer and commentator” (inside the White House make that “commentraitor”). And James Carville says Washington has become The Truman Show, broadcasting Clinton’s private life in something approaching real time.

Even George, at one time, wouldn’t have approved of George. Commenting on Dick Morris’ memoirs, George said, “You have a responsibility not to embarrass the President. It hurts the country. It’s just stupidity and weakness.”

From the book, Carlson mentioned this interesting insight into the Clintons’ relationship:

We get a behind-the-scenes look at Hillary feeding Clinton honey-soaked lemon wedges but then the usual, albeit accurate, picture of a paranoid First Lady, responsible for many of the early mistakes. George doesn’t like it that she didn’t trust him. Of course, she may have had good reason, since George goes on to disclose that Whitewater made her cry. Ouch.

Here’s a snippet that has probably come back to bite Jake Tapper on the ass. He was then a freshly minted young writer at Salon.com but is now Stephanopoulos’ colleague at ABC News:

Another revealing tic is his fixation on the stature of others — the “little” Ross Perot, the “short” Klein, the “small” Dick Morris. I’ve seen Stephanopoulos in the gym, and he has no business pointing out the homunculoid status of others. And his attempts to settle scores by lambasting the back-stabbing loathsomeness of Morris, former Rep. Dave McCurdy, Al Gore and Leon Panetta are really calling the kettle black. Nice try, shorty.

And:

As opportunistic, exploitative and phony as Clinton can be at his lip-biting, tear-faking worst, at least he’s managed to enact some effective policies. Stephanopoulos is just trying to make money.

Oh for the days when the administration was good at both governing the country and smearing its political enemies.
Here’s what USA Today had to say:

Stephanopoulos defines the two most stressful events in his work with the Clintons as the publication of Bob Woodward’s The Agenda and his clashes with presidential advisor Dick Morris.

The Clintons considered Woodward’s book an indictment of Bill Clinton’s presidency and Stephanopoulos a traitor for having given the author information. Woodward quoted Stephanopoulos several times, and many of the statements Woodward included also appear in All Too Human. On “60 Minutes,” Woodward described the Clinton Administration as “chaos, absolute chaos,” and the book was marketed as “the most persuasive proof yet that Clinton was an undisciplined and indecisive president leading an inexperienced, out-of-control White House.”

It was not Morris, but his ideas that Stephanopoulos objected to. Morris was bringing chaos to the White House, wreaking havoc with Clinton’s domestic policy, and suggesting potentially dangerous national security measures. However, Clinton wanted Morris to be his strategist and it was clear that, if Stephanopoulos objected, he could leave…

The book reveals inside stories about almost everyone with whom Stephanopoulos worked. Readers learn that Clinton was always calculating, playing the angles, figuring the outs, and incorporating loopholes. Clinton’s biorhythms were timed to election cycles, knowing when to push and when to pull back. The First Lady did not always like or trust the author. However, at times they bonded, and when Stephanopoulos left the White House, she put her hands on his shoulders and told him that she loved him.

By 1996, damage control, “a cottage industry in the White House,” convinced Stephanopoulos that politics had degenerated into cold-blooded business in which Clinton maneuvered via contradictions. Although Stephanopoulos had survived failure, scandal, and internal exile, he chose to leave.

And from Business Week:

The high-energy, supercompetitive, and ultra-dedicated hotshots who wind up working at the side of a U.S. President can be divided into two camps. There are the ideological zealots and romantic dreamers who see a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape society to reflect their moral code. Sure, they love the perks and prestige, but results are what count. Then there are the self-absorbed opportunists who claim to be driven by a call to public duty. But they spend most of their time grabbing for that golden ticket to fame and fortune.

George Stephanopoulos, who once was President Clinton’s closest personal aide, is one of the opportunists. Any doubts about that are swept away by his new memoir, All Too Human, a firsthand account of a not-very-pleasant life inside the Clinton White House. Perhaps the book should be renamed All Too Ambitious, for Stephanopoulos reveals himself to be a craven politico who continually puts winning–and an obsessive need to be Clinton’s indispensable assistant–above principle and self-respect. This onetime altar boy, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, is aware of the trade-off, and he struggles with it: ”I wanted to do good and do well.” But the raw ambition, which he describes as one of the ”pistons of my character,” always wins out.

That could explain what motivated the betrayal by a devoted loyalist who was a political nobody until his association with Clinton. When a book publisher dangled a seven-figure contract for a juicy insider’s account, Stephanopoulos grabbed it. At the same time, he was signing a fat contract to be a commentator for ABC, a network he had once battled ferociously over its coverage of the President.

Is it an honest and revealing book? In many respects, yes–though not in the way that Stephanopoulos may have intended. He is far more insightful about the workings of the White House staff than about Bill and Hillary Clinton. There are a number of voyeuristic anecdotes sure to embarrass the first couple: Hillary breaking down and crying during a Whitewater strategy session; Clinton shouting obscenities over the phone at Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who was the make-or-break vote for the 1993 budget package; the President’s fretting about a possible 1996 White House bid by General Colin L. Powell.

And:

The truth is, George Stephanopoulos used Bill Clinton to advance his career just as much as Clinton used him for political gain. That’s what too often passes for loyalty and public service these days. Little wonder the voters are so disgusted.

Brings back memories, doesn’t it? Oh for the days when the administration was good at both governing the country and smearing its political enemies.

Not surprisingly, relations between Stephanopoulos and the Clintons were icy after “All Too Human” was published. There was no contact between them until George bumped into Bill in New York in 2002:

For the first time in five years — since one moved to New York and wrote a scorching memoir about working for the other — George Stephanopoulos and his former boss, Bill Clinton, shook hands yesterday.

The encounter was a coincidence. Both had lunch dates in the same restaurant, Michael’s, on West 55th Street. Once so close that they could finish each other’s sentences, they had not seen each other in person since 1997. In recent years, other former White House aides say, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Stephanopoulos had been known to worry about bumping into each other around New York.

As word of the handshake circulated yesterday, another former Clinton aide went so far as to say, ”It has the flavor of the return of the prodigal son.”

Maybe, maybe not. Mr. Stephanopoulos was on the way to the men’s room when he stopped at the table where Mr. Clinton was having lunch with Robin Williams; Billy Crystal; Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas; Diane Sawyer; and the host, Joe Armstrong, an adviser to ABC News and a former publisher of New York and Rolling Stone. Mr. Clinton did not rise to shake Mr. Stephanopoulos’s hand as they exchanged hellos. But a spokeswoman for the former president said later, ”He was glad to see him.”

In his memoir, “My Life,” Bill Clinton apologized to Stephanopoulos for the unnecessary stress he caused. But if there has been any further rapprochement between Stephanopoulos and the Clintons since, it has not been widely reported.

Given this history, charges in the Obamasphere last month that Stephanopoulos was in the bag for Hillary Clinton when he moderated the ABC News debate in Philadelphia would appear to be unfounded. The debate — which focused on Obama’s relationships with the controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the retired terrorist, William Ayres, instead of issues like, say, the economy and the occupation of Iraq — was egregious. But Obama was the frontrunner, and frontrunners usually take the heat, even when it is misguided.

By publishing his memoirl in 1999, Stephanopoulos simultaneously jumped the fence between politics and the media and — to mix metaphors — burned the bridge behind him. He had to sever ties to his political life before he could don the cloak of journalistic objectivity.

Scott McClellan faces a bigger challenge. Bill Clinton, left office with a strong record on the economy and national security, and a popularity rating in the 60s. McClellan’s former boss will likely leave office what he is now, the Worst President Ever.

To distance himself from George Bush, Scott McClellan may need to go a step farther than Stephanopoulos and follow in the footsteps of John Dean, who distanced himself from Richard Nixon, not with a tell-all book, but by telling all under oath.