Loyalty and Scott McClellan

David Frum has a good column up about how the virtue of loyalty became a devastating vice in the Bush White House. Excerpt:

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)

These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

There has been lots of huffing and puffing on the right about McClellan's disloyalty in publishing his new memoir. Funny how the right didn't find blind loyalty all that attractive when Bill Clinton's lackeys were practicing it. It all puts me in mind of this famous line from E.M. Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

I've always found that to be a wicked sentiment, though reading it in context of the essay in which it appeared slightly softens the impact. (If you don't care to read the whole essay, read into the extended entry for the particular passage in which this line appears; it'll give you enough). But only slightly. It doesn't seem to occur to Forster that this is the morality of the mafioso. Nor does it occur to him that a friend who is betraying his country is betraying their friendship as well.

Now, I certainly don't mean to draw an equivalence between Forster's immoral view and what G.W. Bush demanded of his inner circle. But the two aren't unrelated. I expect that my friends are as devoted to me as I am to them, but that devotion must never be unconditional. If they knew that I was committing a crime, or doing a great wrong, and would not repent or make restitution, I hope they would betray me for my own good. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the men and women I consider my closest friends are my friends because they love truth and goodness (as well as the Source of all truth and goodness) above all things. That is to say, I am most attracted to people who love righteousness.

But not righteousness alone, which can be hard and forbidding and inhuman. I'm talking about a kind of righteousness I associate with Christianity: a kind that tempers justice with mercy. Overall, though, I would not want a friend who loved me so much that he would go along with me, never peeping in protest, even when he thought I was seriously mistaken. Is that really loyalty? Is that really friendship? Can you really trust the judgment of a friend who is loyal to you personally over principle? I couldn't.

Scott McClellan has obviously been disloyal in writing this memoir, and those who say that his disloyalty is cheap because it cost him nothing have a point. I don't want to exonerate him for his deed. Nevertheless, the kind of loyalty the president demands and rewards is not virtue, it's the vice of servility. It has done neither the president nor the nation any good, and I'm not sure McClellan keeping quiet about it would have been a commendable path either. Basically, he's screwed either way. I agree with Peggy Noonan:

Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder.

...[T]hose damning him today would have damned him even more if he'd resigned on principle three years ago. They—and the administration—would have beaten him to a pulp, the former from rage, the latter as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk.

Which is why Frum's ironic conclusion is correct: Bush's disordered exaltation of blind loyalty created Scott McClellan.