President Bush, left, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, center, and White House press secretary Scott McClellan, walk into the White House, on the day in April 2006 that Rove gave up his policy role in the administration and McClellan resigned.

AP / RON EDMONDS

I can appreciate tell-all books by former public officials.

I like learning things.

What bothers me is that the authors tell all now. Why didn’t they tell all when they were in power? Why did they stay on and do things — or enable others to do things — they now bemoan?

The questions are prompted by former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan’s best seller, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

I have mixed views. But I’ve also spoken with two veteran Rhode Island press secretaries appalled that a book like this would be written in the first place: Lisa Pelosi, who worked for former Republican Gov. Linc Almond, and Larry Berman, who works for Democratic House Speaker Bill Murphy.

Pelosi says that, after you have had the honor of becoming someone’s spokesman and stayed at it, it’s “a betrayal of trust” to turn your back and unload on him.

Berman calls it “disloyal.”

They say press secretaries should honor the confidences of those they served. There is something to be said for that, but I see a loftier obligation. This book certainly stokes that debate.

It is a sad, largely familiar story of the disasters of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and his administration’s trampling on truth.

It is also a story of McClellan himself, ensnared by power. He began working for Bush in Texas, became deputy White House press secretary, and was only 35 when he was tapped for the top job in 2003. He was destroyed by the lies he was sent out to deliver and defend — most notably that Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby played no role in leaking classified information about CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. A NewYork Times op-ed piece penned by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, had undercut a key point in Bush’s case for war.

McClellan, who was press secretary for almost three years, confesses to failings — he should have known better, etc. — yet draws a devastating portrait of a president he says he still admires, and eviscerates top administration figures. McClellan writes:

“During the 2000 campaign, candidate George W. Bush had pledged to be different, but at the White House he chose to be the same. Just as the Clinton presidency had done when it came to questionable activity, we perpetuated the endless investigations and scandals we’d vowed to move beyond by engaging in spin, stonewalling, hedging, evasion, denial, noncommunication, and deceit by omission.”

You can read books like this as an exercise in rationalization, or a mea culpa, and/or an attempt to get out of the line of fire. What Happened (PublicAffairs, $27.95) is all of that. Still, I welcome its glimpses and analyses of Bush.

For example, McClellan asks, “Is Bush intellectually incurious or, as some assert, actually stupid?”

His answer: Bush is “plenty smart enough” but his leadership style “is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate.” Bush has a good grasp of “marketing and selling policy.” That he has been portrayed as not bright is “a result of his own mistakes — which could have been prevented had his beliefs been properly vetted and challenged by his top advisers.” Those advisers, especially on national security, “allowed the president to be put in the position he is in today,” with his credibility “shattered.”

At its best, What Happened brings you on scene. For example, in February 2004 Bush stumbled when Tim Russert asked him on Meet the Press: “In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?”

Afterwards, McClellan says of Bush, “He seemed puzzled and asked me what Russert was getting at with the question.

“This, in turn, puzzled me. Surely this distinction between a necessary, unavoidable war and a war that the United States could have avoided but chose to wage was an obvious one that Bush must have thought about …”

McClellan turns to a news conference in April 2004. Bush is asked what was his biggest mistake in recent years and what he learned from it.

Bush says, “I’m sure something will pop into my head …” But nothing does. Pause. McClellan writes, “Have you ever experienced seconds that felt like minutes? A hundred thoughts flowed through my brain while that terrible silence hung embarrassingly in the air. I found myself thinking, Come on. Sir, this one is not difficult! Just say something like, ‘I am sure I have made plenty of mistakes, and history will judge them. But I’ve got a job to do…’ ”

Then Bush gave a “rambling” answer about being right in calling on the world to deal with Saddam Hussein, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, etc.

McClellan says the moment “became symbolic of a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow.”

McClellan writes, “Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I’ve come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made — a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

True for the war in general, and true for the Plame affair, which dragged on for two years. McClellan’s assertions that Rove and Libby were not involved in outing her identity did more than anything else to undermine his credibility.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” he writes. “And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president himself.”

McClellan says Bush himself had been deceived and “unwittingly” helped deceive him. “But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

McClellan says, “I allowed myself to be deceived.”

Well, that’s interesting. But this is more interesting:

McClellan writes that when he found out in July 2005 that he had been relating a lie, “I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the president and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story.” Which led to this book.

I say: July 2005 would have been a good time to bolt and start talking loud and long. McClellan says bolting would have been unfair to Bush and bad for the administration. He thought he’d hold on until July 2006, his three-year anniversary as press secretary. But in April 2006, Josh Bolten, who was taking over as chief of staff, told him it was time. And McClellan went quietly.

Former Almond press secretary Lisa Pelosi is familiar with What Happened from news accounts and political talk shows, but she declares, “I’m trying to boycott it. I thought it was such a betrayal of the trust he had gained through working with the president [as far back as the Texas days.] I truly believe it’s an honor and it’s a privilege to be chosen to represent a person as their spokesperson.”

She says, “You’re truly a confidant and you should develop a very strong personal relationship with that person …You have to understand how they think and express their thoughts for them.”

She finds it offensive to write about the relationship, especially when the officeholder is still in office, and, certainly, “you don’t write a damaging book.” Of course, she says, a positive book “wouldn’t sell.”

Pelosi, who now works for Johnson & Wales University, says that if McClellan didn’t like the way things were going when he was in the White House, he should have bailed out early on.

Larry Berman, of Speaker Murphy’s office, says he has some interest in reading What Happened but generally is down on such tell-all memoirs. His views were influenced by having been press secretary to U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy and seeing some of the books on the Kennedy family.

Berman asserts, “When you go to work for someone like that, someone as famous as the Kennedy family, what you do should remain private. And afterwards, to try to make money from selling a book doesn’t seem to me to be a very classy way of doing things. When you go to work for somebody, you pledge your loyalty.”

Isn’t there a higher loyalty to the public and truth and history? Berman says of McClellan, “If he disagreed that strongly, he could have left his job at that point and said, ‘This isn’t right and I’m going to find another job.’ ”

Leave and blow the whistle to the world? Maybe, says Berman, “but at least leave.”

White House press secretary Jerald terHorst did leave, and let the world know why, in 1974, after only one month in the job, in protest of President Gerald Ford’s pardon of former President Richard Nixon.

A story last month in the Grand Rapids Press said terHorst wonders why McClellan did not move sooner. TerHorst told the newspaper, “There isn’t a job in the world that is important enough to keep doing it under pretense.” Your loyalty is to the Constitution, terHorst said, not the man who gives you your job.

I say: terHorst is right.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com