BROOKLYN, N.Y., June 1…Scott McClellan may not get a Pulitzer, but he has already began to reap awards as well as rewards for his memoir, What Happened, about his tenure as White House Press Secretary.
McClellan received the annual Albert Speer Prize for Exculpatory Exposure last night. The award, named after Adolph Hitler’s favorite architect, was presented by Efrain Darg, founder and editor of Snitch. com at a banquet at Golubchiks Restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It honored McClellan for “self-serving betrayal of the highest order.”
“If you snitch on a friend or a family member you’re just a weaselly rat,” said Darg, “but if you give up a President you’re a world class traitor worthy of an Albert Speer.”
Speer (1905-81) was a clever, ambitious young Nazi who ingratiated himself with Hitler and rose quickly in the party hierarchy, going from Building Inspector of the Third Reich to First Architect in charge of the design and construction of Hitler’s grandiose public buildings. During World War II Hitler appointed him Minister of Armaments and he built a war machine of such ruthless efficiency that it functioned under intense bombardment until the very end. He kept the Nazi factories producing at full capacity with the slave labor of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and captured soldiers. He literally worked his captives to death under conditions of extreme deprivation. After the war he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years for war crimes.
Upon his release Speer wrote a memoir entitled Inside the Third Reich in which he portrayed himself an innocent bystander who was unaware of the death camps and tried to improve the lot of the slave laborers under his command. He became world famous as “the Nazi who said he was sorry.” He was especially caustic about Hitler who he said was a stubborn, delusional loner, who brooked no disagreement. The man who had been photographed constantly at Hitler’s side and who had an office down the hall from Hitler’s in the Bergtesgarten, now denied that he had been a close friend of the Fuhrer’s and intimated that he had been part of a plot to assassinate him.
And the world believed him. His crimes were forgiven and then forgotten. Speer was later unmasked as a self-serving liar, but it was too late. He had been completely rehabilitated.
“In a breathtaking, boldfaced piece of deception Speer transformed himself from a war criminal to a Hamlet-type hero, a good person forced to do bad things and tormented by his conscience,” Darg said. “And now Scott McClellan has followed brilliantly in Speer’s footsteps.”
In What Happened, (Public Affairs Press) McClellan, who was Press Secretary from 2003 to 2006 claims he “allowed himself to be deceived” by Vice President Cheney and Louis “Scooter” Libby into lying about White House involvement in the unmasking of CIA agent Valerie Plame. He says he came to the White House a dedicated Bush loyalist, but became disillusioned when he realized that the President could not admit his mistakes and was “too stubborn to change and grow.”
Upon his resignation in April 2006, McClellan shared a tearful farewell with the President. “Scott handled his assignment with class and integrity,” Bush said at the time.
Now McClellan says he could never decide if the President was “intellectually incurious, or, as some assert, actually stupid.” He ridicules Bush’s claim that he really didn’t remember if he had used cocaine or not and says that the President was completely under the thumb of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, who, McClellan says, “got everything he wanted.”
McClellan’s high six figure advance was considerably less than the millions paid to other Bush officials for their tell-all memoirs. And yet his book tells the most. After heated criticism from the Administration, a rumor began to circulate that the book was originally bland, but an editor made McClellan spice it up into the bombshell best-seller it has become.
“This rumor, of course, was planted by McClellan himself,” said Darg, admiringly. “First he he weasels out on the President, then he snitches on his own editor. The man is a genius.” To a smattering of cheers and applause from the seven members of Snitch.com in Glolubchiks’s back room, Darg predicted that “Scott McClellan is the only member of the Bush White House who will be completely exonerated, while getting rich in the process. Albert Speer would be proud.”
A spokesman for McClellan said he was traveling and could not attend the ceremony.
Past winners of the Speer award are John Dean, Robert McNamara, Christina Crawford and Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
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