Excerpts from Scott McClellan's "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." The book is due out Monday, but some bookstores have already begun selling it.

ON PRESIDENT BUSH

President Bush possesses "personal charm, wit and enormous political skill." But he has penchant for self-deception if it "suits his needs at the moment."

on the iraq war

• Bush "signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest."

• In Bush's second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, the president was "insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin."

• The news media were "complicit enablers" for focusing more on "covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war."

on cia case

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. 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."

ON OTHERS

• Vice President Dick Cheney was "the magic man" who "always seemed to get his way" and sometimes "simply could not contain his deep-seated certitude, even arrogance, to the detriment of the president."

• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser earlier in Bush's presidency, "was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences" of war.

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