Pity poor Scott McClellan. Mr. McClellan, who served as the White House press secretary between 2003 and 2006, has a problem with timing.

Mr. McClellan’s latest fumble is his new book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.” The publisher, Public Affairs, put up a brief but inflammatory excerpt on its Web site, and the following day released a statement seeming to reverse it.

The excerpt reads more like a tawdry tell-all than a mea culpa. “I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” Mr. McClellan writes. “There was one problem. It was not true. 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, the vice president, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”

The next day, Mr. McClellan’s publisher, Peter Osnos, circulated a statement saying “there’s no suggestion in the book that the president deliberately lied and sent him to the podium to tell people something that wasn’t true.”

Four years ago, Mr. McClellan was singing a different tune. Back then he told reporters that neither Libby nor Mr. Rove had been involved in exposing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Later, evidence emerged that Mr. Rove and Libby both had conversations with reporters during which they disclosed her identity. Mr. McClellan went through the ritual of saying he had asked the two men if they were telling the truth and made this statement: “They’re good individuals, they’re important members of our White House team, and that’s why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt of that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it’s accurate before I report back to you, and that’s exactly what I did.”

After Libby was indicted in connection with giving misstatements to federal investigators, Mr. McClellan clammed up, and said that the ongoing federal investigation into the disclosure of Ms. Plame as a CIA officer prevented him from speaking about it. Libby’s indictment contradicted with what Mr. McClellan had told the press about the leak. Yet he stayed in his job. We won’t know why exactly until the full text of Mr. McClellan’s book comes out in April, but it’s likely that he thought that remaining in his position would give the press one less thing to harp on.

When the leak was exposed was when Mr. McClellan’s sense of timing got in the way. He had a couple of options, but muffed them both. First, he could have played tough with the administration prior to October 7, 2003, when he unequivocally told reporters that Mr. Rove and Libby were not involved in the leak. At that very point, it is the press secretary’s professional duty to, in political parlance, “push back.” Most political operatives don’t like to push back because they are either habitual people pleasers or deathly afraid of their employer or other members of the administration being angry with them.

Yet if Mr. McClellan had better thought through the situation he may have saved himself and the administration from grave trouble. If after going to Mr. Rove and Libby, he was not satisfied with their answers, he still had an ability to save his boss, to whom his fundamental duty is owed, and himself. He could have given some form of a no comment answer, as he later did.

Or he could have resigned as soon as the indictment came down, the moment at which his credibility, the most important tool for a press secretary, vanished. It’s imperative that press operatives maintain their own credibility so that they can do their jobs.

But that was not the case. Mr. McClellan didn’t leave. Instead, Mr. McClellan preserved his career prospects, for the short term, at the expense of the White House and his credibility with the press. Now, when courage counts for less, and a potential financial upside comes along with it, he’s prepared to tell the truth.

It’s not Mr. McClellan’s fault that he was in way over his head in one of the world’s most politically demanding jobs, one that combines equal parts visibility and pressure. Where he went wrong was that he never seemed to bring the proper amount of subtlety or self-awareness necessary for an operative to keep himself and his boss out of trouble.

The one thing that could always be said about Mr. McClellan was that he valued loyalty. Now that can’t even be said.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.