Being press secretary for George W. Bush must be like being chief spokesman for the Emperor Nero as Rome burns. How do you put good spin on a conflagration that’s consuming everything around you?

It can’t be done. But Scott McClellan gave it the old college try. Once or twice a day for almost three years, McClellan dragged himself before the cameras in an effort to convince skeptics in the White House press corps that Bush knows what he’s doing. He rarely succeeded.

He’s a game guy, McClellan, but for the most part – and increasingly as Iraq dissolved into chaos – his listeners weren’t buying. Republicans began to grumble about his style – a kind of Washington funeral. He rarely smiled or laughed or joshed with the wretches of the press. (What’s there to laugh about in Washington these days? one might ask.)

Instead, McClellan, the good soldier, took an almost daily pummeling from the press. For his pains, he got dumped – which says something unflattering about the Bush presidency.

McClellan had to go, we’re told, because he had lost credibility with the press corps and the public. Republican House and Senate candidates, facing a hostile election climate this fall, are desperate for some change, even if only cosmetic, at the White House. Can’t quibble with that.

But there’s a larger question. Why is an inoffensive fellow like McClellan no longer believable? And the answer lies less with McClellan than with Bush and those around him who mostly compelled McClellan to mislead and often kept him in the dark. Sometimes they flat-out lied to him.

McClellan’s ritual claims about Bush successes in the face of contrary evidence – the Iraq misadventure or the president’s ill-starred Social Security proposal – ate at his credibility among the White House press. It vanished altogether when he asserted that neither Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political architect, nor Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief gofer, had anything to do with leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative.

Would they lie? Alas, they would, as subsequent grand jury testimony revealed.

McClellan was only doing his masters’ bidding. But therein lies the problem. For every press secretary is at the mercy of his boss’ willingness to keep him fully informed, tell him the truth and insulate him from the dissembling and disinformation that are part of ordinary political dialogue at the state or national level.

The White House press secretary who most comes to mind when considering McClellan’s fate is the late Ron Zeigler, who was similarly ill-used by his boss, Richard Nixon. The Nixon strategy, as devised by his communications chief, Herb Klein, was to keep the newshounds barely informed, if at all.

Zeigler, who had never been in the news dodge, was the perfect foil. The press corps learned almost nothing of consequence at Zeigler’s briefings because Zeigler knew almost nothing of consequence.

The most effective press secretaries are not those who seek the job but those who are intimates of the president – like Steve Early, a poker-playing buddy of his boss, Harry Truman – or those who are sought out because they have standing and special credibility of their own – like Jim Haggerty, Dwight Eisenhower’s chief spokesman.

More than that, to be effective, any press secretary must have enough sand in him to stand up to the boss and/or the boss’s inner circle when they’re wrong and so advise them. And to quit if ignored too often or on a seminal issue, a la Jerry ter Horst.

Ter Horst was hired away from the Detroit News to be President Gerald Ford’s press secretary when Ford replaced the disgraced Nixon. Ford and ter Horst were longtime friends from Michigan. Ter Horst owed Ford nothing; he took the post to help a friend.

Ter Horst opposed Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon both on the merits and on the public impact it would have and told Ford as much. When Ford persisted, ter Horst quit. Ford’s decision to spare the country the ordeal of an ex-president on trial helped the national healing. But it may have cost him the election. And it certainly cost him Jerry ter Horst.

If the whispers from Washington are true, McClellan wanted to leave on his own terms and in his own good time. That’s understandable. No one likes to get the boot.

He was a good soldier and deserved better. But considering how badly he was used, maybe he’s better off out of it. In the end, he was more loyal to Bush than Bush was to him.