McMaster and Commander
Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?
By Patrick Radden Keefe
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Two days after Trump’s phone call with Putin, he fired McMaster. Someone in the Administration had leaked the “do not congratulate” story to the Washington Post, and Trump was furious. Yet McMaster’s ouster had seemed imminent for months. As it turned out, Trump found the intellectual side of the warrior-intellectual annoying. When McMaster took the job, he had promised to “work tirelessly” to protect “the interests of the American people,” but the challenges he faced were unprecedented. What does it mean to be the national-security adviser when some of the greatest threats confronting the nation may be the proclivities and limitations of the President himself? McMaster’s friend Eliot Cohen, who was a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, told me that, although they have not spoken about the general’s motives, he thinks McMaster may have believed that he was “defending the country, to some extent, from the President.”
There is nobility in such an effort—but also danger. For any Trump appointee, Cohen suggested, “the challenges to your integrity will not come when the President points at a crib and says, ‘Strangle that baby’—it’ll be much more incremental than that.” In order to keep the job, friends warned, McMaster might be forced to mortgage his integrity for a feckless politician, just like the Johnson advisers he had so scathingly criticized. Ken Pollack, a friend of McMaster’s who was on the staff of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, told me, “He knew going into this that it was going to be a real challenge, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to come out of it, personally.” McMaster recognized that the job might be “disastrous for his reputation,” Pollack said. “But he felt it was absolutely the right thing to do for the country.” After McMaster accepted the position, one of his Army mentors, the retired general David Petraeus, invoked “Dereliction of Duty,” asking McMaster, “What will be the title of the book they write about you?”
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n May 10, 2017, the day after Trump dismissed the F.B.I. director, James Comey, he welcomed the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, to the Oval Office. McMaster attended the meeting. The American press corps was barred, though a photographer from the Russian state news agency was permitted to take pictures. Several days later, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had casually disclosed to the Russian officials top-secret intelligence from a U.S. ally about an isis terrorist threat—a plot to blow up airplanes by sneaking onboard laptop computers embedded with explosives. Although Trump did not reveal the source of his information, he did mention where the ally had learned of the threat: a Syrian city within the territory held by isis. This clue likely allowed the Russians to determine that the intelligence had come from Israel. America’s closest intelligence relationships are predicated on the understanding that shared information will be carefully handled. Kislyak was widely assumed to be a Russian spymaster, and though Russia and the U.S. ostensibly share a commitment to combatting isis, they have starkly different interests in Syria, where Russia supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In the context of the Comey firing and the simmering suspicions about Russian collusion, Trump’s blithe disclosure was a grave blunder.
After the Washington Post reported on the gaffe, creating a furor, the White House denied that Trump had divulged such information. But the President undercut this story line when he acknowledged, on Twitter, that he had indeed done so. Then McMaster held a press conference to address the controversy. He labelled the Post story false, although he did not explain what was inaccurate about it, and he glossed over Trump’s disclosure of classified information to a hostile adversary, focussing instead on the fact that the President did not appear to have jeopardized “sources and methods.” McMaster seemed sincerely exasperated with the press. “It is wholly appropriate for the President to share whatever information he thinks is necessary to advance the security of the American people,” he said. His remarks were brief but aggressive; he managed to use the phrase “wholly appropriate” nine times.
Many of McMaster’s friends found the press conference hard to watch. “We all looked at that and said, ‘O.K., man, you’re trying real hard,’ ” Janine Davidson, the former Pentagon official, recalled. In light of McMaster’s book, and his unrestrained temperament, some observers had hoped that he might be effective as Trump’s foil, curbing the President’s most virulent instincts. Perhaps the press conference simply illustrated how far McMaster was willing to go to preserve his relationship with Trump, in order to protect the nation. As Davidson put it to me, “How many times a week, or a month, does he manage to talk the President out of something? Probably a lot.”
John Nagl sounded a similar note: “On H.R.’s shoulders may be decisions that preserve the world from the threat of thermonuclear war, and there’s literally nobody else who I would rather have in that position,” he told me. “If that means he has to say some things that are not completely true, I’m O.K. with that.” In this telling, McMaster was a martyr—a man who loved America so much that he was prepared to sacrifice his own reputation in order to save it.
But others wondered if McMaster had transgressed a moral boundary. In “Dereliction of Duty,” he had described a dangerous phenomenon in which military men became “shields,” insulating political leaders from criticism by lending an aura of unimpeachability to their decisions—even reckless ones. Paul Yingling, who had served alongside McMaster in Iraq, was sickened by his White House appearance. “It is never O.K. for an officer to lie, period,” he said. “If you want to get into politics and shade the truth, great. But take off the uniform. The problem is when you mix categories: when you ask for the presumption of honor that goes with being an officer and then you mislead the public.” In Yingling’s view, it was grotesque to exploit that honor “as a political asset.”
Yingling believes that the officer’s code left McMaster no choice but to quit. “You don’t make instrumental calculations about questions of honor,” he said. “Some of these senior military officers in the Trump Administration forget that the Constitution they swore to defend includes the Twenty-fifth Amendment. If they believe that the President is unfit, then their job is not to work behind the scenes to mitigate, or paper over, his infirmities. It’s their duty to resign—and go public about why they’re doing it.”
more:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/mcmaster-and-commander
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