Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?
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Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally supplied with talking points prepared by staffers at the National Security Council, which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Because conversations between heads of state can range widely, such materials are usually very detailed. But Trump, as a senior Administration official recently put it, is “not a voracious reader.”
The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget—approximately twelve million dollars—and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “ ‘Thin it out.’ ” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’ ” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”
“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “THE WHITE HOUSE” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’ ”
Given Trump’s avowed admiration for despots, and the curious deference that he has shown Putin, his staff was worried about the March 20th phone call. Putin had recently been elected to another six-year term, but American officials did not regard the election as legitimate. Staffers were concerned that Trump might nevertheless salute Putin on his sham victory. When briefers prepared a card for the call, one of the bullet points said, in capital letters: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
Trump also received a five-minute oral briefing from his national-security adviser, Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster, who goes by H.R. Before McMaster delivered the briefing, one of his aides said to him, “The President is going to congratulate him no matter what you say.”
“I know,” McMaster replied.
Trump takes pride in being impervious to the advice of experts, and he had no personal affection for his national-security adviser. McMaster, who had learned to pick his battles, chose not to raise the matter of Putin’s election. The President took the call alone in the White House residence, but McMaster was listening in on a so-called drop line. Sure enough, Trump did not read or did not heed the briefing card, and congratulated Putin.
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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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McMaster will retire from the Army on June 1st. He will teach, give lectures, sit on corporate boards, and make money. Perhaps he will be haunted by his decision to remain obdurately loyal to Donald Trump. And perhaps he will write another book—one that interrogates his own calibration of the balance between duty and honor in the service of a President who didn’t want to be challenged. For an old soldier like McMaster, the very notion of civilian life may seem mystifying. Years ago, he was asked what he would do if he ever left the Army. “It’s so hard for me to imagine,” he said.
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“A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is ‘a visual person,’ and asked them to express points ‘pictorially.’” And there you have it: the cartoon presidency. https://t.co/osVfBk51M9
— Jim Goldgeier (@JimGoldgeier) April 23, 2018
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