McMaster Besieged
The Trump Administration didn’t want to listen to him
I have long believed that memoirs by Washington policymakers –other than ex-presidents – should have a standard subtitle: “They should have listened to me.” Most of them tell the same story, of a dedicated public servant who, facing great challenges, saw things more clearly and recommended better solutions than their superiors chose. Very few confess to errors or misjudgments, unless they say they didn’t fight hard enough or didn’t anticipate the strength of opponents.
H.R. McMaster’s new book simply calls it “My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” but the main title summarizes his message: At War with Ourselves.” And his story is one of diligent but often unsuccessful efforts to get the president and others in his cabinet to develop a common vision and work together to implement it. Of his 413 days on the job, it sounds as if few were truly gratifying.
McMaster brought to his National Security Adviser position a distinguished record of scholarship and warfare. In Dereliction of Duty he had exposed the by the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Lyndon Johnson. He had demonstrated creative combat leadership in Iraq. Although the Army system long seemed reluctant to admit him to the ranks of generals, eventually it did, and later promoted him to Lieutenant General. His White House job as NSA, however, was his first assignment in Washington. He hadn’t been exposed to its political maneuvering and bureaucratic knife fights before, which probably explains many of his failures. He was dismayed by his early meetings in the Oval Office, which he calls “exercises in competitive sycophancy.” He didn’t fit in.
From the start in February, 2017, just a month after Trump’s inauguration, McMaster felt besieged. Keith Kellogg was disappointed that he didn’t get the job and became a disloyal deputy. Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon challenged his “globalist” views and probably leaked unflattering comments about him.
His biggest problems, however, were with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Each wanted to control their own departments without White House interference -- a typical attitude by cabinet members -- but they justified their independence because they doubted the wisdom of Trump’s policies. Viewing themselves as the “adults in the room,” they considered the president an irksome toddler.
Mattis had encouraged McMaster to take the job, but insisted that he retire from the military. McMaster refused, and Mattis retaliated by refusing to share Pentagon documents and trying to block McMaster calls to combatant commanders and a visit to Afghanistan. “Mattis regarded me as a subordinate, and he expected deference rather than collaboration.” His 4-star ego made it impossible for him to treat 3-star McMaster as an equal.
Tillerson was similarly arrogant and patronizing. He insisted that McMaster come to the State Department for meetings. He got the president to call foreign leaders without informing the NSC staff. He arrived at meetings with new State-written documents that disregarded already coordinated policy documents. He undercut Trump’s decision to resume Saudi arms sales by calling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman and asking him to delay the sales.
He was sabotaging the process by telling assistant secretaries not to attend White House meetings and withholding personnel. I explained this this behavior was not hurting me; it was hurting the president’s ability to set his foreign policy agenda and make timely decisions…
Tillerson and Mattis had decided to run foreign and defense policy. They viewed the president’s disruptive tendencies as dangerous.
When retired General John Kelly became Chief of Staff, McMaster at first welcomed his friend’s help. But within a few months, McMaster learned that Kelly had started meeting separately with Mattis and Tillerson. “[T]hey must have gotten to him, I thought.” Kelly also started limiting NSC issue meetings with the president.
While it was normal in previous administrations for the three top national security officials to have breakfast or lunch weekly, the most McMaster achieved was a scheduled twice-weekly phone call, though one or both often failed to join. They didn’t listen to him, or want to coordinate policy.
McMaster’s relationship with President Trump were fraught by clashes of knowledge and work habits. McMaster wanted to impose a regular process on the impulsive president. Time and again the book records diligent preparation for meetings and options papers. Some worked out successfully; others got derailed. One tactic McMaster says he used was to present talking points as what others might say, hoping that Trump’s contrarian instincts would lead him to say the right thing. He repeatedly tried to show that the new policies were radically different from Obama’s.
McMaster kept trying to do the right thing. At the end, he concluded:
I was worn out with Trump. Collating his diverse positions into diplomatic and national security frameworks to implement his decisions was necessary, but seemed bureaucratic to him. Trump did not fully understand my role relative to his cabinet officials and he had begun to blame me for the slow-rolling and free-lancing of his secretaries of State and Defense.
McMaster saw many echoes of Lyndon Johnson in Donald Trump.
As with LBJ, Trump’s insecurities and desire for attention left him perpetually distracted and vulnerable to a mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him. Also, like he had a loose relationship with the truth and a tendency toward hyperbole…
Trump shared with LBJ the tendency to belittle others to make himself seem bigger and to hide his own insecurities, fears, and flaws.
In a Postscript, McMaster argues that Trump “administered long-overdue correctives to unwise policies.” He cites “a fundamental shift in national security strategy and new policies toward China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba.” But he also criticizes Trump’s deal with the Taliban and his vacillation on China. “Regrettably, after that first year, he abandoned significant elements of his foreign policy.”
Of course, that time was when John Bolton was national security adviser. In a final confrontation with Mattis, after listing many problems he had had with the Pentagon leader, McMaster says he exclaimed, “You know what, Mr. Secretary? I hope you get John Bolton, because you deserve John Bolton.” Bolton was fired after 518 days.
At War with Ourselves is a valuable contribution to history, a record of key meetings and policy formulation during McMaster’s service as NSA. It’s also a sad story of bureaucratic infighting and its troubling consequences. We’ve already seen depictions of Trump’s leadership style in other reports; this is further confirmation of his ignorance and impulsiveness. What’s especially revealing in the McMaster book is the cabinet-level conflicts that weakened America’s foreign policy.