From the moment the president read the Rolling Stone article’s opening paragraph, it was more likely than not that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would be sacked. How Obama took command

Vice President Joe Biden was the first top administration official to know about the Rolling Stone article.

He was flying back from Chicago after a campaign event when Gen. Stanley McChrystal called him on Air Force 2 around 5:30 p.m. to apologize for comments in the article. The vice president had no idea what he was talking about, so the call was brief, and Biden asked his aides to get a copy of the story.


Shortly before, Tommy Vietor, the assistant White House press secretary who handles national-security issues, had been e-mailed a PDF of the article by a colleague in the U.S. government. Vietor forwarded the PDF to a few officials who tried in vain to read the tiny type on their BlackBerries. So Vietor printed out a bunch of copies for the national-security inner circle. He walked one into Robert Gibbs’ office and handed him a copy, with key passages marked.

It would be a long night: Aides would still be in the West Wing at 10:30 p.m. and later. President Obama had already gone to the Residence on the second floor of the White House, and Gibbs walked a copy over around 8 p.m. Within an hour, top aides were talking about firing McChrystal. A senior administration official recalled yesterday during a briefing for reporters: “He read the first few paragraphs and decided that we should go to the Oval Office and get a bigger group of people. … He was angry.”

His top national security aides hadn’t left, and got together in the Oval Office to hash out what to do. Before they were finished, they’d decided to recall McChrystal from Kabul, which bought the president time to make a final decision about his fate. What was McChrystal thinking? One theory: He'd seen the great luck General Petraeus had with glossy magazines, and thought that was what generals do, or that he'd have the same great results.

The White House asked the Pentagon for names of possible McChrystal replacements, sending a foreboding message. Reporters thought maybe Gibbs' harsh message at his Tuesday briefing (a need for "competent and mature leadership") would be the pound of flesh, and that McChrystal would be saved. No one on the inside thought that.

A top aide had said a key consideration in the final decision would be “whether or not Stan gets it.” He didn’t seem to. NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski happened to be on the steps of the Pentagon when McChrystal arrived yesterday morning for his meeting with Secretary Gates, before heading to the White House. “Mik” says McChrystal “bounded” up the steps: "My question was, 'Have you already submitted your resignation?' 'Come on, you know better than that. No!' 'When I asked "Will you?" he was already rushing through the door and up the stairs to his meeting with Gates and never responded."

A few hours later, McChrystal’s black SUV had taken him in disgrace to his home at Fort Myer, while the rest of the national security team was meeting in the Situation Room without him.

From the moment the president read the article’s opening paragraph (“'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris”), it was more likely than not that the Afghanistan commander would be sacked.

Officials who participated in the discussions say no single passage was fatal to McChrystal. But the opening was really bad: It made the general sound more like a high-school knucklehead than a thoughtful warrior. As one aide dryly told Playbook: “The effect on allies was definitely a consideration.”

Intrade, the online prediction market, on Tuesday night had the chance of the general’s ouster at 75 percent. It turns out that was low. “People felt like you cannot have different rules just because you’re the top brass,” an aide said. “A kid who is some PFC [private first class], knows darn well that if he said these things about his commanding officer, he could potentially get thrown in jail.” From the beginning, according to participants, the controlling argument was: “As a matter of civilian control and chain of command, this kind of disrespect is simply untenable and he has to go. The article leaves murky the question of who is in charge, and sends the wrong signal, from the commanders down to the privates.”

So the boot was always the default. Officials say there was careful, extended debate about keeping McChrystal but it was always in the frame of, “Let’s examine the case for not accepting his resignation.” As one official put it, there were different schools of thought, but there weren’t different camps. Both sides were argued, sometimes by the same people. The best case for keeping the general always revolved around the mission: “McChrystal is the right guy to see it through, and he needs to be chastened but go finish the mission. A change in command would be disruptive and damaging.”

That view never gained traction, and there was some relief when it became clear that the consensus was: “We’re better off without him.” Aides were concerned about “the atmosphere of this having happened” and the prospect of “continuing with all of that stuff in the background.” McChrystal already had two strikes: He had previous transgressions (including the London speech in which he dismissed out of hand an approach to Afghanistan that could have wound up being the strategy). Those had “a cumulative effect” and had “taken their toll,” as various aides put it. And we aren’t exactly rolling through Kandahar, so he wasn’t walking on water in the field, which was also in the back of some folks’ minds.

“You’ve got to make the decision that gives the mission, writ large, the best chance of succeeding,” another aide said. “The president wouldn’t have done this just to make a point. The goal wasn’t, ‘Who do we like most?’ or ‘Who is the perfect political operator?’ but ‘Who can succeed?’ There were compelling reasons [to fire him] for the sake of the mission. It was corrosive and damaging and unsustainable.”

No serious consideration was given to “relitigating” the mission, which was why Petraeus was considered “the perfect solution -- one that would mitigate, and perhaps eliminate, the down side of a change of command.” Other names were discussed, but Petraeus was discussed from the beginning. A participant said: “The name surfaced on Tuesday as a possibility and gained real momentum in a meeting with advisers before the McChrystal meeting [in the Oval Office, which lasted 20 or so minutes]. The president was definitely leaning [toward] making a change going into the meeting, though wanted to hear the general out.”

In the Rose Garden, the president would say: “[T]his is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy. General Petraeus fully participated in our review last fall, and he both supported and helped design the strategy that we have in place. … He has my full confidence, and I am urging the Senate to confirm him for this new assignment as swiftly as possible.”

The passage that will live in history is: “I’ve just told my national security team that now is the time for all of us to come together. Doing so is not an option, but an obligation. I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division. All of us have personal interests; all of us have opinions. Our politics often fuels conflict, but we have to renew our sense of common purpose and meet our responsibilities to one another, and to our troops who are in harm’s way, and to our country.”

That was about more than the “The Runaway General.” It was a message to Obama’s entire team that it should function like his loyal, leak-free campaign. A longtime Obaman told us: “This was a loud appeal to keep our eye on the ball. A war strategy is about more than any of its parts or personalities or egos or titles. It’s about getting the job done. That was absolutely intended in those remarks.”

“Obama’s war” now has a new front.