Getty Politics Why Staying Put Was McMaster’s Most Patriotic Act The National Security adviser was called a hypocrite for defending Trump’s handling of classified intelligence. But critics misread his book and his motives.

Mark Perry is the author of Talking To Terrorists. His new book, The Pentagon Wars, will be published this coming year.



In the wake of H.R. McMaster’s May 15 press briefing on the president’s alleged sharing of classified information with the Russians (“The story that came out tonight is false,” McMaster insisted), there was no shortage of voices saying that Trump’s national security adviser had failed to live up to his own standards. His defense of the president, critics said, was an unnecessary mishmash of double-speak and hair-splitting, that he seemed more of a political cheerleader than a sober foreign policy adviser.

After the president chimed in to say that he had in fact shared the classified info, McMaster made a second appearance at the podium to declare the exchange of information as “wholly appropriate.” All this did was amplify the criticism.


Military analysts condemned McMaster by arguing that his defense of Trump “soaked” him in a “swamp of deceit,” that he’s in danger of becoming a second Colin Powell, that his press statement retailed the “parsed half truths” that characterized the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Vietnam era. In sum, his critics claimed, McMaster abrogated the principles of truth and honesty that he laid out in his celebrated 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty, which showed that the joint chiefs were complicit in Lyndon Johnson’s lies about Vietnam and “failed to confront the president with their objections” to the military strategy adopted by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Thus, McMaster sullied his hard-earned reputation.

Those who know him well, including a friend of 25 years and a McMaster mentor, vehemently disagree.

“You need to reread Dereliction of Duty,” this occasional Pentagon consultant told me. “H.R. slams the [Joint Chiefs of Staff], but he also takes on Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a giant, and Trump isn’t, but they have this in common: Neither of them want to hear dissenting views.” Indeed, as McMaster carefully catalogued in his book, Lyndon Johnson marginalized the joint chiefs precisely because he knew what they’d say—and he didn’t want to hear it.

Indeed, despite McMaster’s clumsy May 15 appearance, a proper reading of his book and a review of his career shows that Trump’s national security adviser is doing what the American people expect their military to do: Keep their criticisms private, do their duty—never walk away.



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Dereliction of Duty has an acclaimed history. During the Clinton years, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton recommended it to his fellow chiefs, telling them it was “required reading.” The book’s pedigree was never in doubt: its birth was as a Ph.D. dissertation, husbanded to completion by UNC civil-military guru Richard Kohn and written by an officer who’d been part of a unit that had destroyed dozens of Iraqi tanks at the Battle of 73 Easting, during Operation Desert Storm. That said, while McMaster’s views weren’t new (General Bruce Palmer, Jr. made the same points in 1984 in The 25-Year War, before helping me expand on the theme in Four Stars, my 1989 book on the joint chiefs), they were provocative—and courageous.

A major when Dereliction of Duty was published, McMaster’s book roiled senior officers who’d been young lieutenants in Vietnam, sowing speculation that the 1984 West Point graduate had derailed his own career. “H.R. will make a good Colonel,” I was told by one of his colleagues when his book was published. After all, you don’t describe the joint chiefs as “derelict” when its members include Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Earle Wheeler, who’d served in high command in Europe, Army Chief Harold K. Johnson (who survived the Bataan Death March), and Air Force Chief John Ryan, who lost three fingers to anti-aircraft fire while flying 58 combat missions in Italy. Wheeler, Johnson and Ryan weren’t simply experienced, they were lucky to be alive.

I first met McMaster during a reception celebrating his book’s publication at the home of Bob Sorley, a retired West Point Army Colonel and well known military historian, whose own work details the lives of those officers McMaster criticized. “You’ve got to meet H.R.,” Sorley told me at the time. “His book is brilliant, and so is he.” Sorley was right; McMaster was not only well-spoken, he went out of his way to praise my work before pivoting to discuss his own views. When I noted that Dereliction of Duty might endanger his career, he shrugged. “I don’t think so,” he said. “And you know, what the hell.”

In fact, the early readings on McMaster’s career were prescient. He was passed over twice for promotion because he’d failed to meet the Army’s joint service requirements, but his superiors finally relented and made him a Brigadier General. The incident entered military lore; David Petraeus, it was rumored, inserted himself as head of the Army promotion board to ensure McMaster’s advancement. Petraeus was a fan: McMaster commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Tal Afar, in northwestern Iraq, in 2005, where he shaped an approach (“Stop talking and listen to people,” he told his subordinates) that flew in the face of the “kill and capture” tactics preferred by the Pentagon. His methods placed him at odds with senior Army officers, but not with Petraeus, who consulted with McMaster while drafting the Army and Marine Corps counter-insurgency manual.

So when Donald Trump appointed McMaster as his national security adviser, it was thought the soldier-scholar would bring calm to a chaotic administration, provide an anchor for a rookie president by followng the principles he had outlined in Dereliction of Duty. He would be as honest with Trump as an earlier generation of officers had failed to be with Lyndon Johnson. That he would, if necessary, do what the chiefs had failed to during Vietnam: go public with their dissent and even break with the president. May 15, the popular thinking went, was McMaster’s moment to make good on that expectation—distance himself from Trump and walk away. “Nonsense,” McMaster’s mentor told me. “A misreading of his book, a misreading of history—and a misreading of H.R. McMaster.”



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McMaster’s book ends in June of 1965, 10 years before the end of the Vietnam war. But one month later, Army Chief Harold K. Johnson (as he later told a group of veterans), considered resigning in protest over the incrementalist strategy adopted by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He didn’t, but that didn’t stop him from later issuing his own blunt judgment on the war’s conduct: the worst strategy the U.S. could adopt in Vietnam, he told the president, was the one it was following. Chairman Wheeler wondered as well whether the American public would continue to support a war that was going nowhere. The president waved him off: “You leave the American people to me,” he said, “I know them a lot better than you do”— a Trump-like miscalculation that leaves one gasping. Finally, in August of 1967, civil-military relations over Vietnam strategy became so bad that the joint chiefs considered resigning. It was Wheeler, though, who changed their minds: “If we resign, they’ll just get someone else,” he told his colleagues. “Twenty-four hours from now there will be new guys sitting in our places and they’ll do what they’re told.”

McMaster is not only familiar with this history, he’s obviously digested its lessons. While the joint chiefs were “derelict” in their duty by keeping silent about their views on Vietnam, it’s not clear their dissent would have made a wit of difference. Indeed, while the nation’s military leaders have a duty to tell the president what they think, there’s no requirement that the president actually listen—let alone follow their advice. And Wheeler, despite his myriad critics, had it right: 24 hours after walking off the job, there would be “new guys” sitting in their chairs who would try to make the best of a bad situation, which is precisely what Wheeler and his colleagues were trying to do.

That’s what H.R. McMaster is doing now—though unlike his predecessors during Vietnam, he has considerable latitude to do so. The grapevine thinking among senior military officers when McMaster was named national security adviser was that Trump needed him more than he needed Trump. That certainly wasn’t true for L.B.J. and Earle Wheeler. Johnson was an imposing presence, while Wheeler was a virtual unknown whom Johnson could have kicked easily to the curb. President Trump will have to think twice before doing that to his national security adviser.

McMaster (along with James Mattis and, to a lesser extent retired General John Kelly) lends a patina of badly needed varnish to the administration’s unfinished exterior. Additionally, reporter Eli Lake’s vivid recounting of how Trump screamed at McMaster during a telephone exchange isn’t bad news. Rather it shows that the national security adviser is doing what Earle Wheeler and crew failed to do some 50 years ago: He’s telling the president what he doesn’t want to know and, probably in tones that Trump rarely hears. (McMaster’s initials, those who know him best say, stand for “heat round”). Finally, while it’s possible that McMaster’s reputation will suffer by being associated with a failing administration, history has a way of vindicating those who do their duty, while relegating to historical footnotes those who simply go along.

Vietnam is not the only conflict in which that lesson was on full display. When the U.S. was ramping up for Operation Iraqi Freedom, during the presidency of George W. Bush. The J.C.S. Chairman was General Richard B. Myers, a senior Air Force officer known for his low-key, even-tempered get-along and go-along approach. One of his fellow chiefs referred to him, sotto voce, as “the invisible chairman.” He did his duty or, as military officers describe it, he “stayed in his lane.”

Indeed, while Myers often expressed privately his reservations about Bush’s plans for Iraq, he remained silent during crucial White House national security meetings. A key intelligence official (“a back-bencher,” he recently told me) remembers a break in one session on Iraq strategy when Myers joined a small group milling about, drinking coffee. “You know,” Myers told the group, “I often think during these meetings that we’re not really serving the president very well.” The intelligence officer recalled that the group “remained embarrassingly silent,” though all were thinking the same thing: Who did Myers mean by “we”? Recently, Myers was honored for his service by receiving the Air Force Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award—“Thus proving that in Washington,” as a senior retired Air Force officer told me, “Nothing succeeds like failure.”

There are some things not to like about H.R. McMaster: He can be overbearing, has a volcanic temper and promotes a strategy of “forward deterrence,” which means, his critics claim, more American troops in more unwinnable wars. But McMaster is not invisible, will not stay in his lane, will not be intimidated, and will not remain silent. McMaster might not win any lifetime achievement awards, but he won’t walk away. He’ll be a patriot.

Which is exactly what we need.

