The military's leading warrior-intellectual drew key lessons about the workings of the National Security Council from his exhaustive history of White House deliberations during the Vietnam War. | AP Photo McMaster's takeaways: Don't lie, don't blame the media, don't rely on an inner circle

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president's new national security adviser, knows a thing or two about standing up to the commander in chief and his political confidantes — and the potentially disastrous consequences when you don't.

He literally wrote the book on it.


The military's leading warrior-intellectual drew key lessons about the workings of the National Security Council from his exhaustive history of White House deliberations during the Vietnam War.

They could come in handy as he takes the reins following the ignominious departure of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and joins a White House similarly grappling with deep divisions in the country, public protests and open partisan warfare over Trump's most controversial policies, from immigration to Russia.

The debacle that was Vietnam inflicted "one of the greatest political traumas" on the United States since the American Civil War, McMaster wrote in "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam," which was published in 1997 after he earned his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"It led Americans to question the integrity of their government."

Even a quarter century after it ended, in his view, the shadow of the war — the 58,000 American lives lost , the billions of dollars spent, the social upheaval it caused — hung over American foreign and military policy and the nation itself.

Here's a snapshot of some key insights that McMaster drew as a young Army officer from his recounting of the deliberations of the National Security Council and the internal workings of the military leadership at the time.

Don't lie

A primary theme of McMaster's book is how keeping information from the president that did not support his political aims became institutionalized. His secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was mostly to blame, by not relaying the military's unvarnished advice to the commander in chief on how the war was going — or more to the point, wasn't going.

"When the Chiefs' advice was not consistent with his own recommendations, McNamara, with the aid of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lied in meetings of the National Security Council about the chief's views," McMaster wrote.

Military leaders themselves should have known better, despite the fact, as McMaster explains, "the professional code of the military officer prohibits him or her from engaging in political activity."

Instead, due to their loyalty to the president and desire to advocate for the prerogatives of their individual branches of the military, they played along.

"The president was lying, and he expected the Chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth," McMaster wrote in the epilogue of "Dereliction of Duty." "Although the president should not have placed the Chiefs in that position, the flag officers should not have tolerated it when they had."

Don't rely on a close-knit group of advisers

Another finding from the Vietnam era that eerily echoes today relates to the structure of the National Security Council itself, which McMaster found wanting — especially because it did not seek enough input from its full membership from various executive departments and agencies and because too often decisions were made by the president and a handful of his closest advisers.

Trump, to the dismay of many longtime NSC veterans, elevated his top political strategist Steve Bannon as a permanent member of the council — a break with tradition that has sought to keep politics out of the national security decision-making process as much as possible. And in another unusual step, he has separately empowered his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner with a foreign policy portfolio that includes the Middle East.

The president also stipulated in a directive last month that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have a lesser role on the NSC's so-called principals committee — at least on paper.

"The PC shall have as its regular attendees the secretary of State, the secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of Defense, the attorney general, the secretary of Homeland Security, the assistant to the president and chief of staff, the assistant to the president and chief strategist, the national security adviser and the homeland security adviser," the directive stated. "The director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed."

During the early years of the Vietnam War, the role of the Joint Chiefs chairman was also reduced — in practice if not in letter.

"There was no meaningful structure through which the chiefs could voice their views — even the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] was not a reliable conduit," McMaster wrote. "NSC meetings were strictly pro forma affairs in which the president endeavored to build consensus for decisions already made.

President Johnson's practice was to meet with "small groups of his most trusted advisers."

"Real planning," McMaster found, was made by "ad hoc committees composed principally of civilian analysts and attorneys."

Don't blame the media

President Trump has labeled the news media an "enemy of the American people" and has repeatedly sought to discredit the press as purveyors of "fake news."

The media was a similar target during the Vietnam War, though not nearly as publicly as with Trump — when leading newspapers began reporting from Southeast Asia on developments that did not match with the rosier public pronouncements.

Another scapegoat as the Vietnam War dragged on and public support plummeted was the throng of antiwar protesters that nearly paralyzed the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

McMaster said neither were culprits in the outcome of the war, despite political leaders' assertions to the contrary.

"The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the pages of The New York Times or on the college campuses," he concluded. "It was lost in Washington, D.C."

Personalities matter

And by Washington, McMaster didn't mean some esoteric and lackluster bureaucracy or even a feckless Congress. He specifically meant the individuals who could have made a difference — the ones who had the president's ear.

"The disaster in Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure, the responsibility for which was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisers," McMaster wrote.

"The failings were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in pursuit of self-interest, and above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people."