James Mattis, the first retired general to serve as secretary of defense in seven decades, has steadily pushed more authority down the chain of command on the battlefield and inside the bureaucracy.

But he’s also managed up more than his predecessors.


By leveraging a unique level of personal rapport with President Donald Trump — and often ducking the media spotlight — Mattis has played an outsize role in keeping critical policies on track in the face of a mercurial and often bombastic commander in chief, according to half a dozen current and former administration officials and Mattis' daily schedule for the first half of the year, which the Pentagon recently released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a watchdog group.

The schedule shows scores of meetings and meals between Mattis and his boss, many of them in more intimate settings than defense secretaries were accustomed to under President Barack Obama, whose relationship with the Pentagon was marred by mistrust after early disagreements over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other issues.

Trump, who refers to his civilian defense secretary as "General Mattis” and often touts his military service, appears to defer to Mattis to a greater degree than he does to some other Cabinet secretaries. He has granted repeated requests from Mattis to restore authority to the military that had previously been micromanaged by the White House, and he often includes Mattis in meetings with heads of state and other foreign leaders. So far, the relationship hasn't been rocked by the kind of high-profile undermining and rumors of presidential discontent that have marred the tenures of other top Cabinet officials, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — whom Mattis has gone out of his way to support.

The former Marine's sway has been visible in a host of potent policy challenges where he has worked behind the scenes to influence Trump, the officials say, even as other senior members of the president's team, such as Tillerson, have fallen out of favor.

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Amid the more inflammatory rhetoric coming from the president, Mattis has underscored how diplomacy is paramount to deal with North Korea and has struck a more measured tone on Iran than when he was in uniform. Mattis spent his early months assuaging the worries of NATO allies burned by Trump's dismissive talk and was a key player in maintaining the momentum of the American-led coalition against the Islamic State when Trump barred from entry to the U.S. citizens from Iraq and Libya, two key partners. He was also able to delay Trump’s abrupt ban on transgender military personnel.

“He recognizes that there’s a lot of turbulence out there and that his role as the head of the Defense Department is to make sure that our ship, so to speak, stays steady,” said a senior Trump administration official who was not authorized to discuss publicly the relationship between Trump and Mattis. “He is very deliberate and judicious. His mantra is ‘steady as she goes.'"

Keeping a low profile

In the process, Mattis has also kept the press at arm’s length to reduce getting tripped up or perceived as somehow at odds with the White House.

For example, shortly after the president tweeted that “talking is not the answer" with North Korea, Mattis said that the U.S. was not out of diplomatic solutions. He then quickly sought to downplay any perceived disagreement by showing up in the Pentagon press room to lecture reporters that any differences between him and the boss were "widely misinterpreted."

“If I say six and the president says half a dozen, they're going to say I disagree with him," Mattis admonished them.

His reputation for blunt talk as a general has also, on occasion, reinforced his foxhole mentality as secretary of defense — such as when he seemed to openly acknowledge the divisiveness of the Trump era during an impromptu pep talk to troops in Jordan that was posted on Facebook.

“You're a great example for our country right now, and it's got problems," Mattis told them. "You know it and I know it. It's got problems we don't have in the military. Hold the line until our country gets back to respecting each other."

Mattis criticized media reports that cast the video as an example of him being at odds with the president. He told reporters that he had made the remarks a few hours after Trump himself spoke about the importance of unity in a speech following racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. He explained he was riffing on the president's own remarks. "I'm using the president's thoughts, and they thought I was distancing from the president," he complained to reporters at the Pentagon.

Mattis views keeping a low public profile as a way to stay out of Trump's crossfire, said retired Army Col. Steve Warren, who served as communications aide to Mattis until mid-July.

So Mattis has largely avoided on-camera news conferences and cable news interviews, relying instead on more intimate and off-camera interactions with Pentagon reporters.

“He doesn’t like to be quoted very much because he doesn’t want to put the really extraordinary access he has with the president in jeopardy,” Warren said in an interview. “If your name is in the paper, you put yourself at risk with this president. ... [Mattis is] acutely aware of that.”

Greater access to the Oval Office

That access to Trump is viewed as unusual in the recent annals of secretaries of defense.

While previous presidents met regularly with their Pentagon chief, the sessions were typically less frequent and included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a “full cast of characters” from the White House, the senior administration official relayed.

But during his first six months on the job, Mattis interacted with Trump more than 30 times in small group settings — with just the president or just a few aides in the room, according to a copy of his full calendar from January through June that the government released to the transparency watchdog group AltGov 2.

Those interactions also included seven dinners, including one in the private residence on April 10 — and two White House meetings that the schedule describes as “one on one.” Those are in addition to larger Cabinet and NSC meetings.

“Secretary Mattis has a biweekly with the president, and it’s a smaller group,” the senior administration official said, adding that others that "typically join for those" include the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The records also show that Mattis sat in on Trump’s meetings with the leaders of Canada, Turkey, India, Iraq and Egypt, as well as the secretary-general of NATO. On other occasions, he met privately with Trump and Tillerson or Vice President Mike Pence.

Mattis' office declined a request for an interview.

Many longtime observers consider Mattis, who required a waiver from Congress to become the civilian head of the military because he had not been out of uniform a required seven years, to be a reliable check on some of Trump’s most impulsive instincts.

“The fact that we’ve been able to avoid, at least up to this point, a major crisis — I think the responsibility for that lies largely with the national security team and particularly someone like Jim Mattis,” said Leon Panetta, who served as secretary of defense and CIA director for former President Barack Obama, in an interview, calling the retired Marine general's performance “reassuring.”

Panetta pointed to Mattis’ handling of Trump’s policy pronouncement over the summer via Twitter that transgender personnel would no longer be able to serve "in any capacity" as an example of how he has carefully managed the president.

Mattis opted not to act on the president's tweets and instead to seek more formal guidance from the White House — getting wider latitude from the president in the process. He is also allowing transgender troops to continue serving while the Pentagon studies how best to implement the ban.

Delegating down

While managing up with Trump, inside the Pentagon, Mattis is managing down. He is credited with delegating more authority to lower levels for quicker decision-making.

That is most prominently on display in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and terrorist groups in Somalia and Yemen.

Battlefield commanders have been allowed to move small numbers of special operations troops and other forces closer to the front lines without first getting signoff from the White House, as they had to under the Obama administration. And in Iraq and Syria, colonels nearer to the fight can now sign off on airstrikes that previously had to be approved by generals.

“There has not been a single request for delegation made by Secretary Mattis that has not been approved by the president,” the senior administration official said of such efforts.

When it comes to running the Pentagon bureaucracy, Mattis has similarly sought to decentralize decisions, several current and former Pentagon officials said.

For example, Mattis has empowered the individual branches of the military to find their own solutions to problems — like allowing the Army to offer more waivers to boost recruiting and the Air Force to identify more creative ways to retain pilots.

“You always find with Secretary Mattis that he will always empower people to the lowest level of competency,” said Dana White, his spokeswoman. “The person who’s closest to the issue has the best awareness of the issue.”

Defending diplomacy

But helping to quietly manage an unwieldy Trump policymaking machine has remained an abiding focus.

Mattis has cultivated a close relationship with the embattled Tillerson at the State Department at a time when diplomats — and their budgets — are under near-constant assault from the White House.

Mattis and Tillerson connect several times every week, according to the defense secretary’s newly released calendar. They typically have a regular phone call to sync up on Monday mornings and a weekly breakfast when they are both in Washington.

“The secretary often talks about how America has both the power of intimidation and the power of inspiration," White said in an interview. "As the Department of Defense, we are primarily responsible for the power of intimidation, but it’s just as important that that is complemented by the power of inspiration, so that relationship is at the hallmark of his leadership here."

Mattis also has a State Department representative join him for every meeting with a foreign counterpart or leader, she added.

Warren, the retired Army colonel, said his former boss' focus on “synchronizing, aligning and to some extent even placing himself in a supporting role to the State Department” is the biggest difference between Mattis and the three of his predecessors for whom Warren worked.

“He believes that the purpose of the military is to provide an underpinning for diplomatic efforts,” Warren said, “so a strong military is what allows the diplomats to more effectively do their work.”

Trump supporters as well as detractors view these and other elements of Mattis' overall approach as shrewdly executed and effective.

But not without some anxiety about the longer-term implications — especially his unwillingness to answer questions in anything but highly scripted forums.

“In my personal view, part of the job of the secretary of defense is to communicate with the American public about the military, so I don’t think that’s a role he should shy away from,” said Tom Spoehr, a retired Army officer and Pentagon official who is now an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

On some issues, like the numbers of U.S. troops deployed to war zones, Mattis has pressed for transparency. Reversing an Obama-era troop-counting system that resulted in discrepancies between the public numbers of military personnel in war zones and the actual numbers, Mattis has slowly achieved a more accurate public accounting — at least in Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. In Iraq, the official number has remained unchanged even as the Pentagon has acknowledged sending more troops this year.

That's despite Trump's insistence when he announced a new strategy in Afghanistan that his administration wouldn't "talk about troop numbers" at all.

Loren Schulman, who served as a Pentagon and NSC official in the Bush and Obama administrations, says she gets why Mattis is so inaccessible to the public — but doesn't approve of it.

“We see what happens when Secretary Tillerson gets his boss’ attention in a negative way," said Schulman, who is now an analyst at the centrist Center for a New American Security. "But Secretary Mattis doesn’t just work for the president. I understand he wants to stay out of his boss’ line of sight sometimes, but he owes more to the country than that.”