By Patrick Radden Keefe
When Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin on the morning of March 20th, the two were at an excruciatingly delicate juncture. American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, with the goal of helping Trump win, and Trump had become the subject of an investigation, by the special counsel Robert Mueller, into allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. On March 4th, a former Russian spy and his daughter had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury. Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, announced that the Russian state appeared to be responsible and expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats from the U.K.
Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally supplied with talking points prepared by staffers at the National Security Council, which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Because conversations between heads of state can range widely, such materials are usually very detailed. But Trump, as a senior Administration official recently put it, is “not a voracious reader.”
The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget—approximately twelve million dollars—and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “ ‘Thin it out.’ ” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’ ” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”
“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “the white house” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’ ”
Given Trump’s avowed admiration for despots, and the curious deference that he has shown Putin, his staff was worried about the March 20th phone call. Putin had recently been elected to another six-year term, but American officials did not regard the election as legitimate. Staffers were concerned that Trump might nevertheless salute Putin on his sham victory. When briefers prepared a card for the call, one of the bullet points said, in capital letters: “do not congratulate.”
Trump also received a five-minute oral briefing from his national-security adviser, Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster, who goes by H.R. Before McMaster delivered the briefing, one of his aides said to him, “The President is going to congratulate him no matter what you say.”
“I know,” McMaster replied.
Trump takes pride in being impervious to the advice of experts, and he had no personal affection for his national-security adviser. McMaster, who had learned to pick his battles, chose not to raise the matter of Putin’s election. The President took the call alone in the White House residence, but McMaster was listening in on a so-called drop line. Sure enough, Trump did not read or did not heed the briefing card, and congratulated Putin.
Watching a beleaguered Trump appointee struggle to hang on to his job can feel like watching a tipsy cowboy on a bucking mechanical bull. By the standard set by his predecessor, Michael Flynn—who lasted all of twenty-four days—McMaster was a survivor, having kept his position for more than a year. “H.R. is relentlessly positive,” a senior official who worked closely with him told me, but his ride with Trump had been bruising. McMaster, a decorated war hero, has joked to friends that his combat experiences compare favorably with his tour of duty at the White House. Trump’s combination of bullheaded ignorance and counter-suggestibility makes him singularly difficult to counsel. Before the President asked McMaster to become his national-security adviser, he had offered the position to a retired vice admiral, Robert Harward, who turned it down, reportedly saying to friends that the job was “a shit sandwich.”
But McMaster is “something of a Boy Scout,” a friend of his told me, and he accepted the offer. Much has been written about Trump’s infatuation with the men he calls “my generals,” and what his fetishization of military commanders might indicate about his autocratic tendencies or his sense of masculine inadequacy. There may be a more pragmatic explanation, though, for Trump’s preference: he has struggled to fill his Administration with experienced professionals. Many eligible Republicans disqualified themselves by publicly expressing misgivings about Trump’s suitability for the Presidency. Others just didn’t have the stomach for a shit sandwich. But the military prides itself on not being political, and officers tend not to have spoken publicly about their impressions of Trump. “The professional code of the military officer prohibits him or her from engaging in political activity,” McMaster once wrote. Moreover, the military cultivates a sense of duty. Bill Rapp, a retired Army general who has been friends with McMaster for thirty-eight years, told me, “For a military officer, when the President says, ‘I need you to do something,’ there is only one answer.”
It was easy to see why Trump had settled on McMaster, who had an impeccable reputation as a warrior-intellectual: in addition to excelling in combat, he had written a Ph.D. dissertation that became a landmark book, “Dereliction of Duty,” which was published in 1997. It chronicles the failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s military advisers during the Vietnam War. McMaster describes Johnson as “a profoundly insecure man who craved and demanded affirmation,” and notes that Johnson—who came into office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy—suffered from a sense of illegitimacy, a fear that he was “an illegal usurper.” McMaster points out that Johnson had “a real propensity for lying,” and that he surrounded himself with “advisers who would tell him what he wanted to hear.” The book’s title refers to the reluctance of military advisers to offer Johnson unvarnished assessments of the war’s progress. McMaster argues that they should not have allowed themselves to be politicized, sanctioning the lies that the Johnson Administration told the public.
Two days after Trump’s phone call with Putin, he fired McMaster. Someone in the Administration had leaked the “do not congratulate” story to the Washington Post, and Trump was furious. Yet McMaster’s ouster had seemed imminent for months. As it turned out, Trump found the intellectual side of the warrior-intellectual annoying. When McMaster took the job, he had promised to “work tirelessly” to protect “the interests of the American people,” but the challenges he faced were unprecedented. What does it mean to be the national-security adviser when some of the greatest threats confronting the nation may be the proclivities and limitations of the President himself? McMaster’s friend Eliot Cohen, who was a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, told me that, although they have not spoken about the general’s motives, he thinks McMaster may have believed that he was “defending the country, to some extent, from the President.”
There is nobility in such an effort—but also danger. For any Trump appointee, Cohen suggested, “the challenges to your integrity will not come when the President points at a crib and says, ‘Strangle that baby’—it’ll be much more incremental than that.” In order to keep the job, friends warned, McMaster might be forced to mortgage his integrity for a feckless politician, just like the Johnson advisers he had so scathingly criticized. Ken Pollack, a friend of McMaster’s who was on the staff of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, told me, “He knew going into this that it was going to be a real challenge, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to come out of it, personally.” McMaster recognized that the job might be “disastrous for his reputation,” Pollack said. “But he felt it was absolutely the right thing to do for the country.” After McMaster accepted the position, one of his Army mentors, the retired general David Petraeus, invoked “Dereliction of Duty,” asking McMaster, “What will be the title of the book they write about you?”
Trump first met McMaster, in February, 2017, at a hastily convened interview at Mar-a-Lago, after the ouster of Flynn. “He looks like a beer salesman!” Trump told aides in dismay. McMaster wore his dress uniform to the meeting. He has always looked more comfortable in desert camouflage than he does in a suit. He has the meaty physique of a longshoreman, with tiny blue eyes, a monumental shaved dome, and horizontal creases that line his forehead like a musical staff.
If Trump hadn’t hired him, McMaster soon would have been out of a job. The Army is a hidebound organization that prizes conformity, and McMaster’s lustrous public profile has not always translated into professional advancement. Janine Davidson, a former Pentagon official who is a friend of his, said, “H.R. shines really bright, and people notice that. He outshines his bosses.” McMaster has tried to prevent his celebrity from scuppering his career. In 2014, after Timeput him on its annual list of influential people, calling him the Army’s “pre-eminent warrior-thinker,” McMaster protested that, in the Army, “influence doesn’t come from any individual,” and suggested that the honor should be interpreted as a recognition of the Army “as a team.” His strenuous expressions of humility can approach self-parody. “I don’t think there’s anything about my career or capabilities that warrants any kind of special recognition,” he once said. (McMaster declined to be interviewed for this article, but I was authorized to speak with ten of his aides on the N.S.C.)
McMaster’s father, Herbert, served as an infantryman in the Korean War. His mother, Marie, was an elementary-school teacher. He has a sister, Letitia, to whom he is close. She told me that, when they were growing up, in Philadelphia, their mother instructed them to “use your patterns of logical thought.” McMaster became a highly systematic thinker. “I always wanted to serve in the Army, from my earliest memory,” he once remarked. Like Trump, he attended a military academy for high school, but, unlike Trump, he went on to West Point. Bill Rapp met him there in 1980, when they were both plebes. “He played rugby, and he’s got this hard-nosed Philly edge,” Rapp said. “Nobody can accuse him of being a wimp.”
Through a rugby teammate, McMaster was introduced to a young woman named Katie Trotter, and they married in 1985. (He and Katie, an educator, have three adult daughters.) Upon graduating from West Point, McMaster joined the armored cavalry. But the Cold War was ending, and he feared that he might never see combat. He was stationed in West Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and people streamed across the border, carrying flowers. Katie noticed that he did not appear to share the general euphoria, and said, “You’re just angry because you don’t have an enemy anymore.”
He needn’t have worried. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, McMaster led a small troop of tanks through the Iraqi desert. They advanced through a sandstorm and took on a much larger Iraqi force that included some eighty tanks and other vehicles. McMaster had studied the cavalry tactics of Erwin Rommel. His own tank was nicknamed Mad Max.
The battle lasted twenty-three minutes. When the smoke cleared, dead Iraqis lay amid hunks of smoldering metal. “Everything around us had exploded or died, but we, like film characters, had miraculously survived,” an officer who took part in the battle later wrote. It was one of the last major tank battles of the twentieth century. McMaster received a Silver Star for his valor.
In the years that followed, the nature of warfare changed, as urban insurgencies and terrorist cells became the dominant threats. McMaster, with his nimble intellect, prodded the Army to absorb these changes. He grew concerned that, after the Gulf War, the military had been seduced by the promise of quick conflicts in which the U.S. could rely on its superior hardware and technology to rout any adversary. He was an outspoken critic of a phenomenon that he saw as a form of cognitive dissonance: military leaders’ insisting on fighting the war they wanted to be fighting, rather than the war they actually were fighting. He called it the triumph of “theory over practice.”
McMaster is “not apologetic about America’s greatness,” one of his N.S.C. colleagues told me. Several of them suggested that, to the degree that one can discern a foreign-policy world view in Trump’s sloganeering, it is not very different from McMaster’s. Unlike Trump, McMaster respects international alliances and sees value in protracted troop deployments, but both men regard the world as a dangerous arena in which the U.S. should not be afraid to exert its will. There is a practiced flair to McMaster’s erudition, and in speeches and conversations he relies on a store of quotations from theorists and generals, from Clausewitz to Stonewall Jackson. Invoking Thucydides, he has suggested that peace is merely “an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.”
At the University of North Carolina, where McMaster pursued his Ph.D., he distinguished himself for the thoroughness of his preparation. His adviser, Richard H. Kohn, once chided him for turning in a seminar paper that was two hundred pages long. According to Kohn, when McMaster began his dissertation, “what really intrigued him was the professionalism of the military—did these people do their job?”
In 2005, McMaster deployed again to Iraq, as the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was one of the first Army officers to classify the simmering resistance among Iraqis as an insurgency. Paul Yingling, a retired lieutenant colonel who served as a staff officer to McMaster, told me, “H.R. was unusual in that he understood the non-kinetic aspects of operations.” Yingling recalled accompanying McMaster to meetings with local tribal leaders. McMaster acknowledged their grievances and conceded that the U.S. had made mistakes in the occupation of the country. “But the time for honorable resistance is over,” he told them, adding, “Don’t make me kill your young men in order to convince you that I’m serious.”
To Yingling, McMaster had conjured “a pitch-perfect combination of diplomacy and violence.” McMaster, he noted, was also unafraid to challenge pernicious behavior by his troops. After hearing them use the word “haji” as a slur for Iraqis, he banned the term. Some soldiers had taken to saying, “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six”—that is, it was preferable to be tried for war crimes than killed in action. Yingling recalled that McMaster repudiated that kind of talk, too.
McMaster was careful to couch these admonitions in the realist idiom of narrow self-interest, telling his troops that such hostile sentiments did “the enemy’s work for them,” by radicalizing Iraqis. But his commitment to the Iraqi people seemed sincere. He arranged for a local mayor who had risked his life helping U.S. counter-insurgency efforts to be resettled in America; the two remain close.
Soldiers who served alongside McMaster tend to revere him, but he made some enemies in the Army. People joked that “H. R.” stood for “heat round”—a kind of warhead—and McMaster became infamous for his temper. In 2010, the Army sent him to Afghanistan, to oversee a task force aimed at curbing corruption there. He approached the seemingly insurmountable problem with characteristic zeal, studying the local culture, establishing systematic “lines of effort,” sleeping only four hours a night. But his exuberance turned into impatience when his civilian counterparts were slow to hold corrupt associates of President Hamid Karzai to account. At one meeting, McMaster got into an argument with Kirk Meyer, an official from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the two men, in front of more than a dozen colleagues, entertained the notion of stepping outside to settle their differences. A witness to the exchange recalled, “It was the height of the surge. There were a hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan. The objective was civil-military integration. And in front of all these people McMaster is threatening to fight a dude!” When I asked Meyer about the incident, he laughed it off, saying, “At the end of the meeting, I went up to him and he hugged me.”
Some military leaders are fundamentally contrarian, but McMaster, Ken Pollack said, “is not an iconoclast.” McMaster wasn’t shy about expressing his views—he once observed that, as an Army officer, you “can’t just be a yes-man and say, ‘Great idea, boss,’ if you don’t believe it, because lives are at stake”—but if his arguments were rejected he followed orders. In the Army, what duty most often necessitates is obedience.
Even so, on the first two occasions when he sought promotion to one-star general, he was passed over. It was only after an intervention by Petraeus, who left the war he was overseeing in Iraq to fly to Virginia and sit on McMaster’s promotion board, that he finally received his first star. Despite his deference to the chain of command, McMaster was not a company man in the narrow sense that the Army wanted. He was too brainy, too forthright, too intense. For years, superior officers schemed to end his career. “They didn’t want to give him his second star,” Pollack said. “They didn’t want to give him his third star.” In 2016, the Army informed McMaster that he would not receive a fourth star, and he decided to retire. “He was bitter,” Pollack said. “H.R. had the career that everyone told him he should have. Yet, in the end, it was exactly that which prevented him from grabbing the last brass ring.” McMaster was in talks with Harvard about a teaching job when the White House called.
It was Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, an Iraq War Army veteran, who had pitched McMaster to the Trump Administration. Cotton had gone to Harvard, and when he was a teaching assistant in a government class, one of his students was Jared Kushner. After Flynn resigned, Cotton reached out to his former pupil, and to other officials, recommending McMaster for the national-security-adviser post.
Some associates of McMaster’s believe that his decision to take the position was not entirely selfless. The writer Thomas Ricks, who has known him since he was a major, told me, “McMaster had unfulfilled ambition. The Army has not treated him well.”
Several months before McMaster accepted the N.S.C. job, his Ph.D. supervisor, Richard Kohn, had published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that even those Republican national-security experts who had opposed Trump as a candidate “must serve in a Trump administration if given the opportunity.” Because Trump is “a master of chaos with no core belief,” Kohn said, it would be imperative for the safety of the nation that he be surrounded by levelheaded professionals. “You will have to be prepared to speak truth to power, and then to be ignored, overruled, dissed and otherwise embarrassed,” Kohn warned, adding, “The gig may test your capacity for abuse.”
The National Security Council was established by an act of Congress in 1947, “to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security.” Several years later, President Eisenhower created the position of national-security adviser. Strictly speaking, the N.S.C. consists of the President and several of his closest Cabinet secretaries and military and intelligence advisers. But over the decades, the N.S.C. staff has grown to include several hundred people. When McMaster assembled this cohort on his first day, in the auditorium of the Eisenhower Building, many professional staffers were feeling acutely demoralized. Michael Flynn’s tenure had been as tumultuous as it was short. One of the Trump Administration’s first acts was instituting a travel ban on individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. “We were horrified,” a former staffer recalled. Flynn’s deputy was K. T. McFarland, a veteran of several Republican Administrations who had become a Fox News personality. Career staffers had been offended when, at one all-hands meeting, McFarland proclaimed that everyone would work together to “make America great again.” At another meeting, McFarland brightly disclosed that the shoes she was wearing came from the fashion line of Ivanka Trump.
McMaster speaks in the rousing bark of a high-school football coach delivering a pregame pep talk. He told the N.S.C. staff that his commitment to the nonpolitical nature of the military was so pronounced that he had never voted in an election. Flynn, with his campaign chants of “Lock Her Up,” had not restrained himself in this way. But McMaster, ever upbeat, didn’t malign his predecessor. (Flynn had resigned amid questions about his relationship with Russian officials, and eventually pleaded guilty to charges of lying to F.B.I. agents.) Many in the room were reassured by McMaster’s performance. He signalled, discreetly, that he wanted to moderate the ideological tone of the Trump Administration. He announced that he disliked the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” and called Islam “a great religion.” He also expressed regret that the U.S. had not been tougher on Russia after Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Some people wondered how McMaster would reconcile such sentiments with the rather different impulses of his new boss. A person who attended the meeting told me, “We got back to the office and said, ‘Does he know where he’s working?’ ”
McMaster could not have been blind to the President’s moral shortcomings—his mendacity, his mean-spiritedness—but the military had taught him that you cannot pick your commanders. His friend David Kilcullen said, “H.R. was dealing with an incredibly painful dilemma—how do you keep your integrity while serving somebody who appears to have none of his own?”
During the Iraq War, McMaster sometimes had to negotiate between rival tribes. At the N.S.C., he encountered a different sort of tribal conflict. Flynn was gone, but many people he had brought into government remained. They were a motley assortment of former military and intelligence officials, craven agitators, and political operatives with no government experience. Privately, the career staff called them the Flynnstones. In a surprising move, Steve Bannon, the alt-right flamethrower who had been named Trump’s chief strategist, had been granted a seat on the N.S.C. McMaster also had to contend with Kushner, who had no formal national-security role and no experience in foreign affairs, but who oversaw an expansive, though nebulous, portfolio, including China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. McMaster initially balked at Kushner’s role, saying, “You mean I’ve got somebody running a significant part of foreign policy who doesn’t report into my structure?” According to a senior official, McMaster’s colleagues told him, “This is the way the President wants it, and it’s just going to happen.” So McMaster let the matter go.
Any new Administration has inexperienced officials. Campaign staffers are rewarded for their loyalty with senior positions, and they learn on the job. Even so, Trump’s appointees stood out for their sheer hackishness. The retired rear admiral Garry Hall was named special assistant to the President and senior director for international organizations and alliances. When Hall was flying helicopters in the Navy, his co-pilot was Steve Bannon’s brother Chris. A former Administration official told me, “Garry lacks the intellectual depth to be a Bannonite ideologue. He’s a very nice older gentleman. His world view is thoroughly shaped by all the Fox News he’s watched.” People who have dealt with Hall see his appointment as a reflection of the Trump Administration’s dim regard for multilateralism. Hall is prone to off-color jokes, and in his spare time at the White House he produced a podcast that featured such episodes as “Leadership, Fitness, and Sex.”
One virtue of having career employees is that political novices can draw on their experience. During the transition to the new Administration, N.S.C. staffers prepared briefing binders for Trump appointees. But the new officials showed little interest in the material. They weren’t just dismissive of the professionals; they were suspicious of them.
“How long have you been here?” Kushner asked career staffers when he met them. The question became a litmus test: Trump appointees began describing career staffers whose loyalty to the new President was in doubt as “Obama holdovers.” It didn’t matter that some of them had also served under George W. Bush. Suspicions intensified after embarrassing transcripts of telephone calls between Trump and two foreign leaders—Malcolm Turnbull, of Australia, and Enrique Peรฑa Nieto, of Mexico—leaked to the press. Trump loyalists were certain that the President was being sabotaged. The staffers found the insinuation outrageous. “The bureaucrats were all willing to do what they were told,” one former staffer said to me. “You want to go to war with North Korea? O.K.! We just want there to be a process.”
There was also confusion about the lines of authority within the new Administration. Bannon seemed to hover over Trump’s foreign-policy calculations. Kushner attended high-level meetings but said little. At an early meeting on North Korea, in the White House Situation Room, General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived to discover that he had no seat at the table—but Kushner did. After Dunford took a chair against the wall, Kushner offered to switch places. “Dunford took him up on it, immediately,” a witness recalled. Kushner was silent throughout the meeting, and took no notes.
The White House official Sebastian Gorka, a bloviating Islamophobe, also generated tension. He often appeared on Fox News, which treated him as an authority on the President’s counterterrorism policy. But, according to multiple Administration officials, he was never granted a high-level security clearance. In 2016, he had been arrested for attempting to board a plane with a concealed handgun. Gorka had access to the Eisenhower Building, however, and he prowled its halls. A former employee told me that, whenever Gorka entered their offices, staffers subtly averted their computer screens, so that he could not glimpse classified material. Gorka was fired by the White House in August, soon after John Kelly became chief of staff. Two days later, Gorka told the Jerusalem Post that McMaster viewed “the threat of Islam through an Obama Administration lens.” (In an e-mail, Gorka insisted that he had a security clearance, and that anyone who said otherwise was “a liar.”)
McMaster sought to cultivate Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, proposing that they meet for weekly breakfasts. Tillerson, who showed little regard for McMaster, demurred. McMaster then suggested weekly phone calls. Tillerson had an aide take his place, or skipped the calls altogether. (Tillerson was fired, by tweet, in March.) Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was no more supportive. Last April, when he learned that McMaster planned to visit Afghanistan, Mattis told him not to go. According to an official familiar with the exchange, Mattis may have been “miffed” because, at that point, he had not yet been to Afghanistan as Defense Secretary. McMaster went anyway, an act of defiance from which the relationship never recovered.
McMaster faced the pervasive dysfunction at the N.S.C. with his usual blinkered optimism. He worked long hours, and his staff scheduled in “gym time” to help him cope with stress. (A portrait of vigor, McMaster took work calls while huffing on the treadmill, with sensitive papers fanned out on the console.) He had some natural allies on the staff, because Flynn had installed many current and former military professionals. One Flynn appointee was a close friend of McMaster’s: Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel who was also a Petraeus protรฉgรฉ.
“There are some people who like to sit back and admire a problem,” Bill Rapp said. “H.R. is going to do something about it.” Several people who have worked with McMaster perceive, in his tireless gumption, a form of naรฏvetรฉ. When he arrived in Afghanistan in 2010 to tackle corruption, he irked some of his colleagues. “It was as though you could take a problem that had existed in Afghanistan for the better part of a millennium and solve it by rigorously studying it for a month,” someone who worked with him there recalled. “It sounded a lot like hubris.” McMaster’s efforts did little to curb the endemic graft. (Another former official who was associated with the project told me, acidly, “In Afghanistan, H.R. used to talk about ‘criminal corruption networks.’ Now he works for one.”)
Before joining the Trump Administration, McMaster had never worked in Washington. Yet he pledged to clean up the N.S.C. with the same cockeyed resolve that he had brought to Afghanistan. He read histories of the organization and met with his living predecessors. He selected as his model Brent Scowcroft—the diminutive, unassuming, supremely capable national-security adviser to both Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Just as McMaster had forbidden soldiers to say “haji” in Iraq, he now told his staff that he did not want to hear the words “Obama holdover” in the Eisenhower Building. “We are all one team,” he said.
In a BBC interview in December, McMaster declared, “What we owe the President is options.” He might highlight “advantages and disadvantages,” but “the President makes the decision.” McMaster announced that he was determined to be, like Scowcroft, an honest broker who would coรถrdinate policy deliberations among government agencies and then present potential courses of action to the President. He had rejected the model typified by Henry Kissinger, a policy auteur who relentlessly advanced his own views. But there was one immediate respect in which McMaster was unlike Scowcroft. Before accepting the position, Scowcroft, who had been a lieutenant general in the Air Force, retired from the service, because he did not believe that an active-duty officer should hold the job. Several people close to McMaster recommended that he do the same. As a civilian, he might feel more license to resist an unsound order from the President—or, if it came to that, to quit.
McMaster chose not to retire. One of his closest advisers suggested to me that McMaster believed remaining a general would insulate him from political pressure, by underscoring his separateness. Others who know him suspected that he couldn’t give up hope of further advancement in the Army. Another national-security adviser who had chosen to serve in uniform was Colin Powell, who, upon leaving the White House, returned to the Army—and got his fourth star.
Powell had famously instituted discipline on the Reagan Administration’s N.S.C. after the scandals of the Iran-Contra affair. McMaster hoped to play a similar role. One critique of the Obama Administration was that foreign policy had been too centralized at the White House, with N.S.C. staffers doing the kind of operational decision-making that is better left to departments and agencies. Military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have told horror stories about receiving micromanaging phone calls from N.S.C. officials in Washington. McMaster aimed to revert to tradition. In October, at a panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, McMaster remarked that in recent years the N.S.C. “did cross a line.” He continued, “Consistent with President Trump’s guidance, we have devolved responsibility and authorities back to the departments.” Several of McMaster’s predecessors joined him on the panel, among them Kissinger, who had simultaneously served as both national-security adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon Administration. In his bronchial croak, Kissinger quipped, “Relations between the operators and conceivers were never better than when I held both jobs.”
The panel discussion was held to celebrate the N.S.C.’s seventieth anniversary, but the subtext of the evening, which the panelists were too scrupulously diplomatic to acknowledge, was the profound upheaval of the present moment. None of McMaster’s predecessors had served a President who derided a nuclear rival as “Little Rocket Man.” None had contended with a Commander-in-Chief who spoke approvingly about autocrats. It might make sense, in the abstract, for McMaster to talk about “devolving” authority to the State Department, but there essentially was no State Department anymore: under the absentee leadership of Tillerson, six of the top nine positions at the department were empty, and numerous critical ambassadorial posts remained unfilled. There was no U.S. envoy to Saudi Arabia, or to Germany, Egypt, or the European Union.
In interviews with senior officials who worked closely with McMaster at the N.S.C., I was struck by a sense of willful disconnection. They tended to talk, even on background, as if they were working in the mainstream tradition of U.S. foreign policy, and they behaved, at least outwardly, as though they were not grappling every day with an Administration that was radically unstable. According to a former official, at another meeting on North Korea in the White House Situation Room, K. T. McFarland joked, “You know, the President could send one tweet and all of this will be overturned!”
“We all laughed,” the former official told me. “But this was the deputy national-security adviser. I mean, it’s scary.” When I asked people who worked for McMaster if it was difficult to engage in a deliberative policy process when Trump might embrace a radically different course in one of his predawn tantrums, they reminded me, with the frozen smile of a Stepford wife, that “different Presidents communicate in different ways.” When the BBC reporter asked McMaster, in December, if he wished the President didn’t tweet, he replied, “Aristotle said, ‘Focus on what you can control and you can make a difference.’ The President will do what the President wants to do. It’s his way of reaching the American people.” He continued, in a tone reminiscent of a hostage video, “My job is not to worry about Twitter.”
This refusal by McMaster and his staff to acknowledge obvious anomalies may simply have reflected a fear of the wrath that the President might visit upon candid subordinates. But I also sensed, in the robotically sanguine accounts of McMaster’s team, a collective delusion. One of his aides told me that Administration staffers felt isolated, because old friends and colleagues “fell away.” The “Never Trump” center-right disowned them for coddling a tyrant; people on the left were repulsed by Trump’s “America-first” agenda; even the Bannonite far right disdained them, for being insufficiently extreme. So McMaster and his colleagues may have adopted a bunker mentality, and focussed on one thing that they could control: process. At times, they seemed to be living out the twelve-step adage about faking it until you make it. If they instituted a policy architecture resembling what had come before, maybe they could contain the chaos emanating from the Oval Office. One of McMaster’s senior aides said of him, “He would constantly pull people back into process.” Another said, “We built this process that was incredibly effective.” Multiple people who worked closely with McMaster suggested to me, without irony, that this was one of the most effective National Security Councils in history. (One of them added, “If you grade on a curve.”)
But rational protocols at the N.S.C. matter little if the President doesn’t respect them. McMaster’s process “had the veneer of something that Stephen Hadley or Condi Rice or Susan Rice would recognize,” a former staffer told me. “But it’s not getting the work done.” Another former N.S.C. official said, “There are two parallel tracks—there’s the interagency process, and then Trump makes a decision. But there’s often no suggestion that he’s making decisions with reference to that process. It’s two ships in the night.” The President, speaking to Fox News in November, put it more succinctly. When asked about his failure to fill key State Department posts, Trump responded that, when it comes to foreign policy, “I’m the only one that matters.”
In December, the White House unveiled its “National Security Strategy,” a sixty-eight-page document in which the N.S.C. staff laid out Trump’s official view of the world. McMaster’s aides proudly claimed that this was the first time a national-security-strategy document had been published within the first year of a Presidential Administration. The document had conspicuously Trumpian lacunae; there were no references to climate change as a national-security threat, for example. But it seemed to be an effort to domesticate some of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, emphasizing the importance of competition among the great powers but also of American leadership. Trump had mocked nato as “obsolete”; the document described the alliance as “one of our greatest advantages.” It explicitly named Russia and China as malign influences, and declared that the Russians had used technology “to undermine the legitimacy of democracies.” Such language was in sharp contrast with Trump’s strenuous avoidance of blaming the Kremlin for election interference. An N.S.C. official told me, “The fundamental question is, can you divorce Presidential rhetoric from American foreign policy?”
Composing the document was a challenge, because Trump did not have many concrete views on foreign policy beyond bumper-sticker sentiments like “America first.” When McMaster requested Trump’s input, the President grew frustrated and defensive, as if he’d been ambushed with a pop quiz. So staffers adopted Trump’s broad ideal of American competitiveness and tried to extrapolate which policies he might favor in specific instances. McMaster touted the resulting document as “highly readable,” and as a text it seems reassuringly plausible. But nobody on McMaster’s staff could confirm for me with any conviction that the President himself had read it.
“One reason that Brent Scowcroft was a successful national-security adviser was that he had a pattern of relationships already established,” Eliot Cohen pointed out. McMaster himself once observed that, in seeking to understand historical events, “you cannot neglect the personalities.” Jimmy Carter trusted Zbigniew Brzezinski implicitly. Barack Obama talked basketball with Susan Rice. But McMaster couldn’t establish a rapport with Trump.
The mismatch was surprising. The President gravitates toward people who are brash and informal, and McMaster is a jocular, witty guy. He was forever joking with his staff, and sometimes gathered them around a screen to watch YouTube clips. (He is partial to “Best in Show,” a comedy about dog pageants.) Once, at a morning meeting at the White House, John Kelly asked McMaster if he’d read a certain memo. McMaster replied that he hadn’t yet—because he’d been at the gym. After a moment of disapproving silence, McMaster added, in a gruff deadpan, “A body like this doesn’t just happen.”
McMaster has a “frat-guy appeal,” a senior Administration official told me. “But when he’s with the President he only has one mode—he is a general briefing the Commander-in-Chief.” On the rare occasions when McMaster cracked a joke—parrying some slight by Trump with a mildly sarcastic “You hurt my feelings, Mr. President”—his staff would nudge him afterward and say, “Do that more! You’re funny!” But McMaster’s sense of propriety made it hard for him to engage in the kind of banter that Trump favors. More than one McMaster ally told me it was a shame that the President and his national-security adviser had never had a beer together. Trump doesn’t drink.
Ken Pollack said that McMaster thought a lot about how to improve his relationship with Trump, to no avail. “This President never likes the smartest guy in the room,” John Nagl, a former Army officer who has known McMaster for years, said. “And it’s the job of the national-security adviser to be the smartest guy in the room.” Steve Bannon would complain that McMaster lectured the President even though Trump hated being lectured. There is an inescapable complexity to matters of national security and foreign affairs, and McMaster seemed unable to abbreviate his briefings. In the Army, he had banned PowerPoint, remarking, “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” Now he had to tell a President who wanted everything reduced to bullet points that the world was not as simple as he thought.
Initially, Pollack said, McMaster gave Trump “the benefit of the doubt,” assuming that he could understand complicated issues. Every day, McMaster subjected Trump to detailed briefings. According to Pollack, the President just sat there. “He would look like he was interested,” Pollack said. “He was probably trying to imagine how many times H.R. has to shave his head every day, while H.R. is going on and on about the complexities of Russia policy.” Only later, Pollack said, did McMaster realize that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a fucking thing he said!”
McMaster’s staff urged him to condense his briefings and make them more conversational. (In an interview with a senior official, I described this process as “dumbing down,” and the official corrected me—“Let’s say ‘simplified ’ ”—with a speed that suggested McMaster may also have banned the phrase “dumbing down.”) McMaster felt that oversimplifying national-security matters “was dangerous,” Pollack told me. He tried to turn his wonkishness into a joke: “Mr. President, just seventeen quick points on that!” But Trump responded with open disdain. According to “Fire and Fury,” the book by Michael Wolff, Trump complained that his national‑security adviser was “boring.”
Trump wasn’t entirely incurious about other nations, but he tended to focus on transactional matters. During foreign-affairs briefings, he often interrupted to inquire about a nation’s gross domestic product. “It became a fixation,” a former staffer told me. “Our memos all had to include this kind of basic ‘World Factbook’ data.” Trump was obsessed with trade, to a degree that risked undermining other strategic priorities. He was frustrated that the U.S. had a trade deficit with its longtime ally South Korea, and, in a gambit that had the whiff of extortion, he occasionally threatened to withdraw U.S. troops and military aid from the country if the imbalance was not addressed. In an exchange with Angela Merkel, of Germany, Trump returned eleven times to the prospect of a bilateral trade agreement, even though Germany, as a member of the European Union, could not legally negotiate any such deal.
“The power of the national-security adviser is that the President wants to hear what you have to say,” Michรจle Flournoy, an under-secretary of defense during the Obama Administration, told me. An initial test of McMaster’s clout came in February, 2017, when he urged Trump not to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in a joint address to Congress. The President did anyway. McMaster was more successful in a fight over Afghanistan policy. Before becoming President, Trump had critiqued the war in Afghanistan, and once he assumed office he expressed frustration that the U.S. was still involved in the conflict. Bannon and McMaster openly clashed over Afghanistan, and in at least one instance McMaster lost his temper, reportedly shouting, “You’re a liar!” (One assumes that Bannon knew better than to ask him to step outside.) Bannon loathed McMaster, deriding him as a “globalist” who was all too eager to commit troops to foreign conflicts in which America had little strategic interest. He pushed for a withdrawal of troops. McMaster told his staff that anyone who briefed Trump about Afghanistan should be prepared for his first question: “What are we still doing there?” He presented Trump with photographs of Kabul from the nineteen-seventies, when it was a more peaceful, stable city. The message, tailored to Trump’s preference for images, was implicit: Afghanistan is not hopeless. Things can change. Trump ultimately sided with McMaster, committing several thousand additional troops.
But McMaster’s battle with Bannon was just beginning. When McMaster took the job, he did so with the understanding that he could hire his own staff. He replaced K. T. McFarland and, with Trump’s blessing, removed Bannon from the National Security Council. A former Administration official told me, “The whole reason Bannon went after H.R. wasn’t that he was a globalist—it was that he pushed Bannon off the N.S.C.” Breitbart News and other alt-right outlets demonized McMaster, suggesting that he was in league with “Obama holdovers” to undermine the President. Rumors spread that Administration officials had established an “insider threat” program at the N.S.C., and were trying to root out disloyal staffers.
Most N.S.C. employees spend their careers out of the public eye. But a series of online posts by Bannon allies targeted staff members who were perceived as traitorous, exposing personal details about them. A woman named Megan Badasch, who had worked for Trump during the transition and had become the N.S.C.’s deputy executive secretary, was subjected to so much online abuse that she became fearful for her own safety and moved out of her apartment. Badasch regarded herself as a Trump loyalist, and felt that she had been slandered. One of McMaster’s daughters tried to reassure her, saying, “If you’re being attacked because you’re on Dad’s side, you’re on the right side of history.” (She stayed in her post.) Another N.S.C. staffer, Eric Ciaramella, was described on right-wing blogs as a leaker out to “sabotage Trump.” After receiving death threats, he quit the N.S.C. and returned to his home agency.
According to numerous Administration officials, at least some of the leaks about the N.S.C. were coming from the Flynnstones: they were passing information about colleagues to Bannonite allies on the outside. “It’s like cyberbullying at the highest level,” a senior official told me. “You’re scared. Because these are bad people.” As the atmosphere grew increasingly poisonous, McMaster began to fire the Flynnstones, including his old friend Derek Harvey. Harvey was rumored to have aligned himself with Bannon, though he insisted to friends that this wasn’t the case. He had become consumed with questioning the loyalty of the career staff of the N.S.C.’s Middle East directorate. One day, a member of the directorate approached McMaster after a meeting. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Derek is trying to fire practically the entire staff,” he said.
“Shouldn’t I have a say?” McMaster asked, before putting a stop to the mass termination.
McMaster tried to reassure the political appointees that the professional staffers weren’t spies but, rather, a valuable source of institutional knowledge. Nevertheless, the hostility persisted. At one point, McMaster asked each N.S.C. directorate to generate a memo outlining the most severe threats that it faced. Harvey was responsible for producing the Middle East directorate’s list. According to someone who saw it, the No. 1 threat was not isis, or the war in Syria, but “problematic holdovers.” “It was so unhinged,” the person said.
When McMaster dismissed his old friend, he said, “Derek, it’s just not working out.” An associate of McMaster’s told me that firing Harvey was “a hard call for H.R.,” adding, “He loves Derek.” (Harvey, who declined to comment for this article, joined the staff of Representative Devin Nunes.)
Reporters asked McMaster about the abuse he was receiving. He shrugged it off, saying, “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.” But, in truth, it was making him a bit paranoid. He asked the office of the White House counsel to initiate an investigation of leaks at the N.S.C., and in September he mandated that every federal department and agency hold an hour-long training session on “unauthorized disclosures.”
By the end of the summer, McMaster had weeded out some of his most toxic subordinates. But his working relationship with Trump remained awkward, and Mattis and Tillerson—whom McMaster referred to as the Team of Two—accorded him little respect. “Both Mattis and Tillerson realized that this is not someone who is going to have the President’s ear,” a former senior Administration official told me. Traditionally, the national-security adviser’s physical proximity to the President confers a special power that the Cabinet secretaries do not enjoy. Yet McMaster’s daily exposure to Trump seemed not to strengthen his authority but to weaken it. McMaster, feeling that Mattis, a former four-star general, condescended to him, would grumble aloud to his staff, “I’m being treated like a three-star!”
Of course, McMaster was a three-star. Military codes of hierarchy may be so enduring that it didn’t matter that Mattis was retired, and that McMaster, as Trump’s representative, technically had authority over him. Moreover, in another sense, McMaster, as an active-duty military officer, was Mattis’s subordinate. “Remember, Mattis, as the Secretary of Defense, is his other boss,” a McMaster aide told me. At meetings, McMaster referred to Nikki Haley, the Ambassador to the U.N., as “Nikki,” and Tillerson as “Rex.” He addressed Mattis as “sir.”
On May 10, 2017, the day after Trump dismissed the F.B.I. director, James Comey, he welcomed the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, to the Oval Office. McMaster attended the meeting. The American press corps was barred, though a photographer from the Russian state news agency was permitted to take pictures. Several days later, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had casually disclosed to the Russian officials top-secret intelligence from a U.S. ally about an isis terrorist threat—a plot to blow up airplanes by sneaking onboard laptop computers embedded with explosives. Although Trump did not reveal the source of his information, he did mention where the ally had learned of the threat: a Syrian city within the territory held by isis. This clue likely allowed the Russians to determine that the intelligence had come from Israel. America’s closest intelligence relationships are predicated on the understanding that shared information will be carefully handled. Kislyak was widely assumed to be a Russian spymaster, and though Russia and the U.S. ostensibly share a commitment to combatting isis, they have starkly different interests in Syria, where Russia supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In the context of the Comey firing and the simmering suspicions about Russian collusion, Trump’s blithe disclosure was a grave blunder.
After the Washington Post reported on the gaffe, creating a furor, the White House denied that Trump had divulged such information. But the President undercut this story line when he acknowledged, on Twitter, that he had indeed done so. Then McMaster held a press conference to address the controversy. He labelled the Post story false, although he did not explain what was inaccurate about it, and he glossed over Trump’s disclosure of classified information to a hostile adversary, focussing instead on the fact that the President did not appear to have jeopardized “sources and methods.” McMaster seemed sincerely exasperated with the press. “It is wholly appropriate for the President to share whatever information he thinks is necessary to advance the security of the American people,” he said. His remarks were brief but aggressive; he managed to use the phrase “wholly appropriate” nine times.
Many of McMaster’s friends found the press conference hard to watch. “We all looked at that and said, ‘O.K., man, you’re trying real hard,’ ” Janine Davidson, the former Pentagon official, recalled. In light of McMaster’s book, and his unrestrained temperament, some observers had hoped that he might be effective as Trump’s foil, curbing the President’s most virulent instincts. Perhaps the press conference simply illustrated how far McMaster was willing to go to preserve his relationship with Trump, in order to protect the nation. As Davidson put it to me, “How many times a week, or a month, does he manage to talk the President out of something? Probably a lot.”
John Nagl sounded a similar note: “On H.R.’s shoulders may be decisions that preserve the world from the threat of thermonuclear war, and there’s literally nobody else who I would rather have in that position,” he told me. “If that means he has to say some things that are not completely true, I’m O.K. with that.” In this telling, McMaster was a martyr—a man who loved America so much that he was prepared to sacrifice his own reputation in order to save it.
But others wondered if McMaster had transgressed a moral boundary. In “Dereliction of Duty,” he had described a dangerous phenomenon in which military men became “shields,” insulating political leaders from criticism by lending an aura of unimpeachability to their decisions—even reckless ones. Paul Yingling, who had served alongside McMaster in Iraq, was sickened by his White House appearance. “It is never O.K. for an officer to lie, period,” he said. “If you want to get into politics and shade the truth, great. But take off the uniform. The problem is when you mix categories: when you ask for the presumption of honor that goes with being an officer and then you mislead the public.” In Yingling’s view, it was grotesque to exploit that honor “as a political asset.”
Yingling believes that the officer’s code left McMaster no choice but to quit. “You don’t make instrumental calculations about questions of honor,” he said. “Some of these senior military officers in the Trump Administration forget that the Constitution they swore to defend includes the Twenty-fifth Amendment. If they believe that the President is unfit, then their job is not to work behind the scenes to mitigate, or paper over, his infirmities. It’s their duty to resign—and go public about why they’re doing it.”
Erin Simpson, a defense analyst who worked with McMaster in Afghanistan, has suggested that when honorable people take senior positions in this Administration they become “part of the solution and part of the problem.” Thomas Ricks told me that McMaster surely approached his job in good faith, but added, “Watching him, I came to believe that, at a certain point, he was just putting lipstick on a pig.”
Several of McMaster’s close associates on the N.S.C. strenuously objected to such characterizations. Numerous people told me they were sure that McMaster had established “red lines”—things that he would have refused to do for Trump. But nobody could tell me what those things were. And it is tempting to wonder whether, in this moment of bread and circuses, with fresh scandals erupting every day, the gesture of resigning in protest would have hadany effect. Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin, wrote an indignant Op-Ed in the Times after he was fired, late this past March, and it registered for barely a news cycle. In “Dereliction of Duty,” McMaster recounts the story of Harold Johnson, an Army chief of staff who considered resigning during the Vietnam War. “I could resign, and what am I?” Johnson says. “I’m a disgruntled general for forty-eight hours, and then I’m out of sight.” McMaster notes, however, that this failure to act on principle haunted Johnson for the rest of his life.
Whatever McMaster’s personal calculus, the people around him insist that he has no regrets about his tenure. “I really take issue with the notion that he opportunistically set his principles aside,” an official who worked closely with him said, adding, “I think where some people have a hard time is that, ideologically, General McMaster may find himself aligned with the main thrust of Trump’s foreign policy.” Both Trump and McMaster disdained the Obama Administration’s lofty rhetoric about arcs of history bending toward justice, and saw the world as an arena for brute competition.
Nowhere was this apparent affinity more pronounced than on North Korea policy. McMaster has always had a hawkish temperament. “Dereliction of Duty” is not critical of U.S. engagement in Vietnam per se—but of incrementalU.S. engagement. McMaster retains a deep faith in conventional American military power. Efforts by previous Administrations to halt North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons had proved fruitless. As national-security adviser, McMaster became associated in the press with the so-called bloody-nose strategy, in which the U.S. might launch a “preventive” conventional attack on North Korea, stunning the regime of Kim Jong Un into cowed recognition of America’s power. McMaster has suggested that traditional deterrence may not work with Kim, and that if North Korea develops a long-range nuclear capability it would represent “the most destabilizing development” in the international order since the Second World War. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos in August, McMaster displayed few reservations about deploying military options. “The United States military is locked and loaded,” he said.
Some of McMaster’s friends were shocked that he might advocate such a strategy. The human toll would likely be catastrophic, because Kim would almost certainly retaliate by launching an attack on Seoul. Secretary Mattis has suggested that the scenario could result in “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetime.” The strategy also had a glaring logical flaw: if the basis for a preventative strike were the assumption that Kim cannot otherwise be deterred, what grounds would there be to think that a “bloody nose” might deter him? Some admirers of McMaster’s told me that if he had appeared to endorse a conventional-weapons attack, it must have been a bluff—an effort to constrain Kim through rhetoric. But, when I floated this theory to several people who have worked on the Trump N.S.C., they scoffed. “Bullshit,” one said. “There’s no way this team could ever pull off anything approaching that level of sophistication.”
McMaster’s staff insisted to me that, contrary to widespread reports, he never adopted the bloody-nose position. “He never said ‘bloody nose,’ ” a close aide told me. Instead, staffers suggested, McMaster simply provided a comprehensive list of military options to the President. They contrasted this approach with that of Jim Mattis. There had been instances, with regard to North Korea and also Iran, in which McMaster requested war plans from Mattis, only to have Mattis refuse to supply them. To McMaster and his colleagues, Mattis’s apparent attempts to limit Trump’s options verged on insubordination. One senior N.S.C. official told me that Mattis perceives his role as playing “babysitter” to the President.
“Part of the friction in H.R.’s relationship with Trump was that the guy didn’t like the fact that his foreign-policy team was just stonewalling him,” Ken Pollack said. And Trump didn’t seem to perceive that Mattis was doing the stonewalling. Two senior officials at the White House told me that when Trump demanded to know what had become of options he requested, McMaster, always the Boy Scout, refused to point the finger at Mattis. He just said, “We’re working on it, sir.” According to Pollack, McMaster believed that part of the tension he experienced with Mattis and Tillerson sprang from their perception that he was “too responsive” to the President.
Erin Simpson said that there is a “Goldilocks problem” when it comes to advising Trump. In most Administrations, a policy adviser might present three choices: one that’s too cold, one that’s too hot, and a third that’s just right. But what do you do when you are serving a President who nearly always picks the hot option? The delicate game theory of nuclear brinkmanship is predicated, in no small part, on the idea that the two sides are engaging in rational calculation. Yet both Trump and Kim are prone to intemperate rhetoric, peacocking, and impulsive decisions. According to multiple senior officials, in early January the President asked his staff to present him with a range of evacuation plans for the approximately two hundred thousand American civilians who live in South Korea. (On TV, Senator Lindsey Graham was calling for dependents of U.S. soldiers there to be brought home.) Any evacuation would send a profoundly alarming signal to South Korea, and inevitably put the U.S. and North Korea on a war footing. McMaster and his staff dutifully began gathering options for the President. The deliberations were scuttled only after Mattis and Kelly intervened.
Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, once told Mattis, “Your job is to make sure these morons don’t get up in the morning and advance some lame-brained idea.” Mattis’s interactions with McMaster indicate that he perceives Trump as a radically mercurial figure who must be managed with a degree of manipulation and care that exceeds the usual parameters of his job. McMaster, in his insistence on a doctrinaire approach to his position, could seem, at times, like the Army leaders he once criticized—fighting the war he wanted to fight, rather than the one he was fighting.
“The job is the job,” one of McMaster’s close aides told me, arguing that there was nothing about Trump that necessitated a bespoke approach to the presentation of military options. If Mattis was a babysitter, then McMaster was a waiter, presenting the Commander-in-Chief with a menu, and letting him order. This is the irony of Trump’s ambivalence about McMaster: there should have been no question about his loyalty. At a White House press briefing in January, a journalist asked McMaster if Trump’s incendiary rhetoric—and his refusal to speak out about human rights and freedom of expression—might be “creating a climate where authoritarian leaders feel they have free rein.”
“It’s just not true,” McMaster said, insisting that Trump had “spoken loudly” about human rights. McMaster cited language from a few teleprompter speeches that Trump had delivered, and refused to otherwise address the question. The exchange was striking not so much for McMaster’s disingenuousness, as for the fact that he actually appeared to believe his own spin. In October, Lindsey Graham joined Trump at an event in South Carolina, and afterward Trump invited Graham to fly back to Washington with him. On the flight, Trump asked him, “What do you think of McMaster?”
Graham replied, “The man is always on message for you.”
Trump demands loyalty, but he seldom rewards it. One day in early March, I had just entered the White House grounds when MSNBC, citing five sources, reported that McMaster was about to be fired. When I alerted one of his aides to the story, she seemed bewildered, saying, “He’s been in meetings with the President all day!” Later that afternoon, Trump denied the story, calling it “fake news,” and saying that McMaster was doing “a great job.”
McMaster’s staff told me that he had dealt with the months-long uncertainty about his employment with “dignity and honor,” but also with gallows humor. After the MSNBC story, McMaster attended a meeting of his senior staff and announced, “I will be leaving the White House.” He waited just long enough for alarm to register on people’s faces before adding, “We will all be leaving the White House, eventually.” He adopted the same tone of cavalier existentialism in meetings with some of his foreign counterparts, occasionally punctuating discussions of future plans with “I might not be here next week!” This may have endeared McMaster to foreign ministers, but it could not help the standing or stability of the United States to have a national-security adviser who was so obviously operating on borrowed time.
McMaster surely hastened his own demise when he acknowledged, at the Munich Security Conference, in February, that Robert Mueller had amassed “incontrovertible” evidence of a Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election. When a Russian official at the event proposed a joint initiative between Russia and the United States on cybersecurity, McMaster replied, “I’m surprised there are any Russian cyber experts available, based on how active they have been in undermining our democracies across the West.” Within hours, Trump publicly rebuked him with a tweet: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.” McMaster’s staff was caught off guard. They had not found his comments in Munich particularly controversial. As if to underline how superfluous his national-security adviser had become, Trump announced three weeks later that, rather than give Kim Jong Un a bloody nose, he would break with decades of American precedent and hold direct talks with the North Korean leader. Trump, in an apparent acknowledgment that he prefers to conduct foreign policy by instinct, said that when it came to war and peace he could “go hard in either direction.”
Trump’s announcement was welcomed in the mainstream press, insofar as it represented an alternative to a military strike. But the plan had its own risks. Trump is not, in fact, a great negotiator. A one-on-one meeting was already a victory for Kim: whatever the outcome of the talks, he would bolster his legitimacy by sitting down with a U.S. President. And how would such a meeting unfold? As the “do not congratulate” episode made clear, Trump has a compulsion to blurt out precisely the thing that he has been instructed not to say. And who would prepare him for the talks? Joseph Yun, the U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy, quit at the end of February and was not replaced. Trump had still not appointed an Ambassador to South Korea. (The Administration’s candidate for the job, the widely respected scholar Victor Cha, had suddenly been withdrawn, reportedly because the White House deemed him insufficiently hawkish.) And in mid-March Trump fired Tillerson. When South Korea’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, visited Washington several days later, Tillerson’s replacement, Mike Pompeo, had not yet been confirmed as Secretary of State. Kang met with Ivanka Trump instead.
The delay in firing McMaster could be attributed, in part, to an effort to find him another position in the Army. This would have been a fitting reward for McMaster’s service: he could return to the institution where he had spent his whole career, and perhaps earn a fourth star. But several people close to McMaster told me that he regarded his tenure on the N.S.C. as his “terminal” position in government. The Army did float a number of possible assignments, including the command of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific. But an aide told me that McMaster may have found these offers “demeaning”; the Pacific job is a four-star position, but, because the region is dominated by the Navy, it is not considered a plum assignment. Moreover, a senior White House official told me, “I don’t think Mattis wanted him back.” McMaster, who had written a book about the importance of military advisers remaining untainted by politics, was now tainted himself. “It’s harder for H.R. to be legitimized as a four-star after serving in a political position—especially in this Administration,” Bill Rapp said.
One uncanny feature of the Trump Presidency is the degree to which the former star of “The Apprentice” has reรซnacted, in the White House, a serialized reality show built around dramatic firings. The Washington establishment and the press have been co-opted all too easily by this spectacle, wallowing in the palace intrigue and speculating about who might be ousted next. As rumors of McMaster’s departure swirled, he approached Trump. “Do you want me to go?” he asked. “I’ll go as hard as I can for as long as I can. But if you want me to go now, I’ll go.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Trump replied.
McMaster hoped to stay in the job through the summer. But on March 22nd Trump telephoned him and said that it was time. The President had shouted at McMaster about the “do not congratulate” leak, but never actually suggested that he was responsible for it. McMaster’s staff pointed out that it would have been self-defeating for him to have engineered such a leak; in fact, more than one senior official suggested to me that the leak may have emanated from someone in the White House who was trying to frame McMaster.
The morning after he was fired, McMaster called an all-hands meeting in the same auditorium where he had first greeted his staff. He received a three-minute standing ovation. True to form, McMaster exuded optimism, not bitterness, praising his colleagues and exhorting them to do everything they could to empower his successor, John Bolton—an unrepentant hawk who is expected to adopt a more Kissingerian approach to the position.
Over the several months that I reported this story, I asked friends and colleagues of McMaster’s why he put up with the indignities of the job, instead of resigning. Many offered the same explanation: he knew that if he left because he had grave qualms about Trump, he would be replaced by someone else who didn’t have those qualms. As Nagl told me, “For John Bolton, there is no moral dilemma.”
In describing McMaster’s accomplishments, numerous officials pointed to the relatively moderate language of the “National Security Strategy,” and to his success in persuading Trump not to completely jettison the Iran agreement. But McMaster had been replaced by a man who will likely function as an accelerator on Trump’s wildest instincts, and who will not hesitate to invalidate the Iran deal. The prospects for multilateralism look dim. “You can hear the shock in the Europeans’ voices as they’re saying goodbye to McMaster,” a senior official said.
One of Bolton’s first orders of business was to start dismissing people who had worked for McMaster. Bolton was said to be particularly interested in weeding out “Obama holdovers.” Exiled Flynnstones began angling for a triumphant return to the Administration. If you were inclined to believe that McMaster had achieved anything of note during his thirteen months in office, it was hard not to regard the Bolton appointment as Trump’s repudiation of those achievements. Pollack told me that, policy matters aside, McMaster’s focus on process and precedent was a worthy attempt to inculcate in the President a sense of civility and tradition. “That was the endless challenge—trying to convince Donald Trump to live in the house, rather than just burn it down,” Pollack said. Alluding to Bolton’s ascension, he concluded, “Unfortunately, I think we have our answer.”
A few days before McMaster’s departure, he gave a speech at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington. He again criticized Russia as a nefarious actor, emphasizing its responsibility for the recent nerve-agent poisonings in England. The Trump Administration was introducing new sanctions against Russia, a development that might count as another success for McMaster, but he seemed to express some oblique frustration. “It is time that we expose those who glamorize and apologize in the service of Communist, authoritarian, and repressive governments,” he declared, criticizing people who nurture “idealized” views of tyrannical regimes. It was as close as McMaster was likely to come to taking a public shot at Trump. “It was an angry speech,” someone who worked for him told me. “You could tell from his delivery that there are areas in which he wanted to do more. It’s clear that he has views that he isn’t able to express.”
McMaster will retire from the Army on June 1st. He will teach, give lectures, sit on corporate boards, and make money. Perhaps he will be haunted by his decision to remain obdurately loyal to Donald Trump. And perhaps he will write another book—one that interrogates his own calibration of the balance between duty and honor in the service of a President who didn’t want to be challenged. For an old soldier like McMaster, the very notion of civilian life may seem mystifying. Years ago, he was asked what he would do if he ever left the Army. “It’s so hard for me to imagine,” he said. ♦
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