In an excerpt from last Sunday's "60 Minutes," Scott Pelley interviewed H.R. McMaster, largely because he has written yet another memoir about his days in the White House as national security advisor. McMaster, ever the patriot, was careful not to deride his former boss, 45, too harshly, cloaking his responses more in terms of policy than in personal matters.
But in another work, "A Very Stable Genius," Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig make it quite clear that 45 treated McMaster, a three-star general, like dirt, cruelly and inappropriately. He went out of his way to humiliate him for being nothing more than himself.
McMaster knew early on that 45 had no time for the details of national security. He thinks what he thinks and that's pretty much the end of it. It is exactly the wrong position for someone of the most possible power in the history of the world to take. "I don't want to talk to anyone," he says in the book when even the suggestion of a subject briefing is made. "I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else."
Nonetheless, McMaster, putting his country's security first ahead of himself and his boss' ego, tried hard to get 45 to see the bigger picture. That caused 45 to feel lectured, as if there was someone (in fact, pretty much everybody around him; the rest understood the alternative) who knew more than he did. 45 reduced McMaster, who deserved far better, to nothing more than a court jester.
I'm not going to summarize what Rucker and Leonnig said. I'm going to simply retype it here. You can draw your own conclusions at how terrible our president is--or, if you really think so, how McMaster got what he deserved:
In March [2017], McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing [45] on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. [45] got so impatient that he stood up and walked into a adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of [45]'s feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.
McMaster felt it was his duty to speak truth to his commander, to notify the president of critically important issues, and even to highlight bad news and the cons of a particular strategy [45] was considering. That's how McMaster had always spoken to his wartime commanders when he was reporting from the battlefield: "Things have gone to hell, sir. Here's how bad it is." But [45]'s intelligence briefers downplayed or withheld new developments regarding Russia's election interference or cyber intrusions, so as not to agitate the commander in chief. When they left a key piece of information out of the verbal President's Daily Brief, McMaster would later raise it directly with [45], only to become a punching bag for the president when he inevitably blew up. The routine frustrated McMaster.
Part of McMaster's process entailed providing [45] with written briefing documents on each big decision, with detailed descriptions of the risks and possible rewards. He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn't reading any of the briefing book, or even the concise three-page version.....
"Everyone agreed we needed to stop giving the president paper to read," one former National Security Council staffer recalled. "H.R. was uncomfortable with this. McMaster kept saying, 'How are we not going to give the president any papers?'"....
By the time of the November trip to Asia, [45] was openly mocking McMaster. When McMaster arrived in his office for a briefing, [45] would puff up his chest, sit up straight in his chair, and fake shout like a boot camp drill sergeant. In his play, he pretended to be McMaster. "I'm your national security adviser, General McMaster, sir!" [45] would say, trying to amuse the others in the room. "I'm here to give you your briefing, sir!"
Then [45] would ridicule McMaster further by describing the topic of the day and deploying a series of large, complex phrases to indicate how boring McMaster's briefing was going to be. The National Security Council staff were deeply disturbed by [45]'s treatment of their boss. "The president doesn't fire people," said one of McMaster's aides "He just tortures them until they're willing to quit."
This time, though, 45 fired McMaster by tweet, a horrible way to treat such a distinguished general and patriot. But, after all, he had already indicated his lack of respect for anyone who didn't act the way he wanted him to act in front of him, so no one should have been surprised.
Small wonder that anyone would enjoy working for or with him for any extended period of time. McMaster was replaced by John Bolton, who also quit and wrote a disparaging memoir of his time with 45, disingenuously dodging an important addition to the impeachment inquiry. Now he's being investigated for revealing state secrets, an act he describes as politically-charged harassment. Probably so.
It wouldn't have mattered. Republican Senators had decided long before that to eschew their loyalty to the country and cave to the frenzied attitudes of 45's twisted, badly guided faithful, As we have seen, they withdrew with their tails between their legs, doing the politically expedient thing rather than the clearly right thing.
(More on his book later, when I'm done reading it. Rex Tillerson, though not a particularly effective Secretary of State, comes off a little better in terms of general respect.)
I'm not sure there's a better example of why this is, as Bob Woodward keeps saying after his new book, "the wrong man for the job." Scott Pelley didn't ask McMaster about this--or at least that part of the tape didn't run--perhaps to save him from embarrassment, perhaps because he hasn't read this excerpt. I thought I'd include it as another light to shine on this terrible president's incompetence.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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