by Bob Woodward
He especially remembered a visit to a family in Utah with a large, beautiful home. He drove up a winding hill. Inside, he took a seat.
Tall windows fronted the house. The father, a doctor, was home early. The mother, a professor at a local college, had perfectly painted nails and every hair just right. They were stoic.
Their son had a four-year college football scholarship but had joined the Marines instead. He had died in combat years earlier. The mother talked about their deceased son, the mountains he had climbed. They took Mattis to a boy’s bedroom still fully intact, preserved almost as a museum. They showed Mattis all the pictures—their son as a baby, grammar school, high school, the prom. The full American story. Mattis could only listen so long. There was only so much to say. After an hour, the visit was petering out.
The mother said General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, had asked for 40,000 more troops in 2009, and President Obama had given 30,000. She had her history correct. If there were more, a million troops available, she asked, why didn’t McChrystal get 80,000?
Mattis mumbled something about how the president had to weigh options. Finally, Mattis said, “You know, I can’t give you a good answer other than we thought that was probably sufficient.”
“Were you trying to make it fair for the enemy?” she asked. There was no anger in her voice, just sorrow, as if the wounds of the loss would never heal. All of a sudden the father became engaged and looked directly at Mattis—an unforgettable look.
“We certainly weren’t trying to do that,” Mattis answered defensively.
“We’ve studied you,” said the mother. “We’ve read all the things you’ve done.” Mattis was not the problem. “We know you’re trying to be loyal.”
The father stood and shook Mattis’s hand, holding it for what seemed like 30 seconds, straining for some connection. The mother—cultured, refined, proper, educated—had one final thought about Washington: “General, no one in that town back there gives a fuck what our family lost.”
NINETEEN
Mattis later described for others what it was like to attend meetings with Trump: “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him.
“So you just had to deal with it. He’d been voted in. And our job was not to take a political or partisan position. It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?”
Mattis frequently used a phrase coined by George Kennan, the father of the doctrine to contain the Soviet Union: “the treacherous curtain of deference” that comes down when someone is around high-level officials, especially presidents.
In Trump’s case, there were additional impediments to connecting and communicating with the president. Mattis said beyond that sense of “Oh my gosh, I’m in the Oval Office,” advisers had to push past “the additional curtains of Fox News, of his formative years. Those are long-held beliefs. So those were the real curtains. Because I saw Rex Tillerson and Dan Coats and Mike Pompeo at CIA and certainly Gina Haspel, myself, quite willing to come up with the facts. Joe Dunford never hesitated on it.” Neither did H. R. McMaster or Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
“But the facts would be dismissed, and we’d be off on one of those ramps that circled around and started going. And then you’re sitting there, and it’s not deference at that point. It’s grasping for a way to get it back on subject. And it was just very hard. And there wasn’t a lot of time for it.”
* * *
Mattis had repeatedly reminded the president that 77 nations and international organizations were fighting ISIS, the Islamic state, primarily in Syria. “Thirteen of those nations have military troops,” Mattis noted.
What about the other nations? Trump asked. Who was ripping him off?
“The others are giving money, intelligence,” Mattis said. “They’re supporting programs, all sorts of things. Remember for every one of our troops that died in Syria, 1,000 Kurds have died in Syria.” Actually it was more. “It is in our interest to keep fighting.” Trump had promised to defeat ISIS in the presidential campaign, and Mattis had urged a war of no less than “annihilation”—a concept Trump loved and vigorously approved.
On December 6, 2018, Mattis was in Ottawa for a meeting of the 13 defense ministers of the nations contributing troops to the ISIS fight. His chief talking point: They needed to stay in the fight. Every country needs to stay.
“We meet at a great time,” Canadian defense minister Harjit Sajjan started off at the closed-door meeting. “We can say how great this alliance has been. We’ve broken ISIS’s back. But it isn’t over.”
Mattis was sitting next to him, quite happy to be indoors with the temperature outside hovering around freezing.
“We must not declare victory,” said France’s Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly, leaning forward, “and walk away and wonder why it comes right back at it.” On the verge of victory was the time to stay the course and avoid the temptation of a premature withdrawal.
Everyone seemed to be nodding.
“It is critical at this point that we not take our eye off the ball,” said the British minister.
Perfect, thought Mattis. Everyone was on board. He could ignore his written talking points. He wouldn’t have to say a word. The sale was made.
Finally the meeting was turned over to him as the representative of the lead nation.
Mattis summarized the others’ points and said he couldn’t agree more strongly.
They then all discussed how they would keep their troops there, the exact words to explain the essential rationale underlying their plans: They had to persist because the fight against ISIS was not over.
My God, this is great, Mattis thought. He called White House chief of staff John Kelly. “John, the nations are with us. They’re not pulling. They’re going to stay on the ground. It’s time to force it into the Geneva peace process”—to support the Kurds, who had done most of the fighting. “I’ll talk to Mike Pompeo.”
Back in Washington on Wednesday, December 19, Mattis saw a tweet pop up from the president: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Later that day, Trump released a one-minute video and tweet underscoring his earlier message: “After historic victories against ISIS, it’s time to bring our great young people home!” The United States was withdrawing from Syria.
The brief video, complete with title cards and high production values, showed Trump standing outside the White House discussing the “heartbreaking” task of writing letters to the families of the fallen.
“We won,” Trump said in the video. “And that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they”—he pointed to the heavens—“want it.”
Mattis was shocked. Once again Trump had not consulted his secretary of defense and made a major announcement with no warning.
His first thought: How could we break with our allies? His second was the timing: It was just two weeks after the Ottawa meeting with all the commitments and pledges. He sat there and thought, my God, they’re going to think I lied to them. They won’t believe that I had no idea about this. And now we’re going to leave them high and dry. We’re going to do what Obama did when he said we’re going after the Syrians for the chemical weapons use and the French planes were armed, they were ready to go when he walked. And the Kurds were going to be left unprotected and possibly slaughtered by Turkey.
“John,” Mattis said in a call to John Kelly, “I need an hour with the boss.”
“You got it,” said Kelly.
Mattis figured that Kelly knew what it was about, but the
chief of staff, who had been blindsided by the president so many times and announced ten days earlier that he would soon be leaving, did not ask. Nine months earlier, Mattis had watched Rex Tillerson be fired by tweet.
The decision announcements by tweet were all wrong, in Mattis’s view. Trump lived in his own head and if he wanted, out came an idea or a decision. It did not matter what anybody else thought.
Mattis once said, “In any organization you become complicit with what the organization is doing.” For nearly two years Mattis had gone along. As the commander in chief, Trump called the shots. Mattis decided he was no longer going to be complicit.
He went to his Pentagon office and began writing his resignation letter. Just in case he was successful in rolling back the president’s announced decision, he didn’t want anyone to have a copy of the letter. He had successfully changed the president’s mind at least temporarily on Afghanistan and some other matters. It had never been pretty, but he knew he was not paid for pretty. He thought there was a chance he would come back from a meeting with Trump and still be secretary of defense. He asked a trusted senior member of his staff to type the resignation letter. There were only two copies. One went with him, and one stayed in his desk.
At the White House, Mattis found the president in a good mood. They walked into the Oval Office and sat down.
“Mr. President, we’ve got to come to an understanding here. This enemy is not going away.” He noted that he had been through this before, when Obama walked away from Iraq. “These terrorist groups regenerate.” The U.S. military had to win not just the fighting but the peace. “Our allies are there, and we can force this thing to closure now if we still have traction, if we still have our troops there.”
Mattis was like a broken record, repeating that the strongest military presence gave the diplomats the leverage to speak with authority—work with the diplomats, avoid the use of additional military force.
“You guys will have us fighting forever,” Trump said.
“No,” Mattis said. “The Kurds have done the fighting. Let’s be right up front.”
“It’s cost us billions.”
“Well, a lot of other nations too—77 nations plus Interpol, Arab League, NATO.”
Trump was not moving, Mattis could see. There was no give. He had decided, and that was it. Mattis had seen it before. Nothing. It was over.
“We beat them,” Trump said. “There’s no need.”
“We’re not taking casualties,” Mattis said. “But we haven’t beaten them. We’ve done the military part. Now we have to win the part that’s going to make sure we don’t have to go back in, like your predecessor who pulled out of Iraq too early and we have to go back in.”
Trump did not agree.
Mattis knew he could only quit once. “Mr. President, it’s probably best you read this.”
He handed the letter to the president, who read:
“One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.…
“Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
“It’s not a real nice letter,” the president said.
“Mr. President, if you and I don’t agree that we’re parting over the allies—the way we look at allies—then the press is going to come up, rightly, with a hundred different reasons why I’m leaving.”
“That’s fair,” Trump replied.
Then Mattis delivered his central message: “You’re going to have to get the next secretary of defense to lose to ISIS. I’m not going to do it.”
Is the letter going to be public? the president asked.
“It’s got to be public,” Mattis replied. “Number one, it’ll leak if we don’t do it. Just put the thing out there and say, ‘This is all it is.’ ”
Yeah, okay, Trump agreed.
But they both knew it was a lot more.
Trump walked Mattis to the door. They parted with what Mattis later called a “nonadversarial handshake”—no fireworks.
In his car, Mattis called his chief of staff, retired Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney. “There’s a letter in my top desk drawer.” Have it released to the press. “Tell all the senior staff I want to see them, the political staff” and the senior civilians. “I need to see them in the conference room in the next 20 minutes.”
When they gathered in the conference room, Mattis said, “It’s crucial that none of you quit. Steady, steady, steady. Every enemy is looking at us now. We’ll get through this. The deputy is sitting beside me.” Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan had been in the job for more than a year. “It’s going to be a smooth turnover.
“I’ve offered to be here all the way through February,” he said. That was almost two months away and would get them through the upcoming NATO meeting.
“You have to steady everyone now. And if someone wants to bring it up say, yeah, that’s interesting, but where are we on the budget? Oh yeah, that’s interesting, but what about the deploying Army unit? Just force them to focus.”
Soon calls started flooding in from about four dozen senators and members of Congress. It was about 50/50 Republicans and Democrats. Very bipartisan. Defense was largely bipartisan.
Mattis believed he had good relations with most. He had attended the Senate lunches—the Republicans-only lunches, and the Democrats-only lunches—trying to answer their questions. He’d been given a standing ovation at one of the Democrats’ lunches.
Sorry you are leaving, was the common message.
Mattis tried to say the same thing to each congressional caller, sometimes rather harshly: “It’s time for you to decide if you’re a coequal branch of government or if you’re just going to talk like you’re one.”
Mattis found that most acknowledged his observation and didn’t fight it.
“I’m not here to tell you where to stand on an issue,” Mattis said. “But you seem to be awfully angry at times, and you have the power of the purse. So what are you doing about it? I’ve done everything I can.”
* * *
At 5:21 p.m. Trump tweeted: “General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February… General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations… I greatly thank Jim for his service!”
But three days later, Trump said that Mattis would be leaving early, on January 1. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Trump said, “What’s he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not so good. I’m not happy with what he’s done in Afghanistan and I shouldn’t be happy.”
Trump continued, “As you know, President Obama fired him, and essentially so did I.” Later he called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.”
When I asked Trump about Mattis a year later, the president said Mattis was “just a PR guy.”
Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”
TWENTY
Jared Kushner’s unorthodox ties to foreign leaders and regular conversations with them outside secure channels raised suspicions among the intelligence agencies.
His interim Top Secret security clearance was downgraded and ultimately denied. The rejection meant Kushner could not have access to sensitive intelligence, impeding his ability to work.
White House chief of staff John Kelly wanted Kushner’s security clearance handled by the book, but the president personally ordered that Kushner be granted the highest security clearance. This gave him access to Top Secret intelligence
classified as Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) and fed a constant tension between Kushner and Kelly.
Kelly was rankled by the off-line style Kushner had adopted in general that allowed him to dip in and out of presidential business at will. It undermined the chief of staff’s attempts to channel the workflow of Trump’s chaotic Oval Office through him.
Kushner and Kelly both maneuvered to be first among equals with Trump. “Kelly was killing me in a million ways,” Kushner said. To Kushner’s relief, his rival finally left in early 2019.
His departure cleared the way for both Trump and Kushner to turn to what was foremost in both their minds: reelection. The vote was nearly two years off, but the campaigning was permanent.
“There are basically three things that need to happen to really give you a super-strong chance at winning reelection,” Kushner told the president.
“Number one, build the wall and get the immigration numbers down. That’s a promise that’s not being kept.” Trump’s border wall between the U.S. and Mexico had been “the signature campaign issue” of 2016.
“Number two, get the Mexico-Canada deal done because that is 34 percent of our exports, and a huge amount of our trading volume that we can get certainty on.
“Number three, if we can get to a deal with China, that’s like a cherry on top. And it will also give a huge amount of rocket fuel to the economy.”
* * *
Kushner was also working on criminal justice reform, which was personally important to him. His father had been convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering and spent 14 months in prison.
Kushner brought in Republican Senators Mike Lee, Tim Scott, and Chuck Grassley to meet with Trump. The senators were arguing in favor of relaxing and reducing mandatory minimum drug sentencing and disparities between sentences handed down for crack and powder cocaine offenses. Kushner wanted to try to get Trump on board with the sentencing reform provisions. They made their pitch.
