James Mattis Doesn’t Want to Talk About the President

Jim Mattis has been everywhere this week, and nowhere at all. Over the past several days, President Trump’s former Secretary of Defense has appeared on CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC (twice), PBS (twice), NPR, and various podcasts to hawk his new, sort-of memoir, “Call Sign Chaos,” co-authored with a fellow former marine, Bing West. He has been live-streaming from the Council on Foreign Relations and fielding questions at bookstores. The famously austere retired four-star general even agreed to a swank Washington party in his honor on Thursday night, at the home of The Atlantic’s chairman, David Bradley, and to a celebration in New York, hosted by the former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Yet never in this long and growing list of interviews, lectures, book signings, and conversations with Mattis has the former Secretary of Defense actually answered the questions put to him about the President whose Cabinet he quit, in December. Instead, Mattis has deflected and demurred, referring back to his resignation letter, which warned about the perilous fate that awaits nations that fail to treat “allies with respect,” although it avoided so much as mentioning Trump’s name or citing a single Trump action that troubled him, beyond the abrupt decision to withdraw from Syria, which was the proximate cause for Mattis’s exit. When interviewers have pressed him about Trump, Mattis has recycled the same lines about his desire not to be a critic trashing his former colleagues from “the cheap seats,” and he has insisted that, although he was a Trump political appointee, he owes the President a military man’s “duty of silence” while Trump remains in office. In the book itself, Trump’s name is never mentioned after the first two pages. “I realize how much I am disappointing people when I don’t say, ‘Let’s go torch the White House,’ ” Mattis joked at the Bradleys’ party, on Thursday night, as journalists who had tried to pry an answer out of him looked on.

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CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mounted a particularly pointed effort to get Mattis to talk about Trump. In an interview on Tuesday, on her PBS show, Amanpour forced a visibly uncomfortable Mattis to watch a series of clips of the President at his most outrageous. Her highlights reel included footage of the announcement of the “extreme vetting” Muslim ban, which Trump made in the early days of his Administration, with Mattis at his side; of Trump praising the Russian President, Vladimir Putin; of Trump announcing he “fell in love” with North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un; and of Trump insisting there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville. None of those events caused Mattis to quit, Amanpour pointed out, before asking whether he had a “duty” not only to Trump but to the American people, to speak out about the President before the next election. Mattis hemmed and hawed. “I don’t think right now, for a person steeped in the military tradition in the Defense Department,” he said, “I should be speaking up on things that are political assessments.” When she persisted, Mattis insisted that he was following “long-standing tradition” not to offer his “political assessments.” Once you do that, he said, “then, Katy, bar the door.”

Mattis has, in fact, been more than willing to offer harsh political judgments on issues that remain hotly contested today. The difference is that they concern decisions made by Trump’s two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, about whom he has been scathing, both in the book and at his various appearances around Washington this week. He criticized Bush’s lack of preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and his order to launch a retaliatory battle in Fallujah, over Mattis’s objections. As for Obama, Mattis pointed to his “catastrophic decisions” in Iraq (in a chapter titled “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory”), his nuclear deal with Iran (“I did not think it was a sound idea,” Mattis told the Council on Foreign Relations), and his general lack of strategic thinking about great-power competitors, such as China and Russia. At the book party on Thursday, Mattis was particularly scathing on the last point, telling Washington notables including Obama’s former Pentagon policy chief, Michèle Flournoy (whom Mattis had tried to recruit to serve as his deputy), that, under Obama, “We did not have a strategy. It’s that simple. Eight years, we had not had a strategy.” Listening to Mattis drop scorn on Obama, who pushed him out as Centcom chief, it was hard to see the justification for the distinction Mattis has been making between his willingness to bash the previous Administration and his refusal to bash this one. When Trump runs for reëlection, in 2020, his opponent may well be Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden, a key figure in all the foreign-policy decisions Mattis has no problem firing away at.

The Mattis book tour instantly drew comparisons with Robert Mueller’s painful-to-watch testimony on Capitol Hill this summer, in which the former special counsel, another pillar of the Washington establishment, refused to offer any criticism of Trump beyond the exact language contained in his four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report outlining ten different possible acts of obstruction of justice. But Mattis has taken the no-comment approach even further, into the improbable realm of self-promotion. Mueller, after all, made just a one-day appearance on the Hill, and that was forced upon him by congressional subpoena. And he has a strong argument that prosecutors with knowledge of ongoing cases and still-secret evidence should remain circumspect.

Mattis, however, chose to embark on an extensive book tour and open himself up to questions involving political figures, and he seems perfectly willing to answer those questions, as long as they are not about Trump. Few observers doubt that, privately, Mattis has strong negative views about the President’s judgment, character, and capabilities; the issue is whether and how he will ever share them. Isn’t that a duty, too? It’s also worth noting that Mattis did not serve as a military officer under Trump, as he did under Bush and Obama, but as a civilian political appointee, who resigned from the Administration in protest. “He wants to have it both ways,” a former government official who worked with Mattis told me. “He loved the pomp and circumstance” but opts for an “abdication of responsibility” when it comes to telling the truth about his time working for Trump. “Who is your responsibility to? Isn’t it to the Constitution and the American people?”

The last Republican-appointed Secretary of Defense had none of the same qualms about criticizing the President he served, and doing so while that President was still in office. In fact, Robert Gates, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and stayed on through the first two years of the Obama Administration, wrote a scathing 2014 memoir in the middle of Obama’s second term. In it, he complained not only about the aides on Obama’s National Security Council but also about Vice-President Biden, whom Gates memorably dismissed as having been wrong on “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Gates called his book, “Duty.”

When Mattis left the Trump Administration, nine months ago, it was seen as a red line being crossed, which might have dire consequences for Trump among the still-wary Republican establishment. But that didn’t happen. Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom had spent the previous two years warning about a Mattis exit, remained quiescent, and Mattis himself stuck to his self-imposed silence, except for his long but essentially cryptic resignation letter. After his book tour, he promises to once again “retreat back across the Rocky Mountains” and only break his silence in the case of a truly monumental Trump outrage, an eventuality that he has likened to pornography, in that, he told Amanpour, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Quitting in protest clearly isn’t what it used to be. On the one hand, Trump has had remarkable turnover among his top advisers and Cabinet. The Brookings Institution found a seventy-seven-per-cent turnover rate among Trump’s top staff, and more Cabinet departures in one term than any recent President. At the same time, remarkably few of those former aides have publicly spoken out against him, even in the numerous cases where the ex-adviser left on principle, couldn’t take it anymore, or was humiliated on his or her way out the door. Several others on Trump’s original national-security team, including his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his second national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, shared Mattis’s concerns about a number of Trump’s policy decisions, from his withdrawal from the Iran deal to his move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But, like Mattis, they have remained largely silent. When Tillerson gave a rare interview, to Bob Schieffer, about nine months after leaving the Administration, he caused days of headlines by commenting that Trump was “pretty undisciplined” and had frequently suggested actions that Tillerson refused to take because they were illegal. Since then, Tillerson has been so publicity-shy that he testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in secret, with only the panel’s chairman and ranking member and their staffers present. When Trump’s advisers quit, their motto seems to be “Get out, and shut up.”

Twenty minutes into Mattis’s remarks on Thursday night, the NPR “All Things Considered” anchor Mary Louise Kelly took the microphone and gave it one last shot. What, she asked, was Mattis’s “duty and responsibility to country,” as opposed to its commander-in-chief? The Bradleys’ Impressionist-filled drawing room was crowded with veteran journalists, such as Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward. John Kelly, the former Marine general, who served as Trump’s second White House chief of staff, stood in the back corner—another refugee from the Administration who, like his old friend Mattis, has said nothing at all publicly about his former boss. Mattis was defensive but unswayed. “Yes, the duty and responsibility is to the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief,” he said. But, still, “I have to decide what’s right for me,” Mattis told the room. “I respect those who disagree with what I’m doing,” he added, before launching into a history lesson about strictly nonpartisan military leaders, from George Washington through Omar Bradley, who said that “when a general retires their uniform, they need to retire their tongue when it comes to political issues.” Like it or not, Mattis said, as far as the public is concerned, “I’m a general forever.”

Standing nearby as Mattis said all this was another former four-star general, his friend and fellow-marine John Allen. In 2016, Allen broke with Mattis’s code and endorsed Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention, while another former general, Michael Flynn, endorsed Trump at the G.O.P. convention. Now Mattis brought that up, and criticized Allen and Flynn by name. “I could not disagree more strongly with what they did,” he said. “The military doesn’t do that . . .  Now, fortunately, that tradition is still alive, but I could very easily be the one most damning to it, if I don’t be careful. So I will retreat west of the Rockies soon, but in the interim, I’m not talking.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a Washington doyenne of a different era, was famous for saying, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Today’s Washington leaders, such as they are, have a different creed. If they haven’t got anything nice to say about the President, it appears they won’t say anything at all.