TWENTY-TWO
Milley continued to be hounded by the events of June 1. His critics were everywhere: on cable news channels, on social media, and on op-ed pages.
Milley understood the ridicule. He had been photographed in battle fatigues alongside a president who was intent on politicizing the military. It was a fiasco.
He called many of his predecessors to seek advice.
“Should I resign?” he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush.
“Fuck no!” Powell said. “I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump’s a fucking maniac.”
Milley received similar, though less colorful, advice from a dozen former secretaries of defense and former chairmen.
Milley decided to apologize publicly but did not give Trump advance warning.
On June 11, at a videotaped talk at the National Defense University graduation, Milley said, “As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune.
“As many of you saw, the result of the photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society,” he said. “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I’ve learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.
“Embrace the Constitution, keep it close to your heart. It is our North Star.”
Several days later, Trump stopped Milley after a routine meeting in the Oval Office.
“Hey, aren’t you proud of walking with your president?” Trump asked.
“To the church?” Milley asked.
Yes, Trump said. “Why did you apologize?”
“Mr. President, it’s got nothing to do with you actually.”
Trump looked skeptical.
“It had to do with me,” Milley said. “It had to do with this uniform. Had to do with the traditions of the United States military and that we are an apolitical organization.
“You’re a politician,” Milley said. “You’re a political actor. For you to do it, that’s your call. But I cannot be part of political events, Mr. President. It’s one of our long-standing traditions.”
“Why did you apologize?” the president asked again. “That’s a sign of weakness.”
“Mr. President,” he said, looking directly at Trump, “not where I come from.” He was a Boston-area native. “Where I was born and how I was raised is when you make a mistake, you admit it.”
Trump tilted his head to the side like the Victrola Dog, the small dog famously pictured staring at a windup phonograph and long used by RCA Records as a mascot.
“Hmm,” he said. “Okay.”
Trump later called Milley twice to inquire about how the military should deal with the issue of Confederate flags, statues and military bases named after Confederate generals. Milley said he favored making changes.
During an Oval Office meeting, Trump returned to the issue. He said he did not want a change. “We’re not going to ban Confederate flags. It’s Southern pride and heritage.”
Meadows said that the Confederate flags could not be banned. It was a freedom of speech issue, and the Pentagon lawyers agreed with him.
Trump asked Milley, what do you think?
“I’ve already told you twice, Mr. President. Are you sure you want to hear it again?”
Yeah, go ahead, Trump said.
“Mr. President,” Milley said, “I think you should ban the flags, change the names of bases, and take down the statues.”
He continued, “I’m from Boston, these guys were traitors.”
Someone asked, what about the Confederate dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery?
“Interestingly,” Milley said of the nearly 500 Confederate soldiers buried there, “they’re arranged in a circle and the names on the gravestones are facing inward, and that symbolizes that they turned their back on the Union. They were traitors at the time, they are traitors today, and they’re traitors in death for all of eternity. Change the names, Mr. President.”
There was brief silence in the Oval Office.
Pence, who almost always took the super-serious path supporting Trump, half-joked, “I just think I found my Union self.”
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, added, “I’m a Yankee, too!”
Without saying anything, Trump jumped to the next topic that came to mind.
David Urban, the lobbyist and Trump ally close to Esper, later tried another approach to Trump. “If you don’t do this,” he said, encouraging the name changes, “the Democrats are going to rename them.”
Urban asked, are you familiar with the USNS Harvey Milk?
“What’s that?” Trump asked.
“It’s a U.S. Navy ship named after a gay city councilman in San Francisco” who was assassinated in 1978. “Do you think Democrats or Republicans did that?”
“Okay. All right,” Trump grunted. “Let me think about it.”
Urban suggested renaming the bases after Medal of Honor recipients. “Celebrate the best of America.”
When Trump kept stalling, Urban blamed Meadows. Another mistake during a tough campaign.
“This is a fucking layup,” Urban told Esper. “Did Meadows get like 800 dudes from the South to call the president and say they’re all heroes?”
Milley decided he needed to develop a game plan for the run-up to the election and beyond.
Trump’s curiosity and comments about a possible attack on Iran had stayed with Milley, and so did Trump’s rage, seemingly ever ready to emerge. Milley had to hold firm, be a bulwark. He had to be ready for anything, including a sudden breakdown in Trump’s conduct and the order inside the West Wing.
“This is how I see the next period of time,” Milley said in a private meeting. “My obligation to the American people is to make sure that we don’t have an unnecessary war overseas. And that we don’t have the unlawful use of American force on the streets of America. We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas.”
Wag the Dog was a 1997 movie about a president using war to distract from a scandal.
Milley believed staying on gave him leverage with Trump because Trump effectively could not fire him.
If Trump did not like Milley’s advice, he could just ignore it. But the symbolic power of the office carried weight. To fire a chairman would be a political earthquake—and Milley had been confirmed by the Senate 89 to 1, suggesting near unanimous bipartisan support.
In the Tank, the hallowed JCS meeting room in the Pentagon where military leaders can speak frankly, Milley outlined his plan for the chiefs.
“Phase 1 is from now until the election, November 3,” Milley said. “Phase 2 is the night of the election through certification,” when Congress formally certified the election on January 6, 2021. “Phase 3 is certification through the inauguration on January 20. And Phase 4 is the first hundred days of whoever wins the election.
“We’re going to take it step by step. We’re going to be in constant contact. We’re going to work our way through this. I’ll be on point. JCS, you guys, I just need you to stand shoulder to shoulder—everybody.
“And the watchword of the day is steady in the saddle. We’re going to keep our eye on the horizon. And we’re going to do what’s right for the country, no matter what the cost is to ourselves.”