Collision: The military vs. President Trump
Making complete sense of last week’s Navy SEAL-Navy Secretary blowup is impossible, from this distance at least, though one thing is clear: President Trump had no business interfering with the review that was underway to determine whether Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher should remain part of the SEAL community, even in retirement, or lose his coveted SEAL Trident pin.
And this is reasonably clear: it was proper, under the circumstances, for Defense Secretary Mark Esper to fire Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. “This is my issue with trust and confidence,” Esper, who’s from Uniontown, told a press conference. “I can’t reconcile the personal statements with the public statements and the written word. “
Spencer’s attempted end-run around the chain of command was a no-no, as far as Esper was concerned.
Spencer’s mistake consisted of going to the White House without telling his boss he was doing so, with a deal that would have served the interests of both the Navy and President Trump: Gallagher was to keep his Trident pin while the president was to keep his cotton pickin’ hands off the SEAL’s internal disciplinary process – a process that, from all accounts, has worked well in maintaining the elite standards which this ultra elite outfit requires.
“Good order” demands the process and experience says it works.
Perhaps if the secretary had let Esper know what he was doing things might have turned out differently. But the Defense chief was hemmed in, by Spencer and his own sense of good order.
“Once we agree on a position we stick to it,” Esper told reporters after the dust had settled, “and support it, both in private and public. If you don’t like the position, then simply resign.”
There’s been a good deal of local pride invested in Esper since his appointment as Donald Trump’s third secretary of defense. (Three secretaries in three years is not good.)
Rightly or wrongly, Esper has drawn comparisons to another Uniontown native, George C. Marshall, who served as Harry Truman’s Pentagon chief in the late 1940s.
I think the comparisons are largely misplaced. By the time he became secretary of defense, Marshall was a towering figure. During World War II, he was head of the Army, the leader of 16 million enlisted men and officers. Following the war, he served as secretary of state. He was the catalyst for the Marshall Plan, which saved western Europe from hunger and despair as well as communism.
He was also instrumental in the creation of the military defense shield, NATO, designed to keep the Germans in (Europe) and the Russians out.
By comparison, Esper’s credentials are thin.
However, the two men have this in common: as cabinet secretaries, they were, and in Esper’s case, are subject to the prerogatives and proclivities of the president of the United States.
In a new biographer of Marshall, “George C. Marshall: Defender of the Republic,” author David L. Roll recounts the conflicting roles Harry Truman and George Marshall played in the founding of the state of Israel in May 1948.
The affair pitted the president against the secretary of defense. Truman favored recognition. Marshall favored a U.N. trusteeship for Palestine. Israeli statehood could wait.
Things blew up at an Oval Office meeting between Truman and Marshall and their top aides. Truman, whose admiration for Marshall was unequaled, was stunned when the Defense chief threatened to vote against the president in the November 1948 elections if Truman extended recognition to the new Jewish state.
Marshall suspected domestic politics weighed heavily in Truman’s decision. He stormed out of the White House.
As recalled by Roll, the man whom Truman called “the great one of the age” soon collected himself and offered a reassessment. He told an aide: “You don’t accept a post of this kind and then resign when the man who has the Constitutional authority to make a decision makes one that you don’t like.”
I am not sure any of this relates to Donald Trump, who is so unlike Harry Truman in so many ways. For instance, Truman was never petty and was always loyal to his staff. He was diligent and mindful of the dignity of his office without being stuffy about it. And he was a reader – he devoured biography and history.
A soldier himself in World War I, commander-in-chief Truman knew the importance of both good morale and discipline. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War; he is not known to have either fired nor hired any enlisted personnel during nearly eight years in office.
As for Mark Esper, he is no George Marshall. Still, his decision regarding Richard Spencer looks rock-solid, maybe even Marshall-like. The native son looks to be off to a good start.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.