The Atlantic - October 2019

THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 51

much opportunity as possible to defend the country. They still

have the responsibility of protecting this great big experiment of

ours. I know the malevolence some people feel for this country,

and we have to give the people who are protecting us some time

to carry out their duties without me adding my criticism to the

cacophony that is right now so poisonous.”

“But duty manifests in other ways,” I argued. “You have a First

Amendment guarantee to speak your mind—”

“Absolutely.”

“And don’t you have a duty to warn the country if it is

en dangered by its leader?”

“I didn’t cook up a convenient tradition here,” he said. “You

don’t endanger the country by attacking the elected commander

in chief. I may not like a commander in chief one fricking bit, but

our system puts the commander in chief there, and to further

weaken him when we’re up against real threats—I mean, we

could be at war on the Korean peninsula, every time they start

launching something.”

The subject of North Korea represented my best chance to

wrench a direct answer from Mattis. I had collected some of

Trump’s more repellent tweets, and read aloud the one that I

thought might overwhelm his defenses. It is a tweet almost with-

out peer in the canon:

North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed

some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence

that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled

when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, &

worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?

Mattis looked at his hands. Finally he said, “Any Marine gen-

eral or any other senior servant of the people of the United States

handed Trump his resignation letter, a letter that would soon
become one of the most famous documents of the Trump presi-
dency thus far.
Here is where I am compelled to note that I did not learn
any of these details from Mattis himself. Nor did I learn them
from his new book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, which he
wrote with the former Marine officer Bing West. The book is an
instructive and entertaining leadership manual for executives,
managers, and military officers. Mattis is a gifted storyteller,
and his advice will be useful to anyone who runs anything. The
book is not, however, an account of his time in service to the
45th president.
I’ve known Mattis for many years, and we spent several hours
in conversation this summer, at his home in Richland, Washing-
ton, and at the Hoover Institution, on the campus of Stanford
University. In these conversations, we discussed the qualities of
effective leadership, the workings of command-and-feedback
loops, the fragility of what he calls the American experiment,
fishing the Columbia River, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
and many other topics. But about Trump he was mainly silent. I
caught glimpses of anger and incredulity, to be sure. But Mattis
is a disciplined man. While discipline is an admirable quality, in
my conversations with Mattis I found it exasperating, because I
believe that the American people should hear his answer to this
question: Is Donald Trump fit for command?
He should answer the question well before November 3, 2020.
Mattis is in an unparalleled position to provide a definitive answer.
During moments of high tension with North Korea, he had wor-
ried that being out of reach of the president for more than a few
seconds constituted a great risk. No one, with the possible excep-
tion of John Kelly, has a better understanding of Donald Trump’s
capacities and inclinations, particularly in the realm of national
security, than James Mattis.
I made this argument to him during an interview at his home,
a modest townhouse in a modest development in a modest town.
Mattis, who is 69, is single, and has always been so. His house
serves mainly as a library of the literature of war and diplomacy,
and as a museum of ceremonial daggers, the residue of a lifetime
of official visits to army headquarters across the Middle East. The
decor reminded me of one of his sayings: “Be polite, be profes-
sional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
I knew that this would be a Gallipoli of an interview, and that
Mattis would be playing the role of the Ottoman gunners. But I
had to try.
“When you go out on book tour,” I said, “people are going
to want you to say things you don’t want to say.” I mentioned a
scene from the book, one that concerned an ultimately success-
ful effort to untangle a traffic jam of armored vehicles in Iraq. I
noted that while this story is an edifying case study in effective
leadership, it is not necessarily the sort of story that people want
from him right now.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re prepared for that? For people wanting you to talk about
Trump?”
He paused.
“Do you know the French concept of devoir de réserve?” he
asked.
I did not, I said.
“The duty of silence. If you leave an administration, you owe
some silence. When you leave an administration over clear pol-
icy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as

MANY GENERALS AND

ADMIRALS WORRIED THAT

SUSTAINED EXPOSURE

TO TRUMP WOULD

DESTROY MATTIS, WHO

IS PERHAPS THE MOST

REVERED LIVING MARINE.