A18 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019
a company that was materially
affected by his work.”
Asked about Balash’s job plans,
Interior w ould not comment.
Balash has extensive experi-
ence in Alaska state politics. He
served as the deputy commission-
er for Alaska’s Department of Nat-
ural Resources and ran the a gency
on an acting basis for just over a
year, before becoming c hief of staff
for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).
He j oined Interior i n late 2 017.
Earlier, Balash served in the
governor’s o ffice as a special assis-
tant on energy and natural re-
source development. And before
that, he worked on t he state’s joint
Legislative Budget and Audit
Committee and served as chief of
staff to the state Senate president.
Balash also attended high school
in Fairbanks.
Ethics experts said that regard-
less of the Alaskan’s job descrip-
tion, Balash’s decision to join an
oil company raises potential con-
flicts of interest, depending in p art
on the nature of his negotiations
with the firm before he left public
office.
Under 18 U. S. Code Section 2 08,
a federal official is barred “from
participating personally and sub-
stantially in a particular Govern-
ment matter that will affect his
own financial interests, as well as
the financial interests of ” his
spouse, children and a “person
with whom he i s negotiating for o r
has an arrangement concerning
prospective employment.”
jul [email protected]
[email protected]Alice Crites contributed to this report.ner Repsol, has been expanding
aggressively in Alaska, where it
says it has acquired leases with
more than 700 million barrels of
crude reserves. In M ay, the c ompa-
ny received the go-ahead from the
Army Corps of Engineers, and it
plans to ramp up production oper-
ations this year and over the win-
ter.
Balash noted that Interior “was
not even a cooperating agency” in
the decision to grant Oil Search
the recent permit under the Clean
Water Act.
Oil Search staffers working on
community outreach, govern-
ment affairs and communications
in Alaska will report to Balash in
his new position, according to a
company s pokeswoman.
“Joe is a proud Alaskan and
brings significant regulatory and
external affairs experience to Oil
Search, a company relatively new
to operating in the United States,”
said Keiran Wulff, O il Search exec-
utive vice president and president
for A laska.
Danielle Brian, executive direc-
tor of the Project on Government
Oversight, said in an interview
that the fact that Balash had been
working to make more land avail-
able for exploration near Oil
Search’s ongoing development
raises concerns.
If Balash’s jump to Oil Search
“ends up being legal, it’s further
confirmation to me that our laws
are simply inadequate,” Brian
said. “It is h ard to have c onfidence
that decisions he was making
while he was working for the tax-
payers were not impacted by his
aspirations or hopes to go w ork forto increase oil and gas develop-
ment: t he Arctic N ational Wildlife
Refuge and the National Petro-
leum Reserve-Alaska. During his
time at Interior, Balash oversaw
the department’s preparations to
hold lease sales on the coastal
plain of the 19.3 million-acre ref-
uge and to expand drilling on the
22.8 million-acre reserve west of
the r efuge.
Balash said that even though in
his new role he would oversee
employees who would work with
the federal government on energy
policy, he would abide by the
Trump ethics pledge barring ap-
pointees from lobbying their for-
mer a gencies f or five years.
“I’ll supervise t hose w ho do,” h e
said, referring to Oil Search staff-
ers w ith business before t he feder-
al government, “but I have a ton of
restrictions dealing with the De-
partment of Interior. Most of Oil
Search’s p roperties a re s tate l ands.
There isn’t really the federal nex-
us.”
Nonetheless, Sen. Tom Udall
(D-N.M.) sent a letter to Interior’s
designated e thics o fficial Wednes-
day asking that the department
provide copies of all ethics filings
made by Balash and any notifica-
tions of his negotiations for f uture
employment or compensation.
Udall is the ranking Democrat
on the S enate Appropriations sub-
committee on the interior, envi-
ronment a nd related a gencies.
“I believe the public has a com-
pelling interest in knowing
whether the necessary steps were
taken to address this potential
conflict of interest,” Udall w rote.
Oil Search, along with its part-BY JULIET EILPERIN
AND STEVEN MUFSONLast summer, Scott Pruitt left
his job heading the Environmen-
tal P rotection A gency and within a
few months had started consult-
ing for coal magnate Joseph W.
Craft III. Three weeks after leav-
ing the Interior Department, en-
ergy counselor Vincent DeVito
joined Cox Oil Offshore, which
operates in the Gulf of Mexico, as
its executive vice president and
general counsel. Now, Joe Balash
— who oversaw oil and gas drilling
on federal lands before resigning
from Interior on Friday — is join-
ing a foreign oil company that is
expanding operations on Alaska’s
North Slope.
Balash, who served as the In-
terior Department’s assistant sec-
retary for land and minerals man-
agement f or nearly two years, c on-
firmed in a phone interview that
he will begin working for the Pap-
ua New Guinea-based Oil Search,
which is developing one of Alas-
ka’s largest oil prospects in years.
On Wednesday, Oil S earch officials
said he would become senior vice
president for e xternal affairs i n its
Alaska operations.
The company is drilling on state
lands that l ie outside — but nearby
— two federal reserves where the
Trump administration is pushingmy w ay f orward.”
After the invasion, Mattis’s
headquarters wound up being
only 500 meters from where
Alexander t he Great laid in state in
Babylon. He l aments in the book
that much of the trouble that
followed in the occupation would
have been foreseeable, and even
avoidable, if political decision-
makers had studied the British
occupation of Iraq after World War
I and the French battle for Algiers
in 1956 the way that he had.
In c ontrast, the president
prefers visuals over written text
when it comes to briefings on the
hard issues that reach the Resolute
Desk. The New York Times
reported in 2017 t hat National
Security Council s taffers were told
to keep briefing papers for Trump
to a single page, with bullet points
and graphics. Reuters reported
that the president’s d aily briefers
strategically placed Trump’s n ame
in as many paragraphs as possible
in a gambit to hold his attention.
“I like bullets, or I like as little as
possible,” T rump told Axios in- “I don’t n eed, you know, 200-
page reports on something that
can be handled on a page.”
Mattis makes clear in his book
that Afghanistan cannot be
handled on a page. Nor can Iraq.
Or NATO. He d ecries the deceptive
simplicity of PowerPoint, which he
calls “the scourge of c ritical
thinking.”
“It encourages fragmented logic
by the briefer and passivity in the
listener,” Mattis writes, adding
that “it makes us stupid.”
[email protected]
The Marine Corps maintains a
list of required reading for each
rank. Mattis, who was assisted in
writing the book by Marine
veteran Bing West, said this
common core curriculum proved
critical as he rose in the ranks
because he could comfortably cite
specific examples o f how fighting
forces had faced similar challenges
in previous eras, knowing that his
troops would understand what he
was referencing.
The book showcases a
multitude o f moments that an
institutional insistence on
studying history paid off for Mattis
and his Marines. In s pring 2002,
Mattis was promoted to a two-star
general. He t ook command o f the
1st Marine Division and was
ordered to prepare to go t o war in
Iraq. Mattis writes that t he idea of
invading Iraq “stunned” him.
“Even assuming he had chemical
weapons, I believed we had him
boxed in with our daily combat air
patrols and sanctions against his
oil exports,” he volunteers.
“Having served 20 years in the
region, I knew that [Saddam
Hussein’s] hatred of Iran worked
to our strategic advantage.”
But, Mattis said, his
commanding officer told him that
his job was to get 22,000 troops
ready for combat, regardless of
whether he thought it was a good
idea. That n ight, he remembers, “I
dumped my g ear in my q uarters,
pulled books off the shelves and
began studying campaigns in
Mesopotamia, s tarting with
Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’ and books
on Alexander the Great — workingreading books is historically
unusual. Former president Barack
Obama still occasionally shares
reading lists on his Facebook page.
During his second term, George W.
Bush competed with Karl Rove to
see who could polish off the most
books each year. As p resident,
Trump regularly plugs
hagiographies about himself on
Twitter, but there’s n o indication
he’s r ead them.
Trump’s d earth of historical
knowledge has almost certainly
played a role in the biggest
miscalculations of his
administration, especially the
fateful decision to launch a trade
war against China that he
promised the American people
would be quick and easy to win.your head hurts.”
Mattis is partial to studying
Roman generals and historians,
from Marcus Aurelius and Scipio
Africanus t o Ta citus. “I followed
Caesar across Gaul,” he writes
wistfully. “I marveled at h ow the
plain prose of [Ulysses] Grant and
[William Te cumseh] Sherman
revealed the value of steely
determination.... Biographies of... Native American leaders, of
wartime political l eaders and
sergeants, and of strategic
thinkers from Sun Tz u to Colin
Gray h ave guided me through
tough challenges.” Mattis argues
that intellectual rigor is just as
important as physical rigor to
excel in his beloved corps.
The president’s d isinterest i n
explains. “By traveling into the
past, I enhance my g rasp of the
present.”
In a series o f interviews with
The Post’s Marc Fisher three years
ago, Trump was adamant that h e
does not n eed to read extensively
because he r eaches the r ight
decisions “with very l ittle
knowledge other than the
knowledge I [already] h ad, p lus t he
words ‘common sense,’ because I
have a lot of common sense and I
have a lot of business a bility.”
Trump also insisted that he does
not need to read anything that’s
long because he absorbs complex
issues quickly. “I’m a very efficient
guy,” he said.
Mattis, who prefers the
nickname “Warrior Monk” to
“Mad Dog,” r epeatedly leans on his
bibliomania throughout his 300-
page book. The book reads like a
literature review at t imes, as the
68-year-old recommends dozens
of titles and name-checks too
many authors to mention here. He
also makes time to mock the
scholars who said after the Cold
War that it was “the end of history.”
The way some people prepare
for a marathon, Mattis challenges
himself intellectually by picking
some battle or area of history
where he’s w eak. Then he fixates
on the subject and reads
everything he can find until he
feels like an expert. “Living in
history builds your own shock
absorber, because you’ll learn that
there are lots of old solutions to
new problems,” he explains.
“Strategy is hard unless you’re a
dilettante. You must think u ntil“If you h aven’t
read hundreds of
books, you are
functionally
illiterate, and you
will be
incompetent,
because your personal experiences
alone aren’t b road enough to
sustain you,” J im Mattis writes in
his memoir, which c ame out
Tuesday. “Any commander who
claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is
going to fill body bags with his
troops as he learns the hard way.”
The commander i n chief has
repeatedly said that he’s t oo busy
to read. “I never have. I’m always
busy doing a lot. Now I’m more
busy, I guess, than ever before,”
Donald Trump told The
Washington Post i n 2016.
“Call Sign Chaos: Learning to
Lead” is not the kind of tell-all that
many of Trump’s c ritics hoped for.
But there are plenty of those for
sale. Nine months after he
resigned in protest, Mattis
remains unwilling to speak
candidly about his 712 days as
secretary of defense. Instead the
book is entirely a memoir about
four decades as an officer in the
Marine Corps — with references to
Trump only in the first and final
pages. The book is chock full,
however, of implicit and
illuminating contrasts between
Mattis’s management style and
Trump’s.
Mattis amassed a private
collection of more than 7,
books, despite d eployments
around the world. “Reading sheds
light on the dark path ahead,” h e
PowerPost
INTELLIGENCE FOR LEADERS WASHINGTONPOST.COM/POWERPOSTMattis’s relish for books a stark contrast to Tr ump’s apathy
The Daily
202
JAMES
HOHMANN
Interior o∞cial is joining oil company in Alaska
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Jim Mattis, former secretary of defense, says in his memoir that he
has more than 7, 000 books and that knowing history is critical for
leadership. President Trump says he just needs common sense.As head of land, minerals
management, he pushed
to expand drilling in stateBY COLBY ITKOWITZ,
RACHAEL BADE
AND JOHN WAGNERRep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.,
who has served in Congress for 40
years and is the second-most senior
House member, announced
Wednesday that he won’t seek re-
election, joining more than a dozen
Republicans heading for the exits.
The 76-year-old Wisconsin law-
maker becomes the highest-ranking
Republican to say he would step
down at t he end of his term, part of a
growing wave of retirements that
suggest GOP pessimism about re-
gaining the House majority in 2020.
Sensenbrenner has been a main-
stay on the House Judiciary Com-
mittee, where he served during
President Clinton’s i mpeachment in
January 1999 and was one of 13
House impeachment managers
who tried the case in the Senate.
He also served as the panel’s
chairman in the past decade and has
headed the Science Committee.
Sensenbrenner was instrumen-
tal in securing passage of the Patriot
Act, which gave the government
more tools to combat terrorism af-
ter the Sept. 11 attacks.
Republicans will be favored to
hold the Wisconsin seat as Donald
Trump won the district by 20 per-
centage points in 2016 and Sensen-
brenner rarely had a tough race.
Sensenbrenner joined two of his
colleagues in calling it quits on
Wednesday alone, making him the
16th House Republican to an-
nounce he would not seek reelection
in 2020. By contrast, only four Dem-
ocrats have announced plans to vol-
untarily exit the chamber, which
their party controls, with Rep. Su-
san A. Davis of Southern California
adding her name to that list with an
announcement Wednesday.
In addition to Sensenbrenner,
Rep. Bill Flores (Tex.), the former
chair of the conservative Republi-
can Study Committee, also an-
nounced plans to retire at t he end of
his term. The retired oil and gas
executive first won his seat by de-
feating a longtime Democratic in-
cumbent. His Central Te xas district
has since also become reliably Re-
publican.
Last year, Flores prevailed with
nearly 57 percent of the vote. Flores
wants to spend more time with his
family and go b ack into private busi-
ness, he said in a statement. He
became the fifth GOP lawmaker
from Te xas to retire.
Several of the Republican retire-
ments have been in increasingly
competitive districts; in three of
them, GOP incumbents won reelec-
tion by fewer than five percentage
points in 2018. But others are in
safer districts, such as Sensen-
brenner’s a nd Flores’s.
Davis has represented her South-
ern California district since 2001.
In a letter to her constituents, Davis
did not say why she was leaving but
expressed a desire to live and work
in San Diego after 20 years of com-
muting cross-country.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Paul Kane contributed to this report.GOP’s Sensenbrenner will
leave House after 40 years
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