My Favorite Panamanian and I are
enjoying the continued presence of the FBR in our house. She’s with us until
Thanksgiving when her parents arrive. She’s been every bit as delightful as
usual with an increased vocabulary and some very definite ideas on where grandparental
authority should end. We’ve always said the FBR is an absolute doppelganger for
our daughter, her mother. The one difference was she didn’t have the serial ear
infections her mother did at early age. I guess the cosmos must have been
listening to our observations because the FBR acquired one of those infections
a couple weeks ago and followed up with one that emerged around 2:30 yesterday
morning.
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| BRS Beating up on a Drum |
My wife responded to the baby monitor in
which the FBR was requesting her presence. The FBR related that she wasn’t
feeling well and that her ear hurt. We had the wealth of experience garnered
with parenting her mother through similar late night wakeups. Once the sun rose
we contacted her parents who provided the needed insurance information and
actually looked up a couple nearby urgent care clinics. Sometimes the internet
is fabulous. My wife brought her in and I picked up the requite anti-biotics on
my way home. The FBR is a lot like her mother in that she tends to ignore pain
and symptoms so she was more interested in coaxing me into a game of hide and
seek than taking her medicine. She slept through the night and appears on the mend.
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| FBR This Morning |
It’s so rewarding to see the two granddaughters
communicate on our nightly Facetime calls. The BRS was sitting in her high
chair and gave us a cursory nod when we appeared. That all changed when the FBR
showed up on screen. That took a little convincing because the FBR exhibits a
little bit of jealousy when her grandparents focus on the other granddaughter.
Once she saw the reaction her presence caused for the BRS however she was all
on board. They both seem to thrive with an audience. The BRS acquired the FBR‘s
old kitchen set and this morning made a bee line to that before even getting
out of her sleep shirt. The FBR sagely commented that the BRS probably wanted
to make breakfast for her mom and dad.
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| BRS Making Breakfast This Morning |
A former military bud sent me the
article below on political-military relationships. It’s especially relevant
given yesterday’s testimony by LTC Vindman before the impeachment committee. I’m
often asked about the challenge of military loyalty to a challenging commander
in chief. I know I struggled with the situation when Clinton was president. While
I thought he was competent I also thought he was beneath contempt morally. That
was, of course, before our current president lowered the bar even further. I
believe taken that while the president is at the top of the chain of command,
the military’s service is to the country and the Constitution which establishes
it. I especially liked General Brooks comment that closes the article.
The Slow-Boil Revolt
The Atlantic - November 2019
by Kathy Gilsinan and Leah Feiger
Retired
senior military officers are growing more concerned that the Trump
administration doesn’t want their advice—and they’re struggling with how much
they can say publicly. Here is the unenviable calculation retired senior
military officials must make in this politically unprecedented moment: Say
nothing as norms shatter around you, and you’re implicitly enabling a president
whom some of your former colleagues believe is threatening national security.
Speak up, and you risk destroying the balance of power that protects American
democracy.
“For
the U.S. military, being apolitical is a critical element of civilian control
of the military—an absolute in a democracy,” the retired four-star general
Joseph Dunford told us in his first extensive comments since leaving active
duty. “The alternative is a military dictatorship.” Dunford, who served as the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until this fall, suggests a choice that
is uncomplicated. But he did feel compelled to speak out last month, when he
publicly defended Alexander Vindman, the White House Ukraine specialist and a
witness in the impeachment inquiry, after attacks on Vidman’s character and
loyalty in the right-wing media, later echoed by the president himself. He
still maintains that he will not directly comment on politics—even as other
retired senior military officers have taken the rare step of weighing in on
policy matters, including in some cases calling for the president’s
impeachment. “I had no intent to enter the political fray or address policy,”
Dunford told us in an email. “Alex Vindman was one of my officers and it was an
easy decision for me to speak about him after political figures and members of
the media questioned his loyalty to the Constitution and our Nation.”
Former
Secretary of Defense James Mattis is perhaps the highest-profile example of the
silent general, and he has repeatedly declined to weigh in on policy or the
president he served. “If you leave an administration, you owe some silence,” he
told The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg recently. Mattis has said
he won’t criticize a sitting president, but seems comfortable doing so once a
president has left office. In his new
book, Mattis freely criticizes both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Yet his
resignation letter to Donald Trump can be read as an implicit criticism of the
president, in that he laid out his belief in the importance of alliances and
declared that Trump needed a defense secretary whose views better aligned with
his own.
Following
one of Trump’s most controversial defense-policy decisions yet—the announcement
that he would take U.S. troops out of the way of a Turkish assault on America’s
Kurdish counter-ISIS partners—we made efforts to contact more than two dozen
four-star generals and admirals who retired under Trump to see whether they
believed the moment warranted breaking silence.
But
Dunford was one of only three we reached who would comment for this story on
the record. (Some former senior officers have been willing to criticize the
president or his policies anonymously, however.) We found that, for now, the
military’s apolitical ethos is stronger than some commentators have argued it
should be; and in any case, Trump tends to have more support among veterans
than the general public, though nearly half say he doesn’t listen enough to
military advice, according to one poll. But there are notable exceptions.
John
Kelly, the retired four-star general who served for a time as Trump’s chief of
staff, recently made the eye-popping admission that he had warned Trump he
would be impeached if someone wasn’t there to check his instincts. Prior to
that, Joseph Votel, the recently retired head of the U.S. military’s Central
Command, wrote with Elizabeth Dent in this magazine that “the abrupt policy decision
to seemingly abandon our Kurdish partners could not come at a worse time.”
Retired
four-star generals have come up with a variety of ways to express doubts about
the president. Their methods range from the passive-aggressive (like former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey’s series of #leadership tweets
drawing implicit contrasts with the president’s conduct); to the explicit (like
the Osama bin Laden–raid architect William H. McRaven’s op-ed declaring that if
the president won’t demonstrate the leadership America needs, “it is time for a
new person in the Oval Office … the sooner, the better”, or ex–CIA Director
Michael Hayden’s outright call for impeachment) to the
kind-of-but-maybe-not-really joking about Trump’s own lack of military service
due to bone spurs (Mattis’s remark in October that “I earned my spurs on the
battlefield … and Donald Trump earned his in a letter from a doctor”).
The
drumbeat of open criticism of the commander in chief from retired senior
military leaders is highly unusual. While the overwhelming majority have kept
quiet, some retired officers are still calibrating their own sense of what’s
most important in this moment. “Honestly, I think there’s a balance point that
is not well defined,” Vincent K. Brooks, who retired last year as the head of
U.S. forces in Korea, told us of considerations about speaking publicly. “And I
don’t think that I know it.” Brooks has previously commented on Trump’s
diplomacy with North Korea, saying that the summits with Kim Jong Un didn’t achieve
a breakthrough but that the Korean peninsula was safer thanks to the diplomacy.
He told us, though, that given the stakes of preserving an apolitical military,
the decision to weigh in is personal—and that there’s a difference between
offering policy analysis, which he has done, and taking a partisan stand, which
he says should be avoided. “I think what you’re seeing is a growing concern
that that military advice is not being sought, and if sought, is not being
considered,” he said. “I share the concerns as well.”
Paul
Zukunft, who served as Coast Guard commandant before his 2018 retirement, has
his own concerns. He has tried not to criticize Trump’s policies—but suggested
that it can be difficult in this administration to discern what policy actually
is. “We’re in uncharted territory quite honestly,” he told us. For example, if
a presidential idea comes out as a tweet and not an executive order, is it
really a policy? “In that case, that red line becomes very blurred,” he said.
Zukunft said at a think tank event in 2017 he stood by the Coast Guard’s
transgender troops even after Trump had tweeted they should not serve. Zukunft
now says he stands by that comment—when he made it, Trump had only sent a
tweet, not set a policy.
The
no-politics tradition has had exceptions for decades—probably most dramatically
with General Douglas MacArthur’s open defiance of President Harry Truman during
the Korean War, but more recently with the so-called revolt of the generals
during the Iraq War in 2006, when a number of senior retired officers called
for the resignation of then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Retired
generals such as Jack Keane and Barry McCaffrey appear routinely on cable news;
others went fully political on either side of the 2016 election, with Michael
Flynn leading “Lock her up!” chants at the Republican National Convention and
John R. Allen telling the Democratic National Convention that Hillary Clinton
would be “exactly, exactly the kind of commander in chief America needs.”
The
dilemma for retired senior officers now is whether the oath they took to the
Constitution in military life requires deference to the sitting president—as,
for example, Mattis has argued—or whether the president himself is such a
danger to the Constitution that upholding the oath actually demands discarding
the apolitical norm, as McRaven and Hayden have done. Brooks said that
commenting on any politician in an ad hominem way represents the crossing of a
Rubicon, and that he didn’t know what might force him to do so. But, he said,
“silence itself, like being overly aggressive, can undermine the Constitution.”
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RECURRING
CHARACTERS
BRS
- Blog Reader the Sequel
- second granddaughter; FBR - First Blog
Reader - first granddaughter, ABFA –
Amazing Best Family Athlete = my daughter in law; Wingman – my son in law; Keene
Friends 1 & 2 – friends since high school from my home town of Keene,
NH; Soxfather - my brother in law; Great Aunt = my elder sister; Cantankerous Friend – friend since
grade school who likes to argue about everything, poses as radical leftist to
attract women; Pittsburgh College Roommate
– high school friend, also a “Minor Celebrity” in Pittsburgh; Deckzilla – our backyard deck which
grew to monstrous dimensions once my wife got involved in planning; Maine and Virginia Musqueteras – two
close friends of my wife – her US sisters, my wife is the 3rd musquetera
(musketeer); Riggins - also known as
the Grandpuppy, son's dog, surrogate grandchild while awaiting arrival of the
BRS; PanaGals – female
relatives/friends of my wife from Panama; Panamanian/Latin
Mafia – inevitable group of Latino friends my wife accumulates wherever we
have lived & their spouses; Neighborhood
Mafioso - wife's close friend and Panamanian mafia member, Favorite Panamanian - the wife (of
course); First Friday – celebrations
to mark the First Friday of the Week; Deckzilla
Dude – senior citizen carpenter/contractor; Voices of Inappropriate Worth - members of public who come to every
Worcester public meeting to complain, all are on public assistance along with
demeanor issues
