"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 68

In this episode: The General Who Told Trump What He Didn’t Want to Hear

September 17, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 68

Episode 68: The General Who Told Trump What He Didn’t Want to Hear

H.R. McMaster, a decorated lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and an historian, served as the second national security advisor to President Donald Trump. He recently published a non-partisan yet blistering account of his time in the White House. Hear what McMaster says Trump got right on foreign policy, where things went wrong, and what he thinks Trump’s character would mean for a second term.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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[FUNKY MUSIC]

Peter Bergen: You've described yourself as wanting to be remembered as the funkiest national security advisor ever. (McMASTER LAUGHS) And I mean, the bar is pretty low, given sort of, very kind of white guy white guys…

H.R. McMaster: I mean, Henry Kissinger, right? Brilliant. Not funky though.

Peter Bergen: Brent Scowcroft.

H.R. McMaster: Not funky.

Peter Bergen: Not funky.

H.R. McMaster: Zbig Brzezinski?

Peter Bergen: Not funky.

H.R. McMaster: Not funky.

Peter Bergen: Jake Sullivan?

H.R. McMaster: No, (PETER LAUGHS) I don't funky at all. He's not funky at all.

Peter Bergen: In your funk box, what is there?

H.R. McMaster: So, I grew up in Philadelphia when, you know, Motown was bridging into funk. And, I became a fan of Parliament Funkadelic, and of course I've been a fan of the Commodores, which really was kind of a bridge from Motown into funk. I love that stuff. So, you know, I, I mean, I was really, I was struggling with this, right? I was only national security advisor for 13 months, right? I wasn't the shortest serving. I definitely was not going to be the longest serving. That's Henry Kissinger. (PETER LAUGHS) I wasn't going to be the smartest. That's maybe Kissinger or Condoleezza Rice. I'm not musically talented. That's Condoleezza Rice, hands down, right?

Peter Bergen: Right.

H.R. McMaster: So what's going to distinguish me? And I thought, okay, I'm definitely the funkiest.

In a lot of ways, H.R. McMaster is the very model of a serious guy. He was a highly decorated lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. He's got a PhD in history. He capped off his career in government by serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States.

I've known him for quite a long time. And I also happen to know his less serious side. Which includes an abiding love of funk, and an excellent sense of humor. And I think his humor served him well during a challenging tour of duty as the national security advisor in the chaotic White House of President Donald Trump. McMaster has just published a book about what it was like to work there — evocatively titled At War with Ourselves.

H.R. McMaster: They called it a page-turner and perfect, perfect, perfect beach reading for Labor Day weekend. (BOTH LAUGH)

Peter Bergen: It is, by the way.

I'm not just saying that. It is a great read. McMaster bills it as a nonpartisan account of the decisive year he spent inside the Trump White House, from 2017 to 2018 as Trump’s second national security advisor. And the book is landing at a particularly timely moment: just as many Americans are starting to really consider whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would make the better commander in chief. McMaster has been in the room with President Trump more times than he can count.

H.R. McMaster: Oh, I can't even tell you, I mean,

Peter Bergen: Hundreds of times.

H.R. McMaster: Probably, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I'd like to ask you to join me in the room with H.R. McMaster: A man whose experience gives him unique insight about what worked — and what didn't — when Trump was in charge of U.S. foreign policy. And what Trump's character suggests we'd be in for if Trump ends up in the White House again.

H.R. McMaster: Ultimately, President Trump can be so disruptive that he disrupts his own agenda. He has a tendency to become the antagonist in his own story.

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome back to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Peter Bergen: You served with distinction in the first Gulf War. You famously led a tank troop that, in 23 minutes, destroyed something like two dozen Iraqi tanks and 60 Iraqi trucks. It's called the Battle of 73 Easting. It's still taught at American war schools, as a kind of classic tactical maneuver. And then you also were instrumental in extirpating al-Qaeda from Tal Afar, a small city in Iraq that they had taken over in 2005 which was really the first time that anybody had a successful counterinsurgency strategy against al-Qaeda in Iraq. And you're too modest to mention it in your book, but you also have a Silver Star which is one of the highest medal honors you can get.

Peter Bergen: President Trump came into office having never served in the military and never served in public office. In fact, he's the first president in American history who has done neither. You and he are different personalities. You say in the book, we didn't really click. Do you think you didn't click because of your different experiences or because of your different moral codes? Because you put on the uniform when you were 17 and then you never took it off, and the military is an honor institution.

H.R. McMaster: You mean New York real estate may not be? (BOTH LAUGH)

Peter Bergen: You come into this meeting with Mar a Lago and suddenly you're appointed national security advisor. And I think for some people listening, they may not understand: you were still in uniform at that time. This was an order from the Commander in Chief.

H.R. McMaster: I got a phone call on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, my hometown, where I was briefing out a study of Russian new-generation warfare that we had initiated after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014. And on the way to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, my phone rings. It's the deputy chief of staff in the White House saying, ‘Hey, can you come to Mar a Lago tomorrow to interview for the job of national security advisor?’ And none of this had been in the news or anything yet. And so I called Katie, who was used to these kinds of phone calls that change our lives with, immediate reassignments.

Katie is Kathleen Trotter McMaster, the lieutenant general's wife of nearly four decades.

H.R. McMaster: She was very supportive, said, ‘Hey, you know, of course you've got to do it.’ And I wound up going down on a Sunday. This is President's Day weekend in February of 2017. I interviewed with the president. I was the first of the four interviews. I think he hired me on the spot. And it made everybody in the room nervous. You know, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus, because you have three more interviews to go. So he held me over, didn't get to the second interview that day. And so now it's President's Day, Monday, I don't know who else is still a candidate until I run into John Bolton in the men's room. (PETER LAUGHS) You know, it's like one of these moments, you know, ‘Ambassador.’ ‘Uh, General,’ you know.

Ambassador John Bolton would later take the national security advisor job after McMaster had left the White House.

H.R. McMaster: And so I walked down the steps from the men's room into the ornate living room in Mar a Lago. President Trump comes into the living room and says, ‘Oh, General, you know, we're not going to do another interview. You're hired.’ And so, I walked into the West Wing of the White House, it was quite a surreal feeling to realize, okay, hey, smarty pants, you know, historian, now you're responsible (McMASTER LAUGHS) you know, for the, for the national security decision-making process you criticized.

McMaster had criticized that decision-making in his highly regarded first book, titled Dereliction of Duty. The book recounted the dismal history of how top American generals and senior advisors told President Lyndon Johnson only what they thought Johnson wanted to hear about the war in Vietnam — a war that of course, became a bloody quagmire.

H.R. McMaster: Lyndon Johnson made his decisions on Vietnam mainly on his domestic political priorities, mainly getting elected in his own right in 1964 after John F. Kennedy's assassination in November of 1963, and then passing the Great Society legislation in 1965. And he saw Vietnam principally as a danger to those domestic goals. And so what he wanted from his senior military and civilian officials was a strategy that would allow him to avoid a tough decision on Vietnam. And so America goes to war with a strategy that almost everybody knew would fail, because the strategy was designed to give Lyndon Johnson what he wanted. So I resolved, hey, I'm not going to tell President Trump what he wants to hear because that's a disservice to him and to the country.

Peter Bergen: Well that was a big takeaway for me from Dereliction of Duty. And when you walked into the White House, you were not going to make that mistake.

H.R. McMaster: And I told the president that. The president, in the interview with him, he said he had read the book. I don't think he read the whole book. (McMASTER LAUGHS)

Peter Bergen: Well in fact, there's a great sort of parenthesis. You, like, later found the guy who'd actually done the summary of the book for the president.

H.R. McMaster: That's right.

Peter Bergen: The idea that Trump would read this whole book I think is, you know, I… (BOTH LAUGH) He wouldn't read — when you briefed him, you briefed him on cards, right? He was not a reader. I mean, every president has the right to absorb the information the way they want it. But —

H.R. McMaster: Right.

Peter Bergen: He was not gonna sit down and read your book.

H.R. McMaster: That's right. I would say he's a conversational learner. You know, he likes everything to be just distilled down to the essential elements. He was comfortable with several people around the table having a discussion with him. You he was not somebody who you could subject to like a long briefing or a long briefing paper.

Peter Bergen: Put us in the room, in the Oval Office for a meeting with President Trump. There was often “exercises in competitive sycophancy” which is a great line — and the book is really well written — and then Trump would say completely outrageous things like, why don't we just bomb the drugs in Mexico? Why don't we just take out the North Korean army when it's on parade. You kind of allow him an out, which is like,

H.R. McMaster: Yeah. Right.

Peter Bergen: Maybe he was just doing this to perform or, but I've written my own book about the Trump administration and its foreign policy. And one of the anecdotes that somebody told me — which seemed pretty serious — was, he's presented with a map of North Korea and South Korea, a kind of famous one where you can't, you know, there's no lights in North Korea at night.

H.R. McMaster: Sure. Yeah, right, right.

Peter Bergen: And, and then he sees that Seoul is so close to the North Korean border. And he's like, well, why don't we just get the citizens of Seoul to move? Which is like 20 million people. But the people in the room thought he was being serious. Maybe they didn't know him well enough to know either way.

H.R. McMaster: So I think a lot of it is, they just didn't know him well. Of course, as national security advisor, you're with the president every day. You're with the president multiple times a day. He's not a creature of Washington. He's not a policy guy, right? And so I've talked to a lot of people in my life, right? I'm from Philadelphia, man. I have friends who are not in this world. Musicians, other people. And they talk differently. They come up with ideas that maybe are sound fundamentally, but they sound outlandish in terms of the way that they phrase those ideas. So for example, just to use the one example of bombing the drug labs in Mexico, I thought that was a useful question to ask. Not because we were going to do it, but what he was basically saying is, 'Hey, 60,000 Americans are dying every year from fentanyl that's coming across that border. That's much higher losses than any wars we've fought since World War II.' Right? And so he was saying, what the heck, what are we going to do differently? So it was Trump's disruptive nature. I see that comment as a positive way to start a conversation. Others in the room, jaws dropped, almost have a heart attack.

Peter Bergen: It is an ally after all.

H.R. McMaster: Right. (PETER LAUGHS) Well, yeah, but I mean, an ally that could do a hell of a lot more. Actually, we gained really unprecedented agreements with Mexico under President Trump, despite the insults and the ‘Mexico's gonna pay for the wall.’ But think about the Remain in Mexico.

Peter Bergen: On the immigration front.

H.R. McMaster: Yes. I mean, that was hugely important in terms of stemming illegal immigration. And then, this story hasn't really been told, but there was unprecedented security and law enforcement cooperation going on at the time. So, Again, this is another area that, you know you hear the outlandish comment, right? That, you know, Mexico is going to pay for the wall. And I'll tell you, there were times when we were on the cusp of even a better agreement with Mexico and the president would make another one of those statements. And then one of my interlocutors from Mexico would say, ‘Oh man, I mean, I'm sorry. We can't do it now.’ So again, you know, he's disruptive. That's good. He's so disruptive that he disrupts himself. That's not so good, as he would say, you know. (BOTH LAUGH)

Peter Bergen: Yeah, not so much as he...

H.R. McMaster: Not so much.

Peter Bergen: He said to you in the book a great line, which is like, ‘90 percent of the time we agreed general, but 10 percent not so much.’

H.R. McMaster: Not so much.

Even the most charitable observer would probably agree that, as president, Donald Trump had an impulsive and freewheeling approach to policy. So Trump's team was often left with a job of trying to turn those impulses and instincts into practical courses of action. And sometimes they needed to pick and choose from among contradictory ideas. McMaster described his job as directing the president's disruptive nature toward things that needed to be disrupted. And in McMaster's telling, sometimes this worked.

H.R. McMaster: The national security advisor is the only person in the national security and foreign policy establishment who has the president as his or her only client. Your job is to make sure the president's prepared for foreign policy engagements. Your job is to run a process that gives the president best analysis and multiple options so he or she can make informed decisions. We put into place, Peter, a lot of really significant shifts in U.S. foreign policy.

For example. President Barack Obama had dithered over his own “red line” when the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. By contrast, in April 2017, when Assad’s regime killed dozens of civilians with nerve agents, Trump ordered airstrikes against the Syrian air bases that had launched the attack.

H.R. McMaster: This is where we all worked together very well. We received reports of Syria's mass murder of civilians, including scores of children, using the most heinous weapons on earth. I described how the human body responds to these nerve agents, to sarin gas. And so pulled the team together. We developed options for the president very quickly. And that course of action entailed a military strike, which was, you could say, the first time that the red line that President Obama had spoken about, the first time it was enforced. And so, I think that was a very positive development.

McMaster also says Trump correctly shifted U.S. policy to become much tougher on China. McMaster oversaw Trump's 2017 national security strategy document, which called out the Chinese for stealing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property, while at the same time, building up its military in a clear bid to challenge the United States.

H.R. McMaster: You saw the team work extremely well together to lay a foundation for a big shift in U.S. foreign policy toward China: away from a policy based on the assumption that China, having been welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules, and as China prospered, it would liberalize its economy, liberalize its form of governance to a new strategy based on the recognition that China wasn't gonna play by the rules. They're gonna try to tear down the existing international order and replace it with a new one that was sympathetic to their authoritarian model of governance and their statist mercantilist economic model.

But in an administration where there was so much work to be done translating Trump's impulsive, or sometimes even contradictory ideas into sensible action, there was ample room for members of Trump’s team to disagree about what actions counted as sensible, and then fail to come together with cohesive recommendations for the president.

H.R. McMaster: That's right. That was a constant struggle because I think there are some people who don't want that to happen, especially those who are not there to help the elected president determine his or her agenda, right? There are some people,

Peter Bergen: Well, let's be specific. I mean, the secretary of defense was Jim Mattis, who, in some ways you'd have thought that you guys would get on very well. You're both soldier-scholars and,

H.R. McMaster: And we, we get along well now, now that we're not in the, you know, in the Trump administration. (BOTH LAUGH)

Peter Bergen: And then also Rex Tillerson, who, of course, as you point out in the book, his previous job is running Exxon, and when you run Exxon, you do it from something called the ‘God Pod,’ and you're like giving orders. This is, you know, the secretary of state doesn't really operate like that. So you have these two very sort of particular people that you're trying to like, obviously the State Department, Defense Department, if you're the national security advisor, these are the two most important departments. And yet Tillerson wouldn't really speak to people in the Trump administration at senior levels. It seemed he isolated himself, and Mattis kept slow-rolling things because he thought Trump was a danger to the republic, it seems.

H.R. McMaster: That's true for, in a number of cases. We failed to develop, you know, a harmonious working relationship. Almost to the very end, I thought, ‘Hey, I know I can make this situation better.’ But I failed to do it. You know, and I share responsibility for it.

Peter Bergen: Well, you also say in the book that Trump seemed to encourage and revel in the interpersonal drama in his administration.

H.R. McMaster: Yeah. You know, one of the elements of what people call presidential character is organizational leadership ability, right? And organizational leadership means like you understand what people's roles are, and you understand how to get things done, you know, what the stoic philosophers would call discipline of action. Right? And so, President Trump, he came in with a lot of advantages of not being part of the government before, 'cause he was disruptive and there were a lot of things that needed to be disrupted. But this is an area where he had kind of a deficiency of experience. Like he didn't know really, like who did what, you know? (McMASTER LAUGHS)

Peter Bergen: There were things that needed to be disrupted. For instance, the kind of common view that China would liberalize politically as it liberalized economically. And clearly, it was long past its sell-by date, by the time you got into office. You wrote a national security strategy or oversaw it and were very involved in it, which really called China out on intellectual property theft, its expansion in the South China Sea. This was probably the most serious calling out of China that any administration has done publicly ever. And to their credit, I think, the Biden-Harris team have continued that.

H.R. McMaster: I think it's been an element of continuity. Absolutely.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

H.R. McMaster: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: But, he had this disruptive element to his personality, but that also kind of disrupted his ability to be functional, it seems.

H.R. McMaster: Oh yeah, at times for sure. So in the book I really acknowledge that he disrupted a lot of what needed to be disrupted. I saw it as my job to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted. But ultimately President Trump can be so disruptive that he disrupts his own agenda. (BOTH LAUGH) And so it's really, I write in the book that he has a tendency to become the antagonist in his own story. So it was my job to help him, you know, not do that, but of course, by the time, you know, 2018, by the time I leave, I'd been used up in that job for a number of reasons.

And a key reason may well have been Donald Trump's odd bromance with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. McMaster says he felt it was his duty to point out that Putin was an inveterate liar, who would never be Trump's friend and never be an ally to the United States.

H.R. McMaster: I think it was important for me to do that.

Peter Bergen: What was his reaction to sort of like, was he on listen mode or dismiss mode or,

H.R. McMaster: Well, he didn't want to hear it, and he didn't want to hear it for, I think, an understandable reason, right? President Trump, in many ways, labored under the same conceit of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that they could have a better relationship with Putin. Remember George W. Bush looking into Putin's soul and President Obama….

Peter Bergen: Yeah, and I remember the reset and the looking into the soul, but after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, it seems like the statute of limitations should have expired on that.

H.R. McMaster: Well, yeah, but you know, both of them didn't learn lessons from previous administrations.

Peter Bergen: You say like other presidents, he thought that he could do some sort of grand bargain with Putin and… But by then he had invaded Georgia in 2008. He had invaded Crimea by 2014. He is an unreconstructed KGB officer. You were trying to tell him that.

H.R. McMaster: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: And yet he just did not absorb it, it seems.

H.R. McMaster: Well, you know, I, I would just say, you know, yeah. It was a struggle. And then I write in the book about how after, just soon after I left the job, you have the summit between Putin and President Trump in Helsinki. And I tell the story of I'm yelling at the television, you know, my wife, Katie comes and goes, ‘What is going on?’

ARCHIVAL Reporter: My first question for you, sir, is, who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016, and would you warn him to never do it again?

Reporters at the Helsinki summit asked Donald Trump who he believed: the U.S. intelligence officials, who'd assembled tons of evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, or Putin, who denied everything. With the whole world watching, Trump sided with Putin.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: People came to me. They said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be.

H.R. McMaster: And he was making these statements and I thought, ‘God, you know, who's talking with him about it?’ So, so anyway, I —

Peter Bergen: Well then those statements were, I believe Putin, he didn't interfere with the 2016 election.

H.R. McMaster: Right, and indicating he believes him more than he believes, you know, his own intelligence officials.

H.R. McMaster: So, it's a complex picture and, what I do in the book is try to explain the behavior as best I can. I don't think Vladimir Putin had any dirt on President Trump. I think what affected President Trump's mentality about this was the Mueller investigation, so the president had this sense of beleaguerment because of that. And also, you know, he's reflexively contrary. So you've got the Mueller investigation, you got everybody telling him, ‘Oh, you gotta be hard on Putin.’ He's like, ‘Why do I believe that?’

Peter Bergen: Well, what, what did you end at the end it seems with Trump was you said publicly at the Munich security forum — the gathering of every top Western foreign policy national security official — that there'd been this indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers who had interfered with the 2016 Russian election.

H.R. McMaster: Absolutely they did.

Peter Bergen: You said that there was incontrovertible evidence. And then Trump starts tweeting at you and saying, you're-

H.R. McMaster: Because remember this was the initial Mueller report, right? And so what, what I describe in the book is President Trump struggled to differentiate different questions, right? Question one is, did they interfere with our election and attack really, the election process? The answer to that is yes, it’s incontrovertible. The second is, do they care who wins our election, right? I believe the answer to that’s no. I don't think they care. As long as large numbers of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the election.

McMaster could never convince Trump that Putin was a liar who'd meddled in the 2016 election. But McMaster had slightly more success bringing Trump around to his views on Afghanistan. Although this success would be temporary. Trump had come into office believing that Afghanistan was a lost cause. McMaster, who’d served in Afghanistan for two years, thought there was hope for the country. And he pushed Trump to make a more significant military commitment there.

H.R. McMaster: So as we jump-started the policymaking process in 2017, I asked for a framing paper from the intelligence community. When I read it, I wrote across the top of it in a bold Sharpie, ‘Did we outsource this paper to the Taliban?’ (BOTH LAUGH) I mean, I couldn't believe what I was reading.

Peter Bergen: What did that paper advocate?

H.R. McMaster: It advocated for a negotiated settlement without putting any additional military pressure on the Taliban. Okay, how does that happen? What we're going to do is we're going to give you the timeline for our departure. And then we want to negotiate a favorable settlement with you. Now, from the Taliban's perspective, right? That sounds great. They just wait us out, right? And so when I came in as national security advisor, I wanted to help President Trump question those assumptions.

Peter Bergen: Well, and I think it’s one of the only times he ever said, ‘Look, I came into this from a pretty strong point of view, which is I want out of Afghanistan and I, it looks different when you're in the Oval Office.’

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: My original instinct was to pull out, but all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

H.R. McMaster: He wrote that into the speech himself, but he immediately began to have doubt. And people who were advancing the ‘end the endless wars’ agenda, they were in his ear right away. And so, tragically he reversed the decision. The president backed out of that. This is why I talk about the president's ability, President Trump’s ability to make tough decisions, but he struggled at times to keep those decisions. And a lot of the reason for that is, Peter, the people who are in his ear would say things like, ‘Hey, this is going to alienate your political base. Your supporters aren't going to like this, you know?’

H.R. McMaster: And I thought he had owned that decision. I wanted him to own that decision. And so, you know I was concerned as I left in 2018, about the president's ability to stick with a strategy that was working. You know, of course, working doesn't mean that Afghanistan was going to become Denmark at any moment, right? It meant Afghanistan was still going to be a violent place. There’s still going to be some corruption there, you know, but it was going to be strong enough to withstand the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. What do we have now? We have a state that's in control of a terrorist organization.

President Trump is partially responsible for that, because his administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that included the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and a pledge to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. And then, a year later, the Biden administration went through with that withdrawal, which handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban.

Peter Bergen: And we also left 8.5 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind when we left, according to the United Nations.

H.R. McMaster: Well, that's what happens when you surrender to a terrorist organization. I don't know how else to put it. It was a self-defeat, Peter. And uh, you know, the Biden administration, I mean, what the hell were they thinking? When does it ever make sense to evacuate the military before civilians? Closing Bagram, you know, being in that situation, which I knew as soon as I saw that we're running evacuations out of Kabul airport, this is going to end in a disaster. And of course, we lost, you know, 13 brave servicemen and women there in a situation that really just created a tremendous opportunity for terrorists.

Peter Bergen: When you saw that withdrawal in August 15, 2021, when the Taliban came in and the final American leaving on August 30th, what did you think?

H.R. McMaster: It was soul-crushing for me to watch this. And because all of us who had been there, Peter, I'm sure you too, we all saw it coming. We knew it was going to come. And, I'm going to divulge this for the first time because I think it's, you know, I've let enough time pass. I wrote a letter to President Biden earlier in 2021. And I made the argument that if we don't do these six things, if you don't do these six things, that it’s going to be an utter disaster in Afghanistan, there'll be a complete collapse, humanitarian catastrophe, we won't be able to get people out — everything that happened.

Peter Bergen: You're fond of quoting Thucydides, he says that war happens for three reasons, essentially: fear, honor, and interest. I'm gonna put words in your mouth if you tell me if I'm wrong. I think you have a tragic view of history, which is like, war’s gonna happen. Bad shit is gonna happen. You know, it’s like prepare for this. And so, do you have a sort of theory about history and how did that affect what you did in the White House?

H.R. McMaster: Of course, I’m very much influenced by Thucydides and of course I'm a student of military history, and I think what I've learned is really consistent with Stoic philosophy, but really, channeled by George Washington, when he said the most effectual means of preserving peace is to be prepared for war.

McMaster believes pretty firmly in the United States’ ability to change the world for the better by making sustained military commitments abroad when necessary. He also thinks that when rival nations say and do things that make their enmity towards U.S. interests apparent… that U.S. leaders should believe them.

In the end, Trump didn’t follow McMaster’s advice on Afghanistan. McMaster also wasn't able to convince Trump that Russia was a threat to American interests. McMaster kept telling Trump what he didn't want to hear. And it turned out that there was only so long that Trump was willing to put up with that. Thirteen months to be exact.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: President Trump is announcing that he is going to name a new national security advisor, announcing on Twitter just a few moments ago that General H.R. McMaster will be out.

ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: He was one of the adults in the room, as it’s known in Washington.

ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: H.R. McMaster, because of his military background, has never been afraid to tell the president what he needs to know.

McMaster describes the moment he left the White House for the last time. He walked out alongside his wife, Katie, as the entire National Security Council staff gave him an ovation.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF APPLAUSE, CHEERING FOR McMASTER]

Peter Bergen: When you're walking out of the White House with your wife, Katie. April 6, 2018. It's a beautiful sunny afternoon, and there are hundreds of White House staffers lining that internal drive. And they're all clapping and cheering, and it has a technical term — being clapped out — so what were you thinking when you were going down that?

H.R. McMaster: Well, you know, Peter, it really surprised me. I didn't know that the White House staff and the National Security Council staff was going to do that. And so it was quite moving. It was a bit numbing, you know, and I think the whole 13 months that I'd served in the White House sort of flashed through my mind as I looked at, I tried to look every individual in the eye. And was mouthing the words, “thank you” to them because it was a real privilege to serve. And one of the themes in At War With Ourselves is that service is rewarding, you know, and it was a tremendous, rewarding experience. I was through a bit of a crucible with many of those with whom I served. And then as we got into the car, I felt a real tugging sensation like that I was pulling away from almost like a family, and getting a little bit of anxiety, maybe, but also, a wave of emotion, associated not only with leaving the job as national security advisor, but I knew it was going to be my last job in the Army as well after 34 years.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHAOS, VIOLENCE, SHOUTING]

The assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, seems to have marked a decisive break from Trump for McMaster. He described it as the time when President Trump abandoned his oath to the Constitution. Here’s McMaster reading from his new book about that attack on Congress.

ARCHIVAL H.R. McMaster: [NARRATING:] The attack on the U.S. Capitol stained our image, and it will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those they encouraged took from us that day.”

People coming to this book looking for a portrait of Trump-the-villain or Trump-the-hero are both going to go away disappointed. McMaster is a guy who's spent his career being scrupulously nonpartisan — so much so that he says he’s never cast a vote for president in the more than three decades he was in uniform.

So he’s not gonna tell you how to cast your vote. He will tell you what he saw while he was in the White House. And what I take away from what he saw — and from the research I did for my own book on Trump’s White House — was that it was indeed a chaotic, messy place. And it’d probably be risky to give that chaos a second term in power.

And my take on McMaster's experiences in the White House is likely a little different than his own understanding of them. For one thing, he seems less gloomy than I am about the health of America's democracy. And he's probably got a better sense of humor about it, too. So I think I'm going to let him have the last word, in his own inimitable, funky style.

H.R. McMaster: A lot of times when I give a talk, I'll end the talk with a Clinton quotation. People are like, Clinton quotation? (PETER LAUGHS) And of course,

Peter Bergen: The other Clinton!

H.R. McMaster: George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic. Okay, so think about this right?

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

H.R. McMaster: We think we have it bad today. We're divided. Remember the 1970s, right?

Peter Bergen: Right.

H.R. McMaster: 1970s, you have a failed war in Vietnam and the evacuation of the embassy in '75. You have the first president that resigns in office, right? You have stagflation. You have multiple energy crises. You have the Iran hostage crisis, right? Things didn't look very good. And it was in the midst of all this that Parliament-Funkadelic comes out with their America Eats Its Young album.

[FUNKY MUSIC PICKS UP]

H.R. McMaster: And one of the tracks on there, which I love because it's like Stoic philosophy. If you don't like the effect, don't produce the cause. Ain’t you deep in your semi first-class seat.

[Parliament-Funkadelic sings the song, echoing McMaster]

H.R. McMaster: You protest this and protest that and eat yourself fat. Situation is just that.

[Parliament-Funkadelic fades down]

H.R. McMaster: It has no power over you. We need to restore a sense of agency, you know? So get up out of your semi-first-class seat. You might protest, but like, make a difference in your community. So, anyway, that's why I think all of us need to be a little bit funkier. And get back in the groove, you know? Get back in the groove.

[UPBEAT FUNK PICKS UP, THEN FADES DOWN]

###

If you'd like to learn more about the stories and issues we discussed in this episode. I recommend At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. And, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Both by H.R. McMaster. Both are available on Audible and narrated by McMaster himself.

And if you'd like an inside view of what happened in the White House after H.R. McMaster left, check out the interview I did last year with the national security advisor who succeeded him: Ambassador John Bolton.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Erik German, with help from Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Holly DeMuth, Nathan Ray, and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.