James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington by Dexter Filkins, asks "The former Marine Corps general spent four decades on the front lines. How will he lead the Department of Defense?" in March 2018.
For Trump, the choice of Mattis seemed more emotional than deliberative. Their initial meeting lasted just forty minutes, and Trump seemed drawn to him less for his world view than for his fearsome reputation. Announcing his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Trump revelled in using the general’s nickname—Mad Dog—and compared him to General George S. Patton, who was famous for his tactical brilliance, his profane language, and his merciless style. Anecdotes about Mattis’s audacity in the field are legion. Early in the Iraq War, he met with local leaders and told them, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.”
But, in embracing Mattis’s Mad Dog persona, Trump neglected a side of him that appealed to many others—that of the deeply read scholar-soldier and sophisticated analyst. In this view, Mattis is a kind of anti-Trump, a veteran of three wars who has been sobered by their brutalities, a guardian of the internationalist tradition in American foreign policy. Mattis was endorsed by Henry Kissinger, whom he had worked with at Stanford University. As if to prove his judiciousness, Mattis, during his job interview, tried to persuade Trump to abandon the idea of reinstituting torture as an interrogation tool, saying that offers of beer and cigarettes work just as well. Even the nickname Mad Dog is a misnomer; none of his friends use it, and Mattis himself does not care for it.
McMaster and Commander by Patrick Radden Keefe, asks "Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?" in April 2018.
Two days after Trump’s phone call with Putin, he fired McMaster. Someone in the Administration had leaked the “do not congratulate” story to the Washington Post, and Trump was furious. Yet McMaster’s ouster had seemed imminent for months. As it turned out, Trump found the intellectual side of the warrior-intellectual annoying. When McMaster took the job, he had promised to “work tirelessly” to protect “the interests of the American people,” but the challenges he faced were unprecedented. What does it mean to be the national-security adviser when some of the greatest threats confronting the nation may be the proclivities and limitations of the President himself? McMaster’s friend Eliot Cohen, who was a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, told me that, although they have not spoken about the general’s motives, he thinks McMaster may have believed that he was “defending the country, to some extent, from the President.”
McMaster is “not apologetic about America’s greatness,” one of his N.S.C. colleagues told me. Several of them suggested that, to the degree that one can discern a foreign-policy world view in Trump’s sloganeering, it is not very different from McMaster’s. Unlike Trump, McMaster respects international alliances and sees value in protracted troop deployments, but both men regard the world as a dangerous arena in which the U.S. should not be afraid to exert its will. There is a practiced flair to McMaster’s erudition, and in speeches and conversations he relies on a store of quotations from theorists and generals, from Clausewitz to Stonewall Jackson. Invoking Thucydides, he has suggested that peace is merely “an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.”
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