Editor’s note: This commentary by retired ABC News diplomatic correspondent Barrie Dunsmore first appeared in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald Sunday edition. All his columns can be found on his website, www.barriedunsmore.com.
[I] know something about “misremembering.” Recently I discovered that information that for half a century was imbedded in my brain as a hard fact was incorrect. It was of no great consequence but I was troubled that one’s brain can play tricks, even when there is no intent to deceive.
This was the context to my original reaction to reports that Gen. John Kelly’s recollections of an appearance by U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., at a dedication of a new FBI building in Miami in 2015 were untrue. According to Kelly, now President Trump’s chief of staff, Ms. Wilson had bragged about how she was responsible for getting the money for the building through her contacts with President Barack Obama and said nothing of the two martyred agents for whom it would be named.
However, a videotape of what the congresswoman actually said shows that she took no credit for the funding — and thanked key Republican House and Senate members for helping her get the building named for the two FBI agents killed in the line of duty. She talked specifically about their bravery as well praising law enforcement generally.
So Kelly didn’t just get some of it wrong. He got it all wrong. Perhaps he misremembered. But for a man with his reputation for courage and integrity, it is hard to understand why he has remained silent for so long without responding to the growing chorus of calls for his apology. Maybe by the time you read this he will have done so. But the fact that he didn’t correct the record immediately leads me to one conclusion only – he is afraid of Donald Trump.
That’s why Kelly agreed to try to clear up the mess Trump was making over the handling of four U.S. special forces deaths in Niger on Oct. 4, when he falsely accused former presidents of not sending condolences to family survivors.
That’s why Kelly was willing to bare his soul before the White House press corps on the subject of the death of his own son, Lt. Robert Kelly, killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
That is why Kelly attacked Congresswoman Wilson. As a longtime family friend and mentor of Sgt. La David Johnson who was killed in Niger, Wilson was in the car with Johnson’s widow, Myeshia, on their way to receive his body, when President Trump called, and he was put on the car’s speaker. Wilson subsequently was critical of Trump’s handling of his condolence call, which Trump denounced as a total fabrication.
As it turns out, what Wilson reported Trump saying to Myeshia — that Sgt. Johnson knew what he was getting into when he joined up — is pretty much what Kelly had suggested he say. But while that may have worked for a veteran military man like Kelly, it was hardly reassuring to a young pregnant mother who had just lost her husband.
All that said, let me define what I mean by Gen. Kelly being “afraid” of Trump. My guess is that Kelly would like nothing better than to have the weight of being Trump’s chief of staff lifted from his shoulders. He has said publicly it is the hardest job he has ever had — and he has spent a good deal of his life in military combat. I believe that Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are all “afraid” of what Trump might do if they were to leave their posts. Based on what they have heard and seen of the president’s words and actions in their area of national security, I think their fears are understandable.
Sen. Bob Corker, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is known to have a close relationship with Secretary Tillerson and said this to the New York Times earlier this month: “We could be heading toward WW III.” He was referring to the North Korean crisis.
At any other time, this would be a huge story, yet somehow we have become so inured to Donald Trump’s recklessness that much of the follow-up reporting dealt with the Trump-Corker personal animus. But in a recent examination in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart takes Corker’s charge seriously.
He writes, “It’s … possible Corker genuinely fears that Trump and Kim Jong Un’s blood-curdling rhetoric, combined with ongoing North Korean missile and nuclear tests and American displays of military force, pose a risk of catastrophic miscalculation — war by accident. Reducing that risk requires meaningful communication between Washington and Pyongyang. And Corker — who told the Times that ‘in several instances’ Trump has ‘hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,'” (such as saying Rex Tillerson is wasting his time with North Korea.)
Beinart concludes his analysis, “Donald Trump, who keeps threatening war and authorizing provocative military maneuvers, is doing his best to make sure that Tillerson fails. That terrifies Bob Corker. It should terrify the rest of us, too.”
That seems to be a motivating factor among those on the national security team and even though I think Gen. Kelly has tarnished his own reputation by his handling of the Johnson family matter, I would still rather see him as chief of staff than another Trump toady — because these are very perilous times.
If there is any good news it’s that in recent days four important Republicans — former President George W. Bush, Sens. John McCain, Bob Corker and Jeff Flake — have all publicly broken with the current White House inhabitant largely over the subject of his character. Flake, a bedrock conservative, said Trump was “dangerous to our democracy” and called on his fellow Republicans to end their silence on Trump’s “outrageous” behavior. Senate Republicans reportedly responded by giving Trump a standing ovation later that same day. So for now at least, it would seem the national security generals are still this country’s last line of defense against WW III.
