Chapter 15 of Mark Esper’s account of his 18 months as former President Donald Trump’s second defense secretary is titled “Making Lemonade,” a reference to the old saying about what to do when life hands you lemons.

It could well have been an alternate title for A Sacred Oath, Esper’s pull-back-the-curtain, tell-all memoir about what he considered as his constitutional duty to turn what he saw as an endless litany of loony ideas coming from his “idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and unprincipled commander in chief” into policy he could defend as rational, legal, and in the legitimate national interest.

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