Over the last four years, public affairs officials at the Pentagon, both military and civilian, were afraid to say much of anything in public for fear of ending up on the wrong side of President Donald Trump. Even the defense secretaries had to choose their words carefully so as not to find themselves sideways with Trump.
Under President Biden, things will be different, insisted retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, who, as assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, is the chief spokesman for both the Pentagon in general and for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in particular. On his sixth day on the job, Kirby spoke with the Washington Examiner’s Jamie McIntyre.
[This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]
Washington Examiner: You’re a veteran public affairs officer, served as spokesman for the chairman of the joint chiefs, the chief of information for the Navy, the spokesman for the Pentagon, and then, after you hung up your uniform, the spokesman for the State Department. But a lot has changed in the four years you’ve been watching from the sidelines. We are now operating in an informational ecosystem in which many Americans are genuinely confused about what is fact and what is fiction, a time when the faith in the media and in the government is in decline. How are you going to approach that as the person who will be the face and the voice of the Pentagon?
John Kirby: The way I’m going to approach it is one of obligation. It’s not just an opportunity to tell your story, speaking to the press. It is an obligation that you have when you work for the American people, as we do. We have an obligation to explain to them what we are doing with their tax dollars and the systems that we buy with those dollars. We have an obligation to explain to them what we do with their sons and daughters who willingly sign up, take an oath, and strap on a uniform. I very much view my job as a steward of that obligation. Now, that may sound a little stodgy and may be a bunch of fluff stuff. I get that, but that’s how I really believe the essence of the job is. I think if it doesn’t start from the podium at the Pentagon, then it’s going to be very hard to make others in the Pentagon look at the job of communications in the same way.
Washington Examiner: President Trump railed against negative coverage of his administration by what he called “fake news” outlets, which at one point or another encompassed everyone from the New York Times to CNN to even Fox News, calling them the enemy of the people. I’m sure you’ve encountered coverage of the Biden Pentagon that you feel is unfair or inaccurate. How will you handle it?
Kirby: Well, the first thing I’m going to do is to continue to build on and nurture the relationships that I have had and hope to have with the Pentagon press corps, and it all has to start from relationships. What you’re after is context, and it’s hard to get context into stories if you aren’t starting from a position of a healthy relationship with the reporter from a given outlet. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to have disagreements over a given story or the way a lede is written or how a policy is characterized in a piece. But if we have relationships, then we can have those conversations before and certainly during the reporting process. And if I can walk away and drive home at night and tell myself that I did everything I could to work with that reporter to provide the proper context, and still, the piece isn’t what I want, I can live with that.
Washington Examiner: In that respect, even though we’re on different teams — your job is to promote and defend the policies of your boss and his boss, the commander in chief, and my job is to subject that to scrutiny — we do share one common goal, which is to try to use facts to provide context and correct misinformation. But how do you do that in a world where facts have lost their ability to persuade? I mean, if you can’t convince millions of voters that Joe Biden won the election fair and square, what’s the best you can hope for?
Kirby: One, I disagree. I don’t think we’re on opposite teams. I think we may play offense and defense interchangeably, but I think we both, the media and the military, do have a common constituency, and that’s the American people. The press has an obligation to report, as you say it, facts and context to the American people about what’s going on. And we in the military have an obligation to make sure that the military component of those stories, of that context, is presented as openly and as transparently as possible. Now, obviously, there’s classified information. There’s times when we can’t be as transparent as you would like us to be, but we have that obligation, too. So, I think we’re both serving the same master.
As for getting people to believe it, I mean, there’s no question that the last few years have led to a dramatic increase in the rise of distrust of the press and what people see in the mainstream media. Facts are important and, as John Adams said, “stubborn things,” but they don’t necessarily sway. They don’t necessarily persuade. They don’t necessarily convince. What does convince, my view, and I think you would agree with me, is story.
Washington Examiner: Story?
Kirby: I’m not talking about news story the way you learn in journalism. I’m talking about story as related to human beings. Our species has been a storytelling species since we were in caves. We still want to know what our fellow human beings are up to, what they’re doing, what makes them tick, what drives them to succeed or to fail. I believe that if we can tell stories about the United States military through human eyes, through the stories of our troops and their families, I think we can do much better trying to overcome the distrust out there in institutions and in particularly institutions like the press.
Washington Examiner: Polls have shown a large percentage of Americans believe the media is biased and has a decidedly leftist leaning. When you left the State Department and signed on as a military analyst and regular contributor to CNN, you were often harshly critical of President Trump’s national security decisions. Does that make it harder to be seen as an unvarnished truth-teller?
Kirby: I hope not. I guess the people that have to judge that are the people that either watch my briefings or don’t watch them. I hope that that’s not the case. I was, yes, critical, harshly critical, as you say, of some of President Trump’s national security policies. But if you go back and look at the record, I also voiced support and in some cases gratitude for some of the things that the Trump administration did. I tried to play it straight, and I would say I was never once, not once in the three and a half years I worked for CNN, was any of my analysis questioned or checked or preset or influenced by anybody at CNN. Whatever I said on that network was what I believed, and I hope that that came through and that it’ll come through at the podium here at the Pentagon.
Washington Examiner: You serve a defense secretary who spent nearly his whole adult life in uniform and needed a special waiver from Congress to lead the Pentagon as a civilian. You, too, spent most of your adult life in uniform, retiring from the Navy as a rear admiral. Do you, much like Lloyd Austin, need to surround yourself with civilians to keep from having a sort of military tunnel vision?
Kirby: Well, we’re already working on that. I mean, [Austin] is already staffing the Pentagon with competent, experienced civilians. You saw the nomination of Dr. [Kathleen] Hicks to be the deputy secretary. You’ve seen the nomination of Dr. Colin Kahl to come in to be the undersecretary for policy. I’m going to do the same in OSD Public Affairs. In fact, all of the significant leadership roles in OSD Public Affairs, my office, are going to be civilians and noncareer civilians brought in to provide the oversight and the leadership of OSD Public Affairs. This isn’t my first rodeo in terms of being a political appointee. I was the assistant secretary of state for President Obama in the last couple of years in the Obama administration. I know how important it is to have civilian oversight, and I’m very comfortable in my ability to implement that.
Washington Examiner: Time was when the Pentagon had routine twice-a-week briefings at 1:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know that was back before the turn of the century, but will we see a return to the kind of open-ended briefings that occur regularly and go on until every reporter had a chance to ask their questions?
Kirby: I absolutely intend to return to a regular briefing schedule. As a matter of fact, my intention at this point is to do three briefings a week. It’ll be most likely Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This week’s a bit of an anomaly just because we’re still kind of getting up to speed. I’m not sure when I’ll get up this week, but three briefings a week is the plan. Then, on the days we’re not briefing, to do an on-the-record but off-camera gaggle. We’ll try to shoot for those on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As for time, yes, absolutely. I don’t want to be up there briefing without a chance for everybody to get a shot. In the past, there has been a tendency to cut the briefings off after a certain amount of minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is. But I’m not interested in having a time limit on it. Some briefings, there may not be anything going on, and they may only go for 20 minutes. But if everybody’s satisfied, then we stop at 20 minutes. If we have to go longer, we’ll go longer. I have no intention of making them time limited.
Washington Examiner: And what about your boss? Some people called him “the silent general” because he rarely spoke in public when he was the CENTCOM commander. Will we be seeing Lloyd Austin in the briefing room and on the Sunday shows explaining why the U.S. military is doing whatever it’s doing?
Kirby: I am confident that you will be seeing Secretary Austin up at that podium in the briefing room, as well as doing other media engagements not in the briefing room. I can promise you that he will be bringing media with him on his travels, and absolutely, he’ll be on the Sunday shows.
Washington Examiner: Outside your office, on the Pentagon’s E-ring, are posted the department’s Principles of Information, which pledge “timely and accurate information so that the public, the Congress, and the news media may assess and understand the facts about national security and defense strategy” and promise a “free flow of information without censorship or propaganda” and that no information should be classified or withheld to “protect the government from criticism or embarrassment.” How seriously should we take that? How seriously do you take that?
Kirby: I take it very seriously. 100%. I’m very proud of those words. They are literally right outside my door, and I can’t walk into my office and I can’t leave my office without walking past those words. I can promise you that on day one, when I first arrived here on the 20th, I stopped before I entered my office and I read those principles again, just for myself. It had been a little while since I read them, and there’s not a single word I would change, not even a comma. And I am 100% committed to that.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
