McMASTERFUL CHOICE: President Trump yesterday disarmed his critics and delighted supporters with the choice of a legendary commander to be his next national security adviser. Lt. Gen. Herbert Raymond McMaster, known forevermore as H.R., enjoys a reputation as a deep strategic thinker with strong convictions about speaking truth to power. With the three-star general sitting by his side, Trump called him “a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience” who is highly respected by everybody in the military. True enough. In 2014, he made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Retired Lt. Gen. Dave Barno wrote at the time that McMaster might be “the 21st century Army’s pre-eminent warrior-thinker,” and “also the rarest of soldiers — one who has repeatedly bucked the system and survived to join its senior ranks.”

Much of McMaster’s fame stems from his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, which drew from his PhD thesis at the University of North Carolina. The book, which is now required reading, was a scathing criticism of the failure of senior military officers to challenge President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara over the flawed strategy in Vietnam. One passage from Chapter 5 gives a flavor of McMaster’s thesis: “[Gen. Maxwell] Taylor shielded [Johnson] from the views of his less politically sensitive colleagues, while telling the Chiefs that their recommendations had been given full consideration. To keep the Chiefs from expressing dissenting views, he helped create a relationship based on distrust and deceit in which the president obscured the finality of decisions and made false promises that the JCS conception of the war might one day be realized.”