Slate - The Tarnishing of H. R. McMaster [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/05/h_r_mcmaster_s_reputation_is_being_destroyed_by_trump_s_deceit.html

One of America’s finest soldiers has been dragged into Trump’s swamp of deceit.

By Fred Kaplan

There are many ways to look at President Trump’s disclosure of extreme secrets to Russia’s top diplomats last week: an appalling security breach that would land anyone else in prison for years; a betrayal of a sensitive ally—Israel, according to the New York Times—that will make other allies reluctant to share intelligence with Washington again; a sick-comic plot twist that a satirical novelist would discard as too improbable.


But there is another, simply sad aspect to the spectacle: the tarnishing of a good man’s honor. I speak of the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, one of America’s finest soldiers, a public servant who has been all but incapable of guile throughout his career, now soaked in the swamp of deceit in the service of Trump.

Monday evening, in the wake of the Washington Post’s story on the breach, McMaster appeared before reporters and cameras (after at first turning away from them saying, “This is the last place on earth I wanted to be”), and read a script nearly identical to the statements released by the two other senior officials who’d been in the Oval Office with Trump and the Russians.

This script amounted to a classic “nondenial denial” but with a slightly more deceptive twist, in that it was a denial of claims that the Post story never made.

And here is where the tale gets sad, bordering on tragic. McMaster has built his entire reputation—the past 20 years of his career—on his embodiment and celebration of honesty. He first came to prominence, as an Army major, with a Ph.D. dissertation-turned-book arguing that the U.S. military’s top generals betrayed their constitutional duties by failing to give civilian leaders their unvarnished military advice during the Vietnam War. The book was titled Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, and it was a critique of the deceit that ruled Washington in a dreadful time.

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