A Quieter Presence at the Pentagon

Three days before Christmas, Army four-star General Lloyd Austin, the seventy-year-old secretary of defense, disappeared—he was simply no longer to be found in the Pentagon—and President Biden and his aides did not know about it for ten days. He had gone, without notice to the president he serves, into an Army hospital to be treated for an unspecified illness. The story broke in the media—it was front-page stuff—and Admiral John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, told the press ...