Peril

by Bob Woodward

Milley spoke to the Joint Chiefs in the Tank about the issue of the president’s authority to make the final national security decisions. “Here’s some thoughts for us to think about as the senior leaders of the military,” Milley said. “You’re dealing with a president who was the vice president under Obama and the guys like Blinken and Sullivan and all these other guys. These guys were all in the second and third tier positions in the Obama administration. And all of them have a searing memory of the first year of Obama.” That was when the military and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strong-armed Obama to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to the Afghanistan War. “I was a colonel at the time and Mullen was the chairman and I was in the basement. I was a witness to some of this. Admiral Mullen, McChrystal and Petraeus, the uniform guys, had tried to box in a president, a new, young president from Chicago that maybe, I can’t read minds, they thought they could take advantage of and box him in on a surge in Afghanistan. “Here’s what I take from that as Colonel Milley. Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow. One is you never, ever ever box in a president of the United States. You always give him decision space. Number two, you don’t play cute and you don’t give your advice on the front page of The Washington Post. And you don’t, you damn sure don’t give it in speeches. You just don’t do that. You give candid, honest advice. You give it in private and y...