A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times – An Instant New York Times Bestseller: A Pentagon Insider's Tumultuous Years Under President Trump

by Mark T. Esper

Where I drew a hard line was the Presidential Personnel Office’s attempts to go after career civilians and uniformed officers. This happened on a few occasions after McEntee installed his people at the Pentagon in October 2020. It was these new loyalists who would eventually implement the orders to remove Anderson and others, and then proceed to purge the Defense Policy and Defense Business Boards. As if going after current people wasn’t good enough, Trump’s loyalists once tried to recall retired four-star officers back to active duty to court-martial them for criticizing the president. In early May 2020, stories appeared in outlets like Breitbart that alleged retired Army general Stan McChrystal was advising Democrats on ways to use AI to “track down and counter Trump supporters on social media.”4 This spun the president up. It wasn’t the first time McChrystal was on the wrong side of Trump, though. But this latest report struck a nerve, even though McChrystal had not endorsed former vice president Joe Biden and later told another media outlet that his interest in advising a Democrat-aligned PAC was about ensuring the accuracy of information leading up to the election.5 The next thing I knew, Mark Milley and I were sitting in front of the president trying to talk him out of recalling McChrystal to active duty. To make matters worse, by the time we had arrived at the White House, someone in the Oval Office had thrown retired Navy admiral William H. McRaven, the commander w...