SECDEF Esper Post Script

Review by Bill Doughty––

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s 752-page tome, “A Sacred Oath” (HarperCollins, 2022), is a book of mea culpa justification and behind-the-scenes candor. There are some shocking revelations.

Esper

But the most shocking thing to come out of the Trump administration, Esper says, was the seditious insurrection attack on the Capitol, January 6, 2021. Readers interested in the military and the Constitution will be rewarded by some of the insights, warnings, and attempts at explanation.

For example: Esper tries to convince readers that he did everything he could to promote and retain Col. Alexander Vindman in the wake of 2019 Ukraine scandal leading to President Trump’s first impeachment. Esper contends that Trump’s support for disgraced former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was “the nadir for the DoD” in politicizing the military. Esper said he shut down a White House request to interview senior officers eligible for promotion, interviews that he and others saw as “loyalty tests.”

Esper reveals that Trump wanted to recall Adm. McRaven and Gen. McChrystal to active duty so he could court-martial them. Trump didn’t like what they'd said about him and his leadership.

Speaking to reporters aboard government aircraft, Dec. 16, 2019. (Ferdinando)

Unfortunately, Esper has a different stance on support for now-retired Capt. Brett Crozier, former CO of USS Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier was railroaded for taking extraordinary steps to get his crew to safety when Coronavirus hit his ship's crew in the early months of the pandemic. Crozier’s efforts to get help were revealed by the media, and Trump wanted him fired. So did Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly.

Esper doubles down on his support of former SECNAV Modly’s decision to fire Crozier, and he unsurprisingly agrees with the internal investigation that justified Modly's conclusion. Modly, as we remember, traveled to Guam to tell the crew of TR on the 1MC that their captain, who had tried to save their lives, was “stupid.”

There’s more to read here about Esper’s role in the Trump administration and Trump’s failure to end the war in Afghanistan, for example, as he’d promised. There’s also more about how Trump and his team dealt with North and South Korea; Communist China and Democratic Taiwan; Putin’s Russia; and threats to the NATO alliance –– as well as other strategic issues, including the COVID pandemic and immigration issue.

On the home front, Esper closes his book with a lament about the seditious conspiracy that led to the attack on the Capitol.

Esper expounds about the people who came out of the shadows at Trump’s request and incitement on J6:

“The most shocking and troubling event of the Trump presidency was the organization and incitement of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and stopped the constitutional process Congress was following to affirm the election and transfer of power to a new president. I never thought I would see what happened on Capitol Hill that day.

“It was the worst attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, and maybe the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. And as someone who worked for many years in Congress, and had an office physically in the Capitol, I was shocked, angry, sad, and hurt by what I saw on TV that day. It was doubly hard to believe our fellow Americans conducted these criminal and seditious acts.”

Readers are left with wanting to know more about what Esper knows, especially after he gives his view about former national security adviser and retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn’s call for martial law and for the military to seize voting machines –– “Scary, and real.”

And monumentally treasonous.

There is much to learn from Esper’s experience as a well-defined guardrail in the careening last year of Trump’s presidency.

Esper says his former boss is not fit for leadership on the national stage. About Trump: “He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump pulls Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper in for a handshake after hearing remarks from Vice President Michael Pence during a Full Honors Welcome Ceremony for Esper at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., July 25, 2019. (Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

Ironically, Esper’s attempt at a completely honest portrayal is told through his own lens of self-interest and concern about his legacy. Yet, thank goodness, he kept his oath to the Constitution.