Gen. McChrystal on Trump’s Military Parade & the Need for National Character

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And General Stan McChrystal, welcome back to the show.

GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, AUTHOR, “ON CHARACTER”: Thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: This book, “On Character,” you say that character is a choice we have. How so?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, if you think about it, character is, I try to describe it in the book, is a combination of your deeply held convictions, the things you believe in, the things you’ll live to or die for, and the discipline you have to actually live up to ’em. So you can have all these highfalutin convictions, but if you don’t have the discipline to adhere to them, they’re meaningless. So I think it’s a choice. We first get to decide what we think about enough to adopt as our beliefs, but then we also get to decide how we behave. Now, we sometimes struggle and most of us fall short on a pretty constant basis, but we get to pick ourselves up every day and try to do better the next day.

ISAACSON: You talk about it being conviction and discipline. I know a lot of people with conviction, and sometimes they’re disciplined, but I worry about them. They don’t have a moral compass. Isn’t that part of the equation?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, I, I put that in convictions because I think you actually can have character and it can be bad character. We typically describe character as good. If you were to say Walter Isaacson has character, that would be viewed as positive. But the reality is some people have evil convictions. They have beliefs that are antithetical to what I believe, or a total lack of values, but they’ve got all the discipline in the world to follow those things. Take a, take a, for example, someone who is a complete opportunist. All they’re out for is themselves, but they do it in a very disciplined fashion. They don’t deviate from it, and they’re constantly at it. We may find them despicable, but we find them sometimes effective at what they’re trying to do.

ISAACSON: I just saw Goodnight and Good Luck, the play about Edward r Murrow, and he’s sort of the hero of the play, but the real hero is the army and the Army McCarthy hearings, and I think it’s Joseph Welch who says, “have you no shame, have you no decency,” where the army finally pushed back. It was a period that was eerily like today. Does it have resonance for you and what the military should be thinking now?

MCCHRYSTAL: It does, and I go back to remember, the McCarthy era lasted for longer than we like to pretend it did. He actually had a pretty long run of doing a lot of damage, and it finally took this set of hearings when I think people had sort of had it up to here with him. And then this official from the army basically uses that great line. But, but the reality is it’s hard to do that. And so I wish right now somebody would stand up. I wish somebody would say we are doing things with and to our army that I think are potentially very, very damaging for a long time.

ISAACSON: Are you referring to perhaps the deployment – it’s Marines – but the deployment of both the National Guard and Marines for domestic purposes now in Los Angeles this week?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, that particular action appears to be lawful, although I don’t think it was warranted, but I’m not on the ground, so it’s harder for me to judge. What I’m more concerned about is policies inside, for example, Department of Defense, where senior officers were removed for political reasons, for the fact that they had supported diversity, for the fact that they had followed the things which were the policy of their service or their job when they were doing it. And so when you start to remove – you can always fire generals. There is nothing wrong with firing generals for ineffectiveness or, or any other shortcoming, but if you fire them for political ideology, then I think we are sending a dangerous message across the force.

ISAACSON: When you fire them for political ideology, yes, it’s a dangerous message across the force. But isn’t it a step in some ways to an autocracy or something in which the president or whoever is in charge of doing that takes a certain power that we’ve not seen before in our society?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, Walter, it certainly looks like that. It looks like – the effect, remember, of firing a few, or in the case back of during the Soviet Empire, arresting a few people certainly brings everybody else into line. We didn’t have arrests here, obviously, but when you remove a certain number of people and you show that anyone is vulnerable to that, people who have jobs, positions that they have worked a long time to get, are likely to shape their behavior to fall into line more easily. And I think that we see that in the Senate. I see, think we see the threats that people will put money to your primary opponent or they will do other things that will cause you not to be reelected. The same occurs in a different way to people in uniform. And so I think we’ve got to pay close attention that the sacred relationship that the US military has had with our civilian government and our society, and I say sacred because it’s, it’s not been perfect, but it’s been largely apolitical. It’s been pretty professional in the sense that the military focused on that which the military should do, completely respected the Constitution and the civilian leaders appointed over them and then did not act as any kind of a negative influence on our population, didn’t police our population or, or, or was perceived as a threat. Innocent –

ISAACSON: So you think it’s dangerous that they are now policing our population?

MCCHRYSTAL: I, I don’t think it’s a good idea because if you think about it, pretty quickly, if they become an easy tool to use, then the ability to control our population – it really runs pretty counter against what people who are strong believers in the Second Amendment believe strongly in to have the actual US military out on streets should be very upsetting to the National Rifle Association.

ISAACSON: When you talk about generals being fired for political purposes, and it started with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs it raises that question of, I’ve always thought the military’s first loyalty was to the Constitution, but it makes it so now they have to be loyal to the political leader in power in this case, president Trump.

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, and let me make sure I I nuance this correctly. Leaders should be loyal to their bosses. They should follow lawful orders. They should not do things that are disloyal behind their backs. But at the same time, the ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution. The assumption has always been that the president is a representative. He is a chief executive that represents the values of the Constitution and the limits therein. And so there was no danger in being very loyal to the commander in chief because that was in fact being loyal to the Constitution. When those diverge in any way, then I think you have great danger. Many people will know that in 1936 in Germany, the Wehrmacht changed the oath, the oath of their allegiance from the Constitution to the Führer. And so whenever you personalize ultimate loyalty, I think you have the danger because, you know, you’re not quite sure what kind of leader you’re gonna have wielding that power.

ISAACSON: You begin your book with the incident in which you were having, you know, some time with the Rolling Stone reporter. You were speaking off the cuff, maybe off the record, and you said some things about President Obama, vice President Biden, that weren’t as respectful. And then when it hit the print, you go into the White House and you offer your resignation. You say in this book that you’ve chewed on that over and over again. Tell me what lessons on character you learned from that.

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, and Walter just – I hate to recorrect this story, but the story was one that I thought was not accurate and it didn’t depict me as saying those things, but it doesn’t matter. A negative story came out in the Rolling Stone, and I was the commander, so I was responsible for the fact that my boss, the commander in chief, gets this explosive story on his desk. And so I thought it was my responsibility to offer my resignation. That was not a hard decision. It was a painful decision, but it wasn’t hard because I knew that I was responsible. I should accept that responsibility. So I flew back to the United States, met with President Obama, who was gracious, and I offered him my resignation, and he accepted it. When I say that I chewed over it later- I have never second-guessed the decision to resign. I am convinced from the moment it, the story came out that that was required. And I’ve been convinced ever since it was the right and only right answer. Now, what I have thought about is sort of what if. What if the story had never come out? What if life had been different? What if we had not had that reporter around at all? And then what if I had responded differently to the experience? Because in reality, the most important moment of my life in retrospect, is the moment after the President accepted my resignation. And my wife, Annie, who you know, said, we’re gonna face forward. You know, I said, I had resigned, and he’d accepted it. And she says, good, we’ve always been happy. We’ll always be happy. And she was signaling that we weren’t gonna go back and re-litigate the past. I wasn’t gonna be a bitter general who gets invited out to lunch just so people could hear a story, because nobody cares. Instead, what I decided to do was try to live my life going forward in a manner that those people who had never met me but had heard about the story, would say, wow, that doesn’t seem like what I heard about in that story. Or, people who had known me and had committed themselves in many cases to serve with me, decided they weren’t wrong, that the person they’d always believed in was the real person. And I had to prove that every day. And I’m still doing that. I’m 70 years old, it’s 15 years on, and there are days when it’s hard, but it’s never been the wrong decision for me.

ISAACSON: There’s a part of the book that really struck me as being very honest, and it’s about faith. You have a chapter on faith and you do it throughout the book. Let me read you some of it, which is, “for most of my life, I have believed in God. I am now less sure than I once was. But the habit of accepting the concept was taught as a, I was taught as a child is strong enough that I reflexively accept the idea of a deity.” When it comes to character, is it good to have doubts and to question things? Or is it important to have just faith?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think it’s very important to have doubts. Faith scares me a bit because one definition of faith says to believe in something you can’t prove. And the problem is there are a whole bunch of things out there that I shouldn’t believe in, that I could, that I can’t prove because they’re not true. And so I think faith, it’s comforting in some ways, and that’s why I, I almost envy people who have this complete faith. But I actually think it’s more important to question everything. It’s more important to search ourselves, to search our values, to search what we hear, to doubt the things that are put in front of us because only when we pressure test them do I think we really come out with the closest to an accurate appraisal of whether it’s right for us.

ISAACSON: The name Donald Trump doesn’t appear in this book as far as I can remember reading it. And yet every question of character goes to the heart of what people either feel good or bad about him. You endorsed his, his opponent. Was that partly on character grounds?

MCCHRYSTAL: It was entirely on character grounds. In fact, I didn’t agree with many of the Democratic Party’s positions. I didn’t agree with all the Republican Party’s positions. I really, very much in the center. But when I looked at the character of the two candidates, I had enough data because one had been vice president, one had been president already. I made the judgment that the character of the vice president was better. And I think that you really don’t know what a president’s gonna have to face. There are a lot of unexpected things that arise. So I don’t want to ex elect somebody based upon their position on taxes or tariffs or this ’cause a lot of that’ll change. And what I really need the president to be is a moral leader for the country. And I assess that vice President Harris would do that better than her opponent.

ISAACSON: Was there any particular thing about the current president in terms of the honesty or the commitment that particularly struck you?

MCCHRYSTAL: You know, I think we have a big body of knowledge about the president, and I don’t think he is the cause of our problems. If you get up in the morning and you resent the President for the way things are, I think that’s misplaced. He is a symptom. He is a symptom of an erosion of character in our country. We as people allowed that character to erode for lots of reasons. And then we make choice –

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, why? Why do you think we let that erode?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think we become bewitched by celebrity, fascinated by wealth. We are captivated by the fact that somebody comes out and says, we can get things done. You know, we’re gonna do this. And that becomes expedient. I use the example sometimes of if you live next door to the Sopranos or to Vito Corleone and your daughter gets treated badly by someone, you can go next door and you can get it fixed. You don’t have to go through the legal system or, or that, and there’s a certain amount of seductiveness to that idea that, okay, we are just gonna cut to the chase and we’re gonna go get justice. But we understand societies can’t work that way because the same person who can do that does all of these other things that make our society weaker. So we as Americans don’t demand character. We have decided to accept less. We have this strange situation now where a politician will come on tv, they will look in the camera and they will say something they know is untrue. And the funny thing is, they know you know it’s untrue, but we have this agreement where because they’re politicians, we say, well, they have to lie ’cause that’s, that’s their position. And we have to, no, we don’t have to accept it. We don’t at all have to accept it. We could say no, and yet we have allowed ourselves to accept that’s the way things are. And I think that is a great danger to us.

ISAACSON: Tomorrow, Saturday, is the 250th anniversary of your beloved institution, the US Army. I guess General Washington helped create it back then, 250 years ago. It’s being celebrated or feted in Washington by a parade that I think it has, you know, M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, 7,000 soldiers marching. And in some ways it reminds me of, I actually saw some of those military parades in Moscow when I was a young correspondent. Do you think that’s an appropriate way to be celebrating?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think there’s a better way. First, if I was going to celebrate the United States Army, I wouldn’t have any tanks, any helicopters, any missiles, because any dictator around the world can buy those things. I would have just American soldiers because only America can field American soldiers. That’s our crown jewel. That’s what we should be proud of. That’s what we should be cheering. They don’t do as much damage to the streets as well. But the, the reality is, if we want to focus on the 250th anniversary of the Army, and I think that’s great, let’s put those soldiers out and let’s celebrate their values. Let’s celebrate their sacrifice. Let’s celebrate their heroism. Let’s focus on that. And if we do that, then I think it could be a tremendous reinforcement for the fact that that force is a mirror of our society. We should be proud of it, and they should be comforted by the fact that we believe in them.

ISAACSON: General Stan McChrystal, thank you so much for joining us.

MCCHRYSTAL: Thank you, Walter.