MATTIS STAYS PUT IN PENTAGON, OUT OF STORM
ideas come from the nation with the most aircraft carriers.”
All of this has earned him not so much as a stray tweet from the president.
The president and the defense secretary are “absolutely in sync with how they view the importance of having strong allies in the world,” Dana W. White, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman, said, objecting to the characterization that the two were at odds in their public remarks last week.
Mattis is banking that his “Mad Dog” stock with Trump will remain high enough, long enough for him to accomplish his goals, current and former Pentagon officials say, which include containing North Korea, defeating the Islamic State, pressing for budget increases to lift flagging readiness and updating the military’s nuclear and ballistic-missile defense policies.
Mattis has stayed out of the chaos that has characterized the Trump administration in part because of his ability, friends and associates say, to present an agreeable demeanor. His calm, folksy air eases the sting of his remarks and keeps Trump from feeling threatened even when his defense secretary contradicts him or slow-walks his pet policies, according to five people close to the secretary, who, like others interviewed, would not be named describing the relationship between the two men.
He has taken pains not to criticize the president publicly, though he has disagreed over policy and personnel with the president and his senior staff — and Trump has reminded people around him that he regards Mattis, a retired four-star general, as “a Democrat” who is more liberal on many issues than he is.
Mattis won one early victory that established his authority internally. Shortly before inauguration, Mattis signaled he intended to pick Michèle Flournoy, a hawkish Democrat who would most likely have been Hillary Clinton’s defense secretary, as his chief deputy.
The pick stunned Trump’s advisers. Stephen Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, warned that it would infuriate longtime loyalists of the president and influential conservative senators, such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Flournoy, according to two people with direct knowledge of the exchange, told the new secretary he would lose the fight, but Mattis, a veteran combat commander, assured her that he would win — and he prevailed, gaining Bannon’s unlikely blessing.
Ultimately, Flournoy opted against taking the job, but Mattis proved that he could win an internal battle without losing political capital or sparking resentments.
Mattis has been helped by serving a president with an outsize admiration for military brass. Trump has repeatedly expressed his satisfaction with Mattis to those around him. On the day that John F. Kelly, the former homeland security secretary and a retired Marine general, was sworn in as White House chief of staff, Trump thanked Mattis at a meeting of the Cabinet for recommending that Kelly join the administration in the first place, according to a staff member in the room.
Much as Trump differentiates between billionaires and millionaires, he has told associates that he respects four-star generals — the rank Mattis and Kelly attained — more than three-star generals such as H.R. Mcmaster or advisers on national security who never served in the military.
That inherent advantage has aided Mattis from the start. He told Trump during the transition that he did not agree with his stance on torture or his skepticism about NATO.
“There are three parts to Jim Mattis’ success thus far in working with the president,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former NATO commander. “First is the built-in respect the president has for any four-star military officers, which is sincere. Second is the distance Secretary Mattis can generally keep by sticking to his knitting in the Pentagon — this is a case where absence at least helps the heart stay fond.”
Third, Stavridis asserted, is that a smooth-running Defense Department is critically important to the White House.
For senior White House staff members, such as Kelly and Mcmaster, the national security adviser, proximity to Trump offers more chances to influence the president but also greater risk of inadvertently making the president feel managed, which he bristles at. Mattis avoids such scenarios by spending less time at the White House than many other key Cabinet members, preferring to operate from his thirdfloor, E-ring office at the Pentagon.
“Mattis is not in the eye of the political storm all the time,” said Christine Wormuth, a top Pentagon policy official in the Obama administration who remains in contact with current Defense Department officials. “He has political capital with the president, and he doesn’t want to squander that.”
He is concerned, however, said one former Pentagon official, about how long he has before Trump could make a request that Mattis would be unwilling to fulfill and choose instead to resign.
Pentagon officials say Mattis sees his job as being the protector of the military, and, to a degree, protecting them from Trump. He has tightened the circle of decision-makers and public voices at the Pentagon. Four-star combatant commanders no longer regularly join classified teleconferences with White House. Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speak for the military.
Pentagon officials say Mattis is protecting his people from political land mines, but he is also tightening the flow of information from the Defense Department.
He has shied away from scheduled news conferences that could draw more public attention and possible fury from the White House, preferring informal, impromptu encounters with reporters at the Pentagon. He has moved to shrink the number of journalists traveling with him, and his press shop has curbed some interviews with subordinates in the department — presumably to limit the likelihood a Pentagon official utters some discordant note.
Mattis has enjoyed a remarkably leak-free tenure, in part because even internal critics are worried that his absence would destabilize the government, three current and former defense department officials said.
Mattis has also steered clear of the type of moves by other Cabinet members that drew public outrage, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s inquiry about the use of a military plane for his European honeymoon last month and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s use of private jets last week for official business within the United States.
And he has maintained the president’s confidence without adopting sycophancy. At a White House meeting in June when top administration officials, one by one, praised and thanked Trump before the cameras, Mattis was a lonely voice of restraint. He spoke of the “men and women of the Department of Defense,” adding that he was “grateful for the sacrifices our people are making in order to strengthen our military.”
Mattis has, on occasion, strayed from his make-no-waves playbook. After another instance in recent weeks of dueling interpretations over his and Trump’s comments about North Korea, the defense secretary again dismissed talk of daylight between them, telling reporters, “I can’t help people who misinterpret things.”
“I’ll do my best to call it like I see it, but right now, if I say six and the president says half a dozen,” Mattis added, “they’re going to say I disagree with him.”