KELLY BACK TO WAR
General defends Trump call to widow, rips Dem congresswoman
Gen. John Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, said yesterday he was “stunned” a Democratic congresswoman politicized a call between the president and the wife of a slain American soldier.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Thursday delivered a powerful defense of President Trump’s phone call to the Gold Star widow of a soldier killed in Niger — and ripped a Florida lawmaker for politicizing the hero’s death.
“There’s no perfect way to make that phone call,” a stoic Kelly said from the White House in his first public comments on the controversy over Trump’s call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson.
Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, and Florida Democratic Rep. Frederica S. Wilson — a friend of the family — had called Trump’s sentiments disrespectful, with Wilson on Wednesday appearing on TV in a cowboy hat to denounce the president.
“If you’ve never worn the uniform, if you’ve never been in combat, you can’t even imagine how to make that call,” said Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, whose son, Marine Lt. Robert Kelly, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. “I think he [Trump] very bravely does make those calls.”
Kelly said he advised Trump not to make such calls because it is so difficult to deliver a tragic message to a family still in the throes of shattering grief.
But the president, Kelly said, insisted that it’s the right thing to do.
“He said, ‘What do I say?’ I said to him, ‘Sir, there’s nothing you can do to lighten the burden on these families,’ ” Kelly recalled.
He then told the president about what a military friend had told him about handling such difficult phone calls.
The friend, Kelly said, would tell loved ones that the tragic hero “was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were.”
Trump, Kelly said, “in his way tried to express that opinion that [Johnson] was a brave man, a fallen hero. He knew what he was getting himself into because he enlisted.
“He enlisted and was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken. That was the message. That was the message that was transmitted.”
That phrasing is similar to what Johnson’s family said Trump told them on Tuesday, that the sergeant “knew what he signed up for.”
Wilson said the family thought the comment was callous, and left Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, weeping.
Kelly, 67, blasted Wilson for listening in on what he believed should have been a private call — and jumping in to politicize the matter.
“It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me,” he said, adding that the death of a service member was “sacred.”
Kelly said no one should have been part of the call other than Trump and Johnson’s widow.
“I just thought the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die in the battlefield, I thought that might be sacred. And when I listened to this woman [Wilson] and what she
was saying and what she was doing on TV, the only thing I could do to collect my thoughts was to go and walk among the finest men and women on this earth,” he said to a silent press corp.
“And you can always find them. Because they’re in Arlington National Cemetery. Went over there for an hour and a half, walked among the stones, some of whom I put there because they were doing what I told them to do when they were killed,” said Kelly, a highly decorated Marine who served in both Iraq wars.
He also described in graphic detail military protocol about how the bodies of slain members of the military are handled.
“Their buddies wrap them up in whatever passes as a shroud, puts them on a helicopter as a routine, and sends them home. Their first stop along the way is when they’re packed in ice, typically at the airhead. And then they’re flown to, usually, Europe, where they’re then packed in ice again and flown to Dover Air Force Base,” in Delaware, he said. “Dover takes care of the remains, embalms them, meticulously dresses them in their uniform with the medals that they’ve earned, the emblems of their service, and then puts them on another airplane linked up with a casualty-officer escort that takes them home.”
When a service member is killed, an officer is dispatched to the family’s home early in the morning, waits for the first light to come on inside and then knocks on the door to deliver the news, he added.
Kelly also said he was not criticizing ex-President Barack Obama when he told Trump that Obama had not called Kelly after his 29year-old son was killed in a 2010 ambush in Afghanistan.
Finally, Kelly issued a plea to the press and the public to show respect for the country’s war dead.
“I appeal to America, that let’s not let this be the last thing that’s held sacred in our society — a young man, young woman going out and giving his or her life for our country — let’s try to somehow keep that sacred,” he said.
A few hours after Kelly’s talk, Trump took to Twitter.
“The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson(D), who was SECRETLY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content!” he tweeted.