Palace Intrigue.

• Author: Rosen, James
• Position: Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos - Book review

Peter Bergen, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (Penguin Press, 2019), 400 pp., $30.00.

Near the end of Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, a blistering four-hundred-page attack on the Trump administration's foreign policy written by Peter Bergen, the CNN analyst affiliated with New America, an avowedly centrist think tank, the author devotes two pages to an event missing from all timelines of the major international events of the last three years: a party thrown in September by Kathleen and David Bradley to celebrate the publication of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, the memoir by President Donald Trump's former defense secretary, retired General James N. Mattis.

Who was there? Tout le monde! Andrea Mitchell, Bob Woodward, Sally Quinn, Susan Glasser--even John Kelly, like Mattis, a retired general hired and quickly fired by Trump. "This was no MAGA rally," Bergen quips, but rather a gathering of "the great and the good."

In a vast neo-Georgian house a stone's throw from the British embassy, the courtly Bradley and his elegant wife, Katherine, presided over dinners and parties for the great and the good. Heads of state, foreign ministers, four-star generals, senators, leading TV news anchors and the occasional CIA director all enjoyed the Bradleys' generous hospitality, including delicious butler-served meals under the warm light of candle-lit chandeliers. I've attended a couple of those gatherings. I've also met Bergen and found him, as advertised, charming and erudite; as is well known, he produced the first TV interview, in 1997, with Osama bin-Laden. About a decade ago, Bergen and I commiserated over the opportunity lost when the moderator of a small, private dinner with Mideast dissidents, held at a members-only club in Washington, became inebriated and rambled, leaving our Arab guests little opportunity to discuss the human rights issues they had hoped to spotlight. With five previous books to his credit, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post non-fiction books of the year, Bergen unquestionably ranks among the best-credentialed, and most highly regarded, members of the foreign policy establishment. Indeed, many of the same bold-faced names from the Mattis party turned out for Bergen's own book launch in January.

So it comes as a genuine surprise, and a disappointment, that in Trump and His Generals the author repeatedly employs language beneath a figure of his stature. Some formulations are simply infelicitous, as when Bergen refers to the day Trump "was installed as" president; or when he writes that General Mike Flynn, prior to his embroilment in the Russia probe, "was a genuine war hero, with the blood of the Afghan and Iraq Wars on his hands." It is not to the heroes of armed conflict that society ascribes bloody hands.

In other cases, while lamenting the "cavalier" attitude of the president towards national security and the crudity of his language in meetings with senior staff, Bergen adopts a tone far too casual for a work of serious contemporary scholarship worthy of the creme de la creme of the foreign policy establishment. "Jared Kushner," we hear, "shoved a shiv in [Chris] Christie's back ... Welcome to Jersey!" John Bolton is introduced as "a ferocious bureaucratic in-fighter who had worked in the Washington swamp since the era when Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical' was America's number one song." State Department officials "freaked out" over an Afghan official's comments, while a statement from Kushner's attorney is deemed "baloney, served with generous helpings of bunkum and balderdash." Condemning Trump for accepting too readily Vladimir Putin's denials of complicity in election-meddling, Bergen abandons reporting for retorting: "Well, that's settled then!"

Yet the most surprising defacement of the Bergen standard is the most gratuitous: the author's frequent resort to scatology and outright profanity, not just in quotation but in passages of omniscient authorial voice. It does not enhance Bergen's case when he writes that Trump "bitched and moaned" after his travel ban was revised, that he was "pissed off" about his options in Afghanistan, or that Mattis held as one of the imperatives of working for this commander-in-chief "not pissing him off" (a working condition hardly unique to Trump aides).

And on it goes: an entire chapter carries the title "PISSING OFF ALLIES, EMBRACING PUTIN." President Lyndon B. Johnson issued orders "while taking a crap" in White House restrooms; the chief function that retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg served for the president was "shooting the shit with him"; and large numbers of Americans oppose the mission in Afghanistan because they believe "it's always going to be a shithole."

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