Myeshia Johnson, widow of U.S. Army Special Forces Sgt. La David Johnson, grieves over the casket holding her husband’s remains at Miami International Airport on October 17 .
A FEW DAYS FROM NOW, the members of the Kelly family will mark the seventh anniversary of the worst day of their collective lives, the day they became a Gold Star family.
It was Nov. 9, 2010, when the Kellys − husband and father John F. Kelly, the current White House chief of staff; wife and mother Karen; daughter Kathleen; elder son John, a Marine Corps major; and daughter-in-law Heather − learned that their son, brother and husband had been killed.
At the time, Robert Michael Kelly was a 29-year-old Marine Second Lieutenant working out of a remote outpost in the Sangin district of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, about 90 miles northwest of Kandahar. On that day seven years ago, Kelly was leading a platoon on foot patrol when he stepped on an explosive device and died instantly. He received a posthumous promotion to First Lieutenant.
Today, as the anniversary of that tragedy looms, Chief of Staff Kelly, himself a retired Marine general, is only three months into managing the administration of President Donald Trump. Yet he already has been tainted by an avoidable controversy at least partly of his own making and by some historically defective public comments about the Civil War.
It seems a particularly cruel irony that the controversy revolves around a well intentioned but badly executed condolence call from Trump to the pregnant wife of a U.S. service member recently killed in combat.
As president, Trump bears principal responsibility for making a mess of the call and especially for launching a flurry of false statements and false accusations after news of the bungled call became public.
But Kelly, who retired after a successful 45-year career in the Marines in a wide range of combat, command and administrative positions − and who had more experience in bereavement situations than he ever would have wished − shares substantially in the responsibility.
THE PRIMARY MISSION OBJECTIVE: To the extent possible under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and with infinite variations from individual to individual, a condolence call from the president would have been meant to provide some measure of comfort to Myeshia Johnson, the six-months-pregnant widow of U.S. Army Special Forces Sgt. La David Johnson, 25, of Miami Gardens, Fla.
Johnson and three fellow soldiers died early in October in the African nation of Niger during operations whose exact nature is not yet clear. What is clear is that Trump’s condolence call to the sergeant’s widow failed to achieve its objective.
Trump called Myeshia Johnson from the White House on October 17, as she arrived by limousine at Miami International Airport to pick up her husband's remains. Accompanying her were some close relatives and a longtime family friend. She asked the military casualty officer assisting her to put the call on speakerphone so everyone in the car could hear the president.
But instead of providing her comfort, Johnson said in an October 23 interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Trump's call made her distress worse. She said the president emphasized that her husband had known what he was getting into when he enlisted, although Trump granted that his death still hurts. She said Trump couldn't remember her husband's name and didn't seem sympathetic. She said she was crying so hard she couldn't speak.
Her explanation pretty much matched descriptions by two people who were in the car with her and also heard the call: Cowanda Jones-Johnson, an aunt who raised Sgt. Johnson from the age of five after his mother died, and U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson (D.-Miami), a longtime family friend who has known both La David and Myeshia since they were young children.
Yet Trump responded to news coverage of Wilson's account with a Twitter post accusing her of "fabricating" the details of the call. It was a blatantly false charge.
In fact, the accounts of Johnson, Jones-Johnson and Wilson were broadly consistent with a general description given by Chief of Staff Kelly in an Oct. 19 session with reporters in the White House briefing room. Kelly had been with Trump when he made the call. “He called four people the other day,” Kelly said, “and expressed his condolences in the best way that he could.” For the Johnson family, Trump’s best fell short.
Kelly said Trump had asked him in advance for advice on what to say to Johnson. In response, Kelly told the president what his best friend, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. − then the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff − said on Nov. 9, 2010, when he had to tell Kelly that his son Robert had died. "He said, 'Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war. And when he died . . . he was surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends.' That’s what the President tried to say to four families [including Johnson's] the other day," Kelly said.
The words had been helpful to Kelly in a face-to-face conversation with his best friend, a fellow Marine combat veteran. But Kelly showed poor judgment in believing these kinds of words might be comforting to a young widow in a phone call with the president, a stranger to her. Nor was there any reason whatsoever to believe Trump possessed the delicate communication skills necessary to pull off such an approach.
IN TAKING QUESTIONS from reporters on Oct. 19, Kelly did not acknowledge the call's failure. He did not admit that it failed to convey clearly that the president honored Sgt. Johnson's sacrifice and was sincerely sorry for Johnson's loss and that of her family. Nor did Kelly take responsibility for having given the president what proved to be bad advice on handling the call.
To the contrary, Kelly − following his boss's unconscionable lead − used demeaning language to personally attack the Johnson family friend, Rep. Wilson, with false charges. He condemned what he said were Wilson's remarks at a dedication/naming ceremony on April 10, 2015, for a new FBI headquarters in her congressional district in Miramar, Fla.
Kelly had attended the ceremony and claimed that Wilson used the occasion to make self-aggrandizing statements that took personal credit for having ensured federal funding for the building's construction. Her comments, he said, "stunned" him, a word he repeated six times.
A video recording of Wilson's public remarks, made that day by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, shows that Wilson made no such statements. Rather, she said she and fellow legislators had worked together to satisfy an urgent request from the FBI that the building be named for Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, FBI special agents who died heroically in the line of duty in Florida in 1986.
Kelly later compounded his falsely premised attack on Wilson by failing to acknowledge his error and apologize for it.
Kelly created more problems for himself 10 days later. In a wide-ranging TV interview on the Fox News Channel, he responded to Civil War-related questions about current controversies involving public monuments and memorials to people who led the confederacy of 11 southern states that sought to preserve slavery by destroying the United States and establishing their own country.
Kelly's perspectives sounded more like talking points for revisionists who prefer skipping over inconvenient truths:
SLAVERY WAS KNOWN to be morally wrong in 1861, not something America only learned later; it was the reason that terrible war was fought. The Civil War began after multiple compromises applying to slavery had been forged, not, as Kelly said, because of a failure to compromise. And an attempt to break apart the United States by violence undeniably constituted treason in 1861; condemning it as such today is not, as Kelly suggested, applying current standards to past actions. Respected historians denounced Kelly's comments as ignorant of history.
Viewed overall, Kelly’s seemingly broad-minded attitude toward the Civil War reminded me of an odd section in a speech (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) he gave to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis in 2010. It was just four days after the death of his son Robert, whose fate he never directly mentioned. There was no missing, however, moments when the grieving father struggled to maintain his composure. There also were flashes of anger, spite and resentment in Kelly’s often inspiring address, and this peculiar passage:
Praising the spirit of unity among young people serving in uniform, Kelly said, “They know the real strength of a platoon, a battalion or a country is not worshipping at the altar of diversity, but in a melting pot that stitches and strengthens by a sense of shared history, values, customs, hopes and dreams, all of which unify a people making them stronger, as opposed to an unruly gaggle of hyphenated or multi-cultural individuals.”
TENNESSEE SEN. BOB CORKER, a Republican who often has clashed publicly with Trump, recently was asked if the president was an appropriate role model for American children. "Absolutely not," Corker replied.
When Kelly retired from the Marines in 2016, his personal qualities and career achievements had earned him high regard, respect and admiration as a professional and as a human being. Barely 90 days into Kelly’s work for Trump, his reputation already is in jeopardy. Kelly would be well advised to bear in mind that in addition to being a terrible role model for children, Trump is an equally poor role model for adults, including a chief of staff.
A version of this column originally was published by the St. Louis Jewish Light.