Playing Secretary (New York Magazine article on Pete Hegseth)

[Nevilledog]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-pentagon-leaks-signalgate-trump.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/P73zn

On Dan Caldwell’s 87th day as a senior official at the Department of Defense, he read some intelligence reports and prepped for some phone calls and ordered from the secretary’s mess his favorite Pentagon lunch: “steak bites” with asparagus and mashed potatoes. It was April 15. Pete Hegseth, Caldwell’s friend for more than a decade and the reason he had been elevated as a 38-year-old to the role of senior adviser, spent that particular Thursday at the White House rather than in the office. The two had met while working at a Koch-funded nonprofit. They’d knocked on doors in the Capitol Building years before Hegseth became a weekend host on Fox in 2017. Hegseth always said that if you want to talk to the president, you go on Fox & Friends, and as co-host, he invited Caldwell on to press for Koch-approved reforms at the Department of Veterans Affairs. When there was a chance that Hegseth might be named secretary of Defense, it was Caldwell he asked to help with the transition. Caldwell coached Hegseth for his combative confirmation hearings, and once confirmed, Hegseth told transition officials it was “crucial” that Caldwell be in the building as soon as possible.

In policy circles, Caldwell was known as a serious analyst, a veteran committed to nonintervention and military restraint in ways that worried the bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment. When Mitch McConnell declined to support Hegseth’s nomination, he singled out Caldwell, who had written in support of “retrenchment” from the Middle East, a retreat from interventionism that alarmed the senator. Caldwell is six-foot-two with dark circles under his eyes and a military haircut, polite and professional, fluid in conversation but not given to laugh. On the day we met, he carried in his backpack a book called Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, but he did not want me to mention that because the truth was he hadn’t yet started it; he was reading a different book on “NATO expansion and the end of the Soviet Union.” Caldwell is slightly tuned up, vigilant, a quality that may or may not be the result of his four years in the Marines.

On that Tuesday in April, when Caldwell was about to leave his office in pursuit of his steak bites, an aide told him three men had arrived to escort him out of the building. The aide seemed perplexed. Caldwell thought it was a joke.

“Are you fucking with me?” he asked.

“Can we come in and talk?” one of the men said. They walked into his office, and they walked slowly because one of them had a gold-topped cane; he’d injured his leg pulling people to safety when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.

“We’re relieving you of your duties,” one of the men said, “and we’re escorting you off the premises. Collect your things and follow us.”

*snip*