Former national security adviser says he won’t work for Trump again

In a memoir of his time in the Trump Administration, Lt. Gen. H.

R. McMaster recalls telling his wife he could not understand Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “hold” on President Trump. The same book insists that during McMaster’s 13 months, the United States did much to revise its global strategies to face a changing world.

McMaster writes of struggling to help the president avoid mistakes, like responding to Putin’s flattery in embarrassing ways. Yet McMaster says he was not one of the officials around Trump who believed their job was to protect the country from his erratic or dangerous moves. McMaster is both a scholar–author of Dereliction of Duty, an acclaimed history of U.

S. military decision making in the Vietnam war–and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I had been on the receiving end of policies and strategies developed in Washington that made no sense to me when I was in places like Baghdad or Kabul,” he said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

So when offered the top NSC job, he accepted. “I saw it as an opportunity to help a disruptive president disrupt a lot of what needed to be disrupted in the area of foreign policy and in national security.” That’s at least part of the story he’s telling in his new book – At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.

The other part recounts moments when McMaster had to navigate the fact that Trump himself was manipulated by aides at home and dictators abroad.