Why Did It Take So Long For General John Kelly to Say What He Really Thinks?

John Kelly

Retired General John Kelly, who served the Trump administration as Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, gave a speech yesterday at Drew University. He contradicted President Trump on political and legal issues. But why now? Timing is everything in public speaking, as in most of life, and if you miss your moment, well, you’ve missed your moment.

For one thing, Kelly defended Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during the House impeachment  hearings. President Trump recently fired Vindman and threatened him with military discipline. Kelly said that Vindman “did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave” and “he went and told his boss what he just heard.” He explained that all military personnel are trained not to obey an illegal order and, in fact, they should report an illegal order up the chain of command. Kelly further explained that Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky represented a dramatic change in American policy and that Vindman was therefore correct to express concern.

Kelly also refuted Trump’s claim that the press was “the enemy of the people.” Maybe Kelly’s most important point was to disagree with President Trump’s statements about immigrants and migrants. He said that migrants were not evil and that, “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people. He continued that "they’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

Okay, fine. Decent people already understood all of that. But the question I started with was, why now? 

1.  If Kelly found the President’s policies offensive, he could have spoken out publicly at the time. Instead, he chose to work from within the White House, while publicly assenting (silently or otherwise) to Trump’s policies. Was that right or wrong? The history of domestic and foreign policy is full of people who supported policies that privately repelled them. Maybe they thought they could be more effective working from within. I’m sure that Kelly felt that way. Rarely has that been true. People who struggle behind the scenes usually just get co-opted, exactly as happened to Kelly.

2.   It’s fine for Kelly to defend Lieutenant Colonel Vindman now, but no one stopped him from defending Vindman during his testimony. The conservative media and President Trump attacked Vindman viciously, and then – not now – is when Vindman most needed his support.

3.   I expect that, over the coming years, a whole flock of cackling former Trump administration officials will write books and give speeches to explain how wrong Trump was. That’s too little, too late. At least Kelly is speaking up while Trump is still President, and his comments might have an effect, albeit a tiny effect, on current political opinion. For all of these people to speak up too little, and too late, is a disservice to the American republic.
 

There is a reason that President John Kennedy’s best-selling book Profiles in Courage, which describes courageous acts by American public figures, is so short. Few public officials seem to have much moral courage. Let’s give General Kelly a C+: he spoke up before it was absolutely too late, but he didn’t speak up in time.

Yes, in public speaking, timing is everything. It’s not just what you say; it’s also when you say it.

Technical note: Rhetorical theorists talk about kairos, which is the art of saying something at the best moment, the right time. If you're interested, I wrote about kairos in one of President William McKinley's speeches in chapter 9 of my book about the 1896 presidential campaign. The book is available in paperback, and you can read it free in many large university libraries.

More about Kelly: This is not the first time that General Kelly’s public speaking has irritated me. You might want to read my earlier post about him. In that post, I explain how a 2017 speech that Kelly gave was full of vicious errors and misstatements. 

Photo: Dept. of Homeland Security