Retired Marine general John Kelly is Donald Trump’s leading pick to become the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, reports Eliana Johnson at Politico:
Kelly, 66, whose military career spanned more than four decades, retired earlier this year as the chief of U.S. Southern Command. In that post, where he oversaw military operations in most of Central and South America, he publicly clashed with the Obama administration on its plans – which were never executed – to close Guantanamo Bay and dismissed as “foolishness” concerns that the military’s treatment of detainees at the facility had cost the U.S. the moral high ground in the War on Terror. At the Department of Homeland Security, a massive bureaucracy created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Kelly would become a key player in Trump’s plans to secure the border and crack down on illegal immigration. The president-elect campaigned on a plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to swiftly deport undocumented immigrants guilty of crimes. His addition to the Trump administration would likely have implications on candidates for remaining cabinet posts. If formally offered the position, Kelly would be the third general tapped by the president-elect, in addition to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who will serve as Trump’s national security adviser, and retired Gen. James Mattis, who Trump said Thursday he intended to nominate as his Defense Secretary. Concerns about the number of military officials in Trump’s cabinet may harm the prospects of another military man, retired Gen. David Petraeus, whom Trump is considering for secretary of state.
Kelly served with distinction throughout his career. Upon the occasion of his retirement in 2013, Aaron MacLean wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD of Kelly’s lifetime of service. Here’s an excerpt:
Like these men, Kelly would earn four stars, capping a career that began with his enlisting in the ranks in 1970, followed later by college and a commission. After Baghdad fell, he was appointed to lead an ad hoc force that continued north to seize Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. When the 1st Marine Division returned to Iraq in 2004, he helped oversee some of the fiercest fighting of the war in Ramadi and Fallujah, before returning to the country for a third time in 2008, now commanding all Marines in Anbar and seeing the “Awakening” there through to its successful conclusion. Despite the remarkable accomplishments of the units he headed, Marines who know Kelly say they cannot remember him ever taking credit. Inspired by his example, Kelly’s two sons, John and Robert, followed him into the Marines. The Kelly family was not an anomaly: It is increasingly unusual for someone serving in the military not to have been preceded by a father or other close relative. Robert—who enlisted immediately after graduating college and became an infantry officer—deployed to Afghanistan as a platoon commander at the peak of the fighting in Helmand Province. Before dawn on November 9, 2010, General Kelly opened the door to his home at the Washington Navy Yard to see Joe Dunford, then serving as the Corps’s assistant commandant, standing on the porch in his service uniform. Robert, said by a Marine who served closely with him to be “just like his father,” someone who “was humble, knew his trade, was physically fit, tough as nails, charismatic, funny,” someone who had “a genuine concern for the well-being of Marines,” had been killed in Sangin. Notifications of families of Marines killed in action are always done in person, and Dunford had decided to tell Kelly himself. What came next was, if possible, worse—as Kelly later put it to a reporter from the Washington Post, “I then did the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. I walked upstairs, woke Karen to the news, and broke her heart.” Kelly had earned the terrible distinction of being the most senior American officer to lose a child in Iraq or Afghanistan, and not a soul would have begrudged him taking some time. But November is when the Marine Corps celebrates its birthday, and Kelly had been invited to speak at a celebration in St. Louis four days after. He attended, and there delivered one of the most powerful American speeches of the last decade and a half of war. Even though most in attendance knew about his loss, as a courtesy it was not mentioned by the officer introducing him, who opened instead with the jaunty anecdote, “Let me share my favorite line from General Kelly when we were in Iraq. . . . ‘We’re the United States Marine Corps. We took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t s—.’ ” Taking the podium to raucous applause, Kelly drew a clear moral line from 9/11 through to the fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq: “Our enemy fights for an ideology based on an irrational hatred of who you are. Make no mistake about that no matter what certain elements of our ‘chattering class’ relentlessly churn out.” Kelly expressed dismay about weak support for the war, and about how small the proportion of Americans who served was, before turning to the character of the current generation of Marines.
Read more about Kelly here.
