When did we collectively decide that firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was the kind of thing one could do between the salad course and a quiet Friday evening? I am asking because I would like a date, a time, and the name of the person who signed off on it, and I have a feeling I won’t get any of the three.
I had eight people over last night, the usual assortment — my friend Eliza, who served two administrations and now exists primarily as a guest at other people’s tables; a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, because he has made a career of not being pinned down; two retired flag officers who have known each other longer than most marriages last; and my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has reached the age and pay grade where she can no longer be surprised by anything. I put out the halibut. I put out a decent Sancerre. And at some point between the first pour and the second, somebody mentioned, almost conversationally, that the President had fired General Brown.
There was a pause. It was not a long one. It was the pause of people who have been trained, over forty years of Washington dinner parties, to register a thing and move past it before the thing can register them. Someone asked for more lemon. The lobbyist praised the fish. Eliza, who has watched three decades of men in uniform stand behind three decades of Presidents, said only, “Well,” and let the word die where it landed.
I want to be clear about what happened this week, because the people who are paid to explain things to us are going to work very hard over the next seventy-two hours to explain that nothing happened. The President dismissed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He dismissed the Chief of Naval Operations. He dismissed the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He did not accuse them of incompetence. He did not accuse them of insubordination. He did not, as far as I can tell, accuse them of anything beyond having been hired by somebody else.
One of the retired officers at my table — I will not give his name, because he asked me not to, and because the habit of giving names in this town has become a form of aggression — said the thing I have been waiting for somebody in Washington to say out loud. He said: “They were fired for the color of their boss.” Then he asked for the butter.
I want you to hold those two sentences together for a moment, because I think they are the entire story of American civic life in 2025. A man who wore the uniform for forty years will tell you exactly what is happening, in one unadorned sentence, and then he will ask for the butter, because what else is he going to do, stand on the table?
I have been writing this column for thirty years and I have developed certain instincts about how republics fail. They do not fail, in my experience, because a strongman bursts through the door in a red sash. They fail because a thousand well-dressed people at a thousand well-set tables decide, one Friday night at a time, that the thing that just happened is not quite worth interrupting the fish course for. They fail because the retired general asks for the butter. They fail because the lobbyist compliments the halibut. They fail because Eliza says “Well,” and lets the word die.
The defense secretary — a man whose previous management experience consists of a weekend cable program and a nonprofit board he allegedly ran into the ground — announced the firings with the casual air of somebody reorganizing a fantasy football roster. He will tell you, if you ask him, and he has, that the military needed “new blood.” This is the language of a man who has never bled, addressing a profession that has, extensively.
Judy, who has spent her career cataloguing the paper trail of previous crises, said something over dessert that I have not been able to stop turning over. She said the archives are full of memos from people who were certain, in the moment, that what was happening was procedural. Reorganizations. Realignments. Personnel matters. The memos are almost touching, she said, in how sincerely they avoid the word that would have made them true.
I looked up the word she meant later, because I am sixty-four and I still look things up. The word is purge. It is not a word we use at dinner parties. It is not a word the Pentagon press office will use on Monday. It is not a word the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee will use when he issues whatever statement his staff has already half-written. But it is the word, and Judy is right, and the memos of the future will eventually use it, and the people writing those memos will wonder why nobody said so at the time.
I will tell them why. It was a Friday. The fish was good. The Sancerre was cold. Everyone at the table had a mortgage, a reputation, and a standing reservation they did not wish to lose. A retired four-star told the truth in one sentence and then asked for the butter, because he has been in this town long enough to know that the sentence was the limit of what the room would bear.
I have been asked, more than once this week, whether I think we are in a crisis. I do not know how to answer the question anymore, because the people asking it are the same people who will, on Monday, decide the answer is no. What I know is that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was fired on a Friday, and my dinner guests complimented the halibut, and somewhere in a building off the Potomac a man who has never commanded anything larger than a segment break is picking the next one. If that is not the crisis, I would like somebody at my next dinner party to tell me, with the fish in front of them, what is.