Interview: Gen. James Cartwright on the Relationship Between Presidents and Generals

General James E. Cartwright served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s second highest ranking military officer, from August 2007 to 2011. He previously served as Commander of the United States Strategic Command and devoted nearly 40 years of service to the United States Marine Corps before retiring from active duty on September 1, 2011. Cartwright, a current Senior Fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center, spoke to contributing writer Avika Dua about the relationship between presidents and generals, criminal prosecution in the military, and media coverage of his investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.
Harvard Political Review: What major differences have you seen between presidential leadership styles over your career?
Gen. James Cartwright: Well, certainly I have never run into any president or senior executive that was in the job to fail. They always try to do the right thing for the country.
Second, if you try to be somebody you’re not, you will fail too. So each of them brings a leadership style that has worked for them. But they’ve never held the job before. Quite frankly, even if you were a vice president, you really don’t know what the president has to do and how it feels. So you’re coming to a job and you think you know what it’s supposed to be about, but you likely don’t fully grasp all of the implications of the things that you are supposed to do and the decisions you have to make. It comes as a surprise, and you try to organize yourself and your decision process around your own personality, your own style of learning, and deciding. You make it reflect you so it provides you something you can consume quickly and understand.
It usually takes six months to really get the system organized. It doesn’t mean you can’t make a decision early; it just means it takes a while to get the system organized. There is no standard operating procedure or organizational construct for a president. The style has to fit the individual.
HPR: What would be your recommendations to a future president in how to manage his or her relationship with the generals, and to a general on how to manage his or her relationship with the president?
Cartwright: Well, one is that the president should find somebody who has a reasonable way of thinking similarly and presenting ideas and constructs of thoughts in a way that you can consume easily. So, if you’re a person who reads and likes to have written papers that you study, then find somebody who does that well.
The general, as an individual, should be somebody who can communicate with you in a way that’s meaningful to you and who has your trust and confidence. That’s at the essence of it—if it doesn’t work that way, then you’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to heed their advice just out of simple things like, “That guy never gives me good information,” so you quit listening to him and now you find yourself in a problem. So first and foremost, find somebody who in their communication skills convinces you that they can talk to you on a level that you understand, convey meaningful information, and tell you when the Emperor’s Naked in a way that is useful, not derogatory or demeaning.
HPR: You’ve been called “Obama’s Favorite General” in the press. How were you able to successfully cultivate such a strong relationship with the President?
Cartwright: Well, I don’t know that you cultivate it. It happens if in the relationship he starts to understand, “Okay, A: here are the things I really need to know. B: here’s how I take in information in the most effective way and here’s somebody who’s giving it to me in a way both that I’m comfortable with his or her professional capabilities and also in translating those capabilities into something that I can understand and that I can actually use.”
HPR: What is your opinion on Senator Gillibrand’s bill that would take the prosecution of sexual assaults in the military outside of the chain of command for prosecution, and what changes would you support to deal with the issue of prosecution for major criminal cases like these?
Cartwright: I tend to believe that one, the sexual assault issue is a very real problem and has been ignored and downplayed for all the wrong reasons. But I also believe that there is a place for a military justice system and that discipline, on the battlefield and at the various levels of command, is important in keeping the organization.
Rather than taking the authority away and giving it to the court system, which has not demonstrated in any way that it’s any better in solving this problem, I would rather do what we did early on with what we did with the gender integration, which is we had a commission called the DACOWITS group. They had the authority to go out and visit the commands, come up with an independent assessment of the environment for an integrated gender force, and anything that they said was not contributing to that environment the military had to fix. They had sufficient authority that they could have people relieved if it wasn’t fixed. That changed the incentive structure inside the military in welcoming the gender integration activity.
I feel like that is probably the next step, to get someone in power that is not the military but has the authority to say, “You’re doing that wrong; the environment here is not right and it’s your fault. You’re the commander and I hold you accountable. You’re gone.” It changes the whole dynamic.
If you could show me statistical indications that the Article III courts were better at deterring sexual assault than the military courts, then I’d have a different opinion. But there is no statistical basis for that, and so if that’s the case, I would rather go with something that steps outside of that whole court process but has authority that is viewed as independent, representative, and clearly has the voice to take action that will change the incentive structure.
HPR: We know you’re unable to comment on the investigation regarding suggestions of your involvement in disclosure of classified information to the press, but as a matter of media, have you found the coverage to be generally fair?
Cartwright: Well, to the whole activity writ large, there are so many different things that are happening out there. There are leaks and disclosures—Snowden, Wiki, et cetera—that are all very different from each other, and a lot of it is getting smeared together. The media is trying to do the right thing and is trying to understand what is happening, probably more from a standpoint that people should know what’s going on and know that people are being held accountable for their actions.
So, you’re going to have to take the good with the bad. To me, it’s been fair.
This interview has been edited and condensed.