Everyone around President Trump appears to have had a method for managing the chief executive. Many resorted to stalling—agreeing with the president in the moment, but then failing to take any actions to follow up and hoping he would simply forget any action items they had agreed upon. Tillerson had, famously, tried this strategy with the president’s proposals to withdraw from the nuclear deal that limited Iran’s nuclear energy program. But when the president did not forget, he grew increasingly angry with Tillerson for slow-rolling him and ultimately fired the secretary of state.
Mattis, on the other hand, had survived multiple staff purges with his ability to spin the president around, then gently send him off in the opposite direction. When Trump suggested something crazy, Mattis would compliment the president on his strong instincts. But then, ever so slightly, he would complicate the story, eventually convincing the president that he wanted to do the opposite of what he had just said. Mattis understood that between the president’s susceptibility to flattery and disinterest in details, there was ample room to maneuver. Francis was counting on Mattis to use these skills to full effect in case they needed to talk Trump out of doing something crazy, like starting a nuclear war.
Normally, National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg would have been responsible for briefing the president. But Trump disliked long briefings, especially if they began to sound like a lecture. Francis thought that Kellogg’s briefings were always too long. So Francis took the lead, succinctly summarizing the situation: The North Koreans had shot down a South Korean jumbo jet, killing everyone aboard. South Korea’s president had, to everyone’s surprise, announced a limited missile strike on North Korea, which was now under way.
President Trump, Francis explained, needed to put out a statement as soon as possible, condemning the shootdown and urging the parties to stand down. After that, there would be an effort at the United Nations to dramatically increase the pressure on North Korea, with tough new sanctions to punish Kim for what he had done. (Later, Francis admitted to deliberately mentioning the United Nations, knowing that Trump was far more likely to approve of an idea if he thought it came from Nikki Haley instead of Sullivan.)
Francis recalled being surprised that he got as far as he did before Trump started fidgeting and then talking over him. According to Francis, the president was agitated and appeared to still be working through some of the frustration he had expressed during his tirades against Sullivan and Robbins. Trump started by pointing out that he had been right all along: “I told Rex and what’s-his-name [Sullivan] that they were wasting their time trying to talk sense into that guy [Kim Jong Un]. He only understands one thing!”
Francis recalled bracing for the request for military options.
“Why don’t we hit that little fat kid with everything we have?” the president asked. “What’s the point of having all the best nuclear if we don’t use it?”
As Francis had hoped, Mattis steered the president back to the proposal for another round of sanctions. “Your instinct, sir, is right on the money,” said the secretary of defense, according to a note-taker that Mattis allowed to witness the call from the Pentagon. “Kim Jong Un has to know that if he keeps this up, we will hit him with everything we’ve got. The South Koreans have just given him a good spanking. We’re ready to go too. Now we just need to tell Kim Jong Un that, if he doesn’t back down, there is more where that came from.”
This seemed to mollify the president, so Francis turned the discussion back to New York. The president’s attitude changed when Francis brought up the United Nations for a second time.
“What about Nikki?” Trump asked. “Where is Nikki?” Francis explained to the president that Ambassador Haley was, at that moment, on her way to a meeting with the North Koreans. He did not tell Trump that Sullivan had arranged the meeting, or that Haley had insisted on an invitation only after learning of it from the Chinese ambassador. He certainly did not mention that the Chinese were hosting the meeting. (“Any mention of China,” one aide explained, “and BOOM! You were off on a journey to God knows where. Some old Steve Bannon conspiracy theory, usually.”) The president indicated that it was good that Ambassador Haley was on the case, then made an off-color remark regarding the ambassador’s attributes as an interlocutor.
At that moment, Francis realized that the president was finished with the meeting. “Jack told me that Trump started rehearsing his locker-room talk for later—his golf-game banter,” one aide told us later. “That’s how he [Francis] knew he had moved on.” The president, according to Francis, repeated the remark about Ambassador Haley a second time. “I did wonder how many times his golf buddies would laugh as Trump said it over and over again, as he invariably would.”
With the shift in tone, Francis concluded that Trump was now behind his strategy for managing the crisis. The president had agreed, albeit in general terms, to a diplomatic effort. Francis would issue a statement, one that would reframe the president’s tweet in a less inflammatory context. The nation’s diplomats would go to work in New York. And Trump was off for eighteen holes of golf, followed by a long lunch with his friends.
Typically, with golf and lunch on the agenda, Trump was easy to manage. He might make calls from the golf course, but those calls would be to Francis. As he had the night before, Francis worried that there might be some negative press to the president playing golf amid a crisis. But the White House had dealt with this problem in the past. The White House would often simply refuse to confirm whether the president was playing golf, even if it would later emerge that he had. In one case, a white panel truck just happened to appear parked in a spot that blocked a camera crew from being able to film the president on the green. The truck, it later turned out, was parked in a spot reserved for the Palm Beach County sheriff. Francis declined to discuss these incidents with our investigators, noting that they had occurred before he was chief of staff, but he acknowledged that he had felt confident that he could manage the “optics” of the president’s golf outing. And anyway, like most of the president’s missteps, it would quickly be buried in the relentless news cycle.
The only other challenge that Francis expected were the mealtimes. Lunch or dinner in an open dining room did raise the possibility of uninvited interactions in which Trump might say something compromising about the situation in Korea. But Francis felt that he could manage those.
There was every chance they might all get through this in one piece, one aide remembered Francis suggesting, and in the long run maybe they would even come out with a big win. “Maybe this is a turning point,” the aide recalled Francis saying. “When the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, what happened?” According to the aide, Francis believed that the international outrage that followed the Soviet Union’s 1983 shootdown of a Korean airliner had strengthened the hand of reformers within the Soviet Union, leading to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Getting rid of North Korea was not quite winning the Cold War,” the aide admitted, “but with this president? Jack would take what he could get.”
As US envoy Sydney Seiler was pulling into Penn Station shortly after 7 AM, he read about Moon’s address—and the South Korean military strike—on his phone. Seiler was a career intelligence analyst who spoke fluent Korean; his background was in translating and analyzing propaganda. He read Moon’s remarks in the original Korean and understood immediately that Moon had acted unilaterally. Seiler was pretty sure his meeting was shot. He was not even sure whether the North Koreans would show up to the meeting or not. After all, they would probably want to wait for instructions from Pyongyang, and those orders probably had not yet arrived, given the likely chaos situation on the ground in North Korea.