In February 2017, President Donald J. Trump appointed Lt. General H.R. McMaster, who received a Ph.D. in History from UNC in 1996, as national security adviser. McMaster is the first national security advisor with a Ph.D. in History and, according to his former colleagues, his academic background has informed his career since he graduated from UNC.
McMaster was well-known and respected in the military before his enrollment at UNC. In 1991, he played a crucial role in the Battle of 73 Easting, for which he would later be awarded a Silver Star. Col. David Fautua, a classmate of McMaster who also received his doctorate at UNC, praised McMaster’s humility while in graduate school. “We didn’t know it then that he was the best of us,” Fautua said. “Eventually we would all know what he did in the war, but he never spoke of it, so we didn’t realize that it was a big deal…. but in the midst of our cohort, we had someone who was a true hero.”
In 1992, McMaster joined the inaugural cohort of UNC and Duke’s Joint Program in Military History, which began under the guidance of core faculty members Richard Kohn (UNC), Alex Roland (Duke), and Tami Biddle (Duke). Then and now, military officers who enroll in the program complete coursework, an M.A. thesis, and comprehensive exams in two years, before spending three to four years teaching and writing a Ph.D. dissertation at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Since the establishment of the UNC-Duke Program in Military History a quarter century ago, dozens of military officers and civilians have received their doctorates.
According to his classmates, McMaster was a prolific and methodical graduate student who completed his studies more quickly than his peers. Professor Wayne Lee, also a member of McMaster’s cohort and the current chair of UNC’s Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense, described McMaster as an “unforgettable classmate” with an exceptional work ethic. In one research seminar, “You would give your assigned classmate a 30-page chapter and then they would have to read and revise it and, in our case, we also had to chase their footnotes and adjudicate how well they had used their sources,” Lee said. “H.R. handed his assigned peer a 220-page paper…This was 200 pages of him racing ahead and writing the dissertation. He was even speedier than most.” Another classmate, Robert G. Angevine, who also earned his Ph.D. in History from UNC, similarly described McMaster as “the most well prepared and organized graduate student I have ever met.”
McMaster published his dissertation in 1997 as Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (Harper Collins). In this book, McMaster argues that the United States lost the Vietnam War because of the actions of individuals in Washington, D.C., especially Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who deceived the public, fell victim to petty in-fighting, and became bogged down in bureaucratic decision-making. Fautua and Lee say that the book “made a splash” in the Department of Defense, the Army, and the Clinton administration. Members of the military praised the book, Lee explained, because of McMaster’s critique of military officials who were “political animals” afraid to “stand up to the president.”
Since the publication of Dereliction of Duty, Fautua believes, McMaster has “lived up to the very book he wrote.” In 2005, for example, McMaster cancelled a major training event in the Mojave Desert because of its focus on “traditional kinetic” tactics, which emphasize the use of lethal force. Instead, he created a training village to teach his regiment how to fight a war “in and amongst the people” in Iraq. “This was a completely different, novel kind of training,” Fautua said, “and it showed not only his insight into the war but the courage to swim against the current.”
In interviews since his service in Iraq, McMaster has presented knowledge of history as a key to military success. In a 2007 interview with Frontline, he insisted that “one of the responsibilities of professional officers is to…prepare yourself and your organization through the study of history, because it’s very difficult before a war to understand completely the demands of that war.” Indeed, Fautua attributes an important element of McMaster’s military success to his time in the UNC-Duke military history program, insisting that “the learning we all received, the kinds of questions we were taught to ask, and that higher order of scholarship, has served him well—it has served all of us well.”
–Garrett Wright