Who’s Really Running the Show

If President Biden is impaired, the obvious question arises: who’s really running the show? Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson answered that question on Morning Joe this morning.

“A presidency is more than one man or one woman,” Johnson said, adding: “It is an administration.”

Bureaucracy abhors a power vacuum. When there’s a power vacuum in the oval office, administration officials rush in to fill it, as Johnson was not so subtly hinting. But there won’t be some kind of Rasputin-like figure directing things behind the scenes. (Expect to see a lot of stories in the news media speculating on who this imagined figure is, like Ron Klain or Jill Biden or whoever.) Instead, the reality is much dumber: John Kirby will be running the country.

Not him personally, of course, but the archetype he represents: a Washington bureaucrat and retired admiral with the national security chops requisite to being considered Serious Person. 

Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, serves as the gatekeeper between civilian and military, between national need and national security, between, as Washington sees it, men’s work and children’s play. Thousands of John Kirbys populate the U.S. government’s sprawling military, intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement agencies. They are more important than any of their civilian counterparts in the government, and in some ways more important even than the president. Because when the president pushes the nuclear button or simply falls asleep, they are the backend that keeps things running; not necessarily contradicting what the president wants, not directly. They have the awesome power to say: ‘What you want is in violation of paragraph 37.2a of presidential directive 4,037,’ or ‘Are you sure?’, or ‘Did you really mean that?’ or even to do nothing to wait to see whether he asks a second time, a third, a fourth. And even then, when the president screams ‘I want to nuke Tehran!’ they represent the layers upon layers of bureaucracy that still need to cooperate to make it so. ‘Oh, you meant nuke Tehran! Well, we’re still working on the paperwork.’

National security bureaucrats like Kirby, unelected and unconfirmed by Congress, run things — sometimes even at the expense of other officials.

Kirby’s job is a newly created position that put him in charge of communications that deals with all matters national security, resulting in an extremely unusual arrangement in which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cedes half of each press briefing to Kirby. With the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, immigration, China, terrorism, etc., the John Kirbys of the world apparently decided that the subject of national security was just too important for the actual White House press secretary.

“You’ll have an admiral looking over your shoulder,” Biden reportedly told Jean-Pierre, referring to the appointment of Kirby, who is also a retired Navy admiral. Kirby’s handling of the messaging around the Afghanistan withdrawal while he was the Pentagon’s spokesperson had impressed Biden, who had him promoted to the White House, according to the New York Times.

While Kirby isn’t an admiral anymore, having retired from the military in 2015, the press loves to use the honorific. You’ll hear it dropped at virtually any White House press briefing by some fawning reporter. What you won’t hear is that he was until recently a member of the news media as well, a commentator and “military analyst” for CNN from 2017 to 2021. 

Whatever you think of press secretary Jean-Pierre, her background (outreach coordinator for the union-backed Walmart Watch, regional director for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, spokesperson for progressive advocacy group MoveOn) seems far more consistent with Biden’s base than that of Kirby. But to Washington, Kirby gets it.

John Kirby wearing the smug expression that is the team uniform of all government spokespeople

On the Gaza pier, Kirby talks of humanitarian aid and dismisses cost (and effectiveness). On the war in general , he is always telling us about how Biden has spoken to Netanyahu in "strong" terms and that the U.S. is doing all it can. On Ukraine, he tells us that U.S. aid is vital and that NATO is more united than ever and the U.S. support is vital in defeating an aggressive Russia. From Burundi, Bolivia to Bangladesh, his message is always the same, stressing the necessity of partnerships and close contact and American interests. He is the utterer and amplifier of phrases like “ironclad support.” He has an answer for everything, for the official everything, for the reasonable everything. What John Kirby says at the podium, and what he says behind the scenes (often quoted as a “senior administration official”) is what forms the basis for the news media's blah, blah, blah.

It is precisely because he is unknown, and his background is obscure, and his power is vast that he represents the thousands — tens of thousands — of similar anonymous Washingtonians who have the answer that says nothing and deflects the hard questions. 

He decries chaos and the messiness of social media and indeed the messiness of life in general. He thinks the president surrounds himself with people of the highest caliber and integrity and poise. People just like him.

He probably rarely speaks to Biden but he reads "the traffic" and attends national security meetings and can reach out to anyone in government. He also "knows" what's going on because he talks to news media people who are his window to the outside world, which creates a terrible loop.

And most important, unless you the reader, leak a Top Secret document to me, your humble reporter, he doesn’t waste his time talking to me.

— Edited by William M. Arkin