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NEW YORK (AP) — Six years after departing as national security adviser, H.R McMaster is releasing a book about his brief, contentious time in the Trump administration.
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced Tuesday that “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House” will be published Aug. 27. Harper is calling his book a “riveting” account of a “disruptive” president and of an administration “beset by conflict and the hyper-partisanship of American politics.”
“He writes frankly about some of Trump’s more unscrupulous political advisors who were determined to undermine McMaster and others to advance their narrow agendas as well as cabinet officials who, deeply disturbed by Trump’s language and behavior, prioritized controlling the president over collaboration,” Harper's announcement reads in part.
“With a candid and fresh assessment of the achievements and failures of his tenure as National Security Advisor, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump’s presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term would look like.”
McMaster was the second of four security advisers under former President Donald Trump. He was brought in soon after Trump took office, in February 2017, as a replacement for Michael Flynn, forced out over his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
But McMaster lasted just over a year, clashing often with Trump, who publicly reprimanded McMaster for saying Russian interference in the 2016 election was beyond dispute. In March 2018, Trump announced he was giving McMaster's job to John Bolton. Bolton left after 17 months and wrote the bestselling “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir."
McMaster, 61, is a retired Army three-star lieutenant general who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is also known for writing a candid study of political and military leadership during the Vietnam War, “Dereliction of Duty." He touched upon his year with Trump in “Battlegrounds,” published in 2020, but much of the book was an assessment of national security and foreign policy.
“This is not the book that most people wanted me to write," McMaster wrote at the start of “Battlegrounds,” acknowledging that “friends, agents, editors, and even family” wanted him to write a “tell-all.” During a “60 Minutes” interview aired around the time the book came out, McMaster said he was not looking to tell a story of “palace intrigue.”