Retired Navy four-star Adm. William McRaven — highly paid leadership guru, business consultant, and special operations commander — received a $50 million “Courage and Civility Award” from richest-person-on-Earth Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this past week. Actress Eva Longoria received the other half of the $100 million grant: the exact amount the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost last year before cutting nearly 10 percent of its staff.
For Bezos, the Post’s financial woes are mere pocket change. (With his net worth of $200 billion, covering the Washington Post’s financial deficit would be the equivalent of a person making $100,000 a year paying $50 to save over 200 jobs.) All of which is ironic given that Bezos says his motivation for buying the newspaper was “stewardship.”
“Support of American democracy through stewardship of the Washington Post, and financial contributions to the dedicated and innovative champions of a variety of causes,” Bezos said in 2018, demonstrates his “investment in the future of our planet and civilization.”
Now, he is focused on repairing America’s descent into division, searching for leaders who “aim high, pursue solutions with courage, and always do so with civility.” The three-year-old award follows Bezos’s vow to donate most of his fortune toward reducing inequality and combating climate change.
Bezos is also a growing defense contractor who sat on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board during the Obama administration, an advisory panel that McRaven was also on at the same time. The admiral — famous for overseeing the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and for his commencement address at the University of Texas where he told graduates to start by making their beds — retired in 2014 and has been making a killing in the civilian world. He sits on the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips, is senior adviser to investment firm Lazard, and on the federal advisory board of Palantir, the Pentagon contractor founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. McRaven has also parlayed his military career into paid speaker and bestselling author of motivational titles like “The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived” and “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy),” paper-thin books that each dispense featherweight advice on civil life.
All of this has turned the friendly admiral into a multimillionaire, making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from board membership, publishing, and speaking. He holds $2 million worth of stock from ConocoPhillips according to a January 17 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As chancellor for the University of Texas System, he raked in $2.5 million, making him the highest-paid public university official in the U.S. in 2018. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau and the Celebrity Speakers Bureau, where his fees range between $50,000 and $100,000 per speech. He owns two homes: one in Alexandria, Virginia, and another in Austin, Texas, worth some $5 million, property records reviewed by The Intercept show.
“Man’s compassion far exceeds his greed,” McRaven writes in his book “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations,” one of his many treatises that sprinkles the telling of his career from the first Gulf War through the death of bin Laden.
Since 2021, the Courage and Civility Award has found five recipients, all of whom, in their own ways, have taken a stand against Donald Trump and amassed vast personal fortunes — attributes that Bezos seems to value. The 2021 award recipient Van Jones has blasted the former president for years, alongside chef José Andrés who sued the president after comments he made about Mexican Americans. The 2022 recipient Dolly Parton rejected Trump’s offer for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and this year, Eva Longoria used her celebrity status to mobilize Latino voters against the former president.
Following this pattern, McRaven is also a very political admiral, writing multiple op-eds in Bezos’s Washington Post denouncing Trump. He has said that Trump’s criticisms of the news media represent “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.” In an opinion piece that took the form of a letter to the president, he denounced Trump’s own incivility. “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”
His partisanship doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from receiving millions in a charity grant that will in theory give others a leg up in the world and level the playing field, but it does raise the questions: Why him, and why can Bezos be so generous while starving a top-tier newspaper that is clearly in need of his benevolence?
Among his duties as paragon of civility, McRaven has declared his alliance with his national security blood brothers. When Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance, McRaven jumped to his defense, daring Trump to “revoke my security clearance, too,” in the pages of the Washington Post. McRaven called Brennan, who is a vociferous Trump hater, “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question.”
McRaven also took to the Washington Post defending Acting Director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire, whom Trump had just fired after his subordinate, Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress that the Russian government appeared to prefer Trump over Democratic candidates for the 2020 election. CNN later reported that Pierson had “overstated” the findings of the intelligence community.
Similarly when an obscure Navy Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was passed up for a second star, McRaven again went public, decrying Congress’s “trend of disrespect to the military.” Mr. Civility just didn’t mention why Congress blocked Losey’s promotion: Multiple investigations found he had retaliated against whistleblowers.
When it comes to national security, McRaven is deployed everywhere. He sits on the board of the Gates Global Policy Center founded by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He sits on the board of the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation Advisory Council. He is an honorary board member of the International Spy Museum. He is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Washington Post reports that McRaven will split the money from his Bezos award between the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which supports the families of fallen service members, and the BrainHealth Project, which provides mental health resources to veterans.
The racket goes something like this: A billionaire pays a famous admiral, to pay charities that he is connected with (McRaven’s wife Georgeann is on the board of the Warrior Foundation), to pay disabled veterans, who are the victims of the failures of the national security elite to begin with. It is a modern trickle-down parable that, as always, leaves the worst off with a shiny consolation prize for sacrificing life and limb to their country.
The national security-obsessed, veteran-loving, cowboy-hat-adorned Bezos has become the ultimate commander in chief of the national security elite, an ersatz Mr. Magoo with a trillion-dollar business that actually tears at the seams of America’s mottled social fabric, decimating small businesses that, unlike McRaven, cannot survive on “courage” and “civility” alone.
Alongside Bezos, McRaven has formulated a certain conception of civility in which niceties that maintain the status quo emerge as the highest form of service. The destruction of the working class and the injuries sustained in their mad-man wars go unexamined as the admirals hand out Band-Aids. They perpetuate a certain elite consensus with regard to national security, one that drowns out every attempt to impact the societal needs like inequality and climate change which Bezos claims to address. (Bezos evidently doesn’t care that McRaven collects millions from the oil industry.)
One can read McRaven’s “Sea Stories,” review his speeches, and search through the Bezos philanthropy for a sense of who these blood brothers are, what they really believe in. But following the money is a far more telling endeavor.
Who is McRaven really? Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condensed his storied military career into a G.I. Joe caricature, writing in his autobiography “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace” that “Bill made a big impression with his booming baritone, wide smile, and huge biceps.”
McRaven did not respond to a request for comment.
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