Pete Hegseth’s crusade to oust a “once-in-a-generation general” stemmed from a photo that the defense secretary didn’t like.
Hegseth, who served in the Army National Guard and had two deployments as an officer to Iraq and Afghanistan, waged a war against Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, a four-star general seen as a rare talent by his peers and superiors alike.
According to a report from The New York Times, Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor who has faced scrutiny over his drinking and alleged affairs during and between his three marriages, claimed his distaste for Donahue stemmed from one thing in particular: a photo.
On Aug. 30, 2021, Donahue, 57, was the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan during the disastrous U.S. withdrawal, which stemmed from a deal Trump cut with the Taliban during his first term. Unbeknownst to Donahue at the time, an Army photographer used an iPhone and night-vision monocle to capture the lone general boarding a military cargo plane in a photo that would later be widely circulated, the Times reported.
The photo was taken at 11:59 p.m. at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, one minute before the agreed deadline for the Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan. When Donahue landed in Qatar, his wife informed him that the now-famous photo was plastered across every news site, according to paratroopers who overheard the conversation and spoke to the Times.
“This is not good,” they recalled him saying. And he was right. Five years later, Hegseth fixated on the grainy, green-and-black photo that he mistakenly dubbed a “selfie.”
The photo was captured four days after a lone ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American service members—who were not under Donahue’s command—along with at least 170 Afghans at the airport, an incident that Hegseth has wrongly associated with Donahue, according to reports.
That was partly what fueled camera-loving Hegseth’s determination to shove the decorated general out the door, the Daily Beast reported on Friday. The other reason, of course, was that Donahue was revered, respected and admired—three attributes that, reportedly, aren’t exactly used to describe Hegseth within the halls of the Pentagon.
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As the department’s top brass and Republican lawmakers fought to keep Donahue, they described him as a key strategist preparing the U.S. for future war. But their efforts only hardened Hegseth’s resolve: He wanted Donahue out.
“I don’t care,” Hegseth reportedly told Joe Kasper, his chief of staff, after he handed him a card listing reasons to keep Donahue, the first being a clarification that the photo of Donahue was not a selfie and that he was unaware of its distribution.
Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, threw his support behind Donahue, but according to the Times, he was told by Gen. Dan Caine that his efforts were only making things worse. The more support Donahue gained, the more Hegseth saw him as too powerful.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a close friend of JD Vance from Yale Law School, also attempted to orchestrate an intervention from the vice president to keep Donahue. But when Hegseth discovered that he had set up a meeting between Vance and Donahue, he canceled it, according to the report.
After all efforts were exhausted, a quiet retirement ceremony was held for Donahue at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the end of August. An Army official who was there told the Daily Beast that everybody’s focus was on honoring this hero among heroes, who has been called a “once-in-a-generation general.”
“Then, when the bourbon began to flow…” the official said, it became clear that Driscoll had reached his limit with Hegseth. “Driscoll’s going to resign this week,” was the sentiment, they told the Daily Beast. On Wednesday, Driscoll announced his final day in office was Sept. 2.
Hegseth, who never achieved a rank higher than major, has fired or blocked promotions for some 80 of the nation’s top officers—roughly 10 percent of the U.S. military’s highest-ranking officers.
