Disappearing Defense Secretaries should be a relic of Soviet Russia, not American present politics

When the news broke Saturday on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization and apparent failure to notify other key officials, my initial reaction was to say, “What on earth!”

However, mistakes happen, and sometimes they are “doozies.” As the Washington Post put it, quoting senior leaders: “the handling of the incident showed ‘unbelievably bad judgment’ on Austin’s part.”

Those of us who report on local government expect small-town city and county officials to make mistakes, and while we don’t expect similar mistakes by senior leaders at the upper levels of our national government, they do happen.

Sometimes we assume that those in top leadership roles are ten feet tall and have enough experience not to make rookie errors, or at least have enough staff members surrounding them who will say, “Sir, do you really want to do this?”

Still, people are people, and things happen.

To his credit, the Secretary of Defense has made clear that he takes full responsibility for what appears to be a pretty major communication failure.

What concerns me more than the initial error is the way the Pentagon is handling this matter after the Washington Post broke the story. I expected to turn my computer on Monday morning and find that lots of questions being raised on Saturday had been answered by Monday.