Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's go to our main subject, though.

And, Vivian, you mentioned that Pete Hegseth campaigned for -- against Massie.

I can't remember another time when a Defense Secretary involved himself at that level in partisan politics, but he does everything differently.

I want to ask each of you to take a minute or more and describe from your own reporting perspective the areas in which Hegseth has had the most profound impact on Pentagon policy and culture.

Why don't we start with you, Helene?

Helene Cooper, National Security Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, that's a great question, Jeff.

I think I would start first with just he's instilled an atmosphere of fear, which is pervasive now throughout the Pentagon, just because he has fired or threatened to fire or forced to retire just so many of the top brass.

It used to be you spend 30, 40 years of your life in the military and you rise to the level of general.

And, yes, of course, you serve at the pleasure of the president.

That's always been the case.

But you're not now -- you're not getting -- you're not usually fired for some of the reasons that Hegseth has produced.

He has wiped out to a certain extent so many of the senior leadership and so many people who had been groomed and were destined for greater leadership roles on the joint staff, like D.A.

Sims, who was, you know, director of the Joint Staff.

You have -- so you saw Randy George recently, the Army Chief of Staff, who's gone.

He went -- he got rid of John Phelan, who, like a neighbor of -- and he's not military brass.

He was the Navy Secretary, but he was a neighbor and a buddy of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and his deputy, Feinberg, went into Trump and demanded that Phelan be removed.

So -- Jeffrey Goldberg: What are the categories of targets in the uniform services that Trump -- that Hegseth is going after?

Helene Cooper: He's going after anybody who had anything to do with the previous administration.

And when you are what is supposed to be, and the phrase apolitical military is overused, but it's not supposed to be a partisan military.

They're supposed to -- the military of the United States of America is supposed to be able to serve under, whether Republican or general, whoever the civilian leadership is.

But he is going after anybody who he thinks got -- did too well or got too far in the Biden administration or in the Obama administration before President Trump's first term, anybody who's perceived as being not very loyal to Donald Trump.

And that has been that's been the course that he has charted ever since he first took the job after that very, very contentious Senate hearing with Thom Tillis giving us the deciding vote.

I wonder what would have happened to our brave duck, had he been a brave duck then.

Jonathan Karl: Yes, he was still planning to run for re-election when he cast that vote.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Helene Cooper: So, I don't know that brave is quite the word I would use for these ducks in Donald Trump's -- (CROSSTALKS) Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me go to -- Jonathan Karl: But also women.

Helene Cooper: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we're going to get to the DEI subject in a second because it's a big category for him, and it obviously motivates a lot of his thinking.

But, Missy, maybe this is an area you want to tackle, but to you, what is most notable about Hegseth's leadership at the Pentagon?

Missy Ryan, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Sure.

I mean, there are so many different categories of norm-busting behavior that Pete Hegseth has embraced since he became Defense Secretary.

And to Helene's point about the apolitical nature of the military, the thing about Defense Secretary is it is a political job.

You're, you know, politically Senate-chosen, Senate-approved member of the president's cabinet.

But there is also a tradition where Defense Secretaries attempt to minimize their overtly partisan behavior.

They try -- because they are kind of the safeguard of America's sons and daughters, they try to, in the name of national security, act more as a nonpartisan actor.

And Pete Hegseth has totally discarded that tradition, and we're seeing him lean into his role as a partisan fighter, something that he brings directly from Fox.

He has been incredibly adversarial.

He's actually been the leading edge of members of Congress in having this new normal in attacking members of Congress from the Oversight Committees in testimony, in bringing in -- integrating religion in a new way into the military.

He brought his Christian nationalist pastor into the military.

Not only did he fire these 21 general on flag officers, but he's also just kind of brought this spirit as a brawler into his role, and I think that has actually worked for him very well with the only person that matters, and that's Donald Trump.

The impact on the institution, though, I think is far more corrosive, and I think that we are starting to see that in the behavior of the senior uniformed officers.

For example, in the recent posture hearings when we had, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Central Command commander come before Congress and talk about their priorities about the role in Iran specifically, and they seem to be taking some kind of troubling lessons from Pete Hegseth in terms of pushing back in a new way against the members of Congress who are asking them hard questions.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Jon, I want -- before I go to you, I want to play a -- I can't -- I don't know what to describe it, a cartoon.

I guess it's just a cartoon that was put out in a kind of a South Park-style cartoon that was just put out by the Pentagon that is quite notable for those of us who covered Secretaries of Defense, like Bob Gates or Chuck Hagel or so on.

Why don't you just watch this for a minute and you'll see what I mean.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary: We are defending the homeland.

We're funding the Golden Dome, a next generation multi-layered missile shield over the United States.

It will protect our communities from airborne threats and ensure that America will never be held hostage by foreign powers.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, you know, he's -- the jingoism, he's good at it.

I mean, -- this is a -- I would -- I covered Donald Rumsfeld.

I covered Bob Gates.

I was a Pentagon correspondent for several years.

I never saw anything remotely like that.

But in terms of the bigger picture, the purging of the generals and the admirals, and it's, you know, what are we at?

We're at nearly 20 flag officers that have either retired early or have been fired or resigned.

And it's even gone to the point of like of colonels who are in the line to become one-star flag officers.

He's gone down to pick -- and he's not -- you know, it -- Jeffrey Goldberg: It is his right.

Jonathan Karl: It is his right.

It is not, though, these are political officers, I mean, far from it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's not firing people because they've been incompetent.

Helene Cooper: I'm not sure about the -- it being his right with the colonels part that he -- Jeffrey Goldberg: At that level, it might be statutorily.

Helene Cooper: The Defense Secretary is not supposed to be -- Jeffrey Goldberg: It's only at the general level.

Helene Cooper: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Helene Cooper: It's above, yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Helene Cooper: It's not at that.

He's not supposed to be going into that level.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But yet he's doing it.

Helene Cooper: But he is doing it.

Jonathan Karl: He's doing it.

And, like, I mean, General Randy George, I mean, you can't say what that guy's politics was.

This was a revered Army leader.

Jeffrey Goldberg: This was the Chief of Staff of the Army.

Jonathan Karl: Chief of Staff of the Army.

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, these were not people that were like, you know, big -- they weren't out campaigning for candidates in Kentucky.

These were not people that were involved politically.

But in addition to that, you've had the purging of the press.

I mean, I think it's a notable thing that maybe -- you know, I'm a former Pentagon correspondent.

I went to that building virtually every day when I was covering.

I walked the halls.

That's how I -- you know, that's how I learned the place.

I traveled not just with the Secretary of Defense.

I traveled with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I traveled with the then Secretary of the Army, the combatant commander for Pacific Command.

I mean, this was stuff you could do as a Pentagon correspondent, and that's all been pushed aside.

And it's like he doesn't want to face not any dissent, because it's not a matter of dissent, but even questions that veer from the orthodoxy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Vivian, before I go to you, let's watch him talk about the subject that we've all alluded to here, his campaign against, quote/unquote, wokeness and DEI policies in the Pentagon.

This is, you all recall, his gathering of 800 flag officers, generals, and admirals a little while back, where it was mainly a lecture about physical fitness, which we're all for in the military, and wokeness.

Watch this with me.

Pete Hegseth: This administration has done a great deal from day one, to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics.

No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris.

As I've said before, and will say again, we are done with that (BLEEP).

Jonathan Karl: I mean, the only dudes in dresses that I remember seeing were Klinger in MASH.

I mean, was this a thing that was really affecting the military?

Jeffrey Goldberg: I think there were a handful of people across the branches.

I'm not sure what number.

I've heard 15, something along those lines.

Vivian Salama: Very small.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Vivian, talk about if we're trying to understand what motivates him most deeply, Pete Hegseth, because it's important to try to understand it.

It feels like the maximum energy is his discussion about DEI, affirmative action, and so on, gender.

Vivian Salama: One of the things that he has written as sort of his mission statement, if you will, is maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct.

And this is one of the -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Which I believe was written by ChatGPT, by the way.

Vivian Salama: Entirely possible, entirely possible.

Jonathan Karl: Even the music under that.

Vivian Salama: I know.

A little bit of like a scratch -- record scratch.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's a good TV guy.

He's got little sayings.

Vivian Salama: So I want to get to that actually, Jeff, in a sec.

But, you know, this is something that the president has talked about, but definitely Pete Hegseth believes deeply in this concept that the wokeness from the left has driven the country into no man's land, that they are coming in to correct the -- you know, the, what was wrong and get the train back on the tracks.

They feel especially given sort of the Christian background that Missy was talking about, he believes that the country has basically lost its way and that he's on a mission to try to correct that.

But you talked about the TV element of it, and I want to emphasize, because one of the big questions you get is why is he still in his job?

Administration officials I talk to constantly complain about him.

He is not well-liked among the senior leadership level at the White House and a lot of different agencies.

But the president still believes, A, that he didn't want to shake up a Senate-confirmed Secretary, but also the fact that he has this ability as a television -- a former television reporter to kind of deliver the message to the president in a way the president understands, it resonates with him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Vivian Salama: That has kept him in his job in a lot of ways.

Missy Ryan: Absolutely.

No, I mean, he certainly was hired to be a culture warrior.

That's what brought him there, that and the advocating for people who had been convicted or accused of war crimes, the relationship that he developed with President Trump during his first term.

But also it's something that actually animates him, I think, on a deeper level.

Here's somebody who -- you know, he attended Princeton University, he attended Harvard, and these are largely liberal organizations, and he was kind of a part of a smaller group of social conservatives.

And I think that that kind of, I'm the underdog, I'm pushing back against this oppressive dominant culture, in that context is something that we see transferring into, you know, what he talks about the political elite, about, you know, the foreign policy establishment.

And I think that is a really sort of central part of his worldview.

Helene Cooper: I would just want to -- when we're talking about DEI, we're talking about his anti-woke war, I just would like to put some of this into a little bit of perspective.

The Pentagon has always -- the American military had prided itself about its integration.

They were, you know, one of the first to integrate the minority representation.

And the military had, I think, 42 percent representative minority like in the late around 2018, 2019, 2020.

But if you looked at the people who were in the leadership roles of the military, all of them were white men.

There weren't women, and there weren't black people.

There were not Hispanics.

That was it.

It was white men.

You walk down this hallway in the E ring of the Pentagon, and you -- all you see are the portraits, like the Milley portrait that Pete Hegseth took down.

Jeffrey Goldberg: No longer there.

Helene Cooper: Portraits of white guy after white guy after white guy.

I remember one afternoon, these are the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I remember one afternoon standing at the end, because the press hallway, the old press hallway, was near there, and watching as each one black officer after the other walk down that hallway, and I kept watching, each one pause when he got to Colin Powell.

And there was like this moment where you stop, and you're like, oh, yes, and then you keep going.

Because at that time, there had only been one black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it had been Colin Powell.

And then Lloyd Austin came in.

You have a black Defense Secretary, and not soon after that, President Biden appointed C.Q.

Brown as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and you had two black men leading the military.

And I remember a Black Marine saying to me, this is never going to fly.

And there was this belief that there's no way this military was ready to be led by and it would've been the same way if you had been two women leading the military.

It just wasn't ready for that.

And I think what you're seeing in many ways with Pete Hegseth is sort of the embodiment of what -- you know, what that Marine was afraid of.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Helene, let me keep with you just for a minute.

There's so many topics to cover that we're not going to have time for, including the non-tepid legality issues surrounding the boat strikes.

But let me ask you about the most important issue of the moment, the Iran war.

Hegseth, big advocate for it.

What is his role in strategy, and what is his role in communicating to the president what is actually happening in the region.

Helene Cooper: In strategy, Hegseth has no role.

He is not looked at for strategy.

I was talking to a couple of military officials about who is talking to Trump, who is in the room.

It's not -- Hegseth may be in the room, but, no, Hegseth, Trump goes to Hegseth to be the mouthpiece.

He's there to sort of, you know, cheerlead and we hit blah, blah, blah, we hit this many targets and all that.

But nobody in the White House, least of all Susie Wiles, is looking at Pete Hegseth for strategy.

That is Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that is Admiral Brad Cooper, who's the head of CENTCOM.

They're the ones who are talking about the operational stuff, and they're the ones who are, unfortunately, with president, and I say, unfortunately, because I think we're now at a place in the, with the Iran war where we're in a situation that Trump has not been able to extract himself and he wants to.

They're presenting -- they will present all of the military options that they can and give them to you, and their way of saying, we don't think you should do this, is to say, you can do this, but the result will be this, and it's risky and it's that.

But they never say, don't do this.

That's the political position.

Pete Hegseth is not involved in that.

Missy Ryan: I do agree.

I agree with Helene 100 percent, but I do worry that the people who are presenting the operational options are -- because of this culture of fear and because there has been -- there have been instances of self-censorship within the military, within the Pentagon in terms of people getting shot down for pointing out risks in a way that is seen as politically unpalatable, that there's not a fulsome discussion of, you know, the downsides of any particular course of action.

And actually, as Vivian and I have reported with at The Atlantic, there's skepticism within the government's highest levels about the case that was made for Iran and the information, including from Vice President Vance and his staff, about the reliability of what the Pentagon is kind of trying to sell as the Iran war.

Jonathan Karl: I will say.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, yes, the last 30 seconds.

Jonathan Karl: He is -- he does go to the White House with General Caine.

He is there when the president gets briefed.

I agree he's not the one laying out the strategic options, but he is there and there is no sign at all that President Trump has any lack of confidence in Pete Hegseth.

As Trump sees it, the military's performed amazingly well, Venezuela, the operations in Iran, he's happy with them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We'll leave it there, but we'll be talking about this again.

We're going to thank you.

First, let me thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us.

For a look at the president's Iran war exit strategy, please read Robert Kagan's latest piece at theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, wishing you a meaningful Memorial Day.

Good night from Washington.