In Book, Former Defense Chief Mattis Sideswipes President Trump's Leadership Skills

It's been eight months since President Donald Trump's first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, handed in his resignation.

Now the retired four-star general has written his first book, co-authored by former Marine Bing West. Spoiler alert: Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead is not, as the title might suggest, a tell-all exposé of Mattis' tense tenure at the helm of the Pentagon with Trump as commander in chief.

"I'm old fashioned," Mattis writes. "I don't write about sitting presidents."

Mattis mentions Trump by name only four times, all in the prologue's first two pages — each instance taking place prior to the president's taking office. That said, he does imply criticism, without directly taking shots.

"All Americans need to recognize that our democracy is an experiment and one that can be reversed," Mattis writes. "We all know that we are better than our current politics."

Mattis' maddening refusal to offer direct thoughts about Trump does not apply to past commanders in chief. His war stories — from liberating Kuwait to invading Afghanistan to battling insurgents in Iraq — are also a refighting of old battles with officers and others whose wartime guidance he portrays as deferring more to presidential whims than to theater-of-war realities.

Enjoying his perch as a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Mattis never expected Trump to offer him the Pentagon's top job. "I figured that my strong support of NATO and my dismissal of the use of torture on prisoners would have the President-elect looking for another candidate," he writes. But when