Around the same time that the Pentagon was learning how to control independent battlefield news reporting by “embedding,” i.e. leashing, professional correspondents in deployed units, executive editor Abe Rosenthal hired a general to cover the military for the New York Times. Bernard Trainor stepped directly from 39 years in the Marine Corps into the Times newsroom, where you can reasonably assume that Abe was as enthralled by his medals as Trump was of John Kelly’s. Apparently not content to cultivate another camp follower to replace Drew Middleton, Abe went straight for the brass. A hidebound Cold War reactionary who kept his workers under his thumb via a reign of my-way-or-the-highway terror, Rosenthal built the foundation for an interventionist cadre of Times reporters that continues to this day. On the run-up to war and for as long as possible until everything goes terribly wrong, which has been the rule since 1945, readers can expect lots of positivity, not skepticism, from the Gray Lady. (Those old enough to remember the paper’s Vietnam coverage know that it was one of the primary forces fueling the growth of an “underground” or alternative press, no matter how much self-aggrandizing retrospection appears nowadays about Halberstam, Sheehan, and the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times was a deeply pro-war news company.) Could a Trainor type find a comfortable desk there again? It’s not hard to imagine Abe becoming enamored of H.R. McMaster, say. But Abe is long gone and represented a mix of bigotries unlikely to be tolerated today at the top of the masthead. Besides, you don’t have to hire generals to write the news anymore–not with all those football-field sized American flags being constantly unrolled across the land.