Patrick Shanahan deserved to lose the job he wanted, but his children deserved much better
The aspiring Defense secretary cost his children their privacy and forced them to relive their trauma. He chose his ambitions over protecting them.
Shame on Patrick Shanahan. Only a few days after Father’s Day, the father of a once clearly disturbed child was outed as hands-down winner of the Worst Father Award.
Shanahan, as it’s been well publicized, was the acting secretary of defense who must have desperately wanted to convert that “acting” title into the real deal. So badly did he want the job, he was willing to sacrifice his children’s privacy to get it.
What Shanahan hoped to hide, what cost him the job and caused the abrupt end of his nomination process, were two family incidents in 2010 and 2011.
Nearly a decade ago, Shanahan’s wife was arrested for punching her husband in the face in 2010. And then in 2011 their son, 17, was arrested for hitting his mother multiple times with a baseball bat until she was unconscious and left lying in a pool of blood with multiple injuries.
Shanahan, of course, hoped to keep these events private.
Most parents would protect their children
But as always, always, always happens, the truth got out. And it’s ugly, and if it were my family, I would have done everything in my power — as would most any parent — to protect my children from public exposure of a truly ugly, sad, devastating episode in their past.
Why that happened is left to conjecture and gossip, and doesn’t matter because it did happen. It happened to a family clearly in crisis during and after a bitter divorce, at a time when their lives were in emotional disarray. Shanahan said he didn’t want it to be made public — he told the Washington Post that publishing information would re-traumatize his young adult children and "ruin my son's life."
It appears someone didn’t do his or her job of vetting Shanahan, as he moved easily through the process when President Donald Trump nominated him to become second-in-command at the Pentagon two years ago. Nothing was said then about Shanahan’s legal brush with domestic violence or how he later came to defend his son’s disturbed behavior for aggressively attacking the boy’s mother. (According to Paste BN, the Senate Armed Services Committee members “were not fully aware” of the domestic abuse incident in 2010.)
Clearly the incidents would have raised questions about his judgment and savvy, had they been part of the vetting process. If he couldn't handle his family, how was he going to be able to handle the Pentagon?
Patrick Shanahan did this to himself
In a statement to Paste BN, Shanahan said of his ex-wife and family, “I wish nothing but the best for her and regret that my children’s privacy has been violated and they are being forced to relive a tragic situation that we have worked so hard as a family to put behind us."
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But no newspaper or broadcast article “ruined” Shanahan’s son’s life.
No news outlet “forced” his kids to relive this tragedy.
He did it.
Shanahan “ruined” his kids’ lives by letting his egotistical drive to be Secretary of Defense, a clear gold ring in life, outweigh his more important role: protecting his children at all costs — even if it means giving up the job of a lifetime. The sad irony is he’s not getting the job, and along the way, he (let’s hope temporarily) has hurt his children deeply.
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There are countless examples of arrogant people, mostly men, who believe that their worth and value to the job trumps any ugly events in their past. Remember Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who resigned last year over past allegations of domestic abuse? Even as far back as 1985, there was John Fedders, enforcement chief for the Securities and Exchange Commission, who turned out to be a wife-beater.
President Donald Trump announced in a tweet that Shanahan was withdrawing “so that he can devote more time to his family.” Most of the time, that’s a euphemism for being let go or fired.
But in this case, Shanahan should be doing just that -- doing everything in his power to atone for the anguish and humiliation his hubris has brought on his adult children, who definitely deserve much, much better.
Alicia Shepard, a member of Paste BN’s Board of Contributors, is a former ombudsman for NPR. Follow her on Twitter: @ombudsman