Retired General John Kelly, former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, is coming to Duke just months after walking away from the White House.
Kelly will discuss leading America through global turbulence in Page Auditorium on March 6. In the free, public event hosted by the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy, Peter Feaver, professor of political science and public policy and the program’s director, will interview Kelly.
“John Kelly served in one of the most important and consequential jobs in the U.S. government... during one of the most interesting of times: the first two years of the Trump administration,” Feaver said in a Duke Today news release.
Kelly had been serving as the homeland security secretary in the Trump administration when he was selected to replace Reince Priebus, who spoke at Duke in 2017, as chief of staff.
Before his stint in government, Kelly was a four-star general of the U.S. Marine Corps and commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which covers Central and South Americas and the Caribbean, including the U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.
As chief of staff, Kelly was said to impose military order on a White House marked by high turnover. But reports emerged that Kelly was unhappy in the position and he stepped down at the end of 2018.
“This is a rare opportunity to hear a candid firsthand account from the man who worked at the center of the government, to hear his answers to the questions that everyone has been talking about since the earliest days of the administration, and to learn how his military service prepared him for this post," Feaver said in the release.
Tickets for the talk will be available beginning Feb. 14 at the box office's website and in-person at the Duke Box Office.
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