White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly took a moment from his Memorial Day appearance with President Donald Trump at Arlington National Cemetery to make a public acknowledgement of his own loss. Kelly, along with his wife Karen Hernest and the President, visited his son’s grave at Arlington on Monday.
Photographs of Trump’s visit to Arlington showed Kelly and Trump visiting the gravesite of Kelly’s son Robert Michael Kelly, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was 29.
Although Kelly is the highest ranking military officer to lose a child in Iraq or Afghanistan, he has often avoided talking about the death of his son. In November 2010, just four days after his son’s death, he told a Marine officer introducing him in a speech not to mention what had just happened, the Washington Post reported at the time. “We are only one of 5,500 American families who have suffered the loss of a child in this war,” Kelly wrote in an e-mail to the Post for that article. “The death of my boy simply cannot be made to seem any more tragic than the others.”
But both Kelly and his late son became enmeshed in the debate over fallen soldiers after the controversy last October, after President Trump placed calls to the four military families who had lost loved ones during an ambush in Niger. One of the widows alleged that Trump told her that her husband “knew what he was signing up for,” which caused immediate pushback. Kelly gave a rare appearance in the White House briefing room at the height of that debate, speaking to reporters about the death of his son and defending the President.


- What We Know So Far About the Deadly Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria
- Beyoncé's Album of the Year Snub Fits Into the Grammys' Long History of Overlooking Black Women
- How the U.S. Shot Down the Alleged Chinese Spy Balloon
- Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassment and Abuse, Women Say
- Inside Bolsonaro's Surreal New Life as a Florida Man—and MAGA Darling
- 'Return to Office' Plans Spell Trouble for Working Moms
- 8 Ways to Read More Books—and Why You Should
- Why Aren't Movies Sexy Anymore?
- How Logan Paul's Crypto Empire Fell Apart