Tommy Tuberville is single-handedly stalling more than 200 Pentagon nominations.

Also, he is getting his military advice from a former food critic.

washingtonpost.com
Meet the ex-food writer advising Tommy Tuberville on national security
As a former football coach, the senator from Alabama is an improbable power player. But the story of how his top military adviser

He also is a military officer for 20+ years but sure lead with that.

STYLE

Meet the ex-food writer advising Tommy Tuberville on national security

As a former college football coach, Tuberville (R-Ala.) is an improbable power player in Washington. But the story of how his top military adviser got here is even stranger.

By Ben Terris
May 26, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EDT



Morgan Murphy works as a national security adviser for Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). How Murphy got to Washington is an unusual tale. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

When Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) wanted to stop a new Defense Department policy that helped ensure access to abortions for service members after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the former college football coach sought advice from his top military aide, a former food critic. ... “I explained all his options to him,” said Morgan Murphy, a Navy captain who once sold his own line of bacon products and who now serves as Tuberville’s national security adviser. The option the senator ultimately chose was to single-handedly stall the promotion of more than 200 senior U.S. military officers.

It was spicy dollop of political brinkmanship into a process that is often blandly nonpolitical. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a military veteran herself, said Tuberville was “holding the entire nation’s national security hostage for his own personal social agenda.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the top-ranking Republican in the Senate, said he disagreed with the maneuver. Lloyd Austin, the secretary of Defense, has called Tuberville’s blockade “a clear risk to U.S. military readiness.”

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The rise of political novices has, in turn, elevated the importance of the advisers who influence them. And when it comes to Tuberville’s one-man blockade of Pentagon appointees, the Alabama senator may never have known which norm to break without Morgan Murphy, whose past life included a stint at Vanity Fair, a tour in Afghanistan and multiple appearances on the home-shopping network QVC. ... “Iam, at heart, a storyteller,” Murphy said to me, sitting in a Senate coffee shop in late 2021. ... He was trim, with blue eyes and close-cropped curly hair. He was wearing a three-piece wool suit in olive green, with a red checked tie and matching pocket square. According to people who know him, Murphy had been dressing like this at least since his days as at Vanity Fair, where he worked after college.

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Murphy, who had joined the Naval reserves in 1999, decided he’d rather serve in Afghanistan than deal with the gossiping “ladies of Birmingham” who would almost certainly have thoughts about his crumbled marriage. He deployed in 2010 and served as a director of media outreach during Operation Enduring Freedom, briefing Gen. David Petraeus on a regular basis and interacting with the media. ... He returned home from war in 2011, and spent four years writing his food books before going to work with his sister and father at the family’s public relations agency. In 2017 he tried launching a line of bacon he called Victory Bacon.

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By Ben Terris
Ben Terris is a writer in The Washington Post's Style section with a focus on national politics. Twitter https://twitter.com/bterris