White House on Robert E. Lee: ‘All of our leaders have flaws’

The White House defended chief of staff John Kelly’s remarks about Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Tuesday, saying every major U.S. leader has “flaws” and that memorials honoring their historical impact should not be removed or diminished because them. 

“All of our leaders have flaws,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the press briefing Tuesday.

{mosads}Sanders named former Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as leaders who have been memorialized throughout the U.S., but who also had an imperfect score while leading the nation.

She said these leaders still largely shaped the U.S., arguing that their accomplishments should not be scrubbed away as a result of their faults.

“That doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country and it certainly cannot erase them from our history. And Gen. Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it is not our history,” she continued.

Her remarks come after Kelly received fierce backlash for calling Lee “an honorable man” who gave up his country to fight for his state.

The retired general argued that it is a mistake to pull down Confederate-tied symbols.

“There are certain things in history that were not so good and other things that were very, very good,” he said on the premiere of Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle.” 

“You know, 500 years later, it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then,” he continued, while calling it a “dangerous” practice to retroactively project current attitudes onto past events.

The top aide to the president also suggested that the Civil War was caused by a “lack of an ability to compromise.”