For All Those in Authority
Providence, April 27, 2026
The Miller Center recently released an oral-history collection recounting the Obama presidency. Buried in the collection is a revealing and reassuring story shared by Admiral Michael Mullen.
Prayerful Leaders
Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operation Neptune Spear—the takedown of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
After SEAL Team 6 confirmed it had eliminated bin Laden, Mullen recalls noticing how most of the national-security team began to exhale. He saw Vice President Joe Biden “taking off a rosary ring.” But Mullen didn’t want Biden to let up on the prayers.
Mullen recounts that he turned to Biden and said, bluntly, “Mr. Vice President, I’ve got 47 troops illegally in a foreign country. They just killed our number-one enemy in the world, and I’ve got a 90-minute transit. They’ve got to refuel. I need to get them back into Afghanistan. I then have to transfer them to an Osprey, fly them through contested Pakistani airspace, get them out to the carrier…Would you please put that rosary ring back on?”
Biden glanced back at Mullen and responded, “OK.”
Later, after America’s troops were safe, after the president had finished his address to the nation, Mullen and Biden chatted about their rosary rings. Neither knew the other carried one until that fraught evening. As they talked, Mullen remembers, the president “walks over…reaches in his pocket and…pulls out a crucifix.” Watching the scene unfold, CIA Director Leon Panetta, who, like Biden and Mullen is Catholic, then joined them and pulled a rosary out of his pocket. “He’d been moving the rosary beads during the whole thing as well,” Mullen explains.
Asked if there were any other occasions in his time leading the Joint Chiefs when he turned to prayer, Mullen answered, “It was constant.”
He shares that he often would visit the 9/11 chapel in the Pentagon to attend Mass. Those services and his many silent prayers carried him through “a lot of tough situations,” Mullen offers, with characteristic military understatement.
Burdens
Mullen’s account is revealing because it illustrates that these men find solace and strength in prayer, believe that the God of the universe cares about the affairs of man, and recognize that they need heaven’s help.
We don’t know exactly what each man was praying, though it’s fair to conclude from the Mullen-Biden exchange that those two were not praying for destruction of the enemy, but rather for protection over the young men ordered into harm’s way. They were offering intercessory prayers.
In some mysterious way, scripture suggests, God can use intercessory prayer to help the one in need—the one who’s the focus of the prayer.
One of the first times we see this in scripture is, aptly, related to battle. In Exodus, we learn that during one of Joshua’s battles, Moses needed Aaron and Hur to hold his arms in the air—the symbol of intercessory prayer—for only when his arms were uplifted and outstretched could Joshua’s men overcome the enemy.
There are many other examples. In Mark 2, the friends of a crippled man literally carry him into the presence of God. “When Jesus saw their faith”—not the man’s—“He said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”
Mordecai, Peter and Paul were intercessors. Indeed, Paul implores believers to offer “petitions, prayers and intercession” for “all those in authority”—a convicting, challenging reminder that we are called to pray for presidents (even if we voted for the other candidate) and warriors (even if we are peacemakers) and peacemakers (even if we are warriors).
God can use intercessory prayer not only to help the one in need, but equally important, to change how we see the one in need. In this regard, prayer “doesn’t change God,” as C.S. Lewis argued. “It changes me.” It changes how we perceive another’s plight and burdens and responsibilities. It may even help us see—for the first time—another’s plight and burdens and responsibilities.
The burdens and responsibilities of the presidency are immense—so immense that only those who have held that office can understand what it requires, demands and costs.
President Harry Truman said becoming president “felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.” Grizzled and scarred after eight years in the Oval Office, President Dwight Eisenhower warned President-elect John Kennedy: “No easy matters will ever come to you as president. If they are easy, they will be settled at a lower level.”
President Barack Obama could relate. Doubtless, he prayed for protection over the men who carried out Neptune Spear. But one suspects the commander in chief also offered prayers for discernment and wisdom before giving the go order—and for reassurance amidst his doubts. Recall that Obama was elected seven years into an open-ended, multi-front war; had deep misgivings about the war’s prosecution and expansion; criticized his predecessor for a “go-it-alone foreign policy”; and believed “America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”
Yet Operation Neptune Spear was at odds with those positions. After all, it was technically an expansion of the war. It could have upended relations with Pakistan. And America was acting unilaterally.
Moreover, while the pilots and commandos faced physical risk, the mission carried political risk for a president months away from an election year. Neptune Spear hurled dozens of U.S. personnel, two experimental stealth helicopters, and an aging CH-47 transport helicopter into Pakistan, with more assets on standby just in case the SEALs needed help fighting their way through Pakistan’s not-so-friendly skies. If Neptune Spear were to devolve into another Eagle Claw, dozens of American troops would be killed or captured, America would be humiliated, al Qaeda would notch another victory, and his presidency would be over.
No matter how just or justifiable the mission, all of those factors—the philosophical disconnects, the moral contradictions, the personal unease, the political risks—had to weigh on Obama. But he gave the go order anyway—because that’s the burden that comes after winning the presidency.
Examples
The episode shared by Mullen is reassuring because—even in the 21st century, even in a postmodern and increasingly post-Christian age, even when technology conveys onto our government the trappings of godlike omniscience and omnipotence—the most powerful men commanding the most powerful military on earth realized that there’s something more powerful than them. And so, they turned to heaven for help.
In doing so, they followed the example of a long line of American leaders.
In 1775, Benjamin Franklin urged that “prayers imploring the assistance of heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business.” Later, when he and America were older, Franklin added, “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men! And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”
Asked if he believed God was on his side, President Abraham Lincoln responded not with swaggering certainty, but with searching humility: “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.” In his first inaugural, he deferred to the “eternal truth and justice” of the “Almighty Ruler of nations.” In his second inaugural, he reminded Americans that “The Almighty has His own purposes”—an echo of God’s words to Isaiah: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways.”
As Normandy’s beaches turned red with blood, President Franklin Roosevelt led the American people in prayer. It wasn’t the sort of vague, throwaway reference to “thoughts and prayers” that has become a clichéd punchline in modern political rhetoric. FDR literally asked the American people to pray with him—for “the saving of our country” and “our sister nations,” for the defeat of “the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies,” for victory in the “struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization,” for strength “to set free a suffering humanity,” for protection over “our sons, pride of our nation.” He knew that “some will never return.” And so, FDR prayed, “Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.” He asked all Americans—“because the road is long” and “the enemy is strong”—to “devote themselves in a continuance of prayer.”
More Powerful
It’s comforting to hear leaders of this great nation turn to a far greater power for wisdom, reassurance and help.
In doing so, they are reminding us that there’s something bigger, more enduring, more important, more powerful than any weapons system, any president, any military, any government or any foe.