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 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| John Kelly Pins Civil War on a ‘Lack of Ability to Compromise’ Image John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, in the Oval Office last week. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times 
 
 If, by appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show on Monday night, John F. Kelly was trying to do damage control after the indictments of Trump associates earlier in the day, it did not work. 
 
 Instead, Mr. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, resurrected the debate over Confederate monuments — previously fueled by his boss, President Trump, over the summer — and the Confederacy itself. He called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” said that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” and argued that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” 
 
 Christina Wilkie, a reporter for CNBC, used Twitter to live-blog Monday’s interview, on the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle.” Her tweet quoting Mr. Kelly’s “lack of an ability to compromise” statement spread quickly. 
 
 The reaction was swift and unforgiving, with many commenters ridiculing Mr. Kelly for suggesting that slavery was an issue on which a compromise could or should have been reached. 
 
 Within less than two hours, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King had weighed in on Mr. Kelly’s description of Robert E. Lee as “honorable,” calling his comments “irresponsible” and “dangerous” and criticizing him for making “fighting to maintain slavery sound courageous.” 
 
 On Tuesday, the White House did not back down. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, said there was “pretty strong consensus” among people from “the left, the right, the North and the South” that a failure to compromise contributed to the war. 
 
 That consensus, she said, holds that “if some of the individuals engaged had been willing to come to some compromises on different things then it might not have occurred.” 
 
 But the response on social media and from Democratic lawmakers suggested anything but consensus. 
 
 Other people referred disapprovingly to Mr. Kelly’s reputation as a voice of reason and discipline within the Trump administration: the “adult in the room”; the person keeping, or at least trying to keep, Mr. Trump under control. 
 
 And many pointed out that, in fact, many attempts were made to avert the Civil War through compromise — that is, by agreeing to allow slavery in some places. 
 
 The Missouri Compromise, in 1820, admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state; in exchange, it admitted Maine as a free state and barred slavery in most parts of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of a specified latitude. The Compromise of 1850 eliminated the slave trade from Washington, D.C., but also required citizens of free states to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which replaced the Missouri Compromise in 1854, let citizens of Kansas and Nebraska decide whether to allow slavery. 
 
 And, of course, there was the compromise that aided the very passage of the Constitution: the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional districting. 
 
 “If John Kelly isn’t a complete idiot,” John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research organization, tweeted late Monday, “he’s at least 3/5ths of the way there.” 
 
 In a lengthy series of tweets, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the “notion that Civil War resulted from a lack of compromise is belied by all the compromises made on enslavement from America’s founding.” 
 
 Correction : An earlier version of this article misstated how many Trump associates were indicted on Monday. It was two, not three; the third associate had pleaded guilty weeks before. Daniel Victor contributed reporting. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Sign up for California Today The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state), delivered weekday mornings. SEE SAMPLE Please verify you’re not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. * Required field You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times products and services. * Required field Thank you for subscribing. View all New York Times newsletters. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. Sign Up ||||| Washington (CNN) White House chief of staff John Kelly spoke to the "good" and "not so good" parts of US history on Monday, speaking highly of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and attributing the origin of the American Civil War to a "lack of an ability to compromise." 
 
 Kelly described history as "evolving," and said it is "dangerous" to not be cognizant of it, when asked about the removal of historical but controversial statues commemorating Confederate figures during an interview on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle." 
 
 "There will be, 100 or 200 years from now, people that criticize us for what we do, and I guess they'll tear down, you know, statues of people that we revere today," Kelly told Laura Ingraham. "It's dangerous, I think. ... It's just very, very dangerous and it shows you what, how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is." 
 
 The White House chief of staff called Lee "an honorable man" who chose duty to his state over loyalty to a federal government. 
 
 "It was always loyalty to state first back in those days," Kelly said. "Now, it's different today." 
 
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– White House chief of staff John Kelly, generally viewed as the man whose mission is to keep controversy at bay, finds himself caught up in another one. Kelly is taking flak for his comments about the Civil War, made Monday night on the debut of Laura Ingraham's show on Fox, reports CNN. "The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War," said Kelly. "And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand." Critics are pouncing mainly because Kelly made no mention of slavery, and the New York Times reports that the pushback arrived in fast and furious fashion. "Slavery. Slavery was what they wouldn't compromise over," read one typical tweet highlighted in the paper. Critics drew comparisons to President Trump's blame of "both sides" for the racial violence in Charlottesville, reports the Washington Post. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., called Kelly's comments "irresponsible & dangerous, especially when white supremacists feel emboldened, to make fighting to maintain slavery sound courageous." Kelly also praised Gen. Robert E. Lee as an "honorable man" who "gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country." And he touched on the debate over Confederate monuments, saying the idea of tearing them down is "just very, very dangerous, and it shows you what, how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is."