The wars of Robert Gates

Our history is filled with political memoirs: from often forgettable presidential autobiographies (Richard Nixon’s prodigious two volumes, “RN,” are not so much books as book ends), to scurrilous insider tell-alls — David Stockman’s “The Triumph of Politics” comes to mind. This kind of thing is red meat in Washington, where policy wonks and the merely curious never tire of being entertained by the powerful, formerly powerful or merely power hungry.

But Robert Gates’ “Duty” — the former defense secretary’s account of his time in the Bush and Obama Administrations — doesn’t seem to fit these categories. The Gates memoir runs some 600 written pages, but it will never put you to sleep. Then too, despite its gaudy “tell all” tenor, most of what Gates writes simply confirms what many in Washington already knew: that President Barack Obama has a difficult relationship with the military, that Vice President Joseph Biden has only a winking understanding of foreign policy issues, that members of Congress are “hypocritical” and “obtuse” and that members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee are “rude, nasty and stupid.”

What matters is that Gates actually tells us these things, for no former defense secretary has ever been so outspoken in print. Robert McNamara’s “In Retrospect” (described as “touching” by one reviewer) was an apology for Vietnam, while Caspar Weinberger’s “In The Arena” is the Unisom of memoirs. McNamara was always more interesting in person, with his raspy voice and feverishly hawk like expression, while Weinberger could be cutting and ironic — when I told him in 1985 that it was my impression that “nothing ever really gets done in the Pentagon,” he laughed out loud. “And what is it that a good liberal like you would like us to do?” he asked.

But here’s the thing: While Gates tells us a lot about Bush, Obama, Biden, the Congress and insider debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he actually doesn’t tell us much about Robert Gates. For that, we have to go elsewhere. We should start with this – that while Robert Gates carefully weighed his every word as a public servant (“I have a pretty good poker face,” he writes in “Duty”), that’s not been true when he becomes a private citizen. As a former official Gates is less like the oracular Yoda (his nickname in the Obama White House) and more like Han Solo. That is, he is outspoken, opinionated, blunt and just a tad off key – and always has been.    

 “I don’t understand why people are shocked by Gates’ candor,” a retired senior military officer told me recently during a lunch at Washington’s Army-Navy Club. “It’s not as if he hasn’t done this before.” With that the officer led me into the club’s library to show me a copy of “From The Shadows,” Gates’ narrative of his years at the CIA, which he’d been reading. The book is as damning an account as any ever written by a former government official. Henry Kissinger is, on Gates’ telling, “the Wizard of Oz,” the White House is filled with officials “trying to get on lists” (one of whom Gates calls “the ferret”), CIA Director William Casey is a quintessential Irish Catholic who once greeted Gates by yelling at his staff “bring us two vodka martinis” and George Shultz is friendly and collegial, “even as his knife was being drawn across my throat.”

Like all of those officials, Gates has left enemies in his wake. When he was nominated by George H.W. Bush to be CIA Director back in 1991, agency official Melvin Goodman testified against him. "Frankly, I worry about the signal that would be sent by returning Gates to the environment he created," Goodman said in his testimony. “I worry about the effect this would have on the standards of others back at the Central Intelligence Agency to be led by someone so lacking in vision, integrity, and courage." Goodman was even more outspoken in person, telling me at the time that Gates “cooked the books” on the threat from the Soviet Union and “politicized” the agency’s intelligence gathering apparatus. “He’s unfit to be CIA Director,” he said. The Gates enemies list is long, but its CIA veterans appear in disproportionate numbers. Last week, respected CIA veteran Paul Pillar described Gates as that “master of reputation preservation” who is “especially adept at seeing that responsibility and accountability for what is unsuccessful, untoward, or unpopular stops at levels just below his own.”

Nor does Gates have many friends in the U.S. Air Force, who were stunned when, in 2006, he forced the resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. He pressured both men to leave their positions when a commission reported serious shortcomings in how the Air Force handles nuclear weapons. “I took no pleasure from the dismissals,” Gates writes in “Duty.” “I enjoyed working with both men, but I didn’t believe they really understood the magnitude of the problem or how dangerous it could be.” Gates also reports that when Wynne then, surprisingly, invited him to his farewell ceremony he “kept waiting for a child to come up to me and give me a good kick in the shin and ask if I was the jerk who fired his grandpa.” 

While Gates might deny it, the firings spurred an anti-Gates cabal inside the Air Force that, according to one retired Air Force Lt. General, “celebrated the day that that guy left the building.” “Bob Gates takes pride in being able to work with the military,” this three star Air Force General told me, “but that bit is way oversold. We think he’s tough because he fires people, when it’s actually the other way around – he fires people because he wants that reputation. He’s not tough, he’s a bully.”

Even if all of these allegations are true, does it ultimately matter? When Robert Gates was first appointed Secretary of Defense by George W. Bush, back during the darkest days of the Iraq War, there was a collective sigh of relief inside of the Pentagon’s E Ring, where all of the nation’s highest ranking military officers and their staffs work. “You just got the impression that here was a man who could take on Cheney, that finally there was an adult in charge,” a former high ranking Pentagon civilian official, appointed by Donald Rumsfeld, told me several years later. The first thing that Gates did, according to this official, was to call together the Pentagon’s senior staff for what they thought would be an ugly political office purge – so that the new secretary could appoint his own people.

Instead, Gates delivered a different message. “I don’t have time for that,” this official quoted Gates as saying. “It would take months to get all the new appointments confirmed and meanwhile the mess we have on our hands would only get worse. So tomorrow morning I’m headed to Iraq, to try to straighten that out.” The same sigh of relief was heard twice more: when Barack Obama decided to retain Gates as his Secretary of Defense when he was elected president – and when the White House debated the U.S. intervention in Libya. The first sigh of relief came because the military knew that Gates’ personal belief in seeking consensus on important foreign policy issues would continue, as would the thaw in the chilly relations the Pentagon had maintained with the State Department’s diplomatic corps.

But the second sigh of relief was even more crucial. Overstretched by the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior military officers worried about widening commitments in the Middle East. The argument for intervention in Libya, in particular, was spurred on under the guise of being a “humanitarian intervention” by Obama foreign policy principals Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton — “the coven,” as one senior military officer dubbed them. Gates thought differently, as he had as an official during the Reagan administration. Then, as he related in “From The Shadows,” he counseled against the adventure.

“I told [then-CIA Director William] Casey that the costs and risks included a huge outcry globally against U.S. imperialism, a strong reaction in the Arab world against a U.S. invasion of an Arab country, potentially significant Soviet gains in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Third World, a probably short-term upsurge in terrorism against U.S. citizens and installations, and a potential setback in U.S.-Soviet relations.” If you exclude the reference to the word Soviet in the quote, this is almost precisely what Gates told Obama about his own administration’s Libya intervention more than 25 years later.

In private, Gates was even more outspoken. “We should expect that some of these revolutions should fail,” he said of the Arab Spring. “This is not our fight.” Obama, with Gates’ blunt words in mind, ordered a significantly scaled back U.S. effort after the French and British agreed that they would bear the brunt of the air attack. Even so, the president was chastened enough that, when the international effort in Libya touched off fighting in Mali, he told Gates that he had been right “and I was wrong.”

So it is that we are able to forge a final judgment on a former CIA director and Secretary of Defense. Although Gates holds a deserved reputation for “sharp elbows” and “an almost tireless ambition,” as one former colleague said, he counterbalanced these traits with his keen sense of history and innate conservatism. Despite the salacious headlines, Gates’ lasting legacy will not come from what he wrote in “Duty,” but what he said at West Point in February 2011: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”