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N.Y. TIMES
Robert M. Gates gives us a forthright, impassioned, sometimes conflicted account of his four and a half years as defense secretary in his fascinating new memoir “Duty,” a book that is highly revealing about decision making in both the Obama and Bush White Houses.
Mr. Gates — who has won plaudits from both Republicans and Democrats over the years for his pragmatic, common-sense approach to his job — has a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history, was director of central intelligence in the early ’90s, and worked under eight presidents. His writing is informed not only by a keen sense of historical context, but also by a longtime Washington veteran’s understanding of how the levers of government work or fail to work.
Unlike many careful Washington memoirists, Mr. Gates speaks his mind on a host of issues, freely expressing his dismay with the micro-managerial zeal of White House national security aides and his unfettered fury at a dysfunctional Congress. The majority of it, he says, is “uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities,” “hypocritical, egotistical” and eager to put “self (and re-election) before country.”
... while his overall portraits of Mr. Obama (“the most deliberative president I worked for”) and George W. Bush (he “had strong convictions about certain issues, such as Iraq, and trying to persuade him otherwise was a fool’s errand”) are familiar enough, they are fleshed out with myriad, telling glimpses of the two men at work. Mr. Gates — whose nickname in the Obama White House was Yoda — also gives us his shrewd take on a range of foreign policy matters, an understanding of his mission to reform the incoherent spending and procurement policies of the Pentagon, and a tactile sense of what it was like to be defense secretary during two wars. (For security reasons, he traveled to Iraq inside “a sort of large silver Airstream trailer” placed in the hold of a military cargo plane, which, he says, felt “a lot like being FedExed halfway around the world.”)
Headlines have already been made by passages in this book relating to Mr. Obama’s stewardship of the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates writes that while he “never doubted Obama’s support for the troops,” he did question his support for their mission there. From early on, he writes, there was suspicion in the White House that the president was “getting the ‘bum’s rush’ from senior military officers” over the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and that that suspicion grew over time.
During a heated March 2011 meeting, Mr. Gates says, the president suggested he was possibly “being gamed” by the military. Listening to this, Mr. Gates says he thought, “The president doesn’t trust his commander,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, “can’t stand” the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Such widely quoted bits of the book — now being dissected on TV — give the impression that as a whole it is less nuanced and measured than it actually is. In fact, Mr. Gates seems less intent on settling scores here than in trying candidly to lay out his feelings about his tenure at the Pentagon and his ambivalent, sometimes contradictory thoughts about the people he worked with.
He writes that he found President Obama’s methodical approach to problem solving “refreshing and reassuring,” and commends his ability to make tough decisions “regardless of the domestic political consequences.” But he also talks about coming close to resigning, feeling “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war.” In a note to himself, he wrote: “They all seem to think it’s a science.”
Mr. Gates says he found it dismaying to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton talk about her opposition to the 2007 surge in Iraq in terms of domestic politics and the Iowa primary. But in another passage, he praises her as “smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. does not fare as well. Mr. Gates says Mr. Biden is “impossible not to like” though, in his opinion, Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Mr. Obama’s national security aides like Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes are singled out for some of Mr. Gates’s most stinging criticism. He suggests that such advisers were often “out of their depth” in foreign policy and military matters, and blurred the chain of command by circumventing more senior officials. In this respect, this book echoes the journalist James Mann’s 2012 book “The Obamians,” which argued that the president leaned heavily on an inner circle of young aides who had been with him through his 2008 campaign, while keeping more experienced hands at a distance.
The Obama White House, Mr. Gates writes, was “by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.” He adds that its “controlling nature” and “its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the people in the cabinet departments — in the trenches — who had actually done the work, offended Hillary Clinton as much as it did me.”
Mr. Gates points out continuities in national security policies between Mr. Bush’s second term and Mr. Obama’s first. And he notes other similarities between the two presidents: both “had the worst of both worlds on the Hill: they were neither particularly liked nor feared” and did little to reach out to individual members of Congress; nor did either “work much at establishing close personal relationships with other world leaders.” In short, both seemed “very aloof with respect to two constituencies important to their success in foreign affairs.”
Regarding the Bush administration, the most compelling parts of this book concern Iran and Mr. Gates’s worries about “the influence of the Israelis and the Saudis” on the White House, particularly the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and “their shared desire to have problems like Iran ‘taken care of’ while Bush was still president.” Mr. Gates repeatedly warned of the dangers of “looking for another war” when America was already at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point, he says, he was so worried that Mr. Bush might be persuaded by Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Olmert “to act or enable the Israelis to act” (that is, to take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon) that he made an intense private call to Mr. Bush in which he argued “we must not make our vital interests in the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia hostage to another nation’s decisions — no matter how close an ally.”
Mr. Gates says little more about Mr. Cheney’s influence in the White House, observing that by 2007 the vice president “was the outlier on the team” with President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley “and me in broad agreement on virtually all important issues.” He is also curiously elliptical when it comes to his predecessor at the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom he replaced in December 2006. Instead, he talks in more general terms about the chaotic war in Iraq he inherited, writing that he was “stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success.” He also confides that Mr. Bush told him in January 2008 that “he wished he’d made the change in secretary of defense ‘a couple of years earlier.’ It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.”
Critics of the Bush administration, he writes, fail to understand the sense of fear and urgency that Sept. 11 left on the White House. He adds, though, that “the key question for me was why” several years later, with improved defenses in place, “there was not a top-to-bottom review of policies and authorities with an eye to culling out those that were most at odds with our traditions, culture, and history, such as renditions and ‘enhanced interrogations.’ ” He says that in the summer of 2008, he and Ms. Rice argued “for an aggressive effort to get legislation that would permit us to close” Guantánamo Bay prison but did not prevail.
Mr. Gates is at his most emotional — and moving — in talking about his love for the men and women who serve in the military. “Signing the deployment orders, visiting hospitals, writing the condolence letters and attending the funerals at Arlington all were taking a growing emotional toll on me,” he writes near the end of this plain-spoken memoir. “Even thinking about the troops, I would lose my composure with increasing frequency. I realized I was beginning to regard protecting them — avoiding their sacrifice — as my highest priority. And I knew that this loss of objectivity meant it was time to leave.”
In retrospect, Mr. Gates says, his time as secretary of defense reinforced his “belief that in recent decades, American presidents, confronted with a tough problem abroad, have too often been too quick to reach for a gun — to use military force” even though “wars are a lot easier to get into than out of.”