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Summary
Summary
From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vividly written account of his experience serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House in 2006, he thought he'd left Washington politics behind: after working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happy in his role as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty. Now, in this unsparing memoir, meticulously fair in its assessments, he takes us behind the scenes of his nearly five years as a secretary at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding, and often dissenting, voice for Obama; the ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers--his "heroes"--he developed on the job.
In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations.
He discusses the great controversies of his tenure--surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, how to deal with Iran and Syria, "Don't Ask Don't Tell," Guantánamo Bay, WikiLeaks--as they played out behind the television cameras. He brings to life the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid. And, searingly, he shows how congressional debate and action or inaction on everything from equipment budgeting to troop withdrawals was often motivated, to his increasing despair and anger, more by party politics and media impact than by members' desires to protect our soldiers and ensure their success.
However embroiled he became in the trials of Washington, Gates makes clear that his heart was always in the most important theater of his tenure as secretary: the front lines. We journey with him to both war zones as he meets with active-duty troops and their commanders, awed by their courage, and also witness him greet coffin after flag-draped coffin returned to U.S. soil, heartbreakingly aware that he signed every deployment order. In frank and poignant vignettes, Gates conveys the human cost of war, and his admiration for those brave enough to undertake it when necessary.
Duty tells a powerful and deeply personal story that allows us an unprecedented look at two administrations and the wars that have defined them.
Author Notes
Robert Michael Gates (born September 25, 1943) is an American statesman and university president who served as the 22nd United States Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011. Gates served for 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and under President George H. W. Bush was Director of Central Intelligence. Gates was also an officer in the United States Air Force and during the early part of his military career, he was recruited by the CIA. After leaving the CIA, Gates became president of Texas A&M University and was a member of several corporate boards. He served as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission co-chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, that studied the lessons of the Iraq War.
Gates has won many honorary doctorates from universities, including an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Yale University; his government awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In January 2014, Gates published his autobiography, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, which quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Gates', A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, released in 2016, became an iBook bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
After years working for both the CIA and the National Security Council, Gates was president of Texas A & M when he was asked by President George W. Bush to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in 2006. He accepted, and he served in both the Bush and Obama administrations until 2011. He has written a revealing but sometimes frustrating recounting of his experiences as he attempted to manage the Pentagon and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates offers absorbing and often surprising accounts of the formation of new and sometimes successful policies to alter the course of the wars. He also describes the internal wars within each administration and his struggles to ram change through the Pentagon bureaucracy. Unfortunately, Gates shows little introspection, or questioning regarding the basic geopolitical strategy that got the U.S. into these wars. Furthermore, given his decades in Washington, Gates' pose as an outsider banging his head against entrenched political and bureaucratic interests isn't credible, especially since Gates was regarded as a savvy infighter during his earlier experience in Washington. Still, this is a useful and informative, if self-serving, memoir covering critical years in recent history.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AS I WAS READING "DUTY," probably one of the best Washington memoirs ever, I kept thinking that Robert M. Gates clearly has no desire to work in the federal government again in his life. That evidently is a fertile frame of mind in which to write a book like this one. The former defense secretary is naming names. Vice President Joe Biden? A comical "motormouth" who, though he is "simply impossible not to like," presumes to know more about counterterrorism than an experienced Special Operations general. He is "relentless . . . in attacking the integrity of the senior military leadership" and, for good measure, "has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." The former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is "hell on wheels, . . . a whirling dervish with attention-deficit disorder." Tom Donilon, President Obama's second national security adviser, is suspicious and distrustful of the uniformed military leadership to the point of stating in a meeting that it was "insubordinate" and "in revolt" against the White House. At one point in an Oval Office meeting, Donilon was so querulous about military operations that Gates contemplated walking out in anger. "It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa." One of the few members of the Obama admin- istration who comes off well is Hillary Clinton, who, in her time as secretary of state, is portrayed by Gates as consistently mature and cooperative. However, he was a bit chagrined to hear both Clinton and Obama confess to one another in a meeting that each had opposed the 2008 surge in Iraq for political reasons. "The Iraq surge worked," Clinton conceded. Historians and policy wonks will bask in the revelations Gates provides on major decisions from late 2006 to 2011, during the last part of the George W. Bush administration and the first part of the Obama administration, the span of his time at the Pentagon. The book is dotted with insider stuff reminiscent of the best of Bob Woodward's work. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney advocated bombing both Syria and Iran before leaving office. Also, President Bush, in a mid-2007 discussion of Iraq policy, turned to one of the participants and, showing some self-awareness, said, "Somebody has got to be risk-averse in this process, and it better be you, because I'm sure not." And when Gates, a lifelong Soviet expert, met face to face with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, he found himself staring not into the man's soul (as Bush believed he had) but instead into the eyes of "a stone-cold killer." For many of its readers, this chronicle will be most memorable for the dishing Gates does on the current leadership in Washington. He hates today's Congress. Seen up close, Gates asserts, it is "truly ugly" - parochial, self-interested, rude and bullying. "I was constantly amazed and infuriated at the hypocrisy of those who most stridently attacked the Defense Department for being inefficient and wasteful but would fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in defense activities in their home state or district no matter how inefficient or wasteful." The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is depicted as a small-time hack who telephones Gates to lobby, at one point, for Defense Department funding for research on irritable bowel syndrome. With wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates recalls, "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry." When Gates tried over a breakfast to describe to Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, what he saw as the facts on the ground in Iraq, "she politely made clear she wasn't interested" in reaching a bipartisan agreement. He describes Pelosi close to exploding at a White House meeting on an early decision of Obama's to keep troops in Iraq until near the end of 2011: "She drummed her fingers on the table and had a white-knuckled grip on her pencil." She looked, he says, "like she had swallowed an entire lemon." He also recalls a hearing at which Senator Patty Murray of Washington (where Boeing is a major employer) was reading from prepared notes, and says with disdain that "no one had bothered to remove the Boeing letterhead from her talking points." One person about whom he reveals very little is his ousted predecessor. Donald Rumsfeld barely appears in this account except in a few short asides, as when Gates refers to Rumsfeld's crack to a soldier about going to war with the army you have. Gates goes on to write scathingly that while Rumsfeld's observation was true, "you damn well should move as fast as possible to get the army you need." GATES IS MORE respectful of Obama, who appears here a complex figure - smart, deliberative, always civil but also a bit detached. Gates reports that Obama told him "one reason he ran for president was because he was so bored in the Senate." Obama comes off worst in his handling of the Afghan war. Gates describes the deliberations over Afghanistan policy in 2009 as a "train wreck." Emerging from that bruising process, Obama was wary of his generals, at one point asking why he was being disrespected by them and griping to Gates, "Do they think because I'm young that I don't see what they're doing?" Gates reports sitting in a meeting in the White House Situation Room and thinking unhappily that "the president doesn't trust his commander, can't stand 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." The astonishing lack of collegiality in the administration's review of Afghan war policy late in 2009 set a pattern of mistrust and suspicion that would continue to plague the White House's relations with the Pentagon. Gates in turn developed a deep distrust of Obama's staff, feeling betrayed on major promises made about the defense budget and about the process of allowing gay soldiers to serve openly in the military. At one point he angrily tells William Daley, then the White House chief of staff, "This White House's word means nothing." Over all, Gates, who has worked for six presidents, says he found the Obama White House politicized in its handling of national security, "still stuck in campaign mode a year into the presidency" - and also the most "centralized and controlling" in that area since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Gates had some strange encounters of his own with the military. In June 2007 he was discussing the state of the surge in Iraq with Gen. David Petraeus, then the American commander there, when Petraeus mused, with a small chuckle, "You know, I could make your life miserable" - presumably by asking for more troops, which would create huge political problems. Gates writes that he interpreted the comment as a threat. (He notes in an aside that years later, Obama declined to nominate Petraeus to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs because "the White House didn't trust him and was suspicious that he had political ambitions.") At another point, Petraeus was so aggressive in arguing with the president that "I came within a whisker of telling him to shut up." But Gates is doing far more than just scoring points in this revealing volume. The key to reading it is understanding that he was profoundly affected by his role in sending American soldiers overseas to fight and be killed or maimed. During his four years as defense secretary, he states twice, he wept almost every night as he signed letters of condolence and then lay in bed and meditated on the dead and wounded. He was angry and disappointed with White House officials and members of Congress who appeared to him to put political gain ahead of the interests of American soldiers. Fitingly, he concludes the book by revealing that he has requested to be buried in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of many of those we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point Gates angrily exclaimed, 'This White House's word means nothing.' THOMAS E. RICKS is a senior adviser on national security at the New America Foundation and the author of five books on the United States military, most recently "The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today."
Choice Review
Titillating headlines with embarrassing revelations about President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Joe Biden aside, this is a serious, thoughtful, illuminating, and valuable insider account of the final years of the George W. Bush administration and early years of the Obama presidency. Gates, a mandarin who has served eight presidents, gives fairly high marks to the two recent presidents he served as secretary of defense. He has some choice and quite critical words for the US Congress ("prickly to deal with," "truly ugly," etc.), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whom he chides for his "arrogance and outlandish ambition"), and Vladimir Putin (who has a "lust for power"). Gates himself comes off as a paradoxical figure: he found public service to be the most gratifying part of his life yet repeatedly expresses his frustrations and writes of how much he detested the job of secretary of defense. What comes through very clearly is just how deep and genuine Gates's concern for the troops he and presidents sent into combat is. Gates holds little back in this revealing memoir. --Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount University
Library Journal Review
Gates served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011 under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. With this book he delivers a candid yet balanced portrait of his tenure running the department. He's no fan of the faction-ridden Pentagon's spendthrift ways and calls Congress largely incompetent-as to why he remained in his job despite the drawbacks, Gates points to his efforts to provide better conditions for military personnel. From pushing for faster response time in the field to spending more on IED--resistant vehicles, Gates's focus remained on the ordinary service members under his command. Narrator George Newbern steers the listener through the internecine squabbling of politics with a polished, never boring, tempo. Verdict For political wonks of all stripes. ["Highly recommended for all readers, especially those interested in the U.S. presidency, public policy, and national security," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 2/7/14.]-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Author's Note This is a book about my more than four and a half years at war. It is, of course, principally about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial victories in both countries were squandered by mistakes, shortsighted- ness, and conflict in the field as well as in Washington, leading to long, brutal campaigns to avert strategic defeat. It is about the war against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, those responsible for our national tragedy on September 11, 2001. But this book is also about my political war with Congress every day I was in office and the dramatic contrast between my public respect, bipartisanship, and calm, and my private frustration, disgust, and anger. There were also political wars with the White House, often with the White House staff, occasionally with the presidents themselves--more with President Obama than with President Bush. And finally, there was my bureaucratic war with the Department of Defense and the military services, aimed at transforming a department organized to plan for war into one that could wage war, changing the military forces we had into the military forces we needed to succeed. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were, respectively, the seventh and eighth presidents I worked for. I knew neither man when I began working for them, and they did not know me. To my astonishment (and consternation), I became the only secretary of defense in history to be asked to remain in the position by a newly elected president, let alone one of a different party. I came to the job in mid-December 2006 with the sole purpose of doing what I could to salvage the mission in Iraq from disaster. I had no idea how to do it, nor any idea of the sweeping changes I would need to make at the Pentagon to get it done. And I had no idea how dramatically and how far my mission over time would expand beyond Iraq. As I look back, there is a parallel theme to my four and a half years at war: love. By that I mean the love--there is no other word for it--I came to feel for the troops, and the overwhelming sense of personal responsibility I developed for them. So much so that it would shape some of my most significant decisions and positions. Toward the end of my time in office, I could barely speak to them or about them without being overcome with emotion. Early in my fifth year, I came to believe my determination to protect them--in the wars we were in and from new wars--was clouding my judgment and diminishing my usefulness to the president, and thus it played a part in my decision to retire. I make no pretense that this book is a complete, much less definitive, history of the period from 2006 to 2011. It is simply my personal story about being secretary of defense during those turbulent, difficult years. Chapter 1 Summoned to Duty I had become president of Texas A&M University in August 2002, and by October 2006 I was well into my fifth year. I was very happy there, and many--but not all--Aggies believed I was making significant improvements in nearly all aspects of the university (except football). I had originally committed to staying five years but agreed to extend that to seven years--summer 2009. Then my wife, Becky, and I would finally return to our home in the Pacific Northwest. The week of October 15, 2006, the week that would change my life, started out routinely with several meetings. Then I took to the road, ending up in Des Moines, Iowa, where I was to give a speech on Friday, the twentieth. Just past one p.m. that day I received an e-mail from my secretary, Sandy Crawford, saying that President Bush's national security adviser, Steve Hadley, wanted to speak to me on the phone within an hour or two. Hadley's assistant was "quite insistent" that the message be passed to me. I told Sandy to inform the assistant I would return Steve's call on Saturday morning. I had no idea why Steve was calling, but I had spent nearly nine years at the White House on the National Security Council (NSC) staff under four presidents, and I knew that the West Wing often demanded instant responses that were rarely necessary. Hadley and I had first met on the NSC staff in the summer of 1974 and had remained friends, though we were in contact infrequently. In January 2005, Steve--who had succeeded Condoleezza Rice as George W. Bush's national security adviser for the second Bush term--had asked me to consider becoming the first director of national intelligence (DNI), a job created by legislation the previous year, legislation--and a job--that I had vigorously opposed as unworkable. The president and his senior advisers wanted me to make it work. I met with Hadley and White House chief of staff Andy Card in Washington on Monday of inauguration week. We had very detailed conversations about authorities and presidential empowerment of the DNI, and by the weekend they and I both thought I would agree to take the job. I was to call Card at Camp David with my final answer the following Monday. Over the weekend I wrestled with the decision. On Saturday night, lying awake in bed, I told Becky she could make this decision really easy for me; I knew how much she loved being at Texas A&M, and all she had to say was that she didn't want to return to Washington, D.C. Instead, she said, "We have to do what you have to do." I said, "Thanks a lot." Late Sunday night I walked around the campus smoking a cigar. As I walked past familiar landmarks and buildings, I decided I could not leave Texas A&M; there was still too much I wanted to accomplish there. And I really, really did not want to go back into government. I called Andy the next morning and told him to tell the president I would not take the job. He seemed stunned. He must have felt that I had led them on, which I regretted, but it really had been a last-minute decision. There was one consolation. I told Becky, "We are safe now--the Bush administration will never ask me to do another thing." I was wrong. At nine a.m. on Saturday--now nearly two years later--I returned Steve's call as promised. He wasted no time in posing a simple, direct question: "If the president asked you to become secretary of defense, would you accept?" Stunned, I gave him an equally simple, direct answer without hesitation: "We have kids dying in two wars. If the president thinks I can help, I have no choice but to say yes. It's my duty." The troops out there were doing their duty--how could I not do mine? That said, I sat at my desk frozen. My God, what have I done? I kept thinking to myself. I knew that after nearly forty years of marriage, Becky would support my decision and all that it meant for our two children as well, but I was still terrified to tell her. Josh Bolten, a former director of the Office of Management and Bud- get, who had replaced Card as White House chief of staff earlier that year, called a few days later to reassure himself of my intentions. He asked if I had any ethical issues that could be a problem, like hiring illegal immigrants as nannies or housekeepers. I decided to have some fun at his expense and told him we had a noncitizen housekeeper. Before he began to hyperventilate, I told him she had a green card and was well along the path to citizenship. I don't think he appreciated my sense of humor. Bolten then said a private interview had to be arranged for me with the president. I told him I thought I could slip into Washington for dinner on Sunday, November 12, without attracting attention. The president wanted to move faster. Josh e-mailed me on October 31 to see if I could drive to the Bush ranch near Crawford, Texas, for an early morning meeting on Sunday, November 5. The arrangements set up by deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin were very precise. He e-mailed me that I should meet him at eight-thirty a.m. in McGregor, Texas, about twenty minutes from the ranch. I would find him in the parking lot at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store, sitting in a white Dodge Durango parked to the right of the entrance. Dress would be "ranch casual"--sport shirt and khakis or jeans. I look back with amusement that my job interviews with both President Bush and President-elect Obama involved more cloak-and- dagger clandestinity than most of my decades-long career in the CIA. I did not tell anyone other than Becky what was going on except for the president's father, former president George H. W. Bush (the forty- first president, Bush 41), with whom I wanted to consult. He was the reason I had come to Texas A&M in the first place, in 1999, to be the interim dean of the George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service. What was supposed to be a nine-month stint of a few days a month became two years and led directly to my becoming president of Texas A&M. Bush was sorry I would be leaving the university, but he knew the country had to come first. I also think he was happy that his son had reached out to me. I left my house just before five a.m. to head for my interview with the president. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought a blazer and slacks more appropriate for a meeting with the president than a sport shirt and jeans. Starbucks wasn't open that early, so I was pretty bleary-eyed for the first part of the two-and-a-half-hour drive. I was thinking the entire way about questions to ask and answers to give, the magnitude of the challenge, how life for both my wife and me would change, and how to approach the job of secretary of defense. I do not recall feeling any self- doubt on the drive to the ranch that morning, perhaps a reflection of just how little I understood the direness of the situation. I knew, however, that I had one thing going for me: most people had low expectations about what could be done to turn around the war in Iraq and change the climate in Washington. During the drive I also thought about how strange it would be to join this administration. I had never had a conversation with the president. I had played no role in the 2000 campaign and was never asked to do so. I had virtually no contact with anyone in the administration during Bush's first term and was dismayed when my closest friend and mentor, Brent Scowcroft, wound up in a public dispute with the administration over his opposition to going to war in Iraq. While I had known Rice, Hadley, Dick Cheney, and others for years, I was joining a group of people who had been through 9/11 together, who had been fighting two wars, and who had six years of being on the same team. I would be the outsider. I made my clandestine rendezvous in McGregor with no problem. As we approached the ranch, I could see the difference in security as a result of 9/11. I had visited other presidential residences, and they were always heavily guarded, but nothing like this. I was dropped off at the president's office, a spacious but simply decorated one-story building some distance from the main house. It has a large office and sitting room for the president, and a kitchen and a couple of offices with computers for staff. I arrived before the president (always good protocol), got a cup of coffee (finally), and looked around the place until the president arrived a few minutes later, promptly at nine. (He was always exceptionally punctual.) He had excused himself from a large group of friends and family celebrating his wife Laura's sixtieth birthday. We exchanged pleasantries, and he got down to business. He talked first about the importance of success in Iraq, saying that the current strategy wasn't working and that a new one was needed. He told me he was thinking seriously about a significant surge in U.S. forces to restore security in Baghdad. He asked me about my experience on the Iraq Study Group (more later) and what I thought about such a surge. He said he thought we needed new military leadership in Iraq and was taking a close look at Lieutenant General David Petraeus. Iraq was obviously upper-most on his mind, but he also talked about his concerns in Afghanistan; a number of other national security challenges, including Iran; the climate in Washington; and his way of doing business, including an insistence on candor from his senior advisers. When he said specifically that his father did not know about our meeting, I felt a bit uncomfortable, but I did not disabuse him. It was clear he had not consulted his father about this possible appointment and that, contrary to later speculation, Bush 41 had no role in it.... Continued in DUTY: Memoirs of a Secretary at War... Excerpted from Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. ix |
Chapter 1 Summoned to Duty | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq | p. 25 |
Chapter 3 Mending Fences, Finding Allies | p. 80 |
Chapter 4 Waging War on the Pentagon | p. 115 |
Chapter 5 Beyond Iraq: A Complicated World | p. 149 |
Chapter 6 Good War, Bad War | p. 197 |
Chapter 7 One Damn Thing After Another | p. 239 |
Chapter 8 Transition | p. 258 |
Chapter 9 New Team, New Agenda, Old Secretary | p. 287 |
Chapter 10 Afghanistan: A House Divided | p. 335 |
Chapter 11 Difficult Foes, Difficult Friends | p. 387 |
Chapter 12 Meanwhile, Back in Washington | p. 432 |
Chapter 13 War, War ... and Revolution | p. 468 |
Chapter 14 At War to the Last Day | p. 524 |
Chapter 15 Reflections | p. 566 |
Acknowledgments | p. 597 |
Index | p. 599 |