The nondescript Gates home is down by the water, on a lip of wetland that’s prime territory for largemouth bass. His study, a couple of dozen paces uphill from there, is really a fancy cabin that looks and feels like a mini-presidential library. It was built for a man who served eight presidents (LBJ to Obama, minus Clinton).
Having retired from government two years ago, the secretary is now one relic in a sea of mementos. He has ensconced himself in history books, in positive affirmations of his duties, underneath a cathedral ceiling of cedar.
The subtitle of “Duty” is “Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” though “Anxieties” might have been a better plural noun. In his desk at the Pentagon he kept a hand-copied passage from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals,” in which she describes Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, racked with sobs and wailing, repeatedly, “God help me to do my duty!” after making a decision that would culminate in a soldier’s death.
Robert Gates says he’s at peace. He wears his duty, though, like a millstone around his neck.
If a 600-page book about How doesn’t quite get at Why, then a two-hour conversation in his study might.
It looks like someone beat him up.
Robert Gates’s head seems to have manifested the turmoil described in his book. Two Wednesdays ago, he tripped on a hallway rug and fell. He fractured his first vertebra. The neck brace has to stay on for a couple of months.
A small dark-red gash has scabbed over beneath his fine silver hair. He’ll recover from the fall soon enough, but recovering from the reaction to his book might take longer.
After some contents of “Duty” were reported last week (its publication date is Tuesday), the media used the words “bombshell” and “White House betrayal.” Former Obama staffers took to cable news to dismiss a book they had probably not yet read in full.
Columnists excoriated Gates for not raising such hell while he was still in office. The White House defended Vice President Joe Biden, whom Gates writes has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
” Fox News declared that the book “slams Obama’s leadership style,” though Gates writes that the president is “first-rate in both intellect and temperament” and that his problem-solving nature was Lincoln-like.
”People will use different parts of the book for their own purposes, and that’s just inevitable no matter what you write,” Gates says last week, in his swivel chair. He is wearing light-blue dad jeans and a blue striped dress shirt with his reading glasses folded in the breast pocket.
“There are no evil people in this book,” he says, his voice soft and creaky. “There are no villains. And certainly not the two presidents. . .And I think if people read the whole book, as opposed to cherry-picking sentences, then I think it’s pretty hard to say that I vilify anybody.”
And yet despite Gates’s clear respect for President Barack Obama, “Duty” implies that the president doubted the strategy to surge in Afghanistan but sent troops into combat anyway. Isn’t that a rather serious charge to level against the commander-in-chief?
”That’s a tough question, and I guess the distinction I would draw is that I think he saw Afghanistan as important,” Gates says. “But I came to have the feeling — because it wasn’t there all along — that he had real reservations about the strategy.”
But Obama, in the end, acted “courageously and boldly” when he ordered the surge, Gates writes, and showed that “national interest had trumped politics.”
The man who wrote “Duty,” however, is a man at war with himself, or at war with the role he had to play in Washington.
“I did not enjoy being secretary of defence” is the first sentence in Chapter 8.
Four pages later, excerpting an email: “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”
Didn’t such animus for the position require him to resign from it?
“I think what I detested was the constant conflict in Washington — of where something was so obviously the right thing to do, and for it to be such a big fight,” Gates says.
“That was the part of the job that I detested. People would often ask me, ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ and my response was always, ‘How can you be the secretary of defence during wartime and enjoy yourself?’ The hospitals, the funerals, the condolence letters.
Seeing the kids on the front lines. Anybody who is a secretary of defence during war and says they’re enjoying the job, that’s the person to whom I’d say, ‘You better step down!’ ”
There is a villain in “Duty” and it is politics, the straw man of choice for any official who wants to be perceived as above it all. It was politics, after all, that helped derail Gates’s first nomination for CIA director in 1987 during the Iran-contra scandal.
Gates pinches his raw nerves and picks at the scabs. The result is a messy first draft of history that foreshadows a grim future.
—By arrangement with Washington Post/Bloomberg News Service