A Man Who Is Not Going Back: Robert Gates’ Memoirs

The book authored by the former secretary of defense under the governments of Bush and Obama came out on Tuesday, Jan. 14, but a wave of controversy connected with it managed to overtake it and arrive more than a week before the publication date. “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” was hailed as a crushing critique of the Obama administration — to some, a potentially dangerous one. Is criticizing an administration that is still at the helm politically OK? people asked. Especially since the Afghan conflict — one of the reasons for the controversy — is still going on. For the Democrats, it is a strategic faux pas; for the Republicans, a betrayal of national interests. But one thing is certain — Bob Gates does not seek allies anymore; he does not give a hoot about what those on the right or those on the left will tell him. He certainly will not get back to Washington.

“Duty” is deliberate bridge-burning. It looks as if Gates had begun writing the diary of his term in duty shortly after the resignation in July 2011. He wrought the anger upon it that had been rising in him since 2006, when he took the office of U.S. defense secretary under the Bush administration, relieving Donald Rumsfeld. We get a confession that by no means resembles the stylish, boring and politically calculated confessions of wax figures from Washington. Gates offers us a rare commodity: Truth that is hasty, subjective, bitter and brimming with inconsistencies. The main objection to that book is the fact that Gates had not waited a couple of years — until the end of the Obama administration, to see whether Hillary Clinton will become the president or not, and until Biden makes his next political move and lurks around in a safe position. However, for an ordinary reader, the fact that Gates did not wait so long proves to be the strongest point of this book. This is the first time that anyone so high-ranked in the American politics has written about it so honestly.

Because the 70-year-old Gates is not going back to Russia, he can write that Putin has the eyes of a cold-blooded killer. Because he is not going back to Washington, he can tell us that he viewed Bush’s solutions, Iraq and Guantanamo, as anachronistic — that Dick Cheney has always been for war, be it Iraq or Libya, because for him war is a solution to everything. That it is impossible not to like Biden, although he is notoriously wrong about everything that has anything to do with foreign policy. That you cannot do anything in Washington and the level of bureaucracy in the Obama administration is just unbearable. That it is a tragedy for Benjamin Netanyahu to have an effect upon the American politics. That deliberating the intervention in Libya almost forced Gates to resign.

The media focused on a couple of controversial commentaries: Obama had had doubts about his strategy regarding Afghanistan; he did not believe in the “mission,” even when in 2009 he sent an additional 17,000 of “our men and women” there; he cannot stand the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and he does not trust his own generals; Clinton has not really ever been against the war in Iraq, and her voice was not only a political move in the 2008 campaign; the U.S. Congress is just a bunch of insular, egotistical deadbeats. Basically, there is not anything we could not have known prior to this book. One has to strain themselves really hard not to see that the Afghan War is not Obama’s war or that presidential campaigns are one big load of nonsense. However — according to The Wall Street Journal and those who make up the political world of Washington — Gates committed an indiscretion and besmirched his, so far, impeccable reputation.

Bob Gates has long enjoyed a reputation of “Buddha at the top.” It seemed that he was unflappable. A convinced Republican, he became famous as a man trying to reach a compromise for the two parties. The soldiers’ fate in Iraq and Afghanistan was most important to him. As he himself concedes, it was the deepening feelings and care for “our men and women” at the front that made him resign from his post in 2011. He could not keep the appearance of objectivity, he confesses. Under the mask of “Buddha at the top” were hidden: constant frustration, the fright at the government’s inertia and an ever-appearing desire to let it all go and quit — to leave the D.C. area forever. Today Gates lives in the wilderness, somewhere near Seattle. The sole criterion for choosing this place was: as far away as possible from Washington. He succeeded. As journalists reviewing his memoirs unanimously agree, the former secretary of defense saw to it that no politician will ever ask him for any mutual cooperation.

The fragment of his book that raised most of the ironical comments concerns the meeting on the matter of the potential conflict between Israel and Iran. “I didn’t like the way the president ended this meeting,” writes Gates. “He said to his closest advisers: ‘Apropos of those who are writing their diaries at this very moment, I haven’t made any decision on the matter of Israel and Iran. Joe [Biden] is my witness.’ I felt offended by the president’s suspicion that anyone of us could ever write anything about such sensitive issues.” Yes, exactly such a sentence, The Wall Street Journal tells us, can we find on the 393 page of his memoirs.

So “Duty” is not really consistent. One the one hand, Gates tells us how much he hated his job, but, on the other hand, he emphasizes that the position of defense secretary was the biggest honor of his life and that he would like to be buried in the 60 section of Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, where many of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are already buried. It is thanks to these painful and personal contradictions that this book has so complicated and convincingly honest character. Thanks to him, we get a full — if somewhat subjective and emotionally affected — picture of Washington.

Despite some critical remarks directed at the president, we get to know that, according to Gates, Obama is a very honest man — a man who can make tough decisions that he knows will not make him more popular within the ranks of his own party; that one can cooperate with Mrs. Clinton, that she possesses a phenomenal sense of humor and she would make a great president. All in all, all those who will actually open this book will quickly realize that Gates does not condemn either Bush or Obama; he just does not present us with a black and white view of the situation. He gives us something much more valuable — insights of an insider, from whose perspective one can observe all shades of grey.

Regardless of how we judge Bob Gates, who ultimately made it through all the rungs of career in Washington with a grace of ballerina (from a soldier in the U.S. Air Force, to the head of the CIA, to the position of secretary of defense under the governments of the last two presidents of the U.S.), his book is without precedent. The hasty lynch on it in Washington is caused mainly by fear; not many really had enough time to sit down and read the whole book.

It is the fear of those who are still playing the game, which dealings Gates decided to disclose.

He should have waited, as most politicians claim, among them another military legend of America, John McCain.

But Gates did not want to wait. He had hoped that his book will prove politically useful to us ordinary readers, now that he is gone and will not be back.

*Editor’s Note: The quotations in this piece, accurately translated, could not be verified.