Bob Woodward, Washington Post
Posted: Wednesday, January 8, 2014, 2:01 AMLeveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was "skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail," Gates writes in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.
Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and others, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. "I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Gates writes.
As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghan war as a necessary response to the 9/11 attacks, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates' highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options.
Gates' criticism is even more surprising - some might say contradictory - because toward the end of Duty, he says of Obama's chief Afghan policies: "I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions."
The sometimes bitter tone in Gates' 594-page account contrasts sharply with the even-tempered image he cultivated during his years of government service. That image endured through his nearly five years in the Pentagon's top job, beginning in George W. Bush's second term and continuing after Obama asked Gates, a Republican, to remain in the post. In Duty, Gates describes his outwardly calm demeanor as a facade. Underneath, he writes, he was frequently "seething" and "running out of patience on multiple fronts."
The book, published by Knopf, is scheduled for release next Tuesday.
Gates writes about Obama with an ambivalence that he does not resolve, praising him as "a man of personal integrity" even as he faults his leadership. He calls the president's decision to order Navy SEALs to raid a house in Pakistan believed to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden "one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House."
Though the book simmers with disappointment in Obama, it reflects outright contempt for Vice President Biden and others.
He accuses Biden of "poisoning the well" against the military leadership and calls the vice president "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."
Tuesday afternoon, the White House, while praising Gates' years of government service and wishing him well, pushed back against the criticism of Biden. Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said that the vice president had been a leading statesman who had advanced U.S. leadership abroad and that the president "relies on his good counsel every day."
Gates acknowledges his own ambiguous feelings about the Iraq and Afghan wars. He writes that he does not know what he would have recommended if he had been asked his opinion on Bush's 2003 decision to invade Iraq.
Three years later, Bush recruited Gates to take on the defense job. The first half of Duty covers those final two years in the Bush administration. Gates reveals some disagreements from that period, but none as fundamental or as personal as those with Obama and his aides in the book's second half.
"All too early in the [Obama] administration," he writes, "suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials - including the president and vice president - became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders."
Gates acknowledges he did not reveal his dismay. "I never confronted Obama directly over what I . . . saw as the president's determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House 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."
Gates offers a catalog of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls "remarkable."
He writes: "Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary.. . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying."
Earlier in the book, he describes Hillary Clinton in the sort of glowing terms that might be used in a political endorsement.
Gates often found himself tempted to quit because of the treatment he received from members of Congress. He says that in private the lawmakers could be reasonable. "But when they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf," he says.
At Obama's urging, Gates agreed to stay until mid-2011. He later joined a consulting firm with two of Bush's closest foreign-policy advisers - former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser during Bush's second term. The firm is called RiceHadleyGates. In October, he became president-elect of the Boy Scouts of America.
This article contains information from the Associated Press.
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