In Command (Published 2014) (2024)

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 administration 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 2007 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.”