The Wars Robert Gates Got Wrong by Jonathan Alter, The New Yorker
Robert Gates’s well-reviewed memoir of his years as Defense Secretary, “Duty,” débuted this week at number one on the New York Times best-sellers list, and it’s not hard to see why. Besides being a highly respected member of both the Bush and Obama cabinets, Gates appeals to readers on both sides of the great partisan divide, though more so to Republicans (his tribe), who buy more political books than Democrats do. The sincerity of his love for the troops, and the patriotism that led him to stay on and work for President Obama, give the book heart. It helps that “Duty” is bracing and vivid and made headlines for its trashing of Congress and its tart depictions of major players, especially Vice President Joe Biden. The flap over whether it was right for Gates to publish while the President he served remained in office was ahistorical: government officials have been doing so at least since Raymond Moley wrote “After Seven Years,” in 1939. Franklin Roosevelt described Moley’s book as “kiss ass and tell.”
Gates was not a kiss-ass but one of the shrewdest public servants of his generation—which helps to explain why his many failures and missed calls have been all but air-brushed out of accounts of his career. The best-known part of “Duty” comes when Gates writes that Biden was “simply impossible not to like” but “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” As it happens, this verdict applies rather precisely to Gates himself…