Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
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The Democrats on the committee grew uncomfortable about the lack of decorum. A couple of them spoke out about the need for order in the room. Then Senator Tom Harkin asked Pete about his “hurtful” views on gays in the military. (Pete had given an interview the previous March expressing his personal view that homosexual conduct was immoral.) Pace repeated his views—it was, after all, his last hearing, and he had nothing to lose. That did it. The room went berserk. Byrd had completely lost control of the hearing and realized it. He pounded the gavel so hard, I thought he might collapse. He then said the hearing was adjourned, was quickly reminded by aides to “suspend” it, and then ordered the room cleared of all spectators. As the Capitol police went about their work, Republican Senator Judd Gregg walked out, saying to Harkin, “You should be ashamed.” Harkin jumped up out of his chair and shouted back, “I don’t need any lectures from you.”
I thought the whole thing had been comical—Saturday Night Live meets Congress. I didn’t dare turn around to look at the crowd, or I would have burst out laughing. Politically, it was so over the top, it had been the Senate version of MoveOn.org’s newspaper ad. I told my staff the next day that it had been “a civil hearing … aside from the riot.” The hearing seemed a fitting culmination to my 2007 battle with Congress over the Iraq War. Sadly, one of the political casualties of both of those wars was sitting next to me at the witness table for the last time.
CHAPTER 3
Mending Fences, Finding Allies
I could not make headway on implementing the Iraq strategy without extinguishing—or at least controlling—a number of political and bureaucratic brushfires: with the senior military, Congress, the media, and other agencies, including the State Department and the intelligence community. Figuring out how to do this required a lot of time and energy during my first months as secretary. As you can imagine, I was also determined to establish a special bond with our troops, especially those on the front lines. How could I communicate to them and give them confidence that the secretary of defense personally had their backs and would be their advocate and protector in the Pentagon and in Washington?
In Washington, nearly every day began with a conference call at 6:45 a.m. with Hadley and Rice. Then I would usually spend endless time in meetings. In the White House, there were meetings with just Steve and Condi; meetings with the two of them and Cheney; meetings with that cast plus the director of national intelligence, the director of CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; “principals” meetings with a cast of thousands, all of them taking notes (I was usually pretty quiet in those meetings); and meetings with the president. All those dealt just with routine business. If there was a crisis, more meetings were added. It was frustrating how often we would cover the same ground on the same issue, huge quantities of time consumed in striving to establish a consensus view. Some of the sessions were a waste of time; moreover, they often failed to highlight for the president that under a veneer of agreement, there were significant differences of view. As I would often say, sometimes we chewed the cud so long that it lost any taste whatsoever. I drank a huge amount of coffee, and the only saving grace of late-afternoon meetings at the White House was homemade tortilla chips with cheese and salsa dips. Still, all too often I found myself bored and impatient.
My meeting “problem” was even worse at the Pentagon. My days there began with a “day brief” in my office to acquaint me with what had happened overnight and the bureaucratic challenges ahead that day; the day ended with a “wrap up” at the same Jefferson Davis round table, where we surveyed the bureaucratic battle damage of the day. That table was one of three antiques in the office. (I would joke with visitors, four, if you included me.) There was also an elaborately carved long table behind my desk that had belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. My huge partners desk had been General John J. Pershing’s, spirited away from the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to the Pentagon by the second secretary of defense, a political hack named Louis Johnson. The rest of the office was in “late government” style, that is, brown leather chairs and a sofa, exquisitely accented by stark fluorescent lighting. Two portraits were on the wall behind my desk: my personal heroes, General George C. Marshall and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Robert Rangel conducted both the morning and evening meetings, which included just the two of us and my senior military assistant. Rangel had the best poker face of anyone I’ve ever known, so when he started in, I had no idea whether he was going to give me good news (quite rare) or set my hair on fire with some disaster (routinely). The rest of the day was filled with secure videoconferences with commanders in Baghdad and Afghanistan; meetings with my foreign counterparts (sometimes two or three a day); meetings on the budget or various weapons programs; meetings on civilian and military personnel; meetings on service-specific issues; meetings on issues of special concern to me that I wanted to track closely (usually having to do with the troops in the field). I usually ate lunch alone so I didn’t have to talk to anyone for at least forty-five minutes during the day. For a mental break, I would usually do the daily New York Times crossword puzzle while I ate my sandwich. In the mix were all the calls and meetings with members of Congress and congressional hearings. Pace and subsequently Mike Mullen sat in with me on many, if not most, of these meetings. PowerPoint slides were the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them. As CIA director, I had been able to ban slides from briefings except for maps or charts; as secretary, I was an abject failure at even reducing the number of slides in a briefing. At the CIA, I was able on most days to protect an hour or so a day to work in solitude on my strategies for change and moving forward. No such luck at Defense. One tactic of bureaucracies is to so fill the boss’s time with meetings that he or she has no time to meddle in their affairs or create problems for them. I am tempted to say that the Pentagon crew did this successfully, except that many of my meetings were those I had insisted upon in order to monitor progress on matters important to me or to put pressure on senior leaders to intensify their efforts in accomplishing my priorities.
In truth, nothing can prepare you for being secretary of defense, especially during wartime. The size of the place and its budget dwarf everything else in government. As I quickly learned from 535 members of Congress, its programs and spending reach deeply into every state and nearly every community. Vast industries and many local economies are dependent on decisions made in the Pentagon every day. The secretary of defense is second only to the president in the military chain of command (neither the vice president nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in the chain at all), and any order to American forces worldwide goes from the president to the secretary directly to the combatant commanders (although as a practical matter and a courtesy, I routinely asked the chairman to convey such orders). More important than any of the meetings, the secretary makes life-and-death decisions every day—and not just for American military forces. Since 9/11, the president has delegated to the secretary the authority to shoot down any commercial airliner he, the secretary, deems to be a threat to the United States. The secretary can also order missiles fired to shoot down an incoming missile. He can move bombers and aircraft carriers and troops. And every week he makes the decisions on which units will deploy to the war front and around the world. It is an unimaginably powerful position.
At the same time, no secretary of defense who wants to remain in the job can ever forget that he works for the president and serves only at the pleasure of the president. To be successful, the secretary must build a strong relationship of mutual trust with him and also with the White House chief of staff and other senior executive staff members—and, most certainly, with the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The secretary of defense is also part of a broader national security team—the vice president, secretary of state, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, and director of the CIA among them, and the part he chooses to pl
ay on that team can have a big impact on the nation’s, and a president’s, success. Further, money fuels the Defense machine, and because every dime must be approved by Congress, the secretary needs to have the savvy and political skill to win the support of members and to overcome their parochial interests for the greater good of the country.
In short, despite the tremendous power inherent in the job, the secretary of defense must deal with multiple competing interests both within and outside the Pentagon and work with many constituencies, without whose support he cannot be successful. He is constantly fighting on multiple fronts, and much of every day is spent developing strategies to win fights large and small—and deciding which fights to avoid or concede. The challenge was winning the fights that mattered while sustaining and even strengthening relationships, while reducing the number of enemies and maximizing the number of allies.
MAKING PEACE AT HOME
Before becoming secretary, I had heard and read that Defense’s relationships with Congress, the media, and other agencies of the government—and the national security team—were in trouble. I had also heard rumors of real problems between the civilian leadership and senior military officers. Then I arrived in Washington for confirmation and really got an earful about how bad things were—from members of Congress in both parties, from reporters I had known a long time, from friends in government, and from a number of old associates with close ties to many in the Pentagon, both civilian and military. To this day, I don’t know how much of this gossip was simply animosity toward Rumsfeld, how much was institutional ax-grinding, and how much was just sucking up to the new guy by trashing his predecessor (an old habit and a highly refined skill in Washington). But I also knew that in Washington, perception is reality, and that I had to tackle the reality that the Department of Defense had alienated just about everyone in town and that I had a lot of fences to mend. It would be critical to success in Iraq.
I started closest to home, in the executive corridors of the Pentagon itself, the E-Ring, the outermost corridor in the building and home to the most senior military and civilian officials. An hour after I was sworn in on December 18, I held my first staff meeting with the senior civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I wanted them to know right away how I intended to operate. This is part of what I said:
First, contrary to rumors in the press, I am not planning any personnel changes and I am not bringing anyone in with me. I have every confidence in you and in your professionalism. The last thing anyone needs, in the seventh year of an administration and in the midst of two wars, is a bunch of neophytes surrounding a neophyte secretary.
Second, decision making. I will involve you, and I will listen to you. I expect your candor, and I want to know when you are in disagreement with each other or with me. I want to know if you think I’m about to make a mistake—or have made one. I’d rather be warned about land mines than step on one. Above all, I respect what each of you does and your expertise. I will need your help over what I expect will be a tough two years.
Third, on tough issues, I’m not much interested in consensus. I want disagreements sharpened so I can make decisions on the real issues and not some extraneous turf or bureaucratic issue. I’m not afraid to make decisions, and obviously, neither is the president.
Fourth, on style, you will find me fairly informal and fairly irreverent. I prefer conversation to death by PowerPoint. I hope you will look for opportunities for me to interact with soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen—and opportunities for me to do my part to communicate our pride in them and gratitude for their service.
Fifth, we will succeed or fail depending on whether we operate as a unified team or separate fiefdoms. I will work in an open, transparent manner. I will make no decision affecting your area of responsibility without you having ample opportunity to weigh in. But once decisions are made, we must speak with one voice to the Congress, the media, and the outside world.
Sixth, no policy can be sustained without bipartisan congressional support. This will be a challenge with the change of majority party. But I want this department to be seen as eager to work with Congress and responsive to their requests insofar as we can be. The media is our channel of communication to the American people and the world. We need to work with them in a nonhostile, nonantagonistic way (however painful it is and will be at times).
Seventh, my priorities are clear: Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, and transformation. Much else is going on. I want to continue the division of labor with Deputy Secretary [Gordon] England that existed under Secretary Rumsfeld—with all the really hard stuff going to Gordon! He and I will be joined at the hip. I expect to have the same close relationship with the chairman and the chiefs.
I then told them that General Pace, undersecretary for policy Eric Edelman, and I would be leaving the next day, the nineteenth, for Iraq, would return on the twenty-second and report to the president on the twenty-third. One important reason I took Pace and Edelman with me was to signal to civilians and military alike in the Pentagon that the chairman was going to be a close partner in my leadership of the department, and that the military needed to recognize that my civilian senior staff would play a critical role as well.
I repeated these points and expanded upon them in a meeting with the entire Defense leadership, civilian and military—including the combatant commanders from around the world—on January 24. I told them I was grateful Gordon had decided to stay on as deputy and that he would be the department’s chief operating officer. I made clear to the senior military officers that Eric would have a key role in representing their interests in interagency meetings and at the White House and they should regard him as an asset and work closely with him.
I emphasized that when dealing with Congress, I never wanted to surprise our oversight committees, and I wanted to pick our fights with the Hill very carefully, saving our ammunition for those that really mattered. I encouraged anyone in the department who had special relationships or friendships with members of Congress to cultivate them. I felt that would benefit all of us.
Meetings and conferences, I said, should be more interactive. A briefing should be the starting point for discussion and debate, not a one-way transmission belt. If they had to use PowerPoint, I begged them to use it sparingly, just to begin the discussion or illustrate a point. I asked my new colleagues to construct a briefing while asking themselves how it would move us forward, and what the follow-on action might be. (Again, changing the Pentagon’s approach to briefings was a singular failure on my part. I was not just defeated—I was routed.)
I told them I had decided to make a change in the selection process for flag-rank officers—generals and admirals. Rumsfeld had centralized this in the secretary’s office. I said I would continue to review all positions and promotions at the four-star level and some at the three-star level, but otherwise I was returning the process to the services and the Joint Staff. I said that I still wanted the same things Rumsfeld had been looking for—joint service experience, operational experience, bright younger officers, and those willing to reexamine old ways of doing business. And I would be checking the services’ homework.
I decided to adopt the same strategy with the military leadership I had used with the faculty at Texas A&M and with the intelligence professionals when I was running the CIA: I would treat them with the respect deserved by professionals. I would approach decisions by seeking out their ideas and views, by giving them serious consideration, and by being open and transparent. Everyone would know the options under consideration, and everyone would have a chance to weigh in with his or her point of view (more than once if they thought it important), but I often would not reveal my own views until the end of a decision-making process. I never fooled myself into believing that I was the smartest person in the room. As I had told Colin Powell, I am a very good listener and only through the candor and honesty of both my civilian and military advisers could I work my way through complex issues and try to make the bes
t possible decision. In everything I did as secretary, I sought the advice of others—though I did not always heed it—and depended upon others for effective implementation of my decisions.
Good arguments could get me to change my mind. Early on I had to decide on a new U.S. commander in Korea. The position had been filled for nearly sixty years by Army generals. I thought the time had come to rotate the position to another military service. Because our Air Force and Navy would play a big role in any conflict on the Korean peninsula, I decided to appoint an Air Force officer as the new commander. Army chief of staff George Casey balked and made a strong case that the timing for the change wasn’t good, especially as we were negotiating with South Korea on a transfer of operational control of forces from the United States to the Koreans. He was right, so I recommended that the president nominate another Army general.
As I signaled at my first staff meeting, I worked hard from the beginning to make the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff my partner within the framework of the chain of command, consulting with him on virtually everything and making certain, through him, that the service chiefs and commanders all knew I wanted and expected candor and their best advice.