After my initial months in the job, Gordon England gave me a small countdown clock, ticking off the days, hours, and seconds until noon on January 20, 2009, when I could set aside my duties and return home for good—as the label on the clock said, “Back to the real Washington,” a reference to my home in Washington State. Journalists and members of Congress were always surprised when I could tell them exactly how many days I had left as secretary; I carried that clock in my briefcase and consulted it often.
With the election in 2008, we were facing the first presidential transition in wartime since 1968. I was determined to minimize any chance of a dropped baton and began planning for the changeover as early as October 1, 2007, when I asked Eric Edelman to tell the Defense Policy Board, chaired by former deputy secretary of defense John Hamre, that I wanted them to devote their summer 2008 meeting solely to transition issues. Sometimes there was a temptation by an outgoing administration to try to solve all problems before Inauguration Day, but this would be my seventh presidential transition, and I had yet to see a new administration that did not inherit problems.
Early in 2008, there was press speculation that I might be asked to stay on as secretary at least for a while to ensure the smooth handoff of the wars, no matter who was elected president. At the end of March, when I attended an eightieth birthday party for Zbigniew Brzezinski, he said he had told the Obama campaign that if Obama won, he should keep me on. I stared at Zbig and said, “I thought you were my friend.” Press inquiries about whether I would stay if asked increased as the spring went along, and I usually would just pull out my countdown clock and show the questioner how long I had left. I devoted a fair amount of effort to quelling such speculation, often saying, “I learned a long time ago never to say never, but the circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me.” During those months, I was clear both privately and publicly that I did not want to remain as secretary, did not intend to try to stay, and wanted only to go home at the end of the Bush administration.
My strategy was to be so adamant about not wanting to stay on that no one would ask. Because I knew that, if asked, I would give the same answer I had given President Bush in November 2006: With kids doing their duty fighting and dying in two wars, how could I not also do mine? I maintained a disciplined, consistent, and negative response to questions on this throughout the presidential campaign, with one private lapse. In an e-mail exchange in early April with my old friend and former deputy secretary of state for Bush 43, Rich Armitage, I let my guard down: “The best part of the job [secretary of defense] is the same as at Texas A&M: the kids. They blow me away. They make me cry. They are so awesome. Only they could get me to stay.” I then caught myself, and added, “Okay, that’s really highly classified. Because if Becky saw it, she would kill me.”
Even as I was trying to build a wall that would prevent me from being asked to stay, I was aware of the gossip and rumors circulating about me—and Mike Mullen. My press spokesman, Geoff Morrell, learned in late May 2008 from his contacts that the Obama campaign had “taken aboard” Mullen’s argument that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan simply wouldn’t allow for a months-long interregnum. Morrell was told that Obama wanted a bipartisan cabinet and that my staying in place would show foreigners that U.S. resolve would be undiminished; it would also reassure the domestic audience that Obama could be trusted on national security. There was some criticism on my own staff, once again, about Mullen’s “aggressive” legislative and public affairs “campaign.” I believed that his being seen as holding an independent view of things would be helpful with a change of administrations because he and Petraeus would then be better able to stand up to a new president if he wanted to do something drastic in Iraq. As I told one of my senior aides, “Admiral Mullen is fundamentally in the right place on Iraq and Afghanistan.” President Bush clearly wasn’t as confident as I was about Mike’s views on Iraq, because repeatedly over the ensuing months I would hear from various folks at the White House their concern that the chairman was already “positioning” himself for the next president.
In mid-June, there were several press articles about my efforts to organize a smooth transition, and speculation intensified about my being asked to remain in place for a while. Mullen and I often discussed how to handle the handover. I established a transition Senior Steering Group, chaired by my chief of staff, Robert Rangel. I did so to ensure that the vast preparations routinely undertaken by the Defense Department had coherence and coordination—and would be under my control. Mullen’s involvement was important because he would still be in his position in a new administration and would be central to continuity and a smooth transition. Senior Pentagon civilians had to be prepared to remain in place beyond Inauguration Day so a new secretary wasn’t sitting in his office virtually alone; that had been the case with Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001 as he waited for everyone else to be confirmed. Meanwhile one of Obama’s senior campaign advisers, Richard Danzig, was quoted in an article as saying, “My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration.” In the same article, a McCain adviser said that McCain likely would ask me to stay on for several months to ensure a smooth wartime transition.
On June 18, there was a near disaster. Joe Klein, writing a piece for Time magazine, was told by Obama that “he wanted to talk to Gates about serving in his administration.” Klein told my press spokesman, Geoff Morrell, that, and Morrell told me. I was really upset. I told Geoff that publication of such a quote would render me useless and impotent for the remaining six months of the Bush administration. I told him to tell Klein as much, and that if he ran the quote, I would issue an unequivocal statement saying there were no circumstances under which I would stay on beyond the end of Bush’s term. Klein agreed not to run the quote because, he told Morrell, he didn’t want to hurt that prospect. In the end, the Time story had Klein asking Obama if he would want to retain me as secretary and Obama responding, “I’m not going to let you pin me down … but I’d certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush administration [Bush 41].”
About the same time I heard from John Hamre that it was too late for me “to avoid being on the short list for SecDef for either Obama or McCain.” I e-mailed him back on Sunday, June 22:
What folks don’t understand is that they [McCain and Obama] are not on my short list. Or any list of mine. People have no idea how much I detest this job—and the toll taken by the letters I write [to the loved ones of soldiers killed in action] every day. Being secretary of defense when we are engaged in multiple wars is different than at other times.… Virtually all of the kids in Iraq and Afghanistan today are there by my order. Not to overdramatize, I will do my duty, but I can’t wait to lay down this burden.
In the midst of all this press speculation and to-ing and fro-ing, a most bizarre episode occurred on the last day of June, when I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing. He asked me if I had a public position on abortion; I laughed, saying no. He asked if I was a longtime Republican. I said, actually no; I hadn’t been registered with either party for many years. He asked how long I had been an academic. He wanted us to keep all this very private between us. “Possibly nothing will come of it,” he said. I couldn’t figure out if he was serious, if it was just idle flattery, or if he was delusional. It was so weird, I never told anybody, in part because I didn’t think they’d believe me.
Washington, D.C., is always an ugly, jittery place in the months before, and weeks after, a presidential election. People outside government who want inside are jockeying for jobs in a new administration, and people on the inside are maneuvering to stay there—or beginning t
o look for new jobs outside. Sharp elbows and sharp tongues are everywhere. Gossip and rumors flow around town as freely as liquor at a lobbyist’s reception. Even senior career officials and civil servants are tense, knowing they will soon be working for new faces with new agendas and will be forced to prove themselves anew to people who will be suspicious of them because they served with the preceding administration.
On July 15–16, I chaired the last Defense Senior Leadership Conference of the Bush administration, a gathering of the service chiefs, the combatant commanders, and the department’s senior civilian leaders. We spent a lot of time on the prospective transition. I said that terrorists had tested the previous two administrations early—the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 came a month after Clinton took the oath of office, the 9/11 attacks less than eight months after Bush became president—so it was important that Defense be watchful well into 2009. I warned that a full civilian leadership team wouldn’t be in place for some time after the inauguration and said I would try to persuade Bush 43 to allow us to brief both candidates after the conventions. The chairman and others spoke about trying to establish contact with the campaigns. I reminded them that in preceding transitions, the incumbent presidents’ practice had been to funnel all contact with the campaigns through either the national security adviser or the White House chief of staff, and that the only organization allowed to brief the candidates before the election had been CIA. This presidential campaign would be more complicated for us, though, because both candidates would be sitting U.S. senators with security clearances and Senate staff authorized to ask for briefings. McCain sat on the Armed Services Committee, both Obama and Clinton on the Foreign Relations Committee. I said we had to be very careful about responding to their offices’ requests lest we cross the line between their legitimate needs as senators and their desires as candidates. Rangel’s Senior Steering Group for the transition would be the sole point of contact.
An example of such complications came less than two weeks later. Obama was going to Iraq, and on his return trip, we were informed by one of his staff, a retired Air Force major general named Scott Gration, that the candidate wanted to visit the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany. All American wounded—and many of our coalition partners’—in both Iraq and Afghanistan were flown to Landstuhl to receive further treatment and stabilization before being flown back home. Gration said two campaign staff members would accompany Obama to the hospital. He was told that under Defense Department directives, the senator was welcome to visit the hospital with personal Senate or committee staff, but no campaign staff would be allowed to accompany him. There was a dustup with Gration, who I thought at the time was just trying to insert himself into the senator’s visit and was not actually speaking for him. In any event, Obama ultimately decided not to visit the hospital because he didn’t want there to be any perception that he was using troops—especially wounded ones—for political purposes.
About the same time, McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, attended a National Guard event in Alaska. The press asked Morrell why she was allowed to do so. He pointed out that as governor of Alaska, she was the commander in chief of that state’s National Guard.
Every day was a political minefield. The situation was not helped by rumors about my staying. These rumors were fed by occasions like Obama’s meeting with the House Democratic Caucus during the last week in July, where Representative Adam Schiff asked him if he was considering having me stay on for at least a few months. According to the magazine Roll Call, there were “quite a few moans and groans” from Democrats present, presumably appalled by the idea of keeping on a Bush appointee. In early September, the same publication suggested that McCain might keep me.
In September, Mike Mullen came close to inadvertently setting off a political bombshell that, in my opinion, would have seriously damaged him, the military, and the Defense Department. I wrote earlier that one of the few major disagreements I had with Mike and the chiefs was their nonconcurrence in my National Defense Strategy, specifically my view that we could take some additional risk in terms of future conventional capabilities against other modern militaries in order to win the wars we were already fighting. The usual practice, once the NDS is published, is for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to issue his own document, the National Military Strategy, intended to describe how the uniformed services would translate both the president’s National Security Strategy and the NDS into military planning and resource needs. I read a draft of the NMS closely and could see that Mike was plainly distancing himself and the chiefs from several fundamental elements of Bush’s National Security Strategy. A key component of that strategy for years had been “winning the long war,” a phrase encompassing the war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike made no reference to it. The draft, however, did imply that our forces were unable to respond to multiple military contingencies, just the opposite of what he and I had been telling Congress. Mike also omitted any reference to promoting democracy, walking away from Bush’s “freedom agenda.” He told me he wanted to issue the NMS in early or mid-October.
To me, his timing was terrible. On October 5, I handwrote him a long letter stating my reasons:
I believe it would be a serious mistake to issue this kind of document in the last weeks of a presidential election campaign. The NMS is already some seven months past due, and with such timing, I think you run a high risk of being accused of trying to influence the outcome of the election. Issuing a major pronouncement on the perils the nation faces and the military power required to deal with them in the closing weeks of the campaign could be seen as an effort by the military to shift the debate back to national security issues [versus the economy] and thus help Senator McCain.
I have seen all too often how paranoid campaigns get as election day approaches, and any surprise, any unexpected development, makes them crazy—and they think the worst case.… The irony, of course, is that you have made a huge effort to take and keep the military out of politics. Putting the NMS out now, especially with the distancing from several aspects of the NSS and NDS, likely will land you squarely in the middle of the campaign.
More broadly, I worry that issuance now—as opposed to a week or so after the election—would raise questions in people’s minds about military motives, e.g., why now in the closing days of the campaign? Further, some would wonder, why is the senior military leadership asserting its independence from the civilian leadership—both the secretary and the president—just before an election? And what does that say about the civilian-military relationship going forward? The impact on both candidates could be quite negative. While leaks are always possible (and unclassified slides highlighting where you want to distance yourself from the current administration are tempting leak morsels indeed), that is not the same as formal issuance and roll-out.
In sum, Mike, I am convinced that issuance of the NMS so soon before the election would look politically motivated and would be a serious mistake. Accordingly, I am very strongly opposed to issuance prior to the election. The risk of creating a perceptions problem for our military among political leaders in both parties and the public—as well as problems for you regardless of the outcome of the election—is too great.
On the substance of the NMS, I objected strongly to omission of any reference to promoting democracy. I thought Bush’s freedom agenda as publicly presented by the administration was too simplistic in that real, enduring freedom and democracy must be based on democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society—all of which are the work of decades. As with Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign, the only countries we could meaningfully pressure to reform were our friends and allies; the worst offenders, including Iran, Syria, and China, ignored our rhetoric. But I reminded Mike that promoting democracy around the world had been a fundamental tenet of American foreign policy since the beginning of the republic. “What has differed,” I wrote, “has been how to accomplish or pursue that goal, and a new a
dministration probably will approach it differently [from] the current one. But it will not abandon the goal.” I concluded that omitting the goal from the NMS entirely—and in a way obviously intended to be noticed—“seems to me to go too far.”
Mike made some modest changes in the military strategy document and agreed to hold it until after the election.
On October 14, President Bush made his last visit to the Pentagon to meet with the chiefs and me in the Tank. It was a reflective session, with each of the chiefs talking about how his service had changed during the Bush presidency. Mullen led off by saying the period had represented the biggest change in the U.S. military since World War II. We now had the most combat-hardened, experienced, and expeditionary force in our history, and if we could keep the young leaders, we would be ready for the future. He said that our forces were more balanced, more innovative, more agile, and better integrated and organized than ever before. I chimed in that the biggest danger to the military in the next administration would be pressure from Congress to reduce the number of soldiers in order to buy equipment. George Casey talked about the transformation of the Army from a force trained to fight Cold War–type set-piece battles to smaller “modular brigades” able to operate more flexibly; he also talked about changes in equipment. When Casey said the Army had gone from eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in 2003 to 1,700 in Iraq in 2008, the president exclaimed, “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 34