Robert Gates

Robert Gates: The Man Who Served Both Sides

On 1 December 2008, a newly elected Democratic president stood beside the sitting Republican administration’s defense secretary and asked him to stay. Robert Gates thus became the only Pentagon chief ever to serve two presidents of opposing parties — a Cold War Sovietologist and career spy who, in an age of ferocious partisanship, was judged too useful to replace. When Barack Obama pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in 2011, he called Gates “a humble American patriot, a man of common sense and decency, and one of the nation’s finest public servants.”

A Kansas Analyst

Robert Michael Gates was born on 25 September 1943 in Wichita, Kansas. He took a history degree from the College of William & Mary in 1965, a master’s in Eastern European history from Indiana University in 1966, and a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown in 1974, with a dissertation on Soviet Sinology. His scholarship was never ornamental; it was the toolkit of a man who would spend his career reading the intentions of adversaries.

Climbing the Agency

Gates joined the CIA in 1966 while still a graduate student, briefly served as an Air Force intelligence officer under CIA sponsorship, and then rose steadily as an analyst: director of the Strategic Evaluation Center, deputy director for intelligence in 1982, and deputy director of central intelligence from 1986 to 1989. His ascent was not frictionless. His involvement in the Iran-Contra era drew scrutiny, and a first nomination to lead the agency in 1987 was withdrawn amid expected Senate rejection. Nominated again in 1991, he was confirmed and served as Director of Central Intelligence until 1993. He also served President George H. W. Bush as deputy national security adviser under Brent Scowcroft.

The Interlude at Texas A&M

After leaving intelligence, Gates lectured widely and in 2002 became the 22nd president of Texas A&M University. Over four years he added hundreds of faculty positions, oversaw a major construction program, and worked to raise minority enrollment, leaving in 2006 as president emeritus — an academic administrator’s résumé sandwiched between two national-security careers.

Secretary at War

In November 2006, with the Iraq war collapsing, George W. Bush nominated Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld. The Senate confirmed him 95-2. He arrived as a pragmatist and a fixer. He backed the 2007 Iraq troop surge, then began the withdrawals. When the Walter Reed neglect scandal broke, he fired the Secretary of the Army; when nuclear weapons were mishandled, he forced out the Air Force’s civilian and uniformed chiefs. His willingness to hold senior officers accountable became a signature.

Kept on by Obama, Gates managed a limited 2009 Afghanistan surge, replaced commanders, and sat in the Situation Room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He redirected the Pentagon toward counterinsurgency, ended F-22 production and the Future Combat Systems, and pursued what he called a “culture of savings and restraint,” seeking $100 billion in savings and cutting scores of general and admiral billets. He lifted the ban on women serving on submarines and helped prepare the military to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The Candid Memoirist

Gates wrote plainly. His 1996 book From the Shadows chronicled five presidents and the Cold War; his 2014 memoir Duty praised Obama’s bin Laden decision while voicing deep skepticism about the Afghanistan strategy and delivering a famously blunt verdict that Joe Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The candor cut both ways and made the book a Washington event.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

Gates is not called a genius in the sense of raw intellectual originality, and it would be dishonest to inflate him into one. The specific quality the record supports is managerial and analytical judgment: an unusual capacity to read complex bureaucracies and adversaries, to make hard personnel decisions, and to be trusted across a bitter partisan divide. Obama’s praise — “common sense and decency” — is telling precisely because it is not the language of dazzling brilliance but of reliability. The sources credit him with pragmatism, accountability and steadiness rather than visionary genius; his singular achievement, serving two presidents of opposite parties as defense secretary, rests on being seen as competent and non-ideological. The honest counter-case is significant. Critics from within the CIA, including George Shultz and the analyst Melvin Goodman, accused him of politicizing intelligence and inflating Soviet threat assessments, with Goodman charging that he “corrupt[ed] the process and the ethics of intelligence.” Gates’s gift, then, is best described as the disciplined competence of a superb public administrator — real and rare, but earthbound. He is a genius of governance, not of invention, and the contested chapters of his intelligence career keep even that claim honest.

An Institutional Life

After retiring in 2011, Gates became chancellor of William & Mary and served as national president of the Boy Scouts of America, where he pushed to end the ban on gay adult leaders. He holds the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Security Medal, and numerous intelligence decorations and honorary doctorates. His legacy is that of the ultimate insider — a scholar-spy who spent half a century in the machinery of American power and left behind a reputation, contested at the edges, for putting competence above party.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 2011
• Affiliated with Central Intelligence Agency
• Educated at Georgetown University, Indiana University and Indiana University Bloomington
• Worked as air force officer and politician