Gates Will Not Stay On

In an excellent profile piece on Defense Secretary Bob Gates written earlier this week, Fred Kaplan discusses the possibility of Gates remaining at the Pentagon:

When the next president takes the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, Gates will be just 65 years old, but he insists he will retire from public life, this time for good. A friend recently gave him an electronic key chain, inscribed “The Gates Countdown,” with a small screen reading out how many days remain till the end of the term. He carries it everywhere, in part as a joke but not entirely. Told that those screens can be reset, he replied, “Not this one.” When I mentioned that some lawmakers would like him to stay on in the next administration, he replied, “I am very wary of saying, ‘Never,’ ” but added, “The circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me.”

Arrayed around his office are photos of his remote lakeside house in the Pacific Northwest — as far away from Washington, D.C., as almost any spot in the continental United States. On one wall is a painting of nearby Mount Rainier. He said that he tells visitors, “Those pictures are there to remind you I don’t have to be doing this.” Gates’s press secretary, Geoff Morrell, tried to brighten the mood: “I don’t want you to leave the impression — you’re still having fun in this job, though, aren’t you? I mean, you enjoy what you’re doing, no?” Gates stared at him, for about 10 seconds. Finally, he turned back to me and said: “I consider that, like our soldiers, I’m doing my duty. There are a lot of other things I’d rather be doing. But this is important.”

This is sad news. Gates has done well in the Pentagon during a VERY challenging time and seems to have been the perfect prescription for the post-Rummy DOD. As the article points out, Gates, a hardened cold warrior who came up at CIA, has been conscious of the need for bi-partisan support for foreign policy goals in a manner that Rummy was not and he seems to court advice from the troops concerning policy and replacement commanders where it was my-way-or- the-highway with Rumsfeld. At the same time however, he’s still willing to stick it to allies and the Congress when he needs to. I had hoped he could’ve stayed on in a McCain Administration, both men seem to have similar views on the need for bi-partisan support and possess a cautiousness that Bush(Cheney)-Rumsfeld certainly lacked but it looks like that isn’t going to happen. Oh well, Dr. Gates has certainly earned his retirement.