During
Steve Croft's softball 60 Minutes interview with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the President reflected on advice he received from Robert Gates shortly after coming into office:
"I remember Bob Gates, you know, first thing he said to me, I think maybe
first week or two that I was there and we were meeting in the Oval
Office and he, obviously, been through seven presidents or something.
And he says, "Mr. President, one thing I can guarantee you is that at
this moment, somewhere, somehow, somebody in the federal government is
screwing up."
I expect that Gates was cautioning the new President about the inevitable surprises and disappointments of governance as opposed to how the President used the anecdote in this interview. To whit - the President used it as a fig leaf to dismissively hide and deflect attention from the politically convenient disinformation campaign orchestrated in his administration and delivered via Susan Rice a few days after the attack on our embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Might have been a good opportunity for a
follow up question from Steve Croft as opposed to simply accepting the popular "mistakes were made" non-answer. But I digress...
Regardless how his advice was misused, one of President Obama's best decisions was to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense and avail himself of the benefit of his experience.
Gates has an
extraordinary history of public service, including leadership roles in the Air Force, CIA, and serving in the administration of seven presidents. I had
an opportunity to hear the former secretary of defense
Robert Gates speak in Marin at the invitation of the
MPSF Speaker Series. I've been to a few of these events over the last couple of years and always come away impressed (although some more than
others). He spoke for about an hour and then responded to questions gathered from audience.
I thought some of his more interesting comments came during Q&A and I'd share them here. I do not have the benefit of a recording or transcript - so the comments I am attributing to Gates are from memory and paraphrased. In no particular order a few of his thoughts on our presidents, the presidency and challenges that face us:
A war-time memoir from a former Secretary of Defense is nothing new. It is unusual, perhaps unique, for the number two man in the United States military chain of command to publish a memoir while his Commander in Chief is still in office and the war is still going on. I plan to read Bob Gate's new book "Duty" when available to the general public later this week. Part of my interest in the book stems from hearing Bob Gates speak at the MPSF Speaker Series last year. 
