The “controlling nature” of President Obama’s national security team – comprised almost entirely of “former Hill staffers, academics and political operatives” – fostered a micromanagement of military issues that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates found nearly unbearable to stomach, according to his new memoir,the New York Times reports.
A former CIA director who served eight presidencies throughout his career, Gates in his book calls the Obama White House “by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost,” according to the Wall Street Journal. He alleges he shared with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and others concern that the president was determined to control “every aspect of national security policy and even operations.” Gates reveals he almost quit the Pentagon’s top spot after one singularly unsettling meeting about Afghanistan in September of 2009.
“I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation – from the top down – of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war,” Gates writes, according to the Times.
He singled out Vice President Joe Biden in particular as being “a man of integrity,” but someone who’s “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
The White House defended Biden.
“The president disagrees with Secretary Gates’ assessment – from his leadership on the Balkans in the Senate, to his efforts to end the war in Iraq, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time, and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world,” responded Caitlin Hayden, National Security Council spokeswoman. “President Obama relies on his good counsel every day.”
In the book, titled, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, the Times writes, Gates takes the most issue with the expanded scope of the National Security Council staff under the Obama administration. But of the president himself, he offers a somewhat mixed review.
